Embodied Futurisms, Imagined Femininities

Bjork's Utopia (2018) is a culmination of the biophilic and technophilic themes that have connected much of her mediated expressions. To situate Bjork in a wider framework, she is a prime case study in order to explore how popular artists imagine future representations of femininity that are bound to nature, technology, or a symbiotic relationship of both. The way in which the future is imagined and constructed inevitably impacts the way in which people embody their own gendered expressions, and their future evolutions. Through music videos and other pop culture texts, we become familiarized with our connections to the land and to technology, ultimately informing both. To become familiar is to feel responsible towards, and as such, the impacts of these future femininities is potentially great.

Speculative Creativity, Pop Music, and Artificial Intelligance

The history of popular music is intertwined with the history of digital technology. As the capacities for artificial intelligence and deeper learning have extended into creative outputs, it was inevitable that algorithms would be developed to aid the the production of pop music. By pushing the boundaries of music production, artists collectives, such as SKYGGE, develop innovative relationships with AI, and music production, by utilizing computers as collaborators and boundary pushers. While the history of artificial intelligence and music is quite long, the incorporation of deep learning into pop music will spark wider discussions about the role of AI in society, especially in regards to the assumed innateness of human creativity. Autotune challenged the production and reception of the voice, Flow Rhythms and other systems to be developed will challenge the humanity of creativity. 

Twitter, Collective Future Thought, and Beyoncé's Lemonade

More and more, people are looking to social media, and Twitter in particular, to guide their interpretations of media texts, which inevitably contribute to the formulation of collective meaning, in turn affecting the production of collective memory. It is becoming increasingly evident that social media plays a critical role in the shaping of communities, thoughts, meaning, and knowledge. Twitter makes possible quick and wide-scale mobilization of people. Its position as a contestedly democratic outlet for meaning and interpretation, and its role in influencing public perception draws attention to particular ways of knowing within a culture or community. That being said, meaning is not static, and Twitter discourse also documents how collective and individual meaning shifts over time. This study queries how Twitter discourse, in response to Beyoncé's Lemonade, is temporal, and how shifts in meaning impact the ways dominant interpretations are ultimately formed and circulated in mainstream media and memory.

Edited by Melissa Avdeeff and Scott Henderson, this edited collection seeks to provide a much needed interdisciplinary text focused on the work and career of Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot. Lightfoot’s career spans more than six decades, beginning with his emergence in the folk rock scene in Toronto’s Yorkville in the 1960s through to continued touring in the present decade. Lightfoot’s success has bridged a number of genres, including folk, pop, country, rock and a range of crossovers. A string of Top 40 hits in the 1970s cemented Lightfoot’s international reputation, both as a singer and songwriter. In addition to his own recordings, Lightfoot’s songs have also been recorded and performed by an amazing array of diverse artists., across a vast range of musical genres.

Please consider submitting a proposal - the CFP can be found here.

Please reload