Call for Papers: Media Fields 10 Conference, Survey
Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
April 8th and 9th, 2027
Submission deadline: Dec 15, 2026
Keynote speakers: Brian Jacobson and Hillary Mushkin (California Institute of Technology)
From left to right: Nielsen people meter, 1996 aerial photograph of the area outside of the Salton Sea Wildlife Refuge, Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher’s Winding Towers (1966-97)
To survey is to examine, to query, or to consider comprehensively. In its verb form, it belies the performance of the survey as a political technology, its epistemological function in presenting a worldview as the world. As both a media form and process of mediation, the survey deploys a rationalizing gaze on diverse and elaborate lifeworlds, creating knowable, orderly systems for extraction, incorporation, and management by agents of authority. As such, the survey is inextricable from the necropolitical implications its actions have upon the landscape, its people, and its resources. Survey is a scalar form and concept. It offers a broad view and promises comprehensivity. From survey courses to artist retrospectives, satellite images to field guides, surveys compress time and space, allowing one to consume accumulated data in the stroke of an eye. As a synoptic form of knowledge, the survey brings the individual into picture with the collective public. Following Bruno Latour (1990) and Cornelia Vismann’s (2008) call to study paperwork—inscriptions and files—in order to address its power, we propose a critical reflection on the form of the survey where the document, not necessarily its contents, is the primary object of study.
Some scholars and activists maintain that the form of the survey has productive possibilities, such as bottom-up counter-mapping of territory that images and imagines space from new perspectives or disseminates knowledge of otherwise classified or invisible sites (Parks 2010; Mushkin 2021; Paglen 2009). Groups such as Forensic Architecture reappropriate spatial surveys to reconstruct human rights violations, creating counter-forensic publics. If, per Kate Crawford, an atlas presents us with a particular viewpoint, then a counter-survey might enable “rereading the world,” prompting new ways of acting on or relating to it (2021, 10). We bring these disparate forms of survey and counter-survey together to critically consider their role as media epistemologies, their properties of scale and visuality, and as techniques of governance.
The wide scope of the survey allows its audience to contemplate and classify its subjects, consolidating power through categorizations of geological, cultural, and political difference that prioritize “legibility and simplification” (Said 1978; Scott 1998, 2). Theories of the gaze are useful in understanding how visual surveying simplifies in service of instruments of power (Foucault 1977; Mirzoeff 2011; Browne 2015). For example, survey photographs have depicted indigenous communities in manners aligned with imperial projects (Ahlenius 2024), while aerial perspectives mediate sprawling land into cogent maps, reinvisioned as tools of control (Kaplan 2017). Techniques of photogrammetry complement these perspectives by compositing still frames, untethering the photographic from the static. Its afterlives are evident in the dynamic digital environments such as Google Earth. Surveillance thus produces its own visual lexicon.
Land surveys authorize the drawing and enforcement of legal boundaries. Eyal Weizman notes the colonial dimensions of surveys, where redrawing maps and modifying place-names are deliberate territorializing strategies. Through its rationalizing gaze, the survey becomes a tool for technocratic governance. Environmental surveys determine whether groundwater or air quality are within acceptable ranges for hazardous materials, normalizing toxic exposures. These surveys thus become a means for managing the afterlives of state violence, ensuring the continuity of its operations and revealing the necropolitical implications of the form. Alongside territorial expansion, the survey is embedded in the process of envisioning endless, extractive futures (Angus 2024). The extractivist gaze links the landscape to the man-made registry, capturing and converting what is extracted into legible data points. This operates selectively: surveyors take what they want and discard the rest.
For the 10th biennial Media Fields Conference, we welcome presentations and creative works that engage broadly with surveys and their connections to cinema, media, and technology across disciplines. Presentations may engage with, but are certainly not limited to, the following themes:
● Form: survey courses, artistic retrospectives, panoramas, census, research design, travelogues and travelling cinemas, field guides, atlases, wide-screen formats.
● Data: data visualization, personality quizzes, datapower, demographics, data scraping, audience surveys, Sight and Sound poll.
● Environment: extraction, environmental impact statements, cartography, risk mitigation.
● Surveillance: CCTV, drones, evidence, aerial photography, ring cameras, biometrics.
● Technology: satellites, Google Earth, GIS, LiDAR, AI, people meter, IMAX, Panavision.
● Empire: World Expos, imperialism, sovereignty, militarization, war rooms, command centers, boundary surveys, registries.
● Counter-survey: land art movement, counter-visualizing, counter-mapping, geopoetics.
Participants will have 15-20 minutes to present their work. Please email a 250-300 word proposal and a brief bio to survey.mediafields@gmail.com by December 15th, 2026.
Bibliography
Ahlenius, Jason. “Muybridge and the Imperial Pacific: Fashioning Histories of Empire and the Coffee State, 1867–1876.” Interventions 26, no. 8 (2024): 1267-1294.
Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press, 2015.
Crawford, Kate. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. Yale University Press, 2022.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Vintage Books, 1977.
Kaplan, Caren. Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above. Duke University Press, 2017. Latour, Bruno. “Drawing Things Together.” In Representation in Scientific Practice, edited by Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar, 19–68. MIT Press, 1990.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Duke University Press, 2011.
Mushkin, Hillary. “Survey to Surveillance.” Places Journal, April 2021. https://doi.org/10.22269/210413.
Paglen, Trevor. Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World. Dutton, 2009.
Parks, Lisa. “Mapping Orbit: Toward a Vertical Public Space.” In Public Space, Media Space, edited by Chris Berry, Janet Harbord, and Rachel Moore. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Pantheon Books, 1978.
Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 1998.
Weizman, Eyal, and Fazal Sheikh. The Conflict Shoreline: Colonization as Climate Change in the Negev Desert. Steidl, 2015.
Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. Stanford University Press, 2008.