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Stereoscopy and cinema are old mates: not only the very first photographic experiments with movement were made with stereoscopic images, but also some early film directors were keen stereo photographers!  

The 2021 online edition of International Conference on Stereo & Immersive Media (S&I Media) is proud to acknowledge and promote these historical ties by launching a S3D Short Film Festival that will include a group of 3D cinema experts on its selection committee:

• Almir Almas, director of the Cinema, Radio and TV Department, University of São Paulo
• Ana Isabel Soares, Research Center in Arts and Communication, University of Algarve
• Eric Kurland, director of LA 3-D Movie Festival and 3-D SPACE
• Esther Jacopin, Script supervisor, 3D researcher
• François Serre, Director of Courant3D Festival and President of «Prenez du relief»  
• Manuel José Damásio, Director of Film and Media Arts Department, Lusofona University
• Victor Fajnzylber, Director of VR-LAB, University of Chile 

Our call for S3D short films is open until April 15. We invite international film directors to submit films that explore and highlight the immersive features of stereoscopic technologies. 

We’ve received 117 abstracts for this year’s Online Edition of S&I Media!

Early Bird registration is open until March 28 on Eventbrite.

Come join us on Zoom 17, 18 and 19 June 2021!

Every collector has his favourite item. S&I Media 2021 is looking for collectors of stereoscopic views from across the world who have special stories about one of their items.
In case you are one of those collectors, please contact us. We would be pleased to record a 1-minute Zoom video with your story! These videos will be screened in a special event of our conference in June.

Due to the Covid-19 crisis, we are now organizing this year’s conference as an online scientific event that will take place from the 17th to the 19th of June. This online edition will resume a great part of the contents prepared for our postponed 2020 edition, namely our confirmed keynote speakers (Tom Gunning, Denis Pellerin, Elizabeth Edwards and Carlos Teixidor) and all the accepted proposals for paper presentations. Along the traditional plenary sessions and themed parallel tracks, S&I Media 2021 will explore its new virtual format by launching a S3D Short Film Festival and a Virtual Art Gallery to showcase the most recent and diverse immersive artworks. The red/cyan anaglyph system will be adopted so that images can be displayed in stereoscopic 3-D in all digital screens. Other events are being prepared and will be disclosed soon! In order to meet a larger international community of researchers and art professionals our call for papers has been reopened until March 1st. Follow the link in our homepage to submit your abstract, or send your film proposal to 3dfilm.sim@gmail.com.

We hope you can join us!

IJSIM’s editorial board is proud to announce this new issue which includes three inspiring invited articles by Michael Pritchard (Royal Photographic Society, UK), Carlos Teixidor-Cadenas (Institute of Cultural Heritage of Spain) and Bruno Martins (University of Minas Gerais, Brazil), along with five peer-reviewed articles by Peter Blair (UK), Bradley Kagan (Australia), Stephen McBurney (UK), Esther Jacopin (France) and Volker Kuchelmeister (Australia). We are also proud to present on its cover an extraordinary stereoscopic negative by Jean Laurent from 1869 showing the Tower of Belém (Lisbon) and Laurent’s photographic laboratory cart. We take this opportunity to thank all the authors, reviewers and designers for their remarkable work in putting together this issue in such difficult times.

Click on the image to access.

IJSIM’s call for papers for next issue is open until 30th June 2021. Please find registration and submission informations here.

In the next S&I Media conference, Carlos Teixidor (Cultural Heritage Institute, Madrid) will present the photographs taken by Jean Laurent in Portugal in 1869. A unique opportunity to see these negatives (Lisbon, Batalha, Tomar, Coimbra, Porto, Setúbal and Évora), and  screened in 3D!

