Call: Facing The Future, Facing The Screen – 10th Budapest Visual Learning Conference

Call for Abstracts

FACING THE FUTURE, FACING THE SCREEN
10th Budapest Visual Learning Conference
Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Budapest, Hungary
A blended physical-online event
November 17, 2022
http://www.hunfi.hu/nyiri/FFF/ FFF.pdf

Organizing Committee:

• Dr. Petra Aczél, Corvinus University of Budapest
• Dr. András Benedek, Budapest University of Technology and Economics
• Dr. Kristóf Nyíri, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Dear All, the Committee for Communication and Media Theory of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Corvinus University of Budapest have begun to organize the 10th Budapest Visual Learning Conference, to be held at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, on November 17, 2022, as a blended physical-online event. Conference title: Facing the Future, Facing the Screen. The event will be opened by the President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, world-renowned neurobiologist Tamás Freund.

Following upon the present preliminary call for abstracts, in the course of the following months many circulars and personal messages will be sent out, but please note that the best way to inform yourself about how our preparations proceed is to look at the http://www.hunfi.hu/nyiri/FFF/ FFF.pdf page.

The Facing the Future, Facing the Screen conference is planned as an interdisciplinary encounter of communication and media theory, picture theory, psychology, philosophy, pedagogy, history, political science, and other specialties. We absolutely expect new scholarly results, aim at an es­sential scientific step forward. The central question: what image of the future can we conceive of in a world based ever more strongly and diversely on digital devices and online communication, what new patterns of life and in particular forms of education should we strive to create, what possible distortions in our way of life should we be prepared for? If on the one hand we assume that primordial thinking emerged not as a verbal but as a pic­torial one, as well as of course do re­cognize the scientific value of today’s image creation and image reproduction techniques, and in particular of visual simulation bringing together vast amounts of data in an easily understand­able animation; but on the other hand clearly perceive the often destructive effects of phoney images disseminated via social media: in what direction should we then search, under such contradictory conditions, for the right pattern of a pictorial education for the future?

At this conference we aim to host some 50 to 100 papers. Obviously such a number of talks cannot be fitted into the given time frame of a few hours. The solution we propose is the same one we applied at the 9th Budapest Visual Learning Con­ference, please look at http://www.hunfi.hu/nyiri/ VLC9/graph_1.pdf. The papers – very short papers, say 5000 characters main text plus foot­notes and image captions – will be made available online prior to the event. Please do not feel the limited length to be a yoke, experience it, rather, as a libera­tion. Being brief is the new normal. The conference itself will then serve mainly as a forum to discuss all the submitted papers by all participants. Subsequent to the event, within months, we plan to publish edited collec­tions of a selection of the talks in journals, as well as the entire lot of the talks in a bulky volume, with colour images, both online and printed.

This being an informal first call for abstracts, potential participants are free to suggest topics, sub-topics, etc. Here is a list of topics preliminarily and say lightheartedly thought of by the organizers:

• Facing the Past
  • How the Cave-Man Saw Language
  • Plato’s Cave: Literacy and the Human Mind

• Reading from Paper, Reading from Screen

• Postmodernism Made Easy
  • Post-typography
  • Letters and Fonts in Digital Environments

• Human–Computer Misinteraction
  • The Sherry Turkle Mystery
    • A New Gender Future? Screening Black Matter
  • Asocial Media?

• Artificial Intelligence — bien fait or counterfeit?

• Scholarly Research in the Online World

• Online Publishing
  • predatory publishers
  • author/publisher imbalance
  • how to cite?
  • dilemmas of peer-reviewing
  • paradoxes of open access
  • copyright in an online world
  • books vs. extracts, long vs. short compositions, texts vs. videos

• New Localism
  • Being Home at Home
  • Brick-and-Mortar Universities? Mass Universities? Virtual Universities?
  • Don’t Travel – Communicate!
  • Publishing in small languages

Dear All! Are you interested in participating (online or physically – fate might decide…)? Do you have suggestions as to further topics/subtopics? Feel free to informally write to me (Kristóf Nyíri, nyirik@gmail.com). Or indeed submit an abstract to the combined three addresses of the organizers: petra.aczel@uni-corvinus.hu, benedek.a@eik.bme.hu, nyirik@gmail.com

The abstract should not be longer than 2000 characters, with a bio (affiliation, main research interests) of max. 500 characters added. In the abstract please do not use the (author, year) reference style, nor do have a list of references at the end. Just apply, if you need to, informal references, like e.g. “as Seymour Papert wrote in his Mindstorms”, or e.g. “the theory put forward by Kosslyn et al. in 2001”. We look forward to your messages & submissions. The final aim, remember, is for us to produce a truly im­portant and widely disseminated volume in the classical humanities tradition but adapted to the new online environment.