My erotic Screen
EROTIC SCREEN AND SOUND - CULTURE, MEDIA AND DESIRE
October 2010 26:30
CALL FOR PROPOSALS
Few subjects are as simultaneously commonplace and controversial as the erotic. While sex, gender, identity and desire have been traditional mainstays of artistic, academic and public discourses, the erotic often continues to provoke fears, anxieties and resistances. Screen-based media, such as computers, telephones, games, advertising, television and cinema, multiply in contemporary urban space. Erotic imagery and sound are routine - the erotic invitation to the viewer, representations of erotic attraction between individuals, erotic innuendo in songs and sound bites - proliferating the banal everydayness of contemporary life and culture. Yet at the same time, the erotic remains a site of beguilement, the forbidden, transgression, fascination and mystery.
We are seeking papers on a wide range of topics from students in various disciplines: from sociologists to creative arts practitioners; from writers to historians. We seek to offer an open and inclusive academic space for emerging scholars to share and develop their work, contributing to a broader discussion on contemporary negotiations with subjectivity, identity and creativity.... broadly locatable under the following themes:
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•Representations of the erotic
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•Erotic identities
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•Erotic aesthetics, forms and genres
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•Erotic encounters
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•Taboos, perversions and obsessions
An American
resident of Canada, experimenting with new forms of critical media ethnography in Cultural Farming.
EXCHANGE:
On Oct 11, 2010, at 1:34 PM, holland@culturalfarming.com wrote:
David Baker,
Really?
1.) A screen conference "unable to accommodate a film screening"?
(But then maybe you mis-read? I submitted a video paper.)
2.) Should I surmise you also have no ability to "accommodate" sound either?
(The title is screen and SOUND, right?)
3.) Or maybe this "erotic" image of a severed female torso, with which you advertise your conference, excludes me as well?
4.) Maybe you should re-consider your curious decision, David Baker? As stated,
"In addition to academic paper presentations, we are planning to incorporate an exhibition and screening program. The exhibition and film screenings will feature work by artists whose practice critically mobilises notions of the erotic..... We invite scholars and graduates from a range of disciplines to examine, explore, theorise, and historicise erotic moving images, sounds, visual arts, performances and texts. "
5.) Should I go on? Here is your list of suggested topics:
Representing the erotic
• Screen nudity x
• The eroticisation of childhood/youth x
• Erotics and consumerism x
• Sex and censorship x
• Eroticism and stardom x
• Sound/voice/song and the erotic x
• Erotics and music video x
Erotic identities
• Femininities and the erotic x
• Masculinities and the erotic x
• Queer erotics x
• Erotics and race x
• Ageing and the erotic x
• Disability and the erotic
• Class identity and the erotic x
• Sex industry/sex workers x
• Eroticism and androgyny
• Erotic rivalries x
• Auto-erotics x
• Marriage/motherhood and fatherhood x
Erotic aesthetics, forms and genres
• Erotics and the spectacular x
• The erotic and the tragic
• Erotics and the comic x
• Melodrama and the erotic x
• Surrealism and the erotic x
• Erotics and the pastoral
• Erotics, landscape and mise en scene
• The exotic/erotic object x
• The erotic city/urban erotics
• Kitsch, camp and erotics x
Erotic encounters, taboos and
• Erotic spectatorship and voyeurism x
• Hysteria and erotics x
• Eroticism, conquest and imperialism x
• Pornography x
• Fantasy and fetishism x
• Erotics and violence x
• Erotics, horror and the grotesque x
Look again, David:
http://www.hollandwilde.com/theory/Wilde_Griffith_Erotic.mov
I can visually, aurally and contextually broach your entire conference call from my home screen in just one week of TV alone... every week of the year.
I doubt any other submission offers this viewpoint to your attendees.
And so, I wonder what is it in my submission you cannot “accommodate”?
Or is there something else?
Regards,
Holland Wilde
On Oct 10, 2010, at 7:34 PM, eroticsconference wrote:
Dear Holland
Thanks for your interest in our conference. Regretfully I must inform you that we are unable to accommodate a film screening in our program. For further information about the conference, please keep visiting the website for further updates: http://www.griffith.edu.au/ccr and go to the conference link.
Regards
David Baker (co-convenor)
PROPOSAL SUBMISSION
To: eroticsconference@griffith.edu.au
From: Holland <holland@culturalfarming.com>
Date: 09/23/2010 05:40AM
Subject: ABSTRACT WILDE - Erotic Screen and Sound
Venue:
Erotic Screen and Sound: Culture, Media and Desire Conference
Griffith Centre for Cultural Research and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane Tuesday-Friday, 15-18 February 2011
Date:
24 September 2010
Covenors:
Dr. David Baker (GCCR) d.baker@griffith.edu.au
Dr. Jodie Taylor (GCCR) jodie.taylor@griffith.edu.au
Video Preview Link:
My Erotic Screen: Ethnography with Critical Montage.
http://www.hollandwilde.com/theory/Wilde_Griffith_Erotic.mov
Presenter:
Holland Wilde
2714 Parkdale Blvd. NW
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
T2N 3S7
phone - 403.695.0826
email - holland@culturalfarming.com
project - http://www.culturalfarming.com
bio: http://www.socialtext.net/speakers/index.cgi?holland_wilde
Abstract:
For this Erotics Conference, I have specifically edited a 26minute video for presentation entitled, My Erotic Screen: Ethnography with Critical Montage.
