Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture is soliciting papers for a special themed issue on visualisation and narrative–with special reference to filmmaking, information design, and computing.
Visualisation consists of the visual representation and analysis of processes over time, in dynamically changing information spaces. As filmmaking has moved to digital formats in writing screenplays, making images and sounds and editing and manipulating those images, all filmmaking processes are actually or potentially subject to visualisation. This has led to new metaphors–for example the timeline, and the possibility of applying techniques such as data mining and network
mapping to other areas of film production.
Papers looking at current and possible application of visualisation techniques to the writing, realising and editing of films are particularly encouraged. Papers can for example look at the influence of interface design and visualisation on film practice and aesthetics. This will include the effect of non-linear editing and effects and the introduction of the timeline as a dominant metaphor for visualisation in film. We would also like to encourage contributions from scientific disciplines where visualisation has transformed the understanding of the process, or enabled a different perception of narrative.
Film is particularly interesting as a focus of study, because as well as being an industrial and aesthetic practice which can be differently approached and understood through visualisation, it is itself a form of visualisation, which transforms social relationships and events into image-based narrative developing over time. Film language is therefore the ultimate source of many of the techniques of visualisation. We see potential for a productive dialogue between disciplines which looks at the changes that visualisation can or will bring to filmmaking but also looks at what film language and film techniques have to contribute to visualisation and the dynamic relationship between visualisation and narrative.
Completed papers are are to be submitted by December 15, 2007 to Lina Khatib lina.khatib@rhul.ac.uk. Revisions will be due in March 2008; publication expected in October 2008.
Guest Editors: Adam Ganz and Lina Khatib