THE AUDIOVISUAL BODY

a symposium

Monday 11th & Tuesday 12th June
University of Huddersfield, 2018

Keynote Presentations:

• Catherine Grant, Professor of Digital Media and Screen Studies at Birkbeck, London
• Nwando Ebizie, Performance Artist, Composer, Musician, London / Manchester, UK
• Matej Matejka, Director of Studio Matejka, The Grotowski Institute, Poland
• Ben Spatz, Nazlıhan Eda Erçin, and Agnieszka Mendel: The Judaica Project

Pre-symposium workshops on Saturday 9th & Sunday 10th June
with Nwando Ebizie and the Judaica Project

Call for Proposals:

We invite presentations, performances, and screenings that examine and transform the relationship between embodiment and audiovisuality. While embodiment and mediatization have each been major themes of academic and artistic research for the past half century, their mutual construction has not been as deeply explored. At a time when omnipresent recording technologies spread alongside recurring ecological and political crises, it is more urgent than ever to ask what the exponential growth of the audiovisual means for lived embodiment — and vice versa.

Just as the embodied capacity for speech was forever transformed by the advent of writing and then printing technologies, embodied capacities of movement, vocalization, and other soundmaking are now increasingly received and interpreted in relation to the possibility of audiovisual inscription. The more widespread audiovisual recording technologies become, the more human embodiment is understood in terms of its audiovisual dimensions, especially in the public sphere.

– How does widespread audiovisuality change our experience of lived embodiment?

– What can performing and embodied arts teach us about the audiovisual?

– What new or alternative strategies of audiovisual embodiment are emerging today?

– What is the body in the audiovisual age?

The symposium will bring together practitioner-researchers from dance, theatre, and performance studies, visual anthropology and sociology, digital media and screen studies, and other fields in which the audiovisual body has emerged as a central concern. Affiliated with the new videographic Journal of Embodied Research and hosted by the Judaica project at University of Huddersfield, the event aims to foster interdisciplinary exchange and develop new perspectives on audiovisual embodiment.

Please submit a one-page proposal including a description of your research, a proposal for sharing it during the symposium, and a short bio or CV. Links to audiovisual materials are strongly encouraged.

Submission deadline: 28 February 2018
Notification of Acceptance: 10 March 2018
Email: Ben Spatz <b.spatz@hud.ac.uk>

Conference Fee: £100 (bursaries available)