For its twenty-second issue, InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for
Visual Culture invites scholarly articles and creative works that address
the multiple meanings of opacity.

In the spring of 2013, former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden
began releasing documents pertaining to the wide-ranging data collection
methods of the National Security Agency. Alternately hailed as hero and
traitor, Snowden's actions have fueled intense public debate regarding
issues of privacy and transparency. For Issue 22, we would like
contributors to consider the tension between transparency and opacity and
reflect on the cultural and political contexts that gave rise to their
connotations of openness and secrecy. What does it mean to claim either as
a right? The late writer, poet, and critic Édouard Glissant (1928-2011)
developed a model of opacity as a means of creating ethical relationships,
writing in Poetics of Relation, "Transparency no longer seems like the
bottom of the mirror in which Western humanity reflected the world in its
own image. There is opacity now at the bottom of the mirror, a whole
alluvium deposited by populations." How could opacity be used as a tool of
resistance? What stakes are involved in the revelation or obscuring of
artworks' racial, cultural, or gendered origins? How might we imagine
opacity to be useful or limiting to the work of visual culture?

We also seek to address optical properties of opacity more broadly as a
conceptual tool for approaching medium specificity, innovations in color
theory, and other subjects. Does our understanding of opacity shift in
regard to digital technologies as it may between cultural spheres and
political territories? How might visual culture be invested in the
theoretical and physical properties of opacity and transparency?

We welcome papers and artworks that further the various understandings of
opacity. Possible topics of exploration include, but are not limited to:

-Aesthetic and political dimensions of transparency and opacity

-Identity politics, "the right to opacity"

-Privacy and visibility, surveillance

-The "transparent society" and digital panopticism

-Scientific and medical visualization, the body, big data

-Opacity of architectural traditions

-Liminal spaces, borders, zones of conflict

-Transparency and globalization, geopolitics

-Emerging, established, and decaying democracies

-Politics of clothing, fabric, screens, interstitial space and material

-Camera obscura/lucida, properties of darkness and light, color,
pigmentation

-Transparency and opacity in the plastic arts (painting, film, sculpture)

-Penetration and resistance

Please send completed papers (with references following the guidelines from
the Chicago Manual of Style) of between 4,000 and 10,000 words to
ivc[dot]rochester[at]gmail[dot]com by May 1, 2014. Inquiries should be sent
to the same address.

Creative/Artistic Works
In addition to written materials, InVisible Culture is accepting work in
other media (video, photography, drawing, code) that reflect upon the theme
as it is outlined above. For questions or more details concerning
acceptable formats, go to http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/contribute or
contact ivc[dot]rochester[at]gmail[dot]com.

Reviews
InVisible Culture is also currently seeking submissions for book,
exhibition, and film reviews (600-1,000 words). To submit a review
proposal, go to http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/contribute or contact

ivc[dot]rochester[at]gmail[dot]com.

Blog
The journal also invites submissions to its blog feature, which will
accommodate more immediate responses to the topic of the current issue. For
further details, please contact us at ivc[dot]rochester[at]gmail[dot]com
with the subject heading "blog submission."

* InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture (IVC) is a
student run interdisciplinary journal published online twice a year in an
open access format. Through peer reviewed articles, creative works, and
reviews of books, films, and exhibitions, our issues explore changing
themes in visual culture. Fostering a global and current dialog across
fields, IVC investigates the power and limits of vision.