CALL FOR PAPERS

Figuring the Invisible. Animation and Science Outreach in Contemporary Audio-Visual Culture International Conference
November 20-21, 2024
University of Padua
Padua, Italy
https://www.consultacinema.org/2024/07/11/figuring-the-invisible-animation-and-science-outreach-in-contemporary-audio-visual-culture/

Submission deadline: October 10, 2024

The use of animated models and simulations in contemporary science outreach poses a major epistemological problem. This especially pertains the visualisations of the “invisible” sides of reality: they are mostly offered to the audience “as they are”, without any warning that they are based on non-optical evidence. Because of this, they get misunderstood for true-to-nature representations, and as such they circulate also in audio-visual entertainment, reinforcing the wrong belief that those objects would exactly look like that, if they were to be seen by the human eye. This contributed to establish a widespread audio-visual vocabulary of “invisible” science, whose growing expansion due to the new availability and affordability of creative tools (including generative AI) foregrounds complex problems of transparency, as well as of communication and scientific ethics.

Awareness about the communicative problems of modelling and animating invisible realities started in the second half of the 20th century, when the narration of scientific progress became increasingly involved with concepts, theories, and entities which were completely incomparable with the experiences of everyday life; they included the DNA (1953), the Quarks (1969), and the Black Holes, which became popular in 1964-1974, the «golden age of general relativity», as Kip Thorne called it (Thorne 2003: 80). Animation was almost immediately identified as an ideal tool to meet the new needs of scientific communication, because of its virtually boundless capacity in abstraction and visualisation (Honess Roe 2013: 8; Bissonnette 2014: 142).

The rendition of invisible and unreachable sides of reality called for a growing presence of artistic licenses, encouraged by producers and journalists from the start of the 80s, when science outreach took «a particular shift towards an ‘entertainment orientation’» (Campbell 2016: 8). In line with this, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison (2007) identified a shift from «representation» to «presentation» in visual science outreach. In their analysis, the visual strategies based on «truth-to-nature» and mechanical objectivity give way to a form of interpretation, a «trained judgment». Interactivity, a major feature of contemporary animation (video games; augmented, mixed, virtual reality) is both a feature and a consequence of this: trained judgement invites the creation of an «image-as-process», and not just of an image which documents a process of scientific relevance; the image itself becomes relevant, as it can be directly manipulated by the end user: «With clicks and keystrokes, these digital images are meant to be used, cut, correlated, rotated, colored». The multimediality of contemporary science outreach, in this respect, is a very powerful learning tool, but also something that overshadows the presence of «trained judgment» not only in the visuals itself, but also in the user interface that predetermines the interaction and the responses within the simulation.

As Malcolm Cook, Michael Cowan and Scott Curtis argued (2023) in their discussion about useful animation, a wide category encompassing also the communication of science, «investigating useful animation is necessarily an interdisciplinary endeavour as it incorporates methods and knowledge from intersecting fields, including the histories of science, advertising and education». The International Conference “Figuring Invisibile” seeks such an interdisciplinary approach, inviting contributions about the animation of “invisibile” science after 1980, coming from field such as (but not limited to):

• the scientific areas referenced by the animations: astrophysics, atomic physics, palaeontology, medical sciences, biology, and so on;
• scientific communication and journalism;
• philosophy and ethics of science;
• animation practice;
• data visualisation.

The audio-visual products to discuss can include:

• documentary films for cinema, TV, home video and the Internet;
• science-based animated simulations or representations of research results featured in fictional films;
• user-edited scientific content for social media;
• interactive content and applications.

The “Figuring the Invisible” Conference is funded by the European Commission as part of the MSCA global research project FICTA SciO (https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101063803), aiming to identify and raise awareness about the audiovisual conventions and communication tactics of animation in multimedia science outreach. The host institution is the Department of Cultural heritage at the University of Padua, Italy (https://www.beniculturali.unipd.it/www/homepage/); the partner institutions are the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU) (https://www.hslu.ch/en/) and the CICAP – Comitato Italiano per il Controllo delle Affermazioni sulle Pseudoscienze (https://www.cicap.org/n/index.php).

The Conference is a continuation of the EU funded International Conference “Figuring the Invisible. The Role of Animation in the Communication of Scientific Knowledge”, HSLU, December 15-16, 2023.

The conference proceedings will be published as an edited collection on Open Research Europe (https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/), the open access publishing venue for European Commission-funded researchers, peer-reviewed and indexed in databases such as Scopus and PubMed.

Presentations will have a maximum length of 20 minutes each. It is possible to submit a panel proposal, with three to four speakers. In person attendance is encouraged, but online presentations will also be possible.

The deadline for your proposal (max. 300 words, .doc, .docx, .pages or .pdf; please include also three to five bibliographic references, three to five keywords and a short bio of 150 words) is October 10th. Please send your proposals to marco.bellano@unipd.it and simone.evangelista@phd.unipd.it, specifying in your file if you want to present in person or online.

The conference language will be English.

For enquiries about the conference: marco.bellano@unipd.it and simone.evangelista@phd.unipd.it

SCIENTIFIC BOARD

Prof. Rosamaria Salvatore, Università degli Studi di Padova
Prof. Alessandro Faccioli, Università degli Studi di Padova
Prof. Axel Vogelsang, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts
Prof. Sergio Della Sala, University of Edinburgh; CICAP
Prof. Christian Uva, Università degli Studi di Roma Tre
Dr. Cristina Formenti, Università degli Studi di Udine; President – Society for Animation Studies
Dr. Marco Bellano, Università degli Studi di Padova – MSCA Fellow

ORGANISING BOARD

Prof. Farah Polato, Università degli Studi di Padova
Prof. Giulia Lavarone, Università degli Studi di Padova
Francesca Berti, Università degli Studi di Padova
Simone Evangelista, Università degli Studi di Padova
Dr. Marco Bellano, Università degli Studi di Padova – MSCA Fellow