From Viviane Serfaty

Showing, Demonstrating Université de Marne la Vallée, France Research group: UMLV-Paris 12 : IMAGER June 15-16, 2007 Because the colloquium aims at cross-disciplinarity, its theme - Showing, Demonstrating - is meant to give rise to plural interpretations and encourage methodological hybridization. Showing and demonstrating are the basis of complex sets of relationships in a large array of fields, some of which include, but are not limited to, the areas of research exemplified below : · information: in many countries, the way the media stage-manage information is moving newsreports towards a degree of uniformity. The Internet is a prime vehicle for the globalization and uniformization of information flows and shows. Can these information flows be regulated ? With what technology? What presides over the choice of what the media show ? How does the Internet interact with traditional media ? · TV images, print media pictures, political cartoons : pictures, images or drawings are inserted in electronic or print media. What is the relationship between text and image, commentary and image ? How can the same images be made to demonstrate contradictory views ? How do pictures in TV news reports or newspaper pictures relate to reality ? How do images move from the status of witness to that of actor of history (Gervereau, 2006) ? What metaphors or other figures of speech are used to show and convince ? Are figures of speech used to show or point to the unsayable or even the unthinkable ? · Political activism: mobilizing supporters, staging a demonstration, and getting media attention are defining moments in the life of any militant or advocacy group. How do these groups construct their public image ? What do they strive to show ? Conversely, what do they carefully hide ? What tools do they use for their purposes ? What do these groups show when they build an Internet site ? · the production of private images : the widespread use of traditional and later on of digital cameras has led to the production and the preservation of often poor quality images. What do such images show when they are posted on sites such as youtube or dailymotion ? Do they transform our notions of privacy ? Do they show what ought to have remained hidden ? How can the large scale preservation of amateur pictures be analyzed ? · gaming: what is being played out in networked games ? does gaming demonstrate a new trend in sociality ? do the virtual worlds of networked games show anything about the underlying structures of contemporary sociality ? Can gaming be seen as a vector of acculturation for new technologies ? · the text – image – hypertext relationship : how can the iconic dimension of printed texts be thought through ? how are images mediated by texts ? can the frontier between text and images be described as porous ? the joint presentation of texts, images, videos or sounds paves the way for experiments in hypertextuality, ephemeral art or installations. Do these forms converge towards a rhetoric of multimedia (Bolter, Knoespel, 1994) ? Do they amount to new forms of visual writing ? --------------------------------------------- Please send 300-400 words-long anonymous proposals in English or French with a brief biographical sketch in a separate document to : vivianeserfaty@yahoo.fr or serfaty@mlv-univ.fr Deadline : January 31st, 2007. The scientific committee will examine the proposals by March 1st at the latest. ---------------------------------------------- Works cited : Bolter, Jay David, Knoespel, Kenneth J. “Word and Image in Multimedia”, in Josè Encarnçao and Jim Foley (eds.), Multimedia: System Architectures and Applications, Berlin, Springer-Verlag, 1994, p. 237-253. Gervereau, Laurent. Propagande et images : le gouvernement des icônes. Table-ronde, ENS, 31 hanvier 2006. http://www.diffusion.ens.fr/index.php?res=conf&idconf=659# Montel, Nathalie. « Etablir la vérité scientifique au XIXe siècle. La controverse sur la différence de niveau des deux mers (1799-1869). Génèses. Sciences sociales et histoire, 32 (1998) 86-109. ___________________________________________________________________________ Découvrez une nouvelle façon d'obtenir des réponses à toutes vos questions ! Profitez des connaissances, des opinions et des expériences des internautes sur Yahoo! Questions/Réponses http://fr.answers.yahoo.com