Material Environments: Sensing Time and Matter in Digital and Visual Culture

Call for Papers

July 24th-25th 2015 University of Greenwich, London

This conference seeks to explore the points of intersection at which the material and the digital, matter and the virtual, and embodiment and posthumanism push against each other in visual media. Through encounters with cinema, artist’s film and video, installations, and online archives, the aim of the conference is to conceive of new relationships between temporality, materiality and affectivity, tracing the ways in which matter becomes meaningful, or comes to resist meaning, in the digital age. We hope to illuminate the new ways in which digital experiences allow us to think and sense matter and materiality, while reassessing the role of non-digital media in this equation. The conference will trace the implications of the posthuman turn in the humanities, understood as encompassing a variety of non-anthropocentric approaches, on our understanding of matter and affect in visual culture.


The Conference particularly welcomes papers that explore the following:


• the relationship between image and environment, the materiality of filmed nature, and the ‘ecological turn’ in theory and philosophy


• non-anthropocentric and posthuman approaches to visual media, particularly as they affect our understanding of materiality, mortality, and ethics


• the relationship between posthumanism, materiality and embodiment


• the ways in which the digital has reconfigured our understanding of temporality, spatiality, memory and archiving


• the impact of the digital on engagements with non-linear storytelling and locative narratives.


Confirmed keynote speakers:


Professor Joanna Zylinska, Goldsmiths, University of London http://www.joannazylinska.net/

Professor David Martin-Jones, University of Glasgowhttp://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/cca/staff/davidmartin-jones/

Dr Felicity Colman, Manchester School of Art http://www.art.mmu.ac.uk/profile/fcolman


Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words by 18th April 2015 to calls[AT]timadi.org with ‘Material Environments’ in the subject line.

This Conference is sponsored by the ‘Time, Materiality and the Digital’ (TiMaDi) research group at the University of Greenwich, and organised by Matilda Mroz, Isil Onol, Stacey Pitsillides, and Rosamund Davies.