Storytelling: Playful Interactions and Spaces of Imagination in Contemporary Visual Culture - Call for Papers

Storytelling: Playful Interactions and Spaces of Imagination in Contemporary Visual Culture

CALL FOR PAPERS


Graduate Student Symposium, October 10-12, 2008, History of Art and Architecture Department, University of Pittsburgh


World contemporary art practices and screen media increasingly entail open-ended stories, fragmented narrative sequences, personal confessions, references to literary texts, as well as the design of large-scale fantasy environments and playground-like spaces that undermine contemplative viewing experience. While some artists invent stories and project utopian places as a means of escape from quotidian circumstances, others rely on half-real, half-fictional narratives in order to raise the awareness of grim political circumstances, urban alienation, social enclosure, or aggravating environmental problems. This symposium aims to investigate the reasons for this persistent interest in narrative transposition of personal experiences and public events, as well as the stimuli for playful spectatorial interaction within contemporary visual culture.


We invite paper submissions on the following topics:

-storytelling and ludic participation to art projects as redemptive therapy: the intermingling of reality and fiction; writing history through tales, archival investigations, and memory-work

- intertextuality and hypertextuality: intersections between literature, film, and art practices at the level of appropriations and adaptations; interweavings of classical myths and contemporary myths

- wonderlands: immersive environments, utopic and dystopic worlds, virtual reality spaces, modes of inhabiting and subverting the white cube/black box

-artists as trickster figures and mythmakers: artists' avatars and fictional personas

-ethics and spectacle: carnivalesque representations and moral ambiguity; types of spectatorship; participatory responsibility and interactivity; relational aesthetics and relational antagonism


We encourage paper submissions from graduate students at all stages of their studies, working in any discipline. We also encourage MFA students to send in presentations of art projects related to these themes. Abstracts should be under 350 words. Final presentations should not exceed 20 minutes. Please submit abstracts and CVs to haasymposium2008@gmail.com by March 17th, 2008. We will notify selected speakers by March 30th.

For updated information on the graduate student symposium, visit:
http://vrcoll.fa.pitt.edu/haasymposium2008/Index.html