Special Issue Editors: Erin La Cour and Katja Kwastek

ASAP/Journal seeks essays for a special issue on “Slowness” that explores the aesthetic, ecological, and political exigencies of slowness in the contemporary arts worldwide. Approaching slowness not only as an antidote to speed but as a modality of experience measurable against arrest—stoppage, termination, death—this special issue seeks essays that develop new approaches to “slow” artistic practices, works, and movements around the world, whether in resistance to the accelerationism of global capitalism or in tandem with alternative scales and measures of temporality. This special issue builds on the ASAP/Amsterdam symposium in May 2018, which featured the title “As Slowly as Possible”—an allusion to both the Association’s acronym and to John Cage’s 1987 organ composition Organ²/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible)—but is not restricted to symposium participants. All are welcome to submit an essay for consideration.

Contemporary ideas of slowness, as introduced in the 1980s by projects such as Carlo Petrini’s “slow food” movement, among others, have gained increasing relevance in the ever-accelerating global 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 awareness of the multi-layered interrelations among artistic media, institutions, participants, and environments, 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. Yet it also serves as a measure for empirical as well as suprasensory phenomena on a planetary scale, from erosion to entropy. 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, national boundaries, or media.

ASAP/Journal seeks contributions from arts practitioners, curators, critics, scholars, teachers, and other culture workers relating to the global contemporary arts in any medium. This special issue invites 6,000-8,000 word essays exploring the notion of slowness, including:

- multi-layered temporalities and time-scales as a/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

Whereas the print journal is limited to presenting articles in traditional print format, the editors will consider essay submissions in the form of visual, electronic, and musical texts, images, and other forms of writing.

Essays due by November 1, 2018

Please send queries or abstracts via email to the ASAP/Journal editor, Jonathan P. Eburne, at editors_asappress.jhu.edu. Articles should be submitted to the journal’s online submission site at http://journals.psu.edu/asap/index.php/testJournal/announcement

Essay submissions of 6000-8000 words (including notes but excluding translations, which should accompany foreign-language quotations) in Microsoft Word should be prepared in accordance with the Chicago Manual of Style. All content in the journal is anonymously peer reviewed by at least two referees. If the contribution includes any materials (e.g., quotations that exceed fair use, illustrations, charts, other graphics) that have been taken from another source, the author must obtain written permission to reproduce them in print and electronic formats and assume all reprinting costs. Manuscripts in languages other than English are accepted for review but must be accompanied by a detailed summary in English (generally of 1,000–1,500 words) and must be translated into English if they are recommended for publication.

Authors’ names should not appear on manuscripts; when submitting manuscripts, authors should remove identifying information by clicking on “File”/”Properties” in Microsoft Word and removing identifying tags for the piece. Authors should not refer to themselves in the first person in the submitted text or notes if such references would identify them.

For additional submission guidelines, please see: https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/asap_journal/guidelines.html