Oct 08)

CALL FOR PAPERS:

Storytelling: Playful Interactions and Spaces of Imagination in
Contemporary Visual Culture

Graduate Student Symposium, October 10-12, 2008, History of Art and
Architecture Department, University of Pittsburgh

World contemporary art practices and screen media increasingly entail
open-ended stories, fragmented narrative sequences, personal
confessions, references to literary texts, as well as the design of
large-scale fantasy environments and playground-like spaces that
undermine contemplative viewing experience. While some artists invent
stories and project utopian places as a means of escape from quotidian
circumstances, others rely on half-real, half-fictional narratives in
order to raise the awareness of grim political circumstances, urban
alienation, social enclosure, or aggravating environmental problems.
This symposium aims to investigate the reasons for this persistent
interest in narrative transposition of personal experiences and public
events, as well as the stimuli for playful spectatorial interaction
within contemporary visual culture.

We invite paper submissions on the following topics:

- storytelling and ludic participation to art projects as redemptive
therapy: the intermingling of reality and fiction; writing history
through tales, archival investigations, and memory-work

- intertextuality and hypertextuality: intersections between literature,
film, and art practices at the level of appropriations and adaptations;
interweavings of classical myths and contemporary myths

- wonderlands: immersive environments, utopic and dystopic worlds,
virtual reality spaces, modes of inhabiting and subverting the white
cube/black box

- artists as trickster figures and mythmakers: artists' avatars and
fictional personas

- ethics and spectacle: carnivalesque representations and moral
ambiguity; types of spectatorship; participatory responsibility and
interactivity; relational aesthetics and relational antagonism

We encourage paper submissions from graduate students at all stages of
their studies, working in any discipline. We also encourage MFA students
to send in presentations of art projects related to these themes.
Abstracts should be under 350 words. Final presentations should not
exceed 20 minutes. Please submit abstracts and CVs to
haasymposium2008gmail.com
by March 17th, 2008. We will notify selected speakers by March 30th.

For updated information on the graduate student symposium, visit:
http://vrcoll.fa.pitt.edu/haasymposium2008/Index.html