MEDIA FIELDS
A Graduate Student Conference in the Department of Film and Media Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara
April 6-7, 2007
www.filmandmedia.ucsb.edu/projects/mediafields

Keynote Speaker: Anna McCarthy, Associate Professor of Cinema Studies, New
York University; author of Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public
Space; coeditor of Media/Space: Place, Scale and Culture in a Media Age.

Roundtable Respondents: Edward Branigan; Constance Penley; Bhaskar Sarkar;
and Greg Siegel; Department of Film and Media Studies, UCSB.

The contours of media study are increasingly understood in environmental
terms. This "spatial turn" recasts our ideas about the ways in which we
encounter media objects, spaces and vectors. It is in the cross-sections of
space and epistemology that we are articulating the conceptual catalyst of
the "media field" and convening our conference. Media fields bring into
contact explorations of material spaces, unseen and transmitted
atmospherics, and the languages and knowledges through which they are
imagined, traversed, and constituted. Fields may be open grounds, areas on
which games are played, bodies are screened, and militaries operate; fields
include vast expanses of concrete, electricity, waste, or oil. Fields are
breeding grounds and graveyards, public and private; they are represented
and replayed in bars, airplanes, and memories. Media fields comprise
multi-sensory and synaesthetic ways of knowing. Fields of media are
residual, anachronistic, or embedded in cultural products and histories. Th=
e
stuff of everyday life=97garbage dumps, exhibitions, urban spaces, archives=
,
political campaigns, battlefields, and daydreams=97are also fields of force=
s
where media are built, broadcast and worked through.

The scope of this conference is interdisciplinary, though we are especially
interested in works that reflects upon Media Studies itself as a dynamic
field of study. We also invite artistic projects for exhibition. You might
consider the following questions:

--How do we sense, experience or know media fields or constellations? How
might sounds, textures, temperatures, vibrations, odors, tastes, and
densities inform our understanding of disparate sites, from video games to
the Olympic Games?
--How does site-specific fieldwork lead to different kinds of knowledge
about film or media, spaces, and their histories? What are the stakes of
such shifts? What becomes of the text in the field?
--How might attention to residue, disjuncture and media sedimentation infor=
m
media historiography, policy, or activism?
--How are media flows not only smooth, transnational, and democratic but
made viscous by uneven access to wireless zones, copyright regulations,
surveillance, waste and pollution, electronic warfare, and everyday
malfunctions that characterize mechanically reproduced media objects and
processes?
--How are places of leisure, commerce, intimacy, law, and study co-impacted=
,
reinvented or elided by media?
--How do film and media artists, theorists, and policy-makers evoke fields?
--How might the concept of the "field" generate interdisciplinary discussio=
n
of media spaces and epistemologies?

Please submit abstracts or project descriptions of 300 words or less to
ucsb.media.fields_at_gmail.com.

We encourage you to provide biographical information about yourself along
with your abstract.
Deadline for submission: December 18th 2006.

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Received on Wed Nov 08 2006 - 19:42:03 EST