An International Symposium of the Framing Media Research Group
(Austrian Science Fund, Project 20349)
Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria
June 9-10, 2009

How do modern media define themselves? This is one of the central
questions that our symposium tries to trace by focusing on what has
become the largest, best-documented study of the recent past: the
emergence and establishing of film in the modernist period of the
early 20th century. Inspired, in part, by new computer-based
multimedia formats and digital imaging, recent research in film and
media studies has explored film history as a paradigmatic model for
the synthetic construction of media and phenomena of media blending.
Examples are processes of media convergence and differentiation
(Thomas Elsaesser), the intermedial formation of new media (André
Gaudreault), and the anachronistic projection of cinematic metaphors
onto digital moving images (David N. Rodowick). In the history of film
practice and theory, the novel medium constantly redefines itself
through recourses to already established media and artforms (including
photography, theater, painting, sculpture, and literature). Our
symposium will focus on media blends in film and its intermedial network.
Possible areas of investigation include:
– Plurimedial configurations of film such as relations of image,
sound, and text in silent and sound films
– Multimedia formats in early film history, experimental and popular
forms of film projections on the theatrical stage and through other
media venues
– Framings of film by film and other media, such as film trailers,
film posters, newsreels, animated shorts, and literary approaches to film
– Intermedial exchanges and cross-mappings of the arts in film (e.g.
self-reflexive uses of the visual arts, drama, literature,
photography, and animation; avant-garde conceptions of film as “motion
painting,” “visual symphonies,” and “visual poems”)
– Evocations of genres, arts, and media in film theory
– Media blends in ‘pure’ and ‘synthetic’ theories of cinema
– Metaphors for film in popular and scientific discourses (e.g. living
pictures, photoplay, picture writing, cineplastics, animated
paintings, and architecture-in-motion)
– Similar blending phenomena in other periods or media that are
pertinent to the history of film
– Dialogic approaches to media blends in early cinema and moving
images in the digital age
– Conceptual blending theory and media studies

The conference is hosted in cooperation with the 18th International
Film Festival Innsbruck (IFFI, www.iffi.at), which will take place
from June 9 to 14.
The results of the conference will be published in a volume funded by
the Austrian Science Fund. Please send abstracts (300-500 words) and
short scholarly biography by February 28, 2009, to Christian Quendler
at ch****************@*****ac.at .