ASAP/Amsterdam: As Slowly As Possible - A Symposium of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present

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.

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.

Keynote speakers and performances: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Ernst, Prof. Dr. Mieke Bal, Dr. Maria Fusco, and Dr. Jeremiah Day.

With 50 presentations by international speakers on panels devoted to topics such as slow futures, long durée, post-colonial temporalities, slow modernism, media dispositives, the Anthropocene, processual archives, slow materialism.

Final event at theater Perdu with round table discussion and intervention by the Slow Research Lab.

Option to join guided tours at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, FOAM Museum of Photography, or a tour of Amsterdam’s counter-cultural roots on Sunday morning.

Registration is possible for the whole symposium, for individual keynotes, the performance evening, and the final event at Perdu. For registration and further information, including the full conference program, see http://www.asapamsterdam.nl

All events will take place on the campus of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam), except for Saturday afternoon, when we will be hosted by Perdu (Kloveniersburgwal 86, 1012 CZ Amsterdam).

Programme:

Thursday 24 May
10:00-12:00 Netherlands School for Cultural Analysis (NICA) pre-symposium seminar for graduate students (Enrolment at a Dutch University required, application required); (HG-14A00)

12:00-12:30 Registration (HG-14A00)

12:30-13:00 Welcome (HG-14A00)

13:00-15:00 PANELS 1A & 1B

1A: SLOW ASIAS (HG-13A33)
- Joseph Jeon, “Born to See, Not to Run: Slow Surveillance in Slow Video and Cold Eyes”
- Youngmin Choe, “Reiteration and the Slow Gaze as Artisanal Labor: Kim Ki-duk’s Arirang and Kim Sooja’s Thread Routes”
- Moonin Baek, “Slow Expansion of Screening: Female Fandom of The Merciless (2017)”
- Christopher T. Fan, “Slow Life in Still Life”

1B: MEDIA DISPOSITIVES (HG-14A33)
- Diego Mantoan, “Speeding Up Through Slowing Down”
- Judith Rodenbeck, “Walkers”
- Divya Nadkarni, “Slow Time/Slow Form: Architectural Time-Space and the Poetry of Larry Levis”
- Ariane Noël de Tilly, “The Phenomenon of Slow Motion Perception in the Works of Scott Billings and the Raqs Media Collective”

15:00-15:30 Coffee break (HG-14A00)

15:30-17:30 PANELS 2A & 2B

2A: POST-COLONIAL TEMPORALITIES (HG-13A33)
- Simona Schneider, “Glacial Double-Time in Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses”
- Christine Okoth, “Consumption and Containment: Border Infrastructures and Contemporary Migrant Literature”
- Matthew Whittle, “Trophy Hunting, Taxonomy, and the ‘Animal Mask’ in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Jordan Peele’s Get Out”
- Paul Benzon, “Cinematic Slow Time and the Media Archaeology of Whiteness”

2B: HUMAN-MACHINE TEMPORALITIES (HG-14A33)
- Indiana Seresin, “Soul Delay: Intimacy and the Tempo of the Real in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition
- Alex Thinius, “Caring in Two Modes of Slowness: An Existential Analysis of Qu Xiao-song’s Ji#3 and of Bohren & der Club of Gore”
- Erin E. Edwards, “An Eterniday in Space: Count Zero and the Joseph Cornell Box”
• David Gauthier, “Phase to Phase: Rendering the Sea’s Oscillations, Predictions, and Chronographs”

17:30-18:00 Break

18:00-19:30 Keynote lecture by Wolfgang Ernst, “AS (S)LOW AS POSSIBLE?: On machinic non-sense of the sonic ‘present,’ and on digital indiffera/ence towards ‘time’”, (HG-KC07)

19:30 Reception (HG-KC07)

Friday 25 May

10:00-12:00 PANELS 3A & 3B

3A: PROTEST & PROPAGANDA (HG-12A33)
- Fabienne Rachmadiev, “ Messianic Time, Tsimtsum, and Slowness in the Work of Pavel Pepperstein”
- Bart van Kink, “Art and Legal Change”
- Tal Beery, “A Slow Pedagogy for Instituent Practice”
- Elizabeth Ho, “Temporal Rifts in Hong Kong: Marches, Occupation, and the Arts of Protest”

3B: SLOW MATERIALISMS (HG-14A33)
- Rahma Khazam, “Journeys Through Deep Time”
- Christopher Howard, "The Slowest Kinetic Artist"
- Lytle Shaw, "A Sedimentation of the Rhine: Robert Smithson and Dutch Liquefacture"
- Mona Schieren, "Becoming a Stone: The Topos of Slowness of Minerals”

12:00-13:00 Lunch break

13:00-14:30 Keynote lecture by Mieke Bal, “Slow Looking, Visual Thinking, and the Reasonableness of Doubt” (Kerkzaal HG-16A00)

