Call for audiovisual proposals: #Cycles

We are now inviting proposals for audiovisual essays exploring questions of cyclicality, circularity, and recursivity for our Autumn 2023_#Cycles issue – from loop films to televisual recursivity and gameplay loops to NPC life.

The figure of the loop has become a staple technique of contemporary narrative art. In films and television series, time loops are often deployed to convey the slow violence of unsustainable habits and ‘history in a loop’. In video games, gameplay and progression loops buttress logics of optimisation and improvement. And, of course, videogames have also begun to reflect on and problematize this core dynamic in titles like Deathloop or the genre of rogue-like/lite games. Related to that, meme culture has taken up the figure of the NPC (non-playable character) to articulate a cybernetic subjectivity that runs on nonconscious activity loops. Addressing these and other related topics through audiovisual criticism opens up new ways of understanding circularity, recursion and cycles in media. We are interested in audiovisual essays made with films and television excerpts, videogames and other moving images.

• We look forward to receiving abstracts for audiovisual essays (300 words) and a short biography of 100 words by 15 March 2023 to necsus.info@gmail.com. Please include a brief reference list of the material to be included in your audiovisual essay.
• On the basis of selected abstracts, invited audiovisual essays should be between 10-20 minutes long and and accompanied by a written statement of 500 words positioning the work in the larger context of #Cycles. All audiovisual essays must feature English subtitles (regardless of the languages spoken in the video). Audiovisual essays will be due before 15 June 2023, and will subsequently be peer reviewed by our editors  before final acceptance for publication.