By Liza Kerlen

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.

24, 25, 26 May 2018 @ VU Amsterdam.

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.

Keynotes

• Mieke Bal (NL)
• Wolfgang Ernst (DE)
• Jeremiah Day (US/NL)
• Maria Fusco (IE/UK/NL)

For more information on the keynotes/performances, locations, and times, please click here. Please also note that all keynotes/performances are open to the public. To register for these events, please see registration information below.

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.

Symposium Presentations
The presentations will deal with a variety of artistic genres, such as literature, the visual arts, video and film, music, poetry, performance and dance, and digital art. Panels will be devoted to topics such as deep time, durational art, slow activism, anthropocene asynchronicities, movement and mobility, slowness ‘at home’ and ‘in the city,’ slow cinema, rhythm and slow motion, slowness as (institutional) critique, slow violence, non-human temporalities, and materialities of slowness.

Pre-Symposium Lecture: “How Will Art Survive Us?” by Tal Beery, 22 May 2018
Facing social and ecological changes that may threaten the very survival of our species, our times require large-scale collective adaptation. The arts, and arts institutions, are crucial here. They hold space for new stories and act as arenas for the rehearsal of new structures and modes of engagement that will be the most effective tools for surviving what we have become.

Pre-Symposium Junior Researcher Workshop: “(In)Human Time: Artistic Responses to Radiotoxicity”
What role could art and visual culture play in the discourses surrounding radioactivity and -toxicity and its complex temporality? How have artists responded historically to radiotoxicity and how has this changed over the past decades? How do they render radiotoxicity sensible?

Registration
As this is a symposium of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, you will need to become a member to participate ($65 for Full-time Faculty/Museum Staff; $45 for Graduate Students/Adjunct Faculty/Independents). ASAP membership entitles members to register for meetings of the association, join the listserv, and participate in association prize competitions. Membership also includes a subscription to the ASAP/Journal, published three times annually by Johns Hopkins University Press (an additional fee is required for shipping). Please note that we took these fees into account when establishing the symposium fees, so that they remain affordable.

• Registration is $100 for Full-time Faculty/Museum Staff and $60 for Graduate Students/Adjunct Faculty/Independents. The optional Symposium Dinner on Friday evening is $60.
• Public Events: You may also register for the public events ($15 for Wolfgang Ernst keynote; $15 for Mieke Bal keynote; $15 for Maria Fusco performative lecture and Jeremiah Day performance; $10 for Roundtable discussion, including drink ticket).