Open call for BIMI-Pittsburgh Research Workshop 10-12 May 2023: ‘Collections and Collecting’

Every two years Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) organises a research workshop with colleagues from University of Pittsburgh. The theme for this year’s BIMI-Pittsburgh Research workshop is collections, collecting, and collectors as they relate to Film and Media Studies and to neighbouring disciplines that explore visual and digital culture broadly conceived. With roots in the commissions of wealthy patrons and the heteroclite objects stored in eighteenth-century curiosity cabinets, collecting is at once an effort of preservation, a curatorial practice, and the expression of a passionate interest, or what we might today call fandom or cinephilia.

Collecting takes institutional forms in the acquisition, lending, and screening practices of libraries, museums, archives, cinematheques, and private organizations, but it can also form the basis of one’s own scholarly research and writing. Proposals might consider historical dimensions of collecting, looking at individual collections, collectors, and institutions and the selection criteria and goals that drove their work. How do collections relate to archives? How do individuals, institutions, governments, or communities make use of collections? What roles do expertise and identity play in collecting? How have particular collections moved or changed over the course of their existence? How do lawmakers and government regulators constrain the possibilities for collections? Proposals might also consider the underground networks of collectors and dealers that subvert legal regulations and exist alongside official markets.

Proposals might also take a more contemporary approach and consider what collection means in the age of streaming platforms, social media influences, and online media repositories such as YouTube, Instagram, Vimeo, or MUBI. To what extent can the set of films, series, or videos chosen algorithmically to be shown to users of streaming platforms be considered a collection? A significant portion of media is now stored and used digitally in the cloud, but rights and access to individual objects through media portals are constantly changing. To what extent can viewers depend on digital collections to safeguard or locate media?

Proposals might also look at certain forms of media making as instances of collection, such as the essay film, the documentary, video installation, or even critical writing about media. To what extent do the affordances of media format create the conditions of possibility for collection? To what extent are artists, critics, and scholars themselves collectors? If you yourself are a collector, what is the relation between your collection and official or other unofficial archives, and what is the ethos of sharing personal collections with other scholars?

The possibilities for project proposals are not limited to the topics sketched above, but should relate to some aspect of collections, collecting, and collectors.

Proposals: If you would like to participate, please submit a 300-word abstract (marked ‘BIMI-Pitt Research Workshop’) describing your presentation and any media objects you would like to share, to Michael Temple (m.temple@bbk.ac.uk) copying to bimi@bbk.ac.uk – deadline is 17:00 Thursday 23 March 2023.