The stereoscopic negatives by J. Laurent. Views of Portugal in 1869

Jean (or Juan) Laurent started to work as a photographer in 1856 and by 1857 he was already taking stereoscopic views. Between 1861 and 1868 he was announced as the photographer for Queen Elizabeth II of Spain. In 1869 he traveled to Portugal to obtain city views and portrait the Portuguese royal family.
All his negatives from Portugal were made with the technique of wet collodion glass plates, using a small carriage as a photographic darkroom. Most of the prints were on albumin paper, but also some on leptographic paper. The Laurent archive is preserved in the Cultural Heritage Institute in Madrid. In total there are about 12,000 negatives by Laurent and his hired photographers. Among the stereoscopic negatives (13 x 18 cm format) there are 78 views of Portugal, mainly from Lisbon, Batalha, Tomar, Coimbra, Porto, Setúbal and Évora.

Carlos Teixidor Cadenas is the curator of historical photography at the Institute of Cultural Heritage of Spain (IPCE), Ministry of Culture and Sports, in Madrid. He has published several books, such as “Photography in the Canary Islands and Madeira. The era of daguerreotype, collodion and albumen 1839-1900” and “The postcard in Spain. 1892-1915” (Espasa, 1999).

We are pleased to reveal the title, blurb and a charming stereoscopic daguerreotype of Denis Pellerin’s keynote presentation at S&I Media 2021, next June.

Photo historian Denis Pellerin reveals some of the sad tales behind the mirror-like surfaces of these outstanding daguerreotypes. Much more than mere flesh, the persons who undressed in front of the camera were young women who were dreaming of a better life and did not always realise there was a huge price to pay for the easy money they were earning by flaunting their veil-less charms.

The International Conference on Stereo & Immersive Media is honored to announce Tom Gunning as the opening keynote speaker of its next edition  with a talk entitled “3-D Images: Realistic Illusion or Perceptual Confusion?”

The presentation seeks to explore the ambiguities of the devices of stereoscopic imagery both moving and still. Since the invention of the stereoscope there has been the claim that stereoscopic images gave a more complete representation of their objects by adding an appearance of three dimensionality. However, it has also been acknowledged that stereoscopy creates merely an optical illusion of three dimensionality, one which presents its own perceptual ambiguities. Moving from the issues raised by Jonathan Crary in his discussion of stereoscopy in The Techniques of the Observer to the history 3-D films, I want to explore how the tension between an illusionist approach of fooling the senses into believing an image and an outright challenge to representation which fosters the contradictions of stereoscopic images has made 3-D a dynamic aesthetic form. I will discuss both commercial films, such as the late Transformers series, as well as avant-garde works by Godard, Ken Jacob and The OpenEnded Group (Marc Downie and Paul Kaiser).

Tom Gunning works on problems of film style and interpretation, film history and film culture. His published work has concentrated on early cinema as well as on the culture of modernity from which cinema arose. His concept of the “cinema of attractions” has tried to relate the development of cinema to other forces than storytelling, such as new experiences of space and time in modernity, and an emerging modern visual culture. The issues of film culture, the historical factors of exhibition and criticism and spectator’s experience throughout film history are recurrent themes in his work.

The International Conference on Stereo & Immersive Media: Photography, Sound and Cinema Research will include 3D film screenings, creating an important platform for the display of 3D cinema.

3D films should explore and highlight the immersive features of stereoscopic technologies.

The 4th International Conference on Stereo & Immersive Media is pleased to announce Elizabeth Edwards as a 2021 Plenary Speaker. Elizabeth Edwards is a visual and historical anthropologist and is currently Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Victoria and Albert Museum Research Institute, London. She is Professor Emerita of Photographic History at De Montfort University, Leicester, where she was Director of the Photographic History Research Centre from 2011- 2016.

Elisabeth Edwards’s talk is entitled ‘Immersive histories: photography and the absorption of the past’ and will take place at the Carlos Relvas House-Studio in Golegã, a Nineteenth-Century luxurious and absolutely unique photographic studio, the second venue of our conference next June. See the blurb for her talk in this website.