SPIRAL: It’s Alive! Film / Form /Life
FRIDAY, MAY 17 — SATURDAY, MAY 18, 2019

▶︎ Download the ABSTRACTS ◀︎
ALL PANELS AND PRESENTATIONS HELD AT
TORONTO MEDIA ARTS CENTRE, 32 LISGAR ST.
– – – EACH PRESENTATION IS 20 MINUTES IN LENGTH – – –

DAY I – FRIDAY, MAY 17

CONFERENCE CHECK-IN
8:30am-9:15am

CONFERENCE INTRODUCTION
9:15am-9:30am

PANEL I — COMMON LIFE
9:30am—11:10am
Chair: Philippe Theophanidis, York University

◆ Graeme GILLOCH, Lancaster University
“Home again, home again, jiggidy-jig!”:  J. F. Sebastian and his welcoming and unwelcome friends

◆ Scott BIRDWISE, York University
Walking on Thin Air: Agamben and the Creaturely Cartoon

◆ Patrick MARSHALL, University of Toronto
Prediction, Population, Power: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s World on a Wire

◆ Joshua Harold WIEBE, University of Toronto
Behold now, Behemoth

PANEL II — OTHER LIFE
11:20am—12:40pm
Chair: James Leo Cahill, University of Toronto

◆ Sarah COOPER, King’s College London
Vegetal Life Forms: Filming Flowers and the Secrets of Nature

◆ Charlie HEWISON, Université Paris VII Diderot
The Organic and Inorganic Life-Image. Emmanuel Lefrant’s Parties visible et invisible d’un ensemble sous tension and the Umwelt of Analog Film

◆ Erin OBODIAC, The Media Ecology Lab
Animation, Automata, Biomimesis

LUNCH BREAK
12:40pm-1:40pm

PANEL III — AFTER LIFE
1:40pm—3:00pm
Chair: Gabriel Levine, York University

◆ Grant LEUNING, University of California
The Corpse-Image

◆ Erin NUNODA, University of Toronto
A Zed and Two Noughts: On Snails and the Terror of Symmetry

◆ Hilary BERGEN, Concordia University
Animating the Kinetic Trace: Kate Bush, Hatsune Miku and Digital Dance

PANEL IV — FIGURING LIFE
3:10pm—4:30pm
Chair: Steven Bailey, York University

◆ Colin WILLIAMSON, Pace University
On the Origins of Animation: Proteus, Metamorphosis, and the Moving Image

◆ Sandra ANNETT, Wilfrid Laurier University
Being in the Digital World: Embodiment in the Works of Lu Yang

◆ Shane DENSON, Stanford University
Cinematic and Post-Cinematic Animation: Medium, Theme, Phenomenology

PANEL V — SPECTRAL LIFE
4:40pm—6:00pm
Chair: Brian Price, University of Toronto

◆ Carrie REESE, University of Toronto
A Figure of Speech: Atomic Gestures of Mediation

◆ Alexandra GRIEVE, University of Cambridge
Framing the Spectral: Corporeality and Mediation in the early cinema of Laura Bayley and George Albert Smith

◆ Lia TURTAS, Cornell University
Phantasm of Style: The Ubiquitous, Yet Unlocalizable, Cinema’s Form-of-Life

BREAK
6:00pm-7:00pm

ARTIST TALK
7:00pm

ARTIFICIAL NATURE
Haru Ji, OCAD University
Graham Wakefield, York University


DAY 2 – SATURDAY, MAY 18

PANEL VI — MEDIATED LIFE
10:00am—11:40am
Chair: Sara Swain, York University

◆ Natalja CHESTOPALOVA, York University & Ryerson University
Reality-Testing as Choose-Your-Own Adventure Storytelling, or the Phenomenology of the Living-Archive in Charlie Booker’s Black Mirror and Bandersnatch

◆ May CHEW, Concordia University
‘Soft TV,’ Affective Velocity and Smooth Violence

◆ Marek JANCOVIC, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz
Beastly Work: The Moving Image as a Precondition of Life?

◆ Fan WU and Zohar FREEMAN, Independent Scholars
Mukbang – Eating About Eating (Live!)

PANEL VII — POLITICAL LIFE
11:50am—1:10pm
Chair: Resat Fuat Cam, York University

◆ Kanika LAWTON, University of Toronto
Pick My Face Up Off the Ground: “Placeless, Raceless, Bodiless” Potentiality in Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer (an “Emotion Picture”)

◆ Eric HERHUTH, Tulane University
The Animated Figure in Judith Butler’s Theory of Subject Formation

◆ Janet HARBORD, Queen Mary, University of London
Film as a Training for Neurotypical Life

LUNCH BREAK
1:10pm-2:10pm

PANEL VIII — PLACING LIFE
2:10pm—3:50pm
Chair: Scott Birdwise, York University

◆ Suzanne BETH, McGill University
Film and the Unknowable of Nuclear Radiation: Philippe Rouy’s Fukushima Trilogy

◆ Terrance H. McDONALD, Brock University
A City is a Form of Light: Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself

◆ Özge EJDER, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University
On the Ambiguous Place of the Human Subject

◆ Michael TROMMER, York University
Points Further North: An Acoustemological Cartography of Non-Place

PANEL IX — SHELF LIFE
4:00pm—5:20pm
Chair: Tamás Nagypál, Ryerson University

◆ Sarah CHOUKAH, York University
Towards a Theory of Cinematic Discretion, by Way of Slime

◆ Hanwei SHI, Buffalo University
Becoming Mushroom: Time-Lapsing Photography as a Non-Human Perspective

◆ Joel ONG, York University
Alien Entanglements and the Microbial Mise-En-Scène

BREAK
5:20pm-6:00pm


KEYNOTE
6:00pm

Living in the Pluriverse:
Animation Philosophy and Experiments in Cosmotechnics
Deborah Levitt, The New School

JOIN US FOR BEER AND FOOD!
7:45pm
The Craft Brasserie & Grille, 107 Atlantic Ave.
▶︎Directions