Call for Papers and Artworks: Speeding and Braking – Navigating Acceleration
12-14 May 2016, Goldsmiths, University of London
Confirmed keynote: Prof. Frances Dyson (UC Davis)
Confirmed speakers: Susan Schuppli, Joanna Zylinska, Mark Fisher, Kodwo
Eshun
***
Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But
perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the
passengers on the train – namely, the human race – to activate the
emergency brake. (Walter Benjamin)
The only way out is through. (Robert Frost)
Acceleration has been characterised as both reason and remedy for the
challenges presented by an increasingly fraught global economy, marked
by financial crises, ecological ruination, neo-colonial oppression and
forced displacements of an unprecedented scale. Concurrently, the
contemporary political and cultural imagination is caught between
opposing temporalities: the accelerationist affirmation that “the
increasing immanence of the social and technical is irreversible and
indeed desirable” (Avanessian & Mackay, #Accelerate, p. 7) on the one
hand, and “regressive, decelerative or restorative ‘solutions’” (ibid.,
p. 6.) on the other. The conference Speeding and Braking: Navigating
Acceleration aims to explore critical techno-practices in screen and
sonic media that eschew this conceptual deadlock by extending across and
beyond such totalising and mutually exclusive attitudes – of immersion
vs. rejection – with regard to the contemporary technosphere.
The conference is concerned with the material and phenomenological
consequences of accelerations and decelerations as well as aesthetic
strategies afforded and/or precluded by them. It seeks responses
concerned with the material inscription, practical harnessing and
phenomenological experience of varying speeds, from the perspective of
contrasting temporalities. We are particularly interested in transversal
approaches reading across, and drawing into dialogue, seemingly
incompossible positions within the fields of sonic and visual arts,
cultural and critical theory, and media and communications:
accelerationism vs. post-growth or ‘folk’ politics; afro-futurism vs.
afro-pessimism; techno-feminism vs. feminist emphases on care and other
forms of reproductive labour reliant on human agents etc.
A suggested (but by no means exhaustive) list of topics for consideration:
Alternate futures: What are examples of speculative fantasies and
hi-tech futurisms that problematise the modernist rift between
techno-utopias and techno-phobias? What are the internal debates
involved in discourses thinking race, gender and sex in and through
technology and progress? What role do pessimisms responding to these
discourses play in their recuperation of the future?
Particle Time: Rust, dust and other particles point to the mutual
entanglement of man-made and environmental change, blurring the
boundaries between historical and natural (biological, geological)
durations. What temporal ontologies might a reconsideration of the
geochemical particles involved in the making of media (art) help emerge?
How do artists address this “deep time of the media” (S. Zielinski)?
Spectrality and Ruination: Ghosts and ruins occupy the longue durée
of history; they are negative inscriptions of the obsolete, the
uncanny/unhomely return of the repressed and the unrealised, persisting
as spectral/ruinous present against capital’s double telos of perpetual
growth and progress. How and by way of which temporal logic may ghosts
and ruins converse with the past? How do they inflect our understanding
of the present (as future ruin/spectrality)?
24/7: Neoliberal urban and domestic experiences are marked by an
acceleration of visual mediation as a means of social regulation and
capture. What critical and aesthetic tools might allow us to recuperate
the lost dimensions of social-spatial practice in both private and
public spaces?
Slow motion: Both the contemporary “slow cinema” and certain
instances of structural film enact a systematic deceleration of the
moving image, emphasising its stillness, silence and uneventful
duration. Usually defined in aesthetic terms (e.g. as an affective
economy that resists the logic of consumption), these slow currents may
also be framed as poietic strategy – with particular resonance in
marginal or ‘underdeveloped’ moving image ecologies of the Global South.
What are the aesthetic and political stakes involved in slowing down the
moving image?
We invite abstracts for 20 minute presentations and proposals for
artworks (audio, video and performance). Deadline for
abstracts/proposals (300 words max) is March 20th 2016 23:59 GMT.
Applicants will be notified of acceptance by April 7th. Please send
submissions as an attachment including a title, a brief biography and,
if relevant, documentation of your artistic practice to
screenandaudiovis...@gmail.com
--
Professor Joanna Zylinska
Department of Media and Communications
Goldsmiths, University of London
http://www.joannazylinska.net
NEW BOOK, Photomediations: A Reader, available open access:
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/photomediations/
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