קול קורא // לכנס: רשתות וסריאליות חזותית בתרבות הדפוס של שוק-המונים [לובן 04/24] דדליין=30.11.23

Context

This conference is a joint event between the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) & KU Leuven. It is the closing conference for ARTPRESSE, a Brain-be 2.0. research project offering an intermedial study of Belgian art as a networked structure as seen through the lens of the mass media magazines in the interbellum years. The corpus of digitized broad-audience illustrated periodicals (+500,000 pages) is accessible online and fully text-searchable through BelgicaPeriodicals. It is also organized alongside an exhibition on the French film-photo-novel taking place in Spring 2024 at KU Leuven Central Library, showcasing the large collection hosted by the University Special Collections. The exhibition approaches the film-photo-novel as part of mass-market periodical culture.

Argument

Covering a period that stretches from after the First World War to the 1960s, this conference invites for new perspectives on European popular serial culture in print, its diverse forms and its media networks in the 20th century, as well as on the archival and curatorial approaches to this type of print heritage. By mass-market print culture, we refer to a broad and diverse variety of popular serial culture in print: from illustrated periodicals to almanacs, pulp book series to print ephemera, film-photo-novels to stapled leaflets. A specific attention will be given to mass-market illustrated magazines, as studied by the Artpresse digitization and research project, on the one hand, film-photo-novels and film magazines on the other hand. This conference proposes to approach this miscellaneous array through the prism of two interrelated concepts – networks and seriality – that describe and capture relationships, connections, and dialogues amidst the vibrant diversity of mass-market print culture. Taken together, defined in an open and encompassing way, these two concepts are opening new avenues for research into periodical cultures: