The Popular Uncanny

Ludicine has posted a call for papers to an intermedial conference focused on horror video games (and films and books and such), entitled “Thinking After Dark.” With a focus on such topics as “figures of interactivity specific to the survival horror subgenre” and a featured guest in Barry K. Grant as a keynote speaker, this conference sounds quite promising.

“Thinking After Dark” will be held in Montreal (Quebec, Canada) from the 23rd-25th of April 2009 under the supervision of the Ludicine research group from the University of Montreal. The deadline for proposal submissions is Jan 15, 2009. I don’t know if I game enough to attend, but my curiosity is strong.

Conference reports and reflections from the Uncanny Media conference in Utrecht, Netherlands (2008) are starting to pop up online. Since it relates to my work on The Popular Uncanny, I was very interested in attending this event, but was unable to, so I’m seeking as many discussions and reports from the conference as possible online — and I’m especially keen on finding posted conference papers and related scholarship by the scholars in attendance.

I’ll keep updating this post as I collect what I discover here:

Isabella van Elferen (Utrecht University)– who coordinated the Uncanny Media conference — posts her report on the conference’s website (and hints that a sequel to the event may be fomenting).

Ilse Marie Bussing (University of Edinburgh) posts her con report at The Gothic Imagination and links to entertaining (but bandwidth-soaking) event photos by LeAnne Kline.

Steen Christiansen (Aalborg University, Denmark) kindly shares his conference paper, “David Bowie’s Hauntology” on his great weblog, New Mappings.

In addition to sharing his published research online on his website, Karl F. MacDorman has a series of youtube videos from his presentation on the the “uncanny valley” in android science, given at the 2007 NMC Summer Conference , hosted by the Indiana University School of Informatics (June 6, 2007).  Below is part VII of the lecture.  Mind Hacks has a posted a good overview page of these videos if you want to watch them in order.

Uncanny Media is “An International Conference on the Gothic Shadows of Mediation” being held next month on Aug 7-9, 2008 in Utrecht, Netherlands. With keynote speakers like Fred Botting (author of Gothic) and guest authors like Patrick McGrath (author of Trauma and The Grotesque), in addition to numerous academic panels, performances, and various gothic lifestyle events, this sounds like a fullblown experience more than a convention. (Wish I could attend.)

Update 07/05/08:

They have posted the conference programme, which includes abstracts to papers being delivered.