current calls for papers
Issue 20: Slow Media - Submissions CLOSED.
Issue 19: Rancière: Politics, Art & Sense - Submissions CLOSED.
CFP: Issue 20
Slow Media
Given the contemporary fascination with and, indeed, addiction to real-time media dispatch and commentary, what would it mean to speak of “slow media”? Dare we even think such a thing when everything around us screams of increased speed, increased bandwidth, and increased convergence? We are 24-7, we are always-on, we are connected; we are locatable, we are X/Y coordinated, we are plotted; we are status updated, we are tweet-fed, we are real-time media junkies and we don’t have time to slow down.
“Slow media” is surely inimical to the age of social media and 24-hour news channels, where we live immersed in a mediascape dedicated to reducing to nothing the temporal division between the occurrence of an “event” and its reportage. In such a scenario, “slow media” appears either heretical or retrogressive, a wanton disregarding of the patent necessity of instant information dissemination and rampant friending, or just another Luddite reaction-formation. Indeed, “slow media” as a term has already been spun-off from the “slow” movement more generally, and is used to describe the reduced media diet of people turning off the email, closing the facebook, and going outside for a sniff of the flowers.
But while “slow media” as a term may appear primarily to describe a mode of resistance, it also allows us to think about the speed of the media as such. Have our popular media always been increasing in speed? What is the end point of all of this, the apotheosis of real-time: are we, as Bernard Stiegler suggests, approaching the “time barrier”? And, what happens when we break it?
For this issue of Transformations, we invite papers that meditate on the speeds and slownesses of the contemporary moment. Papers could address, but would need not be limited to, any of the following themes:
- real-time and the news media
- social media and the status update
- new media explorations of speed and slowness
- artistic responses to speed and time
- social media suicide: suicidemachine.org and seppukoo
- the “slow” movement and resistance
- histories of speed in the media
- tweet-streams and data-feeds
- bandwidth, access and connectivity
Abstracts (500 words): due 1st July 2010, with a view to submit articles by 1st October.
Abstracts to be forwarded to Grayson Cooke, at grayson.cooke@scu.edu.au
CFP: Issue 19
Rancière: Politics, Art & Sense
In The Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Rancière has argued that we need to rethink aesthetics as “the invention of new forms of life” (25). Rejecting the idea that aesthetics should be confined to such questions as the status of the art object and the aestheticisation of politics, Rancière’s work opens up aesthetics to a reflection on the possibilities of sense and its distribution in terms of sensible forms and practices. Politics is itself aesthetic in that it requires a sharing of sense in common; art is not the exemplary site of sensory pleasure or the sublime but a critical break with common sense, opening up possibilities of new commonalities of sense. Art as politics is thus a manifestation of what Rancière calls dissensus, or a gap in the sensible itself. Rethinking the avant-garde as “the aesthetic anticipation of the future,” (29) Rancière calls for an aesthetics concerned with “the invention of sensible forms and material structures for a life to come” (29). In this issue of Transformations we invite submissions on critical aesthetics along the lines outlined above. We are especially interested in submissions that employ Rancière’s ideas in particular artistic and political contexts, both contemporary and historical.
Some possible themes include:
- Distributed sense as aesthetic anticipation of the future
- Politics and aesthetics as forms of dissensus
- Technicity and sense as an aesthetic-political problem
- Art as resistance in new media aesthetics
- Bio-art and the life to-come
- New media explorations of the senses
- Revision of the Kantian and Hegelian ideas of aesthetics
- Technics and the culture industries
- The continuing relevance of the avant-garde
Abstracts (500 words): due 1st May 2010 October With a view to submit articles by 1st August 2010
Abstracts to be forwarded to Warwick Mules, general editor at w.mules@bigpond.com
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