April 27, 2022

Virtual symposium

Deadline: March 4, 2022

Co-hosted by Dylan Mulvin (London School of Economics) and Annette Hill (Lund University)

We invite applications for a (virtual) symposium on the proxy, the stand-in, and the warm-up to be co-hosted by the London School of Economics and Lund University. We aim to gather an eclectic and wide-ranging cohort of people exploring the emergent intersection of technology, background work, and hidden performances within media and cultural industries – the infrastructural and hidden labour of our daily lives. We offer this invitation for those who want to further interrogate the cultural dynamics of proxies. The logics of the stand-in draw attention to how certain people, and attendant material objects and infrastructures, are made to not matter and disappear from view.

Our world is suffused with proxies, and the background work of the people who stand in for others, from models who pose for test images to calibrate image technologies, stand-ins for theatre and live events, warm-up acts who prepare an audience for an entertainment show, to voice-over actors, foley artists, and stunt doubles. The art of performing as a stand-in reaches far beyond the fixed realms of media and cultural industries and deep into civil society, including the medical establishment and legal institutions where we might find medical actors who offer their bodies up to trainee physicians and mock juries who come to stand-in for the ordinary citizens. This symposium will dig deeper into these stand-in dynamics while mapping an already existing and interdisciplinary investment in the surrogate logic, absent presence, and politics of proxiness.

Send abstracts to:

Dylan Mulvin d.mulvin@lse.ac.uk & Annette Hill annette.hill@kom.lu.se

Submission deadline: March 4, 2022 (notifications sent out by March 28)

Submission details: a (maximum) 400-word abstract and a 200-word biography