Deadline for submissions: Extended to January 23th, 2009.

Keynote Speaker: Lisa Parks, Chair and Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellite and the Televisual, co-editor of Planet TV: A Global Television Reader, and is working on two new books entitled Coverage: Media Spaces and Security after 911 (forthcoming, Routledge) and Mixed Signals: Media Infrastructures and Cultural Geographies. She is also the producer and co-producer of an array of media arts projects such as Experiments in Satellite Media Arts (w/ Ursula Biemann), Loom (w/ Miha Vipotnik), Postwar Footprints and Roaming.

Artist’s Talk by: To Be Announced

The graduate students in the Department of Critical Studies and the Media Arts and Practice (iMAP) PhD program in the School of Cinematic Arts seek conference papers and creative presentations from graduate students addressing the theme of "Translating Media."

“Translation” has gained a renewed valence within the fields of media study and arts practice. As theoretical and creative inquiry shifts toward transmedia, transnational and transdisciplinary approaches and renderings of the current global audiovisual landscape, translation means more than just a linguistic exercise. Rather, the term increasingly lends itself as a productive conceptual lens and metaphor for the interlaced and often contradictory set of transformative processes at work when media objects, policies, and economies traffic across geographic borders, cultural institutions, and technological platforms. The widespread global, regional and local shifts in cultural media practices that arise from these traversals undoubtedly call for transdisciplinary methodologies. To address these issues, Media Studies has sought to exchange and translate critical vocabularies among Cultural Studies, Global Critical Race Feminism/Critical Race Theory, Ethnic Studies, Queer Theory, History, Art History, Mass Communications, American Studies, Post Colonial Theory, and Visual and Performance Studies. And, as many media studies scholars seek to produce more than just textual representations of their research, the translation of theory into audiovisual practice has more frequently become an alternative mode of scholarship. We thus feel that translation is a critical keyword that speaks in diverse ways to media cultures, Media Studies and a growing body of scholar-practitioners who both thematize translation in their media art and seek for new translative possibilities in their creative processes. We have chosen “Translating Media” as the title for the conference to foreground media’s translation as an ongoing process. And we believe the expansive deployment of the term will invite an exciting array of creative interpretations and theoretical positions.

We invite submissions for 20-minute papers, 20-minute creative project presentations, or pre-constituted panels of no more than four presenters that consider the stakes of ‘translating media’ from diverse methodological, disciplinary and creative approaches. Panels that include both critical and creative presentations or that enact a productive dialogue of theory and practice are especially encouraged.

Topics to explore may include, but are not restricted to:

- the various implications of media and cultural convergence
- how media policies translate into labor relations and practices
- the problems that arise when incorporating media theory into media art practice, and translating a media art project into a gallery space, social space, institutional space, etc.
- the rise of transmedia storytelling and media that are experienced on multiple platforms including mobile devices, urban screens, game environments, etc.
- ongoing tensions around the status of narrative in linear vs. interactive media and the problems of translation between games and cinema
- ideological concerns around the rise of runaway productions, co- and omnibus productions, and transnational remakes within global film industries
- the traffic of global television ‘formats’ and/or ‘canned shows’ across national borders and media systems
- issues pertaining to linguistic translations through subtitling and dubbing
- questions pertaining to the archive: how translation between film, analog, digital and textual media affect archival institutions; what kinds of issues do we still face with archival research, especially if that archive is in a different language?
- the translation of programming languages and code into critical theories of media, and vice versa
- the difficulties and possibilities presented when media scholarship travels and converses across the Humanities

Selected papers will be included in a special conference-themed issue of Spectator, the University of Southern California's Journal of Film and Television Criticism, and selected media projects may also be included on the School of Cinematic Arts website.

For individual submissions, please send abstracts or project descriptions of 300 words or less and a brief biographical or artist statement. Links to images or media files are encouraged but not required. For panels, please submit a 300-word panel description and a 300-word abstract for each panelist's paper.  Please do not send large media files as e-mail attachments. Presentations requiring special technological setup will be considered on a case-by-case basis; these technological needs should be detailed in the proposal. Send all submissions to usc.translating.media@gmail.com

Please feel free to address any questions or comments to Patty Ahn at pahn@usc.edu.