The Nomadic Image 2022

The Seventh Transdisciplinary Conference

on Imaging at the Intersections of Arts, Science and Culture

Naryn Campus, September 23 to 25, 2022

The Conference is Presented by the UCA-SAS Research Cluster

Modernity in Central Asia: Identity, Society, Environment

The Seventh Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference will be held in the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan, a country where equestrian nomadism remains a powerful cultural signifier. In Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology, the nomad pursues pure lines of flight across the steppe, desert, or ocean: smooth, continually shifting spaces that stand in opposition to the striated, enclosed world of the settled State. Similarly, images traverse and produce unbounded, uncharted spaces whose circumference shifts, expands, and dissolves. Confounding distinctions between arrival and departure, every return of the image is a phantom, as illusory as the belief that the earth returns to the same spot after orbiting the sun. Heterogeneous and dynamic, de-territorialised and de-territorialising, how do the image’s nomadic flights construct and reflect the textures of the everyday?

In a hybrid online and in-person event hosted by the University of Central Asia on its Naryn campus, the conference offers an exciting opportunity for international participants to connect with Kyrgyz and other Central Asian creatives and scholars, and to explore experimental imaging cultures at the crossroads between East and West, and hypermodernity and tradition. 

We invite abstracts for i) written papers for a peer-reviewed volume of conference proceedings to be published by the University of Central Asia; ii) panel discussions; iii) we also encourage creative practitioners to address the conference theme in more informal talks that present their work. 

Submissions are invited from practitioners and theorists in Media Arts, Painting, Drawing, Curation, Installation, Film, Video, Photography, Design, Contemporary Craft, Speculative Fictions, Creative Non-Fiction, Data Visualization, Real-time Imaging, Intelligent Systems and Image Science. 

Papers, panel discussions and talks should address the theme of “the nomadic image” from any angle, in one or more of the following areas: 

traditional and contemporary nomadisms • migration and diasporas • hypermediation and post-truth• everyday aesthetics • the contemporary gaze • transnational imaginaries • gender and identity • data visualisaton and coded realities • augmented and virtual reality • non-visual imaging • embodiment and performance •

Keynote speakers:

1. Prof Olga Kisseleva: University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (installation, science and media art, immersive virtual reality)
2. Altyn Kapalova: Cultural Heritage and Humanities Unit, University of Central Asia (performance, installation, experimental art)
3. Prof Paul Thomas: University of New South Wales, Sydney (electronic art, nanoscience, quantum consciousness)
4. Prof Dominic Lopes: British Colombia (aesthetics in Europe and South Asia, epistemic value of images, ontology of art, computer art)
5. Dr Ulrike Al-Khamis: Director and CEO of the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto
6. Prof Erin Manning: University Research Chair in Relational Art and Philosophy in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University 

Co-chairs:

1. Dr Soheil Ashrafi: University of Central Asia, Communications and Media
2. Dr Michael Garbutt: University of New South Wales, Art, Design and Architecture

The conference is a collaboration between the University of Central Asia and the University of New South Wales, Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture, and supported by Ololo House, Bishkek and the Ala-Too International University.  

The transdisciplinary scope of the conference allows for participation in diverse fields of scholarship and practice and therefore all fellow academics and students are encouraged to submit their work by 30 April 2022. 

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