CfP Creative Image: Ways of Seeing, Representing and Reshaping Reality, Manchester, 2018

Creative Image: Ways of Seeing, Representing and Reshaping Reality, 1st International Residency Conference, Manchester, 21-27 September 2018.

​The aim of this event is to channel and showcase new perspectives and approaches that visual practitioners, practice researchers and visual ethnographers are currently employing in their work. In order to enrich visual practices toward new disciplinary horizons, we therefore advocate for a visual, sonic, experimental, and more widely multisensory cross-disciplinary knowledge. 

The VRN Residency Conference aims to bring together visual researchers and practitioners, especially PhD students, who are actively working with visual methods in their own fieldwork or their practice-as-research. It welcomes participants from a variety of disciplines, including, visual anthropology, filmmaking, music, fine arts, performance arts, animation, and photography. 

​The event is composed of a five-day residency open to 12 participants, a one day conference including participants of the residency and external presenters, and a transitional day where researchers will be able to share their practice and network with each other before the conference.

During a five-day residency, participants will inhabit a shared creative and living space at an appropriate location, and will be working on their own visual materials in order to enhance the narrative of their research, but, more importantly, work collaboratively in the pursuit of pushing the creative boundaries through experimental methods. The five-day residency will become a space for collective learning and artistic creation in which we will share experiences from our own respective projects, as well as give rise to new and unforeseen practical outcomes. Furthermore, each day of the residency will have a different special guest who will be working with us for the day, or who will facilitate specific workshops and masterclasses. The guests will include Ken Faro, Dr Jenny Holt, Prof. Erik Knudsen and Kesang Lama. 

The one-day conference will be open to the wider public, preceded by a ‘transition day’, to which both practitioners (who took part in the residency) and non-practitioners (only attending the conference) will be invited, so that their respective fields can be cross-fertilised through practical workshops and practice-oriented seminars. This mixed Residency Conference format, seeks not only to explore and debate the long-standing legacies of audio-visual research, but wants to create a productive and inspiring discussion through an active and embodied involvement, so that every participant can effectively express and communicate their own practice through multisensorial, emplaced, participatory, embodied, experimental, and collaborative approaches. The conference keynote speakers will be Dr Laurent Van Lacker and Prof. Andrew Irving.

More information at www.visualresearchnetwork.com.