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[ image here ] Film and Visual Studies Conference and Exhibition Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts Harvard University Cambridge, MA USA Conference: April 7–9, 2016 Exhibition: April 6–17, 2016 Not simply a blank, [image here] functions as a placeholder—a formatted but unpopulated space. A page under construction, a refusal to show or be shown, an empty frame. Marking what is indicated but not given, [image here] simultaneously exposes and withdraws from the logic of representation. This conference seeks to elaborate the turn to non-representation in recent philosophy, media theory, art, and related fields. We invite contributions that trace non-representational strategies––in theory and practice––across history, media, and disciplines. As a negation or threshold, non-representation (de)limits multiple discourses. It recasts cycles of aniconism, censorship and other prohibitions of the image. It reframes junctures in the history of art such as the rejection of mimesis in modernist abstraction, the “anti-aesthetic” from dada to conceptual art, and contemporary trends of post-representation and art “against” the image. Non-representation opens theoretical approaches that emphasize other sensorial spheres of sonic, affective, and atmospheric experience beyond visual phrasings of representation. In addition, the schematic logic of the digital—its transmission, inscription, protocols and templates—avert traditional representationalism, placing contemporary media and mediation at the center of this turn away from “the image.” Can we, with these concepts in mind, ask what lies outside representation? What forms, if any, can we expect to create or encounter if representation is bracketed? We invite proposals for audiovisual presentations, exploratory writing, performances, and scholarly papers that engage with, as well as extend beyond, the following areas: Negation, negativity, and apophasis Secrecy, surveillance culture, censorship and redaction Politics of disappearance, aesthetics of withdrawal and camouflage Crises of the image, the anti-aesthetic, Conceptual Art Grids, rasters, matrices, graphs, lines Scripts, data, protocols Drafting, modeling, rendering Abstraction (neo-, modernist, post-) Affect, sensation, and the body at the limits of representation The Anthropocene and ecological imaginaries Time, temporality, and scales of duration Negative prefixes: non-representational theory, non-philosophy, non-photography, et al Form, format, medium, conduit, container technologies Atmosphere, clouds, and ambient media Noise, interference, static, silence Paratext and the out-of-frame Templates, placeholders, blanks, defaults Aniconism, the sublime, and the refusal of the visual Data visualization, cybernetics, and systems theories