VCS - Visual Culture Studies
VCS si pone come area di dialogo tra discipline diverse, impegnate a riflettere ciascuna per proprio conto sul visivo, sul visuale e sull’iconico, senza alcun intento di appiattire i risultati di ciascuna di esse. VCS contempla al suo interno: storici e teorici dell’arte, estetologi e filosofi dell’immagine, semiotici, sociologi della cultura e antropologi, studiosi di cinema, fotografia e teoria dell'immagine, storici e archeologi delle arti e dei media, specialisti di grafica e design, economisti, data scientists, e molti altri.
VCS nasce da studiosi che lavorano in Università e non hanno alcun timore di confrontarsi con i problemi estetici, etici, politici del nostro tempo.
VCS nasce da un gruppo di studiosi italiani, ma possiede una vocazione internazionale e ospita interventi e curatele di studiosi internazionali.
VCS pubblica due numeri all’anno ciascuno dei quali è dedicato a un tema specifico. Il primo numero è basato su call for papers e promuove nuove ricerche e lavori di giovani studiosi. Il secondo numero è a inviti e fa il punto su una tematica “calda” con l’aiuto di studiosi affermati.
VCS nasce da studiosi che lavorano in Università e non hanno alcun timore di confrontarsi con i problemi estetici, etici, politici del nostro tempo.
VCS nasce da un gruppo di studiosi italiani, ma possiede una vocazione internazionale e ospita interventi e curatele di studiosi internazionali.
VCS pubblica due numeri all’anno ciascuno dei quali è dedicato a un tema specifico. Il primo numero è basato su call for papers e promuove nuove ricerche e lavori di giovani studiosi. Il secondo numero è a inviti e fa il punto su una tematica “calda” con l’aiuto di studiosi affermati.
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Call for Essays #07
"Wearable – Media to be worn"
edited by Barbara Grespi e Federico Vercellone
The role of the body in new media has been discussed for some time, along with the tendency to make devices that are increasingly compact so that they can be incorporated and always available (Carbone, 2023). This topic is not new, and McLuhan’s idea of the medium as a prosthesis already alluded to a continuity, at least imaginary, between bodies and technology. In contemporary times, the question is now posed in reverse: given the extreme automation achieved by algorithmic capital media (Eugeni, 2021), it is the human body that is now considered an appendix, or a complement to the device, rather than vice versa, as Vilém Flusser suggested decades ago through the concept of “epithesis” (Flusser, 1991).
VCS #7 intends to explore the territory of wearable media, reconnecting them to the practices of bodily wearability of the image from a media-archaeological and philosophical-cultural perspective (Huhtamo, Parikka, 2011). The process of transforming the human body into a support, or more precisely, materially into a device for image display and transmission, has deep roots, motivated by the very nature of the body itself, which Merleau-Pontian phenomenology has clarified as inherently medial (Dalmasso, 2018). But in addition to ideas, the practices of the body as a medium have also nurtured the development of technologies to be incorporated. Various cultural and artistic forms have long experimented on the surface of the body as a place where images can appear, starting from the centuries-old practice of tattooing. Tattooing acts out the idea that “one can make of their own body, of what is most ours, a Ding, something both of one’s own and foreign” (Vercellone, 2023), precisely a screen based on a paradoxical retro (or intra) projection. The extreme intimacy of skin and image, their fusion into a compound that overcomes the distinction between symbolic and material, fixity and movement, internal and external, opens up various mediological reflections, ranging from the possibility of understanding the Western and 19th-century version of tattooing as a variant of pre-cinema, a body-based optical toy (Grespi, 2021), to the mediatic aetiology of skin diseases (Violi, 2013), and to ancient and modern, artistic or therapeutic treatments aimed at its externalization, instrumentalization and sharing (such as transplants, Damiani, 2022).
In this key, the issue intends to broaden the investigation to various phenomena of corporeal mediatisation, for example those delegated to our “second skin” (Strauven, 2021), such as the illusionistic use of clothing fabrics, which the tradition of cinema studies has already traced back to the emergence of the moving image (Gunning, 2003). Experiments with the forms of projection (now refocused by Bruno, 2022, and Casetti, 2023) and their use on bodies as screens are equally central – from the first cine-installation conceived by Man Ray, who in the 1920s projected a film by Méliès onto the moving screen formed by the costumes of the guests at a masked ball, to the experiments of Lettrist filmmakers who cast images onto the bodies of the spectators in the theatre (Lischi, 2001) and the practices of re-signification of the body of the artist (The Gospel According to St. Matthew of/on Pier Paolo Pasolini by Fabio Mauri – Intellettuale, 1975). Valerie Export’s tactile screening (Tapp und Tastkino, 1968), a feminist performance of expanded cinema in which the author transforms her own breasts into a touchscreen, is also part of this series, which ideally continues in those visual performances in real time (Vjing) that anchor themselves to the bodies of actors or dancers, and ultimately in the practice of the virtual dress (Liberati, 2017). These aesthetic and cultural forms have prepared the ground on which contemporary wearable media have settled in the form of accessories (glasses, watches, bracelets, Bluetooth rings, sensor headgear, headphones) or of rewriting the naked body (as in the case of electronic tattoos, which embellish and simultaneously connect our skin to the environment).
Contributions are solicited on the following, non-exhaustive topics:
- Case studies on contemporary wearable media (their cultural implications, their phenomenology, and preferably, but not exclusively, their archaeology)
- The production of images in the body, due to “natural” reactions or surgical interventions
- Artistic experiences of every era based on the valorisation of the transmissive,
reflective, absorbent and shielding qualities of the skin
- Fabric and its mediatisation, between fashion and technology
- Live performances, Vjing, and augmented reality based on the capitalisation of bodies
- Philosophies of bodily-based images (forms of symbolisation of the body, the
question of lost nudity in the face of digitisation)
Attraverso tutto il Novecento, varie forme estetiche, artistiche e culturali hanno preparato il terreno su cui si sono insediati i contemporanei media da indossare, pensati in forma di accessorio (occhiali, orologi, bracciali, anelli bluetooth, copricapo a sensori, cuffie) o di riscrittura del corpo nudo (come nel caso dei tatuaggi elettronici, che vestono e insieme connettono la nostra pelle all’ambiente).
Si richiedono contributi sulle seguenti questioni, non esaustive:
- studi di caso sui media indossabili contemporanei (le loro implicazioni culturali, la loro fenomenologia, e preferibilmente, ma non esclusivamente, la loro archeologia)
- la produzione di immagini nel corpo, a causa di reazioni “naturali” o interventi chirurgici
- le esperienze artistiche di ogni epoca basate sulla valorizzazione delle qualità trasmissive, riflessive, assorbenti e schermanti della pelle
- il tessuto e la sua mediatizzazione, fra moda e tecnologia
- live performances, Vjing, e realtà aumentate basate sulla capitalizzazione dei corpi
- filosofie delle immagini incorporate (forme di simbolizzazione del corpo, la questione della nudità perduta alla prova della digitalizzazione)
edited by Augusto Sainati and Andrea Rabbito
Historically, film theory has encountered the problem of visual culture since the first decades of the 20th century. From this point of view, research on cinema preceded visual studies by indicating methodologies and objects of study – although there are discordant voices on the relationship between the two undisciplined disciplines. Film studies have not been distant from visual studies, but on the contrary - taking up the title of the CFE - they have been "before" but also "be for" ("functional to") studies on the visual.
The Call for Essays for number 6 of VCS -Visual Culture Studies invites you to propose contributions, which can be developed according to different disciplinary perspectives, on the themes and problems concerning the link between film studies and visual studies.
Deadline: 25 march 2023
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