CFP As Slowly as Possible: A Symposium of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present

ASAP/Amsterdam “As Slowly as Possible”: A Symposium of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 24-26 May 2018
Call for Papers
ASAP/Amsterdam invites proposals from scholars and artists addressing the contemporary arts in all their forms since the 1960s—literary, visual, performing, musical, cinematic, design, and digital. We are interested in work across disciplines and media that examine the formal, cultural, social, and political dimensions of the arts today.
 
The 2018 international Association of the Study of the Arts of the Present symposium will be hosted by the CLUE+ Interfaculty Research Institute for Culture, Cognition, History and Heritage at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and dedicated to exploring notions of slowness. 
 
Keynote Lectures/Performances
Mieke Bal (NL)
Wolfgang Ernst (DE)
Jeremiah Day (US/NL)
Maria Fusco (IE/UK/NL)
 
Contemporary ideas of slowness, as introduced by such movements of the 1980s including Carlo Petrini’s “slow food” and other projects, have gained increasing relevance in our ever-accelerating present. Far from denoting merely a claim to slow down, slowness encourages us to address the complexities of contemporary production and reception processes with a heightened sensibility to multi-layered interrelations from the economic to the ecological. The relational nature of speed can serve as a fruitful metaphor for the complex interrelations of spatial/geographical and temporal/historical orders, as well as aesthetic and political discourses. Its relationality encourages us to question other binary notions of hot versus cold media, digital versus analogue, culture versus nature, local versus global, as well as any categorization of the arts according to disciplines, genres, or media.
 
The symposium encourages papers exploring the notion of slowness, including:
·      multi-layered temporalities and time-scales as effective in artistic practices and works
·      relations of any of the slow movements (slow cities, science, film, food) and the arts
·      ecological, durational, activist, processual, systems-oriented approaches
·      multi-modal and cross-medial approaches to slowness
·      challenged binaries of aesthetics vs. politics, digital vs. analogue, local vs. global
 
Participants are encouraged to think as broadly and imaginatively as possible about the intersections between and among the contemporary arts and their institutions, economies, policies, and traditions. Proposals may focus on individual artists, writers, designers, composers, or performers and/or their works; they may consider artistic movements, collectives, and local scenes, including those online, or underground; they may discuss any theoretical, intellectual, or aesthetic formation that figures in the world of the arts as we know them now.
 
*For further information and conference updates, please visit www.asapamsterdam.nl.
 
Abstract Submissions
Applicants to the symposium are invited to submit a 250 word abstract and short biographical note by 17 November 2017 to the organizers at asapamsterdam@gmail.com.
 
Organizing Committee
Erin La Cour, Katja Kwastek, & Diederik Oostdijk
 
Contact
Should you have any questions, please contact us at asapamsterdam@gmail.com.