The Black Box: Opacity in Cinema and Media 

Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2027 Conference Panel CFP

Montreal, Quebec, March 17-20, 2027

Emma Gibb, emma.gibb@ubc.ca

Seeking three paper presentations for a pre-constituted panel proposal. 

In Introduction to Cybernetics, William Ross Ashby puts forward that “In our daily lives we are confronted at every turn with systems whose internal mechanisms are not fully open to inspection” (86). He proposes that these Black Boxes permeate our lives, and their opacity forces observers to shift their method of understanding the world. Edouard Glissant’s writings on opacity invoke the Black Box through the notion of a Western pursuit of knowledge; “at the base of the western idea of difference lies a reductive gesture of grasping (each other’s) realities and ideas, a requirement for full transparency” (Phan Ðinh). The Black Box is thus simultaneously the pursuit and refusal of knowledge. The 2015 book Black Hyperbox expands this concept of the Black Box into a modulating method between theory and practice in art, performance and literature; a method of “shak[ing] the established reality of mediums” and “produc[ing] an explanatory void that forces thinking and speculative explorations” (Fleuras 17). These works meditate on that which we can’t quite grasp, and that which exists in between multiple realities, spatiotemporally alienated from its origin. This panel poses the question: How can we approach cinema and media as Black Boxes to provoke new explorations of opacity, visibility, representation and knowledge? How can cinema, media and performance produce opaque closed-circuits, or alternatively reveal their presence?

Topics may include interdisciplinary approaches to:

• Recording devices as a black box apparatuses

• Ephemeral screenings, alternative theatre spaces and live cinema

• Narratives of alienation or estrangement

• Limits of representation

• AI work and speculative fiction

• Opacity/transparency in cinema 

• Subversions of visibility, censorship, surveillance

• Resisting representation, non-representation

• Politics of opacity, alienation or transformation

• Interdisciplinary methods of black box interpretation

Please send a title (max. 120 characters), abstract (max. 2500 characters) and bibliography of 3-5 sources, and a short bio (max. 500 characters) to Emma Gibb (emma.gibb@ubc.ca) by August 19th 2026 midnight PST. 

The panel must be finalized for submission to SCMS by August 28th, 2026. All panelists should ideally be members of SCMS at the time of submission. Please note that the conference in entirely in-person.