Macquarie University (Sydney, AU) and online, 16-18 July 2025 

Life and art are entangled. […] Art makes life new. We become something different in an art world. And crucially, our world has always been an art world.  

(Alva Noë, The Entanglement, 2023)

In the 2020s, we are more aware than ever of the effects that our networked culture is having on human and non-human entities across the globe. The entanglement of our political and economic policy with climate catastrophe, for example, has produced convergent feelings of collapse and crisis. Still, we continue to reckon with questions of meaning in the face of finitude, through art. Aesthetic experience means being attentive to, as Noë puts it, our ‘patterns of curiosity, interest, or caring’. Tracing the entanglements of art and society with ourselves forces us to reflect on questions of care, since what we collectively care about is what will ultimately survive.  

The Sydney Literature and Cinema Network’s biennial conference welcomes critical engagements and interventions, affiliations and alliances, which explore those aspects of aesthetic experience that are inextricably or tenuously entangled. The Network welcomes proposals for single papers, audio-visual essays and pre-constituted three-person panels on the theme of ‘The Entanglement: Networks, Intersections, Polyphonies, and Intertextuality’ between literature, film, television and other visual media. 

We invite responses to this theme across the broad spectrum of aesthetics, politics, philosophy, and practice-based research. It is our hope that the conference will be a forum for the creative endeavour of criticism—a site where our experience of the world and of ourselves can be revealed, challenged, and remade. 

The Sydney Literature and Cinema Network was founded in 2015 and has to date convened five successful international conferences and several symposia. It brings together researchers from Australia, Asia, the US, the UK, Europe and across the globe to examine the intersections between media, technologies, expressive modalities and representational forms. 

The Network invites contributions addressing any of the following lines of enquiry, as well as other topics in similar areas:  

• How is our entanglement with the world, nature, and climate catastrophe aesthetically mediated? 

• What is the dominant affect of our entanglement with technology, computing, social media, and artificial intelligence? 

• How have the entanglements of interdisciplinarity shaped the history and focus of literary studies, film studies, and other disciplines? 

• How is art – literature, cinema, and other visual media – entangled with imagining alternative social, political, and economic structures? 

• In what ways has entanglement become a proxy for adaptation, given how adaptation studies has opened itself to intertextual correspondences between visual / textual artefacts?

The forms of entanglement are many and varied, and feature prominently in literary and screen cultures. Theories of quantum entanglement have been explored through literary fictions (Recursion, Superposition, The Fold) some of which have been adapted for television (Dark Matter, The Peripheral); original TV series, such as Constellation, Devs, The OA and Counterpart; and films both mainstream (Tenet, Arrival) and arthouse / indie (Entangled, Source Code).  

Other cinematic instances of the theme encompass entanglements of myth and reality (Lamb), fact and fiction (May / December), and narcissistic self-entanglement (Sick of Myself, Triangle of Sadness). In a similar vein, there is temporal entanglement (Past Lives), identity entanglement (The Substance, A Different Man) and various viral and posthuman entanglements in graphic literature (Swamp Thing, Transmetropolitan) and gaming (Resident Evil).   

As these examples indicate, the question of ‘entanglement’ covers a wide range of literary and media works, across rarefied, arthouse and popular forms. We welcome these and any other such works as objects of analysis in line with – but not limited to – the themes and approaches mentioned above.  

Guide for Contributors: 

We welcome twenty-minute papers, video lectures and essays, pre-organised panels (can be longer than twenty minutes), forums and other presentations on these themes and more.

Please submit a 200-word abstract and short bionote by 30 April, 2025 (AEDT) to: slcn2025@gmail.com (conference enquiries can also be sent here).

Panels should include a short abstract addressing a common theme in addition to individual abstracts.

Presenters at Caméra-Stylo 6 will be invited to submit papers for publication in the network’s international journal, Caméra-Stylo: Intersections in Literature, Film and Other Visual Cultures.