InVisible Culture, Issue 21: Pursuit
Deadline for proposals: January 1st 2014 at 11:59 pm
For its twenty-first issue, InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture invites scholarly articles and creative works that address the topic of pursuit. We encourage authors and artists to reflect on the meaning and mechanics of pursuit across broad ranging phenomena. This term is
meant to address two larger and related concerns. First, it prompts a discussion about matters of narrative, aesthetics, and medium, including topics as specific as the ‘chase film’ and crime narratives, to those as seemingly abstract as failure, paranoia, and process.
Second, the word pursuit is meant to direct thinking toward a number of more clearly socio-political concerns, including, but not limited to, the topics of work and profession. In his new book, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep, Jonathan Crary worriedly observes that in the current global
paradigm “the highest premium is placed on activity for its own sake,” and that it is the pursuit of
sleep that stands as the most meaningful form of resistance in this context. We offer the term pursuit
as a thematic framework for considering the manifold forms our embeddedness in a fully-networked,
around-the-clock habitus can take, and how these forms bear not only on our positions as workers,
professionals, and laborers, but also as active subjects.
We welcome papers and artworks that address, complicate, and expand these models of pursuit.
Some possible topics of exploration are (but not limited to):
● Purpose and purposelessness, means without ends
● The “pursuit” of media: transmediality; new media; medium specificity; the myth of total
cinema; pursuit of perfect software (FOSS, cloud storage, smartphone apps, etc.)
● Paranoia, surveillance, cyberstalking
● Detective fiction
● Gaming culture
● Futurity and speculation
● Surpassing subject/object conditions
● Praxis
● Realism, mimesis
● Labor, work, vocation, craft, profession
● Modernism/contemporaneity
● Failure
● Nostalgia
● Utopias and heterotopias
● Pursuit and politics: feminism, Occupy, Arab Spring; political investments in academia or
other professional contexts
● Agonism
→ Please send completed papers (with references following the guidelines from the Chicago Manual of
Style) of between 4,000 and 10,000 words to ivc.rochester@gmail.com by January 1st, 2014
at 11:59pm EST. Inquiries should be sent to the same address.
Creative/Artistic Works
In addition to written materials, Invisible Culture is accepting work in other media (video,
photography, drawing, code) that reflect upon the theme as it is outlined above. For questions or
more details concerning acceptable formats, go to http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/contribute or contact
ivc.rochester@gmail.com
Reviews
InVisible Culture is also currently seeking submissions for book, exhibition, and film reviews
(600-1,000 words). To submit a review proposal, go to http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/contribute or
contact ivc.rochester@gmail.com
Blog
The journal also invites submissions to its blog feature, which will accommodate more immediate
responses to the topic of the current issue. For further details, please contact us at
ivc[dot]rochester[at]gmail[dot]com with the subject heading “blog submission”.
* InVisible Culture (An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture) is a peer-reviewed journal dedicated
to explorations of the material and political dimensions of cultural practices: the means by
which cultural objects and communities are produced, the historical contexts in which they
emerge, and the regimes of knowledge or modes of social interaction to which they contribute.