BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies

An early and popular form of film projector, “bioscope”, was widely used to refer to the cinema in twentieth century South Asia. By focusing on the word’s component parts, we highlight the expanding spectrum of forms involved in thinking about the relationship of life to visual and sound technologies. From the orbit of film, television and video, we invite research into a wide historical and contemporary canvas, from precinematic forms of assembly, through to contemporary computer practices, game cultures, multimedia telephony, ambient television, surveillance cameras, and the wide range of materials assembled on the internet. Our interests also extend to new media arts and contemporary screen-based art installations. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies is a blind peer-reviewed journal published biannually, starting January 2010. We encourage theoretical and empirical research both on located screen practices and wider networks, linkages, and patterns of circulation. This involves research into the historical, regional, and virtual spaces of screen cultures, including globalized and multi-sited conditions of production and circulation. There is special attention given to archival research and field work. This includes documentation and ethnographic enquiry into media institutions and industries, and their modes of regulation, for example, the policies, debates and practices of urban administration, censorship regimes, and intellectual property regulation. Our concern with old and new media forms invites work not only on changing technologies, but also on the spaces within which media experience is organized, including changing architecture and design and an enquiry into spatial forms and histories. Our attention extends to the rich intersection of South Asian screen practices with related media forms, for example musical recording and performance, popular print culture and stage set design, and the history of publicity, advertising and consumer cultures. To engage the specific idioms and forms of screen culture, we invite translations of important texts on screen experience as these are made available through writings on visual and sound cultures and technologies such as reviews, criticism, essays, and literary works.