Technovisuality and Cultural Reenchantment: Call for Paper

(Please circulate)
Call for Paper

Conference on Technovisuality and Cultural Reenchantment
21-22 November 2008
Co-Organized by Chinese University of Hong Kong & Hong Kong Shue Yan University

http://www.hksyu.edu/english/2008Techno/home.html


Daily life is increasingly mediated by technology and remorseless visual stimuli in everyday technovisual forms have now become the very incarnation of what it means to be human. While technovisuality points to the visual as object and site of social interaction, it is also very much about embodiment and how we transform information and knowledge (infoledge) into material and aesthetic forms. Bergson thinks of the body itself as an image among other images, hence the theory of perception as affect (Hansen). Such a process of technical and biological symbiosis entails cultural reenchantment, which takes place where nature and nurture overlap, where becomings through circuits of intensity occur between humans and machines, humans and nonhumans.

Think of cinematography, digital images in all media, video games, scientific data visualization, virtual environments - all could be summed up as manifestations of the Figural (Rodowick). Together they encapsulate an epoch of hybridity in a wide range of interactive experiences, in which technovisuality programs more and more intelligence into the very fabric of a new ecology of wonders. Images are now thought to be able to think and to have desires themselves (Mitchell).

Within the spaces of visuality, cultural re-enchantment also points to eco-consciousness, warning us of our ecological violence, requiring the re-enchantment of nature by recovering a sense of the sacred as a means of survival. Here, Latour�??s network, Prigogine�??s affirmation of the fabulous in the nature of swerving matter, the quantum enigma in new physics, might be drawn upon in leading us towards what Laszlo calls the re-enchantment of the cosmos.

There is nothing unnatural about technology; and like cyberpunk, technology is certainly us. Hence technology does not have to limit itself to those �??technological devices�?? that Heidegger is wary of. In a sense, visualization has always been technological since the beginning of time as a kind of primordial mechanism which has, according to Heidegger, not too much to do with �??the technological.�?? Here oriental philosophy provides an alternative perspective of how cultural reenchantment can be tied to technovision in a broad sense.

Suggested themes:

1. Cinematography�??s magical world, and the camera�??s eye.
2. Technovisuality and enchantment in mediated visualization.
3. The history and development of digital images and the way �??nuanced�?? relationship is established between human and nonhuman.
4. Technovisuality, science and philosophy
5. Imagescape as a new ecology
6. On-line gaming as spectacular show case of cultural enchantment
7. Classical Eastern philosophy and contemporary theories of visualization: an interdisciplinary and intercultural approach.
8. Science fiction and film as artifact of cultural reenchantment.
9. Architecture and virtuality
10. Virtual life

Important Dates:

4th April - Deadline for submission of abstracts
Early May - Acceptance letters sent out
3rd October - Papers Due
October - Refereeing
31st October - 10th November - Revise Papers

Conference website: http://www.hksyu.edu/english/2008Techno/home.html
Conference email address: techno08@hksyu.edu/ technovisual@cuhk.edu.hk


Conference Committee:

Prof. WONG Kin-yuen
Professor and Head
Department of English Language & Literature
Director
Technoscience Culture Research and Development Centre
Hong Kong Shue Yan University
email: kywong@hksyu.edu

Prof. Helen GRACE
Associate Professor
Department of Cultural and Religious Studies
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
email: hmgrace@cuhk.edu.hk

Dr. Amy CHAN Kit-sze
Assistant Professor
Department of English Language & Literature
Associate Director
Technoscience Culture Research and Development Centre
Hong Kong Shue Yan University
email: amychan@hksyu.edu