[spectre] CFP: BTS 2019 - Graphic Intelligences & Algorithmic Fictions

[Gabriel Menotti]

Dear all,

Apologies for cross-posting! Here is the call for the next Besides the
Screen conference, in Brazil. I hope it might interest you and/or your
colleagues.

Best!
Menotti

* * *


*Besides the Screen 2019: Graphic Intelligences & Algorithmic Fictions*A
conference about all things GPU
Vitória and São Paulo, Brazil, 03-08 June 2019


Call for papers, artworks and other contributions
Submission deadline: *02 March 2019*

The passage from cinema to post-cinema is often heralded as a cleavage in
image practices. Photography loses its ground to rendering, editing to
compositing, and projection to streaming. New storytelling assemblages and
their respective affects signalize the dissolution of the medium’s
operational principles and their reconstitution in new technical
underpinnings. This cinema of graphic processing, associated to interface
design and videogames, allows for an unexpected epistemic stability. Ever
since the – effective, if not symbolic – abandonment of celluloid film,
never did we have a material component as expressive of the logic of
cinematographic representation as in the figure of the *graphics cards*.
Neither, paradoxically, so atypical.

*Graphic Processing Units *have become the unlikely bedrock of a wide range
of prominent industries to emerge in the last decades. Their high parallel
processing power has invited uses beyond the most obvious applications in
fields such as computer vision and virtual reality. These computer
architectures, historically developed to simulate appearances, are
currently employed in the production of statistical truths. Untethered from
screens, GPUs have been used in enterprises as diverse as machine learning
and cryptocurrency mining. In this context, to the same extent they embody
a new cinematographic *rationale*, graphic cards stand as an important
territory of dispute and convergence between media industries and other
contemporary sociotechnical systems.

The ninth edition of the Besides the Screen conference takes the economic
and cultural centrality of video cards as the point of departure to explore
the reconfiguration of audiovisual systems and the emergence of new media
practices and politics. We invite abstracts for papers, workshops,
single/multi-channel artworks, audiovisual performances, installations
pieces, and/or panels that explore all things GPU, covering topics such as:


- Procedural cinema, virtual/augmented/mixed reality, and videogames;
- Logic and applications of computer vision and cognition;
- Special effects, shaders, and new affective assemblages;
- Executable, performative, operational, and real-time images;
- Desktop documentaries, let’s play videos, and other performative
appropriations of GUI;
- Probabilistic spaces, frame prediction, and the temporalities of
rendering;
- Deep dreaming, deepfakes, and other generative forms based on neural
networks;
- Political bias of artificial intelligence and machine learning;
- Cryptocurrency mining and / as infrastructural detours of GPUs.

Submissions of individual papers, panels and lectures should include an
abstract of about 250 words and a short biographical note (150 words).
Artwork, demo and installation proposals should include a short
description/ synopsis (250 words), links to available documentation (videos
/ pictures / drafts), a complete list of technical requirements, and short
biographical note (150 words).

Proposals must be submitted by *02 March 2019* to the address
*besidesthescreen at gmail.com
<besidesthescreen at gmail.com>* with the subject heading *2019 CONFERENCE
PROPOSAL.*

We strongly encourage submissions from early career researchers and
research-practitioners.

Participants will not be charged a registration fee.

* * *
Besides the Screen is an international research network on the subject of
experimental audiovisual media. It aims to reconfigure the field of screen
studies by refocusing it on the seemingly secondary objects, processes, and
practices that exist within cinema. Besides the Screen also means to
promote an open and horizontal academic environment, favouring
practice-based approaches to research and artist collaborations. Info from
previous conferences can be found at besidesthescreen.com.
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