The University of Southern California’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy is pleased to announce a third annual Fellowship program for summer 2006 to foster innovative research for its digital publishing venture, Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular.
First launched in 2005, Vectors is an international electronic journal dedicated to expanding the potentials of academic publication via emergent and transitional media. Moving well beyond the text-with-pictures format of much electronic scholarly publishing, Vectors brings together visionary scholars with cutting-edge designers and technologists to propose a thorough rethinking of the dynamic relationship of form to content in academic research, focusing on the ways technology shapes, transforms and reconfigures social and cultural relations.
Vectors adheres to the highest standards of quality in a strenuously reviewed format. The journal is edited by Tara McPherson and Steve Anderson, with Creative Directors Erik Loyer and Raegan Kelly and Lead Programmer Craig Dietrich, and is guided by the collective knowledge of a prestigious international board.
About the Fellowships
• Vectors Fellowships will be awarded to up to eight individuals or teams of collaborators in the early to mid- stages of development of a scholarly multimedia project related to the themes of Difference or Memory. Completed projects will be included in Volume 3 of the journal in 2007. Vectors features next-generation multimedia scholarship, publishing work that can only be realized in an online format.
Volume Three, Issue One: Difference
From Charles Babbage’s 19th century “Difference Engine” to Derrida’s 1980s neographism “Différance,” the notion of difference has served as a provocative metaphor for thinking about language, culture, politics, technology and identity. This issue of Vectors encourages diverse examinations of the notion of difference as it plays out in a variety of cultural spheres, discourses and practices. We are interested in a broadly-conceived notion of difference, one that engages technology and culture or that might be productively examined through the format of an interactive multimedia journal. In particular, we seek proposals that foreground the cultural or political manifestations of racial, gender, national, religious, ethnic, geographic, technological or economic differences.
Possible areas of investigation include but are not limited to:
-historical and future conceptions of difference
-rethinking otherness, multi-culturalism, convergence
-technologies of difference
-legacies + limits of 1990s theories and manifestations of difference
-sounding out difference(s)
-afro-futurism, speculative differences, future species
-sameness and/or difference, the logics of both/and
-rethinking identity; difference/multiplicity/fragmentation
-post-Katrina, post-9/11, post-racism
-post-feminist gender differences
-war and ethnic/religious differences
-economic disparity and cultural differences
Volume Three, Issue Two: Memory
Jean Luc Godard’s dictum that “only the hand that erases can write” underscores the ironic and contradictory status of memory in postmodern culture. In an age when both history and memory are routinely characterized as being at an end, it is more important than ever to closely examine the epistemological precepts and rhetorical strategies by which we engage, remember and speak about the past. This issue of Vectors explores a range of possible frameworks for thinking about memory as a phenomenon that is fundamentally entangled with the discourses of competing disciplines, political imperatives and cultural contexts. We are particularly interested in proposals that engage the eccentric, disruptive and dynamic potentials of memory as it relates to history, media, technology, and/or the sciences.
Possible areas of investigation include but are not limited to:
-the impact of proliferating technological and prosthetic forms of memory
-scientific and medical visualization
-visual memory, media and popular culture memories
-memorialization, reminiscence, recall
-the role of nostalgia, desire, psychology and narrative
-amnesia, displacement, erasure, regeneration
-the dynamic interplay of remembering and forgetting; “creative forgetting,” “active forgetting”
-memory as practice, process and ritual
-reconstruction, reenactment, rescripting and remixing of memories
-counter-memory, chaos and resistance
-discontinuous, fragmentary or disruptive visions of the past
-individual vs. social, cultural and popular memory
About the Awards
All fellowship recipients will participate in a one-week residency June 19-23, 2006 at USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy, where they will have access to state of the art production facilities. Fellows work in collaboration with world-class designers and Vectors’ technical support and programming team throughout the project’s development, typically during a span of 3-5 months.
The residency will include colloquia and working sessions where participants will have the chance to develop project foundations and collectively engage relevant issues in scholarly multimedia. Applicants need not be proficient with new media authoring, but must demonstrate familiarity with the potentials of digital media forms. Evidence of the capacity for successful collaboration and for scholarly innovation is required. Fellowship awards will include an honorarium of $1500 for each participant or team of collaborators, in addition to travel and accommodation expenses.
About the Proposals
We are seeking project proposals that creatively address issues related to the themes of Difference and Memory. While the format of the journal is meant to explore innovative modes of multimedia scholarship, we are not necessarily looking for projects that are about new media. Rather, we are interested in the various ways that ‘old’ and ‘new’ technologies suggest a transformation of scholarship, art and communication practices and their relevance to everyday life in an unevenly mediated world.
Applicants are encouraged to think beyond the computer screen to consider possibilities created by the proliferation of wireless technology, handheld devices, alternative exhibition venues, etc. Projects may translate existing scholarly work or be entirely conceived for new media. We are particularly interested in projects that re-imagine the role of the user and seek to reach broader publics. Work that creatively explores innovations in interactivity, cross-disciplinary collaboration, or scholarly applications for newly developing scientific or engineering technologies are also encouraged.
Proposals should include the following
• Title of project and a one-sentence description
• A 3-5 page description of the project concept, goals and outcome. This description should address questions of audience; innovative uses of interactivity, address and form. Please also detail the project’s argument and its contribution to multimedia scholarship and, more generally, to contemporary scholarship in your field.
• Brief biography of each applicant, including relevant qualifications and experience for this fellowship
• Full CV for each applicant
• Anticipated required resources (design, technical, hardware, software, exhibition, etc.)
• Projected timeline for project development
• Sample media if available (CD, DVD, VHS (any standard), or NTSC Mini-DV); for electronic submissions, URLs are preferred but still images may be sent as e-mail attachments if necessary)
Projects that articulate a clear understanding of the value of multimedia to their execution will be the most successful. Take seriously the questions “Why does this project need to be realized in multimedia? What is to be gained by the use of a rich media format for the argument or experience I aim to present?”
Electronic applications are preferred. Please submit to:
vectors [at] annenberg [dot] edu
Mailing address
Vectors Summer Fellowships
Annenberg Center for Communication
746 W. Adams Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90089-7727
Priority will be given to applications received by April 15, 2006. Fellowship recipients will be notified in May 2006.
Additional Information
For additional information about Vectors and the Vectors Summer Fellowship Program, please visit http://www.vectorsjournal.org
Questions may be directed to Tara McPherson tmcphers [at] usc [dot] edu or Steve Anderson sfanders [at] usc[ dot] edu