Cultural Farming is my seven-year critical (and purposefully surreal) media ethnography project. In it I appropriate, archive, remix and disseminate video “writings” to help inform and reform ideological practice inherent throughout normative media production. In short, I attempt to critically respond to TV/media makers by refunctioning their own language and technique. Following Eisenstein (critical montage), Benjamin (critical theory) and Brecht (critical praxis), I examine how absurdist production conditions much of our communication. Thus what I am mostly concerned with today is the profound lack of reflexivity in both professional and social media production because, whether apparent or not, manipulations made during production are expressions of power and therefore political. Much of my work is an attempt to “critically jolt” viewers to an awareness that our compulsory tools and techniques are the originating mouthpiece of unethical media communication. Here, I offer McLuhan (1968), “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” Likewise, I submit that despite growing TV/media proficiencies we continue to neglect how we become both what we behold (consume) and hold (produce).
Through the metaphor of Cultural Farming I have, by necessity, accumulated and comparatively archived thousands of hours of North American broadcast TV content for broaching a wide range of socio-political media projects, including: five hundred daily blog posts containing well over 2,500 video clips; eighty “critical mystory” video essays; a dozen ethnographic projects, and a self-writing montage machine containing 12,000 individual video fillips of the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Other projects include pornography; digital visuality; technological determinism; Hurricane Katrina; a 105 minute critical reenactment of the news coverage during the U.S. school shootings on the campus of Virginia Tech; the recent British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico; and a six-hour “video book” of allegorical lament, Trauerspiel, in honor of Walter Benjamin.
Presentation:
While this unorthodox proposal submission is neither paper, panel or poster, it is in direct alignment with the conference’s premise, themes and call. My videos have been screened at many academic venues and in numerous ways: as stand-alone sessions, as "interstitials" between sessions, as lead-ins to keynotes, in separate adjoining screening rooms, as "added value" evening affairs, and recently where multiple Cultural Farming videos were continuously looped on a podium flat-screen in a common lobby area for conferees to wander past and peruse during proceedings.
My appropriation and dissemination is fully and explicitly allowed under US/CA/AU/EU freedoms of "fair use-dealing". If accepted for presentation, I can immediately proffer a higher resolution video in whatever format you require (DVD, PAL, NTSC, Quicktime, etc.).
On Oct 12, 2010, at 6:10 PM, David Baker wrote:
Dear Holland
Thanks for your email and your continued interest in our conference. The passion with which you've responded certainly demonstrates your considerable commitment to your work!
The reason we were unable to accomodate your video in the seminar program was really rather prosaic. We had an excellent response to our call for papers and finished up with more presentations than slots. In deciding which papers to include, priority was given to delivered papers. This is entirely standard for academic conferences.
The screening program you allude to is not being organized by Jodie and myself; we are responsible for the papers. The exhibition and screenings are being organized by the IMA (Institute of Modern Art) in collaboration with Otherfilm. Otherfilm are curating the screenings and as I understand it already have a clear understanding of what is to be included their program: you will note that unlike the open call for papers, we have made no open call for film or video presentations.
All I can suggest is that you contact IMA and see if they are willing to accept and schedule unsolicited video works for the conference.
Regards
David Baker
From: Holland <holland@culturalfarming.com>
Date: October 12, 2010 7:49:17 PM MDT
To: David Baker <d.baker@griffith.edu.au>
Thank you...
I was not expecting a reply.
The important (missing) point in this exchange, however, is that MY VIDEO IS A RESEARCH PAPER.
(Certainly we can accept media as "writing"... even when we are untrained to critically read/write "delivered" media.)
My projects are examples of visual, critical, ethical, screen ethnography.
You are not the first to dismiss this robust approach, even as it rises above others.
(I can mention several others in Brisbane alone who do the same.)
And to be sure, I will not be the last to proffer this approach.
Video/film may ultimately be the very best way to research video/film.
Maybe next conference you will be more open to visual-critical-surreal qualitative methodologies.
My "erotic" TV screen demands theoretical attention.
It will reach a deserving audience eventually.
Good luck to you and to your conference.
Regards,
holland
“...We invite scholars and graduates from a range of
disciplines to examine, explore, theorise, and historicise
erotic moving images, sounds, visual arts, performances
and texts...”
Despite “calls” like these, my video writing, my research, my screen ethnography continues to face curious resistance. Cultural Farming scholarship appears to hold insufficient merit throughout much of the academy....although I seriously doubt many other submissions were more aligned with the stated premise of this “Erotics” conference. (read below)
How can my screen not be valued at a screen conference? And so it goes.