The electronic journal of visual culture InVisible Culture welcomes submissions for issue 19, «Blind Spots.» To set up a critical conversation under the thematic framework of “blindness” runs the risk of holding one mode or locus of vision above others. In other words, by inviting our peers to carry out their thinking with the question of “blind spots” do we mean to encourage a purely negative criticality or counter‐discourse aimed at new technologies of vision, of revealing their artifice and lamenting their hegemony? Such concerns might provisionally be put to rest when we consider blindness less as a metaphor for criticism and more as an actual phenomenon, even how blindness itself might ground a phenomenology. In considering such questions, we begin by inquiring into the horizon of vision as it currently presents itself. It is as if everything increasingly makes itself available to sight. Google now not only seeks to “organize the data of the world” but evidently has in mind the visualization of that data as well—of turning seeing itself into a question of data, as evident in the company’s various projects (or products?) such as Google maps and its latest Google glasses technology. In part because of this hyper‐availability of information by way of (for instance) technologies of algorithmic vision, seeing has not only become de‐centered from the eye: the eye is itself becoming an obsolete organ, at best a point of support for the manifold ways in which technology narrows the space between itself and bodies. And yet, how might the blindness of the eye—its “ability” to falter—assist us in thinking about these modes of vision? In what ways can sensorial limits be understood as horizons of possibility? What fresh insights might a critical examination of past discourses on blindness and technological vision offer to our current understanding of contemporary technologies of augmented vision?
Another question we hope to address with Issue 19, then, concerns the relationship between blindness as a condition of the lived body and blindness as a condition attributable to certain media. In Derek Jarman’s 1993 film Blue, film itself is taken up as a medium that might provide the basis for reflecting on and even substituting for
the AIDS‐stricken artist’s own faltering vision. Comprised entirely of a single, seamless blue image, Blue incorporates voice‐over from a variety of sources (including Jarman) as a means of envisioning what is “technically” absent to sight. Both the eye and the film camera lens are, in the case of Blue, mediated by a larger poetics of blindness. By mentioning the examples of emergent technologies of algorithmic/augmented vision as well as a film such as Jarman’s, and by generally proceeding under this rubric of “blind spots,” we at InVisible Culture wish to encourage a vibrant, cross‐disciplinary conversation and to stimulate creative/artistic work concerning the rhetoric of vision and blindness from the perspective of our culturally, historically, and technologically unique moment.
Topics could include:
new media and sensorial “authenticity”
blindness as a critical‐discursive symptom
blindness and affect
media decay/rejuvenation
medical histories of blindness
blindness and the politics of (in)visibility
blind temporalities
glitches
technologies of visualization including stereoscopy, 3D movies,
and IMAX
blindness and cultural difference
code, algorithm, and augmented vision technologies
blindness as form and content
gender and blindness
Please send inquiries and completed papers of between 4,000 and 10,000 words to ivc.rochester@gmail.com by September 1, 2012.
Creative/Artistic Works
In addition to written material, InVisible Culture is accepting visual work (in videoexample) that reflects on blindness. For questions or more details concerning acceptable formats, please use the contact form on our website with the subject “Creative/Artistic Work Submission.”
Reviews
InVisible Culure currently seeks submissions for reviews of book, exhibition, and film (600‐1000) to be published in the reviews column on our blog. To submit a review proposal, please use the contact form on our website with the subject “Review Submission.”
Blog
The journal invites post submissions to our blog feature, which accommodates more immediate responses to the topic of the current issue.
For further details, please use the contact form on our website with the subject “Blog Submission.”
Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture
http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/
Matthew A. Killmeier
Associate Professor of Media Studies/
AFUM Grievance Representative
University of Southern Maine
19 Chamberlain Ave.
Portland, ME 04104 U.S.A.
1.207.780.4579, 1.207.780.5739 fax
AFUM 1.207.780.4197
«It’s not true I had nothing on, I had the radio on.» Marilyn Monroe,
1952
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Blog de Octavio Islas 