call for submissions: memory in a digital age
Theme Description:
We seek submissions of critical essays, films, and other/new media forms that address the issue of memory and its permutations in a digital age. Rather than a traditional attempt to define the parameters of the topic, we offer the following more open-ended description and invite your related submissions:
Memory can involve veiling or unveiling.
Where what is out of context creates other contexts,
turning words and images over
until they take on new roles.
What’s new are the spaces between things
newly brought together—
It is also the oldest thing there is.
Let us play among the ruins and stroll
along the wandering paths.
Remapping the past.
It speaks, emotes, evokes.
Explore the fragments and make more of them,
make them something,
break them down to nothing.
I store my memory within and without,
in stories and images, through sounds and smells
and the taste of cigarettes.
Meet with spirits in the fog
and ghosts in the shadows,
Hazy, brief, and haunting.
Potential Topics
· Indices of memory (e.g., records, documentation)
· Storing memory and redundancy with digital memory
· Memory deletion and digital censorship
· Memory and temporality (e.g., time travel)
· Internet as a collective memory (e.g., Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Netflix, Hulu, Wikipedia)
· Traumatic memory (e.g., Holocaust, 9/11)
· The Persistence of Memory in a digital age
· Fragmented memory, random access, broken memory
· Cultural memory (e.g., tradition, ritual, and national identity)
· Film as oneiric
· Memory and the perception of history; alternative history (e.g., teleological and topological history)
· Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and technological singularity
· Technological memory, false memory, and memory transfer (e.g., cyberbrain)
· Commodification of memory (e.g., targeted advertisements, browsing history, digital footprint)
· Spatial memory (e.g., memory palace, digital spaces)
· Tactile memory, sensate and bodily memory
· Mnemotechnics and cinema
· Video games and memory (e.g., save points, save files)
· Media archeology
About the journal:
cinemedia is the online, student-run journal of the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. We seek innovative critical essays, films and other media—especially new media, videographic essays and online materials that challenge media boundaries and the division of creative from critical work. cinemedia publishes largely, but not exclusively, student work.
Please submit work to cinemedia@sfsu.edu by Friday, April 19, 2019.