14:30-15:00 Coffee break

4A: AUDIENCE & DURATION (HG-12A33)
- Sarah Sweeney, "Towards a Temporal Sublime"
- Alice Bennett, "Slow Words"
- Françoise Sammarcelli, "Slowness and Renewed Perception in Contemporary Aesthetics: Revisiting Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho (1993) with Don DeLillo's Point Omega (2010)”
- Catalina Lopez Imizcoz, "‘Teach Me How to Look at What I’m Trying to See’: On the Temporal Codes of Conduct of Dance Exhibitions"

4B: PROCESSUAL ARCHIVES (HG-14A33)
- Ekaterina Kochetkova, "Hasten Slowly: On the Perception of Time and Space in Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta"
- Trine Friis Sørensen "To Centennial in an Age of Biennials"
- Marcus Verhagen, "Viewing Velocities"
- Nadia de Vries, "Sharing Sickness: Terminal Illness Blogs and Pain as Linear Narrative"

17:00-18:00 ASAP reception and speeches (Kerkzaal HG-16A00)

18:00-18:30 Musical intermezzo by Hans Fidom (Kerkzaal HG-16A00)

18:30-20:00 Performative Reading by Maria Fusco, “Legend of the Necessary Dreamer” & Performance by Jeremiah Day: “1-2-3-4” (Kerkzaal HG-16A00)

20:00 Conference Dinner at the Botanical Garden of the VU (registration required, paid for individually)

Saturday 26 May

10:00-12:00 PANELS 5A & 5B

5A: SLOW FUTURES (HG-11A24)
- Leif Sorensen "Slow-pocalypse Now: Building Ruined Worlds"
- Mark Goble, "Exploded View: From 1968 to the End of Time"
- Karen Jacobs, “Murmurations of Homing”
- Annette Svaneklink Jakobsen, "Sensibility for the Wadden Sea: Relational Compositions Through Temporal, Spatial, and Disciplinary Scales"

5B: SLOW MODERNISM (HG-11A33)
- Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, "James Joyce and The Politics of Temporal Manipulation in Performance Art and Conceptual Writing"
- Hui-Han Chen, "Cinematic Universalisation of Slowness: Transcendental Localisation in Tsai Ming-Liang’s Stray Dogs"
- Jason Baskin, "Slow Forms in the Curated City"
- Ifat Reshef, "The Slowness of ‘Boring Video Art’ as Enabling Temporal Metaphors"

12:00-13:00 Lunch break

13:00-15:00 PANELS 6A & 6B

6A: THE LONG DURÉE (HG-11A24)
- Abram Foley, "Editing and Entropy"
- Michelle Smiley, "Undoing Photographic Time: The Long Exposure and the Snapshot"
- Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou, "Fossilising Time: Julian Charrière’s Radioactive Photography"
- Leo Rafolt, "Durational Logic of Legal Discourse: Slow Performances of Terrible Fish and Cyankali §218"

6B: ANTHROPOCENE TEMPORALITIES (HG-11A33)
- Rebecca Collins and Johanna Linsley, "Stolen Voices: A Slowly Expanding Eavesdrop on the East Coast of the UK"
- Ruby de Vos, "’The Power that Remains a Half-Century Later’: Radiotoxic Temporalities in ‘From Trinity to Trinity’"
- Karen Stock, "The Sculpture of Jason deCaires Taylor as Anthropocene Chronometer"
- Monique Peperkamp, "Ecological Urgencies and Physical Slowness"

15:00-16:30 Break and travel time to Perdu

16:30-16:45 Welcome by Perdu

16:45-17:30 Considerations on “Slowness” by Slow Research Lab

17:00-19:00 Roundtable discussion: “Mediated Temporalities”
with Birgit Kaiser, Mieke Bal, Maria Fusco, & Jeremiah Day

19:00 Closing reception

Sunday 27 May Optional Events

1. Tour of Foam Photography Museum (11:00, tickets available for purchase)
Meeting point: information desk in the entry area of the museum for a guided tour. Limited availability. Please reserve a spot by sending an email to asapamsterdamgmail.com. The tour is free, but participants must purchase an entrance ticket to the museum beforehand at the ticket office or online at https://tickets.foam.org/en.

2. Tour of Stedelijk Museum (11:00, tickets available for purchase)
Meeting point: information desk in the entry area of the museum for a guided tour. Limited availability. Please reserve a spot by sending an email to asapamsterdamgmail.com. The tour is free, but participants must purchase an entrance ticket to the museum beforehand at the ticket office or online athttps://reserveringen.stedelijk.nl/en/tickets

3. Vacant Stories - The (Aspiring) Amsterdam Museum of Squatting and Social Activism (12:00, by donation)
In this donation-based walking tour/conversation we will explore the effects of alternative social movements on the public spaces and life of Amsterdam. During times such as these, when the possibility of anti-commercial alternatives is exiting our collective understanding of past and possible futures, we will be taking to the streets to reawaken the memories of and engage with current political, social and protest movements. The tour will take around 2.5 hours, and will start at 12:00 at Dam Square. To reserve your spot please mail Alon at alonziv12gmail.com.

4. Event on Performance Art, organized by Barbara Krulik. To be confirmed.
More information will be made available soon.