Slices of Everyday Lives
Visual Culture, especially cinema, has produced an unprecedented archive of audio-visual records of everyday domestic practices in diverse cultures, constituting a highly valuable resource for the study of lived spaces. This conference will explore how the comparative analysis of visual culture artefacts, from paintings to fiction films, can contribute to our understanding of everyday life practices in homes around the globe.
The foundation for this event is our 30-month AHRC research project entitled ‘CineMuseSpace: A Cinematic Musée Imaginaire of Spatial Cultural Differences’ for which this international conference will be the final act (more information about the project can be found at https://www.cinemusespace.arct.cam.ac.uk).
The aim of the ‘Slices of Everyday Lives’ conference is to investigate and generate novel understandings of spatial cultural differences and new awareness of everyday life across cultures. The conference will also provide an opportunity to debate issues around the analysis of the everyday in visual culture more broadly.
In addition, the event aims to explore the creation of innovative technological methods for comparative approaches to the study of the everyday, such as film databases and image-recognition technologies as well as the preservation and dissemination of the everyday in museums and galleries.
By bringing together various disciplines engaged in the comparative study of the everyday, the conference hopes to stimulate an exchange of methodologies and help foster interdisciplinary collaboration.
The conference will take place over two days and will explore 4 themes:
Theme 1: The minor magic of everyday life – and its many facets
This theme investigates everyday practices through a number of sub-themes including:
• Architecture and the everyday
• Everyday urbanism
• Spatial ethnography of everyday life
• Painterly practices and drawn representations of the ordinary
Theme 2: Cinematic representation of the practices of everyday life
This theme focuses on the everyday embedded in moving images, especially cinema and includes sub-themes such as:
• Studies of everyday life across different cultures in fiction films
• Rhythmanalysis of everyday activities in films
• Emotions and atmospheres of the everyday in sound and image
• Cinematic studies of behaviour patterns and energy use
• Urban cinematics and the everyday
Theme 3: The future of the everyday imagination – new technologies of representation
This theme explores the development of new technologies to study existing visual culture material on the everyday. Sub-themes will focus in particular on:
• Database cinema
• Cinemetrics – measuring the filmic parameters of the everyday
• AI approaches, such as language, sound, pattern and
image recognition technologies used to examine everyday life practices
Theme 4: Musées imaginaires of everyday life – celebrating the ordinary
This theme looks into the role of museums, galleries and artists in capturing and representing everyday objects and activities. Sub-themes include:
• Representation of the everyday in museums
• Theatrical performances of mundane activities
• Remediating and showcasing the everyday