CALL FOR PAPERS

An international conference hosted by
Out of the Box Intermedia

1 October 2010, Benaki Museum, Athens

Locus Solus by Out of the Box Intermedia is a multidisciplinary project, under the auspices of the French Institute, the European Cultural Foundation and the British Council, involving collaboration across universities, art companies, and scientific institutes. The project employs structural affinities between theatre, architecture, the visual arts, science and choreographic research so as to explore how spectators respond to intermediality and to the intersection between curatorial and theatrical practice.

Papers | Performances | Exhibition|

Keynotes to include:

Thea Brejzek (Professor, Zurich University of the Arts) Sodja Zupanc Lotker (Prague Quadrennial Artistic Director) Werner Nekes ( Filmmaker, Media Researcher) Sozita Goudouna (Artistic Director, Out of the Box Intermedia) Panos Kouros (Professor, School of Architecture, Univerity of Patras) James Putnam (Independent Curator) Jerome Zoidakis (Researcher, Bio-academy of Athens) Lea Sinoimeri (Lecturer, University of Havre)

THEME

RAYMOND ROUSSEL / INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES

Raymond Roussel | Surrealism | Oulipo| Architecture| Philosophy | Visual Arts | Sound Art| Choreography | Scenography| Virtual Environments | Performance

This peer-reviewed conference will bring together international researchers and practitioners in fields including science, visual arts, theatre, dance and sound art so as to reconsider the world of writer Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), one of the ancestors of experimental writing. The enduring impact of Raymond Roussel on the arts and his direct or indirect influence to artistic movements will be examined with regard to the performance based installation project of Roussel’s Locus Solus at the Benaki Museum.
Locus Solus is a labyrinthine installation, an entity with many discrete parts, of spaces within spaces, that generates critical “points of view,” concerning scenographic and theatrical practice. The production deploys a scenographic model based on an analogy between the central character’s laboratories and a museum (cabinet of curiosities). The laboratories with the ingenious inventions represent the gallery where visual artists exhibit their work.

Focusing on artistic work with materials and concepts derived from scientific research, artists approach Locus Solus on several levels: by concentrating on the use of the machine, on research laboratory as an art studio, by focusing on the concept of the experiment, on the human body and medicine, on artworks as new life forms and on the importance of "form" (concepts of symmetry etc).

In 1914, Raymond Roussel commissioned Pierre Frondaie a popular pulp fiction writer, to turn his novel ‘Locus Solus’ into a play. For the production of Roussel’s Locus Solus narrative exists in an expanded context in which performance, architecture and the objects, it contains, are fluid in use and meaning, shifting between levels of significance, spatiality and textuality. The project reconsiders the work of the proto-surrealist writer so as to examine intermediality, as a radical force that operates in-between realities and that involves new modes of representation, new dramaturgical strategies, new ways of creating temporal and spatial interrelations.

At present some of the most vigorous works of art are being produced not in the studio but in the laboratory, where artists probe cultural, philosophical, and artistic questions connected with cutting-edge scientific and technological research. Their work ranges across disciplines, the physical sciences, information technologies, human biology-living systems and kinetics.
The overall aim of the conference is to overview the ways in which contemporary artists draw on scientific and technological developments to explore new forms of creative expression and to unfold the wide range of disciplines, genres, theoretical, and artistic positions that comprise the relationships between spectator, artist/scientist and curator in contemporary art practice.
We invite researchers in practice and theory (artists, scientists, curators, directors, dramaturgs, critics, and theorists) to participate in the conference Raymond Roussel: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. The Conference Programme Committee invites proposals for individual papers on any of the following themes:

• Art & Science: Expanding the Field
• The structural affinities between theatre, architecture, the visual arts and choreographic research
• Intermediality
• Inscriptions and the imaging of text
• Surrealism and Contemporary Art
• Architecture and trans-disciplinary understanding of space
• Visual, Aural and Tactile interpretations of text / of narrative

• Visual literacy and visual perception in performance

• Aesthetics and visual principles in performance

• Digital media and the scenographic as a mode of enquiry into performance
.
• Specific uses of digital media in performance scenography


• Changing ways of working and collaborating

Papers will also be considered on related themes. Please send abstracts (up to 300 words) for 20-minute presentations with a short biographical note by the 1st of September, 2010 to the Organizing Chairs: rousselconference@gmail.com
Do not hesitate to address any questions about the conference to the above address. The language of the conference is English.


Website: http://www.outoftheboxintermedia.org
The Museum: http://www.benaki.gr
Abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:
a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract

b) E-mails should be entitled: Raymond Roussel: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted.
Organising Chair: Sozita Goudouna: University of London, Royal Holloway.

SELECTION CRITERIA AND PROCESS

All proposals will be blind reviewed by the programme committee with the following criteria in mind:
• relationship to the conference theme
• interdisciplinary implications
Receipt of all submissions will be confirmed electronically and notification of acceptance will be on the 7th of September 2010