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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. The
stuff of everyday life—garbage dumps, exhibitions, urban spaces,
archives, political campaigns, battlefields, and daydreams—are also
fields of forces 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
inform 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
discussion of media spaces and epistemologies?
Please submit abstracts or project descriptions of 300 words or less to
ucsb.media.fields@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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