The 2016 conference in Coventry marks the end of a cycle of activities sponsored by the British
Arts & Humanities Research Council , meaning to articulate an international research network
devoted to the many territories of dispute in the contemporary arrangement of audiovisual
media, such as piracy, curating, and projection practices.
The conference series Besides the Screen began in London in 2010 at Goldsmiths College,
University of London. The event meant to gather research projects focused on an apparently
secondary subject in the field of screen studies: the instances of film distribution and
consumption. By that time, it already seemed important to promote debates around these topics,
considering that some of the most meaningful effects caused by computer networks on
audiovisual media are connected not to image production, but rather to the emergence of new
dynamics of circulation – from peer to peer filesharing to mobile screens, from VJing to
video on demand.
Wednesday 20th July 2016
Ellen Terry Building, Coventry University
14:30 Coffee and Registration (Foyer, Ellen Terry Building)
15:00 Conference Welcome (ET101)
15:15 16:45: Panel 1 (ET101)
17:00 18:30: KEYNOTE Charlotte Brunsdon & The Projection Project (ET101)
18:30 19.30: Break
19:30 Exhibition opening and music from Accelra @ The Box, FarGo Village
Thursday 21st July 2016
Ellen Terry Building, Coventry University
10:00 11:30: Panel 2 (ET101)
11:30 12:00: COFFEE
12:00 13:30: Panel 3 (ET101)
13:30 14:30: LUNCH
14:30 16:00: Panel 4 (ET101)
16:30 17:30: Performance (Ricardo Carioba) (ETG34)
17:30 18.00: Break
18:00 Leafcutter John (Performance & Q&A) @ The Box, FarGo Village
Fri 22 (Ellen Terry Building)
Ellen Terry Building, Coventry University
10:00 11:30: Panel 5 (ET101)
11:30 12:00: COFFEE (Foyer)
12:00 13:30: PANEL 6
13:30 14:30: LUNCH (Foyer)
14:30 16:00: KEYNOTE Nelson Brissac (ET101)
18:00 Performance (mirella & muep) (ETG34)
20:00 Close
Keynotes
Projection, the Moving Image and the Transition to Digital
Charlotte Brunsdon, Michael Pigott and Richard Wallace
This plenary session will be presented by Charlotte Brunsdon, Michael Pigott and Richard
Wallace who are working together on the AHRCfunded Projection Project (201418). This
multimethod project takes projection as its starting point in an exploration of cinema’s transition
to digital. In this presentation we will outline some of the premises of the project, and present
findings which range from interviews with former projectionists to sounds from the projection
box. Our project includes archival and oral history research into the neglected history of the
cinema projectionist through which we challenge the primacy of the image in theorisations of
cinematic specificity, revealing in contrast the role of hidden labours of cinema exhibition. While
we are attentive to the human cost of the transition to digital in terms of redundancies and
redeployments, we are also concerned with the new possibilities of the emergent uses of digital
projection outside of the cinema space. Here we attend to practices – such as projection
mapping enabled by the portability and flexibility of digital projectors, and situate them within a
long history of projection. By investigating the role of outdoor projection as a means of both
advertising and protest, as well as the figure of the nightclub VJ, the project seeks to identify
continuities and differences that pertain within the extracinematic everyday uses of moving
image projection. As a multipart presentation we will seek to give a sense of both what is
hidden and lost in the projection box, and what is imagined outside it in a wide range of venues
and practices.
Professor Charlotte Brunsdon has been Principal Investigator of the Projection Project. Her
most recent research had been concerned with the spaces of film and television and she has
just completed a book on T
elevision Cities t o be published by Duke University Press in 2017.
Dr Michael Pigott is coinvestigator on The Projection Project and author of J oseph Cornell
versus Cinema (2013). He teaches visual cultures and audiovisual performance at the
University of Warwick. He also works as an artist and has been known to do some VJing.
Dr Richard Wallace is Research Fellow on the Projection Project. He has research interests in
British film and television history and technology, historical research methods and screen
documentary and has published in the J ournal of British Cinema and Television.
All work at the University of Warwick, mostly in the Department of Film and Television Studies.
projection.project@warwick.ac.uk