Place and dates:
Riga/Liepaja (Latvia), 15-20 June, 2010

Main Organizer:
Electronic Text + Textiles (e-t+t)

Venues:
Main site for the academic programme, reception, lunches:
The Stockholm School of Economics in Riga (SSE Riga)

Other conference sites:
e-t+t; Latvian Centre for Contemporary Arts; Riga City Art Space (t.b.c.), The Art Lab, University of Liepaja

The SLSA-EU 2010 conference is dedicated to exploring fabrics, structures, surfaces, and interfaces in a world that has been transformed to a large extent through technoscience and networked media. This transformed world is highly textured, partly through verbal and non-verbal 'texts' but also by mixtures of human-made and given environments whose complexity offers resistance to symbolic readings.

Through the term, 'textures,' we aim to bring together transitional figures of thought in many fields:

• in literary criticism: the movement from the material signifier to meaning, affect, and communication;
• in the arts: the well-known 'resistance in the materials';
• in cognitive science: the transition from the neuronal to the mental;
• in a textile: the construction of cloth and the surfacing of a pattern from the interwoven material threaded lengthwise (warp) and widthwise (weft);
• in painting: the emergence of a whole through the patterning of smaller elements; the presentation of an 'all over' composition in a series of canvases;
• in sound art: the blending of running water or traffic noise into a continuous sonic structure;
• with regard to the body: the perpetual becoming-other of an allegedly fixed and bordered identity;
• the 'fold' in Deleuze; the 'tissue of quotations' in Barthes, the 'weave' in Derrida, the feminist spider's embodied writing of gendered subjectivity, and other materialist readings of familiar poststructuralist conceits;
• etc. (please send us your ideas)

The list is meant to be suggestive, not restrictive, of the range of interests we hope to accommodate. As the conscious embrace of constraints - in science, literature and the arts - , can be productive not narrowing, so is our theme designed to be generative and to stitch together the diverse theoretical and transdisciplinary approaches that have long defined SLSA research.