ALTERNATIVE FILM VIDEO - Research Forum 11 December 2020

Desktop Cinema organised by Miriam de Rosa and Greg de Cuir Jr

Call for submissions

Alternative Film Video 2020 will take place from 9-13 December 2020 at Students’ City Cultural Center in Belgrade as a hybrid edition. The Alternative Research Forum, scheduled on 11 December 2020, will be organised as a fully online event, offering a focussed, intimate environment in which to share thoughts and promote exchange of ideas.

The organisers of the Alternative Research Forum invite academics, artists, curators, writers and researchers of all types to submit proposals for presentations on the topic of Desktop Cinema. By that we mean those audiovisual pieces often labeled as “desktop documentaries”, and any other works alluding explicitly to or replicating the digital interface which has been employed to technically create the work itself. Experimenting and hinting at what Harun Farocki called “operational images”, the kind of audiovisual works we will focus on for this Research Forum combine technical and aesthetic elements in a mix that interrogates the desktop environment as well as its most commonly used apps and software.

Embracing a theoretical or an applied take, the proposals can deal with these and other approaches:   •    Offer a definition of desktop cinema •    Delve into an archaeology of desktop cinema, considering antecedents and conceptually connected media formats •    Focus on the techniques (e.g. screen capture) and the interfaces employed in desktop cinema, reflecting on their possible theoretical and philosophical implications •    Exemplify the techniques and interfaces employed in desktop cinema embracing a meta approach •    Present a work of desktop cinema in a performative manner that somehow reflects on the format

We are accepting abstracts of 300 words along with short biographies of 150 words for consideration. Details on the platform to be used for the Forum will be provided upon acceptance. Please forward inquiries and submissions to Greg de Cuir Jr, Selector for Alternative Film Video, and Miriam de Rosa, Centre for Postdigital Cultures (Coventry University), by 30 October 2020 at [email protected] and [email protected].

Alternative Research Forum was established in 2012. Participants have included artists such as Marina Gržinić, Ivan Ladislav Galeta, and Dirk de Bruyn, researchers such as Terri Francis and Meghanne Barker, curators such as Shama Khanna, Bruce Posner, and others. The founding curator of Alternative Research Forum is Greg de Cuir Jr.    Alternative Film Video (Belgrade, Serbia) is an international festival for new film and video work and one of the oldest manifestations of its kind in Europe. It was founded in 1982 as an antidote to commercial film and video-making and to support unconventional practices while celebrating moving image cultures. Alternative Film Video is organised by and hosted at AFC Belgrade, which was established in 1958 as Academic kino club and where many iconic filmmakers worked, including Tomislav Gotovac, Živojin Pavlović, Radoslav Vladić, and others.