Expanded Cinema: Activating the Space of Reception :: April 17 - 19, 2009 :: Tate Modern.

Featuring lectures, discussions, performances, projections and installations, this major international conference presents a critical appraisal of an expanding field of film and video art from multi-screen, immersive, performance- based live-projections through to interactive, digital and virtual reality multi-media events.

Coined in the mid-1960s by Stan VanDerBeek, but with its origins in the experiments of early twentieth century avant-garde filmmaking, media-technologies and performance art, the term Expanded Cinema identifies a film and video practice which activates the live context of watching, transforming cinema’s historical and cultural ‘architectures of reception’ into sites of cinematic experience that are heterogeneous, performative and non-determined. Works identified as Expanded Cinema often open up questions surrounding the spectator?s construction of time/space relations, activating the spaces of cinema and narrative as well as other contexts of media reception. In doing so it offers an alternative and challenging perspective on filmmaking, visual arts practices and the narratives of social space, everyday life and cultural communication.

Speakers and artists include Mark Barlett, Eugeni Bonet, Cecile Chich, Noam Elcott, Cate Elwes, Valie Export, Steve Farrer, Sandra Gibson & Luis Recorder, Anja Gossens, Chrissie Iles, Cindy Keefer, Ji-Hoon Kim, Liz Kotz, Tamara Krikorian, Mike Leggett, Malcolm Le Grice, Anthony McCall, Chris Meigh-Andrews. Stephen Partridge, William Raban, Lucy Reynolds, Lis Rhodes, Tony Sinden, Yvonne Spielmann, Jonathan Walley, Chris Welsby, Duncan White, Peter Weibel and Maxa Zoller.

The conference is part of an AHRC (Arts & Humanities Research Council) funded project entitled Narrative Exploration in Expanded Cinema set up by the late Dr Jackie Hatfield. Conducted by Duncan White and David Curtis, the project - based at the British Artists Film and Video Study Collection at Central St Martins, College of Art & Design (University of the Arts London) in collaboration with Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, Dundee - seeks to explore the various histories of expanded cinema and their impact on the question of narrative, space and time in experimental film and art practices.