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 Location: United Kingdom Call for PapersDate: 2014-01-07 Inspired in part by the work of contemporary artists like Panos &#38; Kirchner, Ed Atkins and Elad Lassry, this conference brings together art history, theory and practice to address a number of questions concerning the significance of production values in contemporary cultural production. How might highly-polished modes of production be used to actively produce critical effects and affects? Can artistic approximations of high-spec commercial image production technologies produce a disjunctive or defamiliarising effect in relation to those very technologies? Or do such practices simply constitute a form of empty posturing that commodifies political dissent and places it in the service of the market? We invite papers which address contemporary artistic interest in high-specification visual production and the cultural politics of production values more broadly.Approaches may include: * Papers which write with and from the position of the art object, including papers influenced by the new Object Oriented Ontologies.* Queer and feminist considerations of the sexualisation and gendering of superficiality.* Discussions of the relationship between corporeal messiness and its mediation by the clean and smooth digital image.* Considerations of the tacit dissemination of taste and value judgements in art criticism.* Papers which track the historical development of Marxist and post-Marxist criticism's relationship with the 'seductive image'.* Papers which work through the affective complexities of resolution and gloss in the production and reading of images.Paul Clinton &#38; Luke Healey, PhD Candidates,Art History &#38; Visual Studies, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UKEmail: shimmeringworldconference@gmail.comVisit the website at http://shimmeringworldconference.tumblr.com