IFTR 2024, Intermediality in Theatre and Performance Working Group CFP
12 December, 2023 by Christina Papagiannouli | 0 comments
The Intermediality in Theatre & Performance Working Group invites proposals for participation from academics, early career researchers, postgraduate students and artists for IFTR 2024 in Manila
The Intermediality in Theatre & Performance Working Group
The Intermediality Working Group (WG) examines the interrelationships of theatre with other media as well as combinations of different media in performance. It looks at theories and conceptualizations of media in live performance, historical developments and transformations of media, and contemporary manifestations of intermediality in postdigital culture. The Intermediality WG is research active. Recent publications include Avatars, Activism and Postdigital Performance: Precarious Intermedial Identities (Bloomsbury 2021), and a special edition of IJPADM ‘TechNo-fixes? Performances within Ecological Emergencies’ (2022), both edited by WG members and former convenors Liam Jarvis and Karen Savage.
IFTR2024: INTERMEDIALITY CALL FOR PAPERS:
In early 2023, the Future of Life institute has released an open letter calling to Pause Giant AI Experiments. Recognising the ‘profound change in the history of life on Earth’ AI represents, the appeal to immediately suspend the training of AI systems for at least 6 months, asks ‘Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? … Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete, and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?’ The warning of prospective tragedy is a prototypical response when it comes to the digital and technological. Yet, more recent global challenges, large scale loss, trauma, violence, and emergency turn promethean dare into practical necessity replacing hubristic rhetoric with interdependency, capability, and power. As Fintan Walsh argues, ‘[i]f, during the pandemic, we humans could only confront our losses by confirming our screen dependence, perhaps it will only be in moments of digital death, too, that we will rediscover what being alive together ever felt like to begin (or end) with’ (2021, 407). What are the consequences of AI-anxiety and global technophobia for theatre – the artform that still trades on its ‘(a)liveness’? How is performance now mediated and remediated through quotidian digitality? And what is intermediality in an age wherein the mechanisms of mediation – such as AI and digital interfaces – are ubiquitous? We ask what are the opportunities that theatre affords in the AI age; how does theatre stage this crisis and performance resist the doom-laden narratives?
In response to the theme of the Manila conference, “Our States of Emergency: Theatres and Performances of Tragedy”, and ongoing global crises, the aim of the 2024 Intermediality call is to rethink and reimagine tragedy as a transitional phase and ontological shift from the ‘medial’ to the intermedial.We invite proposals for 20 minute presentations in any format (papers, performance lectures, practical demonstrations, workshops, etc.) or for a 15 minute position statement from established academics, early career researchers, postgraduate students and artists around the globe to join our working group. We also welcome practice-based researchers, and cross-disciplinary scholars.
Proposals may include but are not limited to any of the following themes:
- Tragedy and the Digital and/or Inter/medial.
- Spectacular, digital, virtual, and augmented tragedies
- Media memory in a digital world
- Virtual sites of destructions
- Intermediality, sustainability and states of emergency
- Ecological emergencies and performance
- Intermedial and digital performance at times of crisis
- Transhumanism, the post-digital subject, hubris, and humility
- Digital degradation and virtual disintegration
- Intermedial catastrophe/opportunity
- Intermediality after tragedy
- Recovery and hope
Open Call: We encourage other submissions that address intermediality in theatre and performance, including those that do not directly refer to the conference theme. For more information, please visit IFTR Intermediality in Theatre & Performance WG.
SUBMITTING YOUR ABSTRACT:
We welcome both existing and new WG members to submit papers on any aspect of intermedial theatre and performance, broadly conceived. We are keen to hear from academics and practitioner-researchers at all career stages and welcome attendees from diverse geographical locations. The WG aims to encourage lively and energized debates during the sessions and in this spirit, we also invite observers to attend and contribute to our discussions. The group is welcoming and inclusive and we will be organizing a social event for all of our WG members during the conference.
Abstracts between 200-250 words are invited for this conference from all interested scholars and students of the Performing Arts and related disciplines.
Conference Dates: 15-19 July 2024
Conference Venue: University of the Philippines Diliman, Manila, Philippines
Deadline for Submission of Abstracts: 2 February 2024.
All abstracts should be submitted to the Cambridge Core website.
Please feel free to contact us with any questions regarding the WG and/or your abstract submission.
ACCEPTANCE:
Applicants will be informed of acceptance by 15th March 2024.
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