Abstract

Word and image relations and the institutions where these play out determine much of how societies (individuals and groups) define themselves. With this conference, we propose to explore how intermedial practices (inter- and/or transdisciplinary) impact on social dynamics, e.g. determine the ways in which art and activism operate and intersect and how art, literature, comics, film, digital media, theatre, etc. institute themselves in the public sphere or are entangled in power dynamics.

These relations can take many forms and engage us in thinking about the significance of society’s connection with various semiotic signs and in studying a variety of material that tends to fall outside of traditional boundaries. Therefore, we welcome historical and contemporary case studies and methodological explorations from artistic research, art history and theory, creative writing, literary studies, cultural studies, cultural analysis, film, theatre, comics or digital media studies, political science, museum studies, art sociology etc.

Questions that this conference aims to address include:

• the dynamic (power)relationships
between words and images and
their social impact

• the creative, activist and / or
transformative potential of this
interdisciplinary dialogue

• the institutions of word and
image (and experimental
institutionalism)

• intermedial activist art and
literature / digital
subjectivities

• the impact of word / images on
the situated reader / viewer

• historical perspectives on word
and image and this history’s
mediation today

• questions of (art) institutions,
display, and curating

• methodological questions arising
from hybrid cultural material in
the social domain

• indirect efficacies in / of word
and image in repressive
political contexts

• environmental activism in word
and image

• critical fabulation in word and
image

• word and image in counter-
forensis

• word, image, and the affordances
of their infrastructures