[spectre] CFP: A Light Footprint in the Cosmos (Vancouver, 24-27 Jun 22)

[Andreas Broeckmann]

From: Radek Przedpełski
Date: Feb 15, 2022
Subject: CFP: A Light Footprint in the Cosmos (Vancouver, 24-27 Jun 22)

School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, 
Jun 24–27, 2022
Deadline: Mar 7, 2022

The Substantial Motion Research Network (SMRN) is an international 
research network founded in 2017 by Azadeh Emadi and Laura U. Marks for 
scholars and practitioners interested in cross-cultural exploration of 
digital media and philosophy and, in particular, the interconnected 
themes of non-Western inspirations for new media technologies; the 
global circulation of ideas and technologies; and theories of 
circulation and connectivity. We adopted our name from 17th–century 
Persian process philosopher Sadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī to characterize 
the way each SMRN member’s practice contributes to the development of 
other members’ research and individuates in response to their input. We 
are also inspired by the material and environmentalist turn in media 
studies. Some of our works, research databases, and podcasts are 
available to the public at substantialmotion.org and 
creativedisturbance.org/series/substantial-motion-research-network. Our 
collective research methods include researching the histories of media 
in world cultures, tracing paths of transmission and exchange, seeking 
models for media in world philosophies, studying vernacular practices, 
cultivating cultural openness and developing hunches, and, when 
historical links cannot be identified, building imaginative and 
fabulative connections.

Celebrating the substantial motion of thought and/as creative practice, 
SMRN will hold the four-day symposium “A Light Footprint in the Cosmos” 
at the School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University, 24-27 
June 2022, accompanied by workshops, exhibitions, performances, and 
curated screenings. We are delighted to extend an invitation to scholars 
and artists to take part in the symposium. We are looking for scholarly 
papers and performative artistic presentations that resonate with the 
network's core interests and interrogate one (or more) of the following 
themes:

- grounding new media in traditional and vernacular technologies whose 
operative logic is capable of accounting for forms and processes of 
contemporary algorithmic media. We are interested into inquiries that 
problematise the unilateral, globalised and extractivist "meta" 
character of modern technology, demonstrating multiple ways in which 
media can be different and untimely, where the past is a creative 
potentiality. To quote Amiri Baraka, "the future is always here in the 
past."
- non-Western media archaeologies. We are interested in the diverse 
cultural origins of media technologies, especially their Islamic, South 
and East Asian, African, and global indigenous “roots.” We are 
interested in how these alternative genealogies can partake in the 
project of decolonization as modes of resistance. Taking a 
de-Westernized and post-European perspective is crucial given the role 
of Western imperialism in the acceleration of climate change and 
environmental destruction, theorised as the Anthropocene.
- travelling cultures. We are interested in inquiries that investigate 
how culture transforms as it circulates geographically, whereby the 
transfer of practices and objects, such as textiles, across time and 
space draws alternative cartographies that exploding nationalistic, 
reactionary, and identitarian modes of thinking art and culture.
- media ecologies and cosmologies. We are interested in how contemporary 
artistic practices are grounded in the unground of different 
cosmologies, and how local cosmologies partake in an extended ecological 
system where an object or a practice mediates between the body and the 
cosmos. We are also interested in how contemporary artworks can function 
as cosmological diagrams that guide the viewer’s perception and 
imagination. We are interested in practices that draw on cosmologies to 
promote sustainability.
- healing media: interventions that reinvent the contemporary media 
landscape as opportunities for individual and communal healing. We are 
interested in inquiries into appropriate technologies that use less 
electricity and generate a social renewable energy for communities of 
practice; practices that are intensive rather than extensive, connecting 
to the viewer materially, affectively, and socially.

Please send your abstract of up to 300 words with a short bio to 
contact at substantialmotion.org by March 7, 2022.

Questions? Contact Radek Przedpełski, manager, A Light Footprint in the 
Cosmos: przedper at tcd.ie

Reference / Quellennachweis:
CFP: A Light Footprint in the Cosmos (Vancouver, 24-27 Jun 22). In: 
ArtHist.net, Feb 15, 2022. <https://arthist.net/archive/35921>.