Screening Scholarship Media Festival (SSMF) 2025
Sound & Color
CAMRA is pleased to announce the theme of the annual 2025 Screening Scholarship Media Festival (SSMF): Sound & Color.
This year, we will be unhinging from indexical representations and reorienting towards what is possible when we attune ourselves through the senses: music and sound, color and light, touch and taste. This theme is a call to inhabit the modality in multimodality and to embrace abstraction as we listen, learn, teach, exchange, and prototype freer conditions in the long story of life on earth.
We understand this theme to encompass a range of projects and perspectives that explore the interplay of sound and color, amongst other modalities, across diverse mediums, disciplines, and traditions. We encourage submissions that innovatively utilize sensory modalities to evoke new imaginaries. With this in mind, we offer these provocations:
- What does it mean to sense a world anew? To vision it, hear it, feel it, taste it, touch it, live it?
- What do these modalities afford us as we learn to inhabit the world otherwise?
- How might engagements with various modalities disrupt, reconfigure, or illuminate structures of power, knowledge, and being?
- How do we mobilize the modalities of sound, light, and other sensations in communal rituals, resistance movements, and spiritual practices?
- What does it mean to think and create beyond representational constraints?
Inspired by the works of artists and scholars such as Torkwase Dyson, Saidiya Hartman, Emily Jacir, Do Ho Suh, Rizvana Bradley, Simone Leigh, Fred Moten among the many whose experiments in abstraction viscerally put us in touch with our humanity and that of those around us, we offer Sound & Color as a way to think together about the politics and poetics of our sonic, chromatic, tactile, and embodied expressions in art, culture, scholarship, and media. By gathering in this way, we hope to collectively explore what harmonies might exist within and through our (multi)modal practices.
We are open to proposals in a variety of formats, including AUDIO / EXHIBITS & INSTALLATIONS / RESEARCH PRESENTATIONS / POETRY / VIDEO & FILMS / WORKSHOPS that engage the theme and/or the questions we lay out above. We invite submissions from scholars, activists, artists, filmmakers, and educators of all backgrounds that creatively explore these ideas. We hope to include contributions that challenge the boundaries of form, language, and perception. Proposals are due Friday, January 31 at 11:59PM.
SSMF 2025 will take place in-person at the University of Pennsylvania on March 28 & 29. The festival will involve commissioned musical and poetry performance as well as talks and workshops. It is produced in collaboration with the support of the Annenberg School for Communication, the Graduate School of Education, and the Center for Experimental Ethnography. The festival will remain free and open to the public.
Join us as we co-create an environment that celebrates the resonances and reverberations of Sound & Color, imagining a world more vibrant, just, and alive.