::fibreculture:: CFP Transformations Journal - The Ruin, the Future.

[Grayson Cooke]

CFP Transformations issue 28: "The Ruin, the Future."

Over the past few years a swathe of what has come to be known as "ruin porn" has swept the internet. Perhaps in an uncanny updating of Albert Speer's dark fantasies of "ruin value", photographs of Detroit's abandoned factories and theatres, Chernobyl's crumbling tenements and "urbex" photos of ruined asylums and hotels are gleefully traded on Facebook and Reddit and have amassed immense cultural currency.

This contemporary interest in ruins scales from numerous blogs and sub-Reddits to the vaulted heights of major art institutions, with the Tate gallery's 2013 "Ruin Lust" exhibition. But of course - as the Tate's exhibition charted - this fascination has its roots in much older traditions. The ruin was employed for theological purposes in the paintings of the Renaissance, and for didactic and allegorical purposes in the Romantic paintings of the 18th century. For hundreds of years ruins have been both quotidian elements of the daily lives of many, especially in Europe, while they have also operated as rich sources of historical meaning within various modes of artistic expression.

What can be done with the ruin today? Can we put the observations of key theorists of the ruin, such as Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel, to new purposes? And from our ancient, colonial and industrial ruins can we pull some hope, some imagination or possibility for the future that sees the ruin differently than as an emblem of a glorious or inglorious past?

This issue of Transformations calls for reflections on the ruin and ruination, its past and its future. Possible topics may include (but need not be limited to):

* Ruins of the ancient world and archaeological practice
* The ruin and Romanticism
* Walter Benjamin's allegory and the ruin
* The city in ruins
* The aesthetics of the ruin
* Colonial ruins and ruination
* Film emulsion and the media, the ruin of the image
* The ruin and the archive, memory and forgetting
* The ruin as poetics
* Hermeneutics of the ruin
* Contemporary ruins: "ruin porn" memes and the internet
* Urban exploration and the industrial ruin
* The ruin and pollution, bloodstreams and the environment
* The ruin as messianic event
* The ruin and the future, the ruin as possibility

>> Abstracts (200-400 words) are due 1st September 2015, with a view to submit articles by 15th January 2016.

>> Abstracts should be forwarded to: editor at transformationsjournal.org

>> View Transformations online: http://www.transformationsjournal.org



--
Dr Grayson Cooke
Course Coordinator BMedia
Director of Higher Degree Research Training
School of Arts and Social Sciences
Southern Cross University
PO Box 157
East Lismore NSW 2480
Ph: +61 2 6620 3839
http://www.graysoncooke.com
CRICOS Provider: 01241G


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