News

Call for Papers: MIRAJ: Moving Image Review & Art Journal

Issue 9.2: ‘Artists’ Moving Image, Isolation and Covid-19’

Deadline: 15 September 2020

The coronavirus Covid-19 has impacted all aspects of our lives and is affecting the visual arts community, including artists working with the moving image in numerous ways. This fast-changing and uncertain situation brings with it questions about the short and long term impact on creative practice. Moving image-making, like other contemporary art practices are often solitary, with artists spending much of their time working alone either at home or in their studios. Conversely, artists are also social creatures and belong to collectives, groups or movements and are supported by a nexus of state and commercial institutions currently under enormous threat from the economic and social consequences of the pandemic.

The spread of the pandemic and the different responses it has elicited from governance internationally, throws into sharp contrast the deepening of inherent inequalities of wealth, gender and opportunity. The more intangible, but no less urgent, questions that its conditions have also brought to the fore – concerning isolation, vulnerability, care and tactility – can also be found in the works of artists in previous decades. In these earlier contributions to other crises, conveyed through the intimacies of personal experience, political outcry and at other times through inventive experimental or allegorical form, offer valuable perspectives on the current circumstances of Covid-19. Looking to the future, however, creative responses to the question of how moving images might exist in non-physical spaces may also elicit new and unexpected forms of both practice and spectatorship. Already online platforms are expanding moving image exhibitionary practices in ways that go beyond reacting to the closure of physical screening spaces, suggesting instead models of expansion that might be developed for a post-pandemic future.

In view of this, MIRAJ invites articles that engage with the current crisis in direct or indirect manners, providing testimonies to their experience as well as taking the opportunity to provide new ideas and strategies in a post pandemic world.

We invite articles that examine:

How Covid-19 transforms moving image practice;
How isolation is affecting artists in both positive and negative ways – potentially giving us more time but less resources;
Great plagues, pandemics and wars have always been followed by dramatic changes in the arts, what will be at stake in the new British artists’ moving image culture after the pandemic?
In isolation, we are all redefining our cultural life in the light of our new restrictions, but are we rediscovering things about ourselves that we can use in our practice?
How can we return to the physical and public display of film and video following the endless on-line exhibitions in which the artworld is engaged?
Are artists better equipped to deal with isolation, quarantine and economic hardship because of the individual nature and historical insecurity of their practice?
Are there new forms of moving image practice, which will be developed under the duress of the lockdown?
Technological shifts and the significance of medium specificity in post pandemic practice;
A perspective on the pandemic through the consideration of its precedents in the history of experimental film and video;
How the body in isolation or illness has been represented through the moving image;
Some of the formal and fictional strategies adopted by artists past and present to reflect the conditions of the pandemic;
How online viewing platforms might expand modes and models of moving image exhibition for the future.

The Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ) is the first peer-reviewed publication devoted to artists’ film and video, and its contexts. MIRAJ offers a widely distributed international forum for debates surrounding all forms of artists’ moving image and media artworks. It is published twice a year in print by Intellect Books, and has its editorial base at the Centre for Research in Education, Art and Media (CREAM) at the University of Westminster.

The editors invite contributions from art historians and critics, film and media scholars, curators, and, not least, practitioners. We seek pieces that offer theories of the present moment but also writings that propose historical re-readings.

We welcome essays that:

re-view canonical works and texts, or identify ruptures in the standard histories of artists’ film and video;
discuss the development of media arts, including the history of imaging technologies, as a strand within the history of art;
address issues of the ontology and medium-specificity of film, video and new media, or the entanglement of the moving image in a ‘post-medium condition’;
attempt to account for the rise of projected and screen-based images in contemporary art, and the social, technological, or political-economic effects of this proliferation;
investigate interconnections between moving images and still images; the role of sound; the televisual; and the interaction of the moving image with other elements including technology, human presence and the installation environment;
analyse para-cinematic or extra-cinematic works to discover what these tell us about cinematic properties such as temporal progression or spectatorial immersion or mimetic representation;
explore issues of subjectivity and spectatorship;
investigate the spread of moving images beyond the classical spaces of the cinema and galleries, across multiple institutions, sites and delivery platforms;
consider the diverse uses of the moving image in art: from political activism to pure sensory and aesthetic pleasure, from reportage to documentary testimony, from performativity to social networking;
suggest new methods of theorizing and writing the moving image.

We welcome work that intersects with other academic disciplines and artistic practices. We encourage writing that is lucid without compromising intellectual rigour.

We publish the following types of writing: scholarly articles (5000–8000 words); opinion pieces, feature articles and interviews (3000–4000 words); review essays of books, individual works, exhibitions and events (2500–3000 words). Scholarly articles will be blind peer-reviewed and feature articles and review essays can be peer-reviewed on request. All writings should propose a central idea or thesis argued through a discussion of the work under review.

Articles submitted to MIRAJ should be original and not under consideration by any other publication, including online publications. We do not publish articles by artists about their own work, nor reviews by curators or venues about their own exhibitions.

All submissions should be in English and adhere to the Intellect Style Guide (https://www.intellectbooks.com/media/Intellect_Style_Guide_2019.pdf)

Please submit completed manuscripts only. Send all contributions and proposals by e-mail in DOC or RTF format to the Editorial Assistant: miraj@cream.ac.uk