This is a call for proposals on cyberqueer strategies in contemporary art, film and media.

The importance given to spatial configuration in relation to technology in contemporary art and film scholarship points to the fact that cyberspace is no longer viewed as an intangible software entity or space outside our physical reality. Instead, it is understood as a pervasive presence imbedded within our DNA.  Many contemporary artists and filmmakers who have grown up with the Internet have labeled their artistic practice “post-Internet,” in order to articulate this cultural shift.

The artist filmmakers selected for this talk extend the digital realm beyond the limitations of the subject, the screen, and the internal logic of machinery into our familiar physical world.  They have begun to translate the web’s familiar aesthetics into various stylistic devices.  This panel will examine how these visual thinkers fashion a cinematic language that takes its cues from electronic modes of communication and create virtual geographies and multi-linear narratives.  In doing so, they challenge previous notions of time and place by expanding their applicability through online mediation.

We propose the cyberworld and its mutable subjects as manifestations that are inherently queer.  They transcend the physical world into a parallel time and space, where they can freely construct identity(ies) from an infinite combination of mutable possibilities.

You may send your paper abstract and bio by August 23 to Dr. Ricardo Zulueta at r.zulueta@miami.edu  

The abstract should be no more than 2500 characters (including spaces and hard returns) and contain three to five bibliographic sources.  The bio should be no more than 500 characters.  

Papers that deal with interdisciplinary connections between contemporary art history, film studies, and/or new media with queerness and post Internet aesthetics are encouraged to apply.

Panel proposal will be submitted for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference held in Chicago between March 22 and March 26, 2017.