Submission Guidelines

All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. The following paper categories are welcome:

Proposals should be submitted no later than the 15th of January 2024 and include a paper title, extended abstract in English (<700 words), name, e-mail address, institutional affiliation and a brief bio (max. 100 words) mentioning ongoing research. Applicants will be informed of the result of their submissions as soon as possible. 

International Conference on Animation and Comics

Ink & Motion #2

Re[volution]

This conference aims to constitute a pioneering cross-disciplinary platform in Portugal for a fruitful dialogue between the fields of Animation and Comics. Responding to a growing artistic and academic interest in these two media and the new conceptual, practical and theoretical challenges they pose, we feel the need to provide a space for academics and artists to share ideas on these subjects. These are very dynamic, and often under-recognized areas in the arts, even though they often underlie some of the most successful cinematic productions of our time. As such, they are moving more and more into the mainstream consciousness, and attracting extensive audience and critical acclaim. 

This year our goal is to broaden the scope of the conference to, not only explore the intersectionalities between Animation and Comics, but similarly include other forms of artistic expression (i.e. videogames, photography, live-action cinema, music etc.). In order to achieve these goals, this edition of the conference aims to gather national and international speakers, specialists in various storytelling methods, to discuss new avenues and intermedial crossings brought by the recent technological paradigm shifts. In doing so, we aim to promote synergies and exchanges of ideas. We hope that this effort will build a basis for a new cooperation and a more comprehensive understanding of these forms of art. The event targets a broad public, including artists and creative practitioners, academics and those who work in the field of creative practice as research. Given the established influence that Animation and Comics hold on mainstream culture and contemporary media, we also seek to discuss the increasing significance of these fields in academia, highlighting contemporary works and studies being made in both, as well as other forms of cross-disciplinary approaches, like the rise of the animated documentary in the 21st century. In sum, this conference will actively engage in rethinking the status quo of Animation, Comics, and other related and hybrid forms of artistic and narrative expression, building bridges between researchers and artists alike.

The second edition of the conference will take place in the spring of 2024, when Portugal will be commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution. We would like to take this opportunity and reflect on the topic of revolution in its broader sense. On the one hand, it evokes ideas of a breakdown in continuity, a challenge to the established order where a re-structuring of the systems of power occurs. Revolution is also a term that can be applied in media studies when thinking about the transformations that have been taking place in the moving-images ecosystem since the end of the 1990s, when we started seeing new and exciting connections between the previously separated media. Finally, if we look at the etymology of the term – revolution holds in itself the idea of motion, a process of revolving around an axis. Hannah Arendt, in her work On Revolution (1963), wrote that our modern concept of the term is “inextricably bound up with the notion that the course of history suddenly begins anew, that an entirely new story, a story never known or told before, is about to unfold” (Arendt, 1963: 28). We hope that Ink and Motion #2 Re[volution] will foster research and discussion on such stories and we invite you to think of Animation, Comics and the intermedial connections that these establish with other forms of art as means of storytelling that can be explored through the referred aspects – socio-political, historical and technological. 

List of Topics

Politics and Visual Memory: Representing Revolution(s) through Animation and Comics:

• Animation & Memory
• Animation and the Archive
• Animation and Disruption
• The revolutionary properties of animated images
• Political animation
• The Carnation Revolution in Animation and Comics
• Political caricatures
•  

Animation as a means of Emancipation : Identitarian, decolonial and ecological narratives

• Post-memory
• Collective memory and nostalgia in animation
• World Colonial/Decolonialist discourses in Animation/Decolonization through the practice of Animation as research
• Indigenous Animation
• Feminist/Queer Animation
• Subversion and resistance in Authorial Animation: How to regain agency over narratives of power
• Punk aesthetics and revolution (e.g. hopepunk, etc)
• Ecology and Animation
• Animation and the Anthropocene/ Animating the non-human perspective/ Posthumanism

Animation and the "In-Between": New Technological Paradigms and intersections

• Technological turns
• Living the future with AI (threats, perspectives and the revolution it can bring)
• Intermediality: from comics to animation, animation and video games, etc.
• Experimental Animation, hybridization and New Media

Other topics are welcome.

Committees

Organizing committee

• Sahra Kunz, CITAR - Escola das Artes, Universidade Católica Portuguesa (PT)
• João Apolinário Mendes, CITAR - Escola das Artes, Universidade Católica Portuguesa (PT)
• Ekaterina Cordas, CECC - Universidade Católica Portuguesa (PT)
• Bruno Leal, CIEBA - Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade de Lisboa (PT)

Venue

The conference will be held in Porto, Portugal, at Escola das Artes, Universidade Católica Portuguesa

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to skunz@ucp.pt.