CFP: CODE - A Media, Games & Art Conference (Australia, due May 31)

With the recent material turn in media studies and the refinement of new approaches including software studies and platform politics, the time has come to bring code out into the open.

Full submissions due May 31, 2012. 21-23 November 2012, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.

Code is the invisible force at the heart of contemporary media and games, routinely obscured by the gadget fetish of breathless tech marketing and scholarly focus on more visible social and technical interfaces. With the recent material turn in media studies and the refinement of new approaches including software studies and platform politics, which emphasise interrogating the formal characteristics and underlying technical architecture of contemporary media, the time has come to bring code out into the open.

Code can be defined in two distinct but related ways: as an underlying technological process, a set of rules and instructions governing, for instance, the permutations of all those 0s and 1s obscured behind user interfaces, but also as a cultural framework navigated and understood socially and performatively, as is the case with legal, social and behavioural codes. As an operative principle, code’s significance thus extends far deeper than its current digital manifestation. For this conference, we invite submissions of papers and creative works that consider the role of code as a simultaneously material and semiotic force that operates across the wider cultural, social and political field, with particular emphasis on media, games and art.

The conference theme is also an opportunity to reflect on how, as academics and creative practitioners, we often participate in but can also challenge the disciplinary and institutional codes that can arbitrarily separate these domains. CODE will be a transdisciplinary event that brings media studies, media arts and games studies into dialogue through individual papers, combined panels, master classes and an included exhibition.

View the full call here: http://code2012.wikidot.com/call-for-papers