SLSA 2010, Streams

Textuality and Materiality

Chairs: Joseph Tabbi (Co-Creative Director of e-t+t / Department of English, University of Ilinois at Chicago) and Maria Damon (Department of English, University of Minnesota)

Embodied presence of, for example, dance, touch, and the sensory qualities of language and/or haptic communication. Texture in the abraded, never-completely frictionless encounter between the reader/audience and the object of engagement/ consumption/ appreciation, and the social relations embedded, deep-patterned or ephemeral, in the encounter. Productive misreadings, heretical recastings of canonical texts touching on multi/di/versity, dialectics, tissues, folds, patterns, scarifications, and other textural terms.

Architextures

Chairs: Vera Buhlmann (media theorist, CAAD ETH Zurich) and Janis Taurens (philosopher, architect, Art Academy of Latvia)

The focus of this stream lies on exploring the implications, promises, benefits and maybe also hinderings that accompany the popular metaphor - popular both within and outside of architectural theory itself- to think about architecture in terms of "text", "texture", or "textile." This panel proposes to cast a close look at what it means to engage with the contemporary architectural situation by reference to the cultural techniques of "reading" and "writing," e.g. as opposed to that of "calculating." In what sense might their legacy still be suitable for coming to terms with the challenges of the deeply embedded networked structures of today, for which some people have declared the "beyond of measurability" alias "virtuality" (e.g. Hardt/Negri)?
Key issues of this stream are:

• The relation of architecture to symbolization, both from the perspective of everyday people living in architecturally designed surrounds as well as for architects themselves.

• The relation between "measure" and "signification" in the context of architectural design.

• The role of the matrix/grid in architectural design today: Theoretical approaches to the relation between code and form, program and process.

• The synthetization of apt metrics for measuring the manifold scales each territory incorporates, and what approaches to this problem have already been proposed?

• The possible ways of understanding the "textures" and "language-games" of city: Seeking the new vocabulary of urbanism.

• Genealogies of "Analysis as a Practice," both in applied contexts as well as from a theoretical angle.

• Other ways of approaching networks, beyond the textuality paradigm

We hope to bring together a heterogeneous group of lateral thinkers from different fields such as architecture, city planning and architectural theory, philosophy, semiotics, cultural theory, media science, engineering and design, urbanism, geography, as well as science researchers.

Biopalimpsests

Jens Hauser (curator & writer, Paris /Department for Media Studies, Ruhr University Bochum) and Monika Bakke (Philosophy Department, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan)

The Biopalimpsest stream welcomes papers focusing on the overwriting of diverse and apparently unrelated knowledge flows induced by the superposition of biological disciplines or models, and their cultural impact. By reassembling erased, underlying or barely legible remains, the stream aims not so much to generate 'new figures of knowledge', but rather to reveal the very nature of transitional and trans-historical figures of thought, and the mechanisms of reappearance of once obsolete or unfitting bio-logics. The stream encourages cases of conceptual remediation in fields such as molecular biology, cognitive ethology, neurophysiology and neuroaesthetics, biocybernetics, immunology, ecology, animal/plant studies, post-anthropocentric philosophy, art and science history or media studies. Biopalimpsests is meant to be a forum for trans-disciplinary recognition of patterns and textures that materially explores the depth of hidden heuristic layers; therefore papers are free to speculate over the epistemological consequences of re-enacted palimpsests. The stream also wishes to encourage hybrid proposals from academics and artists who combine research and cultural resonances.

Tissue Cultures

Chair: Joanna Zylinska (Department of Media and Comunications, Goldsmiths College, University of London)

The focus of this stream is both cultural and biological. It proposes to engage, on the one hand, with the cultural signification of biomaterial and its multiple technological and artistic applications. On the other hand, it will consider the philosophical and technical problems that the cultivation and transformation of tissue generates in the context of science and art respectively. The ontology of 'tissue' is clearly uncertain: it can be both natural and manufactured. Tissue can function as both a gift and a commodity. Indeed, the processes of its cultivation situate tissue as part of the material and symbolic economy of exchange, with trade in biomaterial being accompanied by the exchange of values and meanings surrounding bodies, organs and cells. It is not surprising that such processes of tissue exchange and transformation would raise serious ethical concerns. These concerns are of interest to this stream but we hope to go beyond the 'moral panic' reaction against tissue manufacturing to consider the possibility of the emergence of new paradigms - ethical and aesthetic - that 'culturing' tissue enables. This conversation can be most meaningfully conducted from an interdisciplinary perspective that brings together cultural theorists, media experts, philosophers, artists, medical practitioners and science researchers.

Key issues and themes this stream aims to address:

• The cultural signification of tissue in different disciplinary contexts - science, art, media, etc.

• The evolving ontology of tissue in science and bioart

• The ethics of tissue cultivation and transformation

• The political and symbolic economy of tissue exchange

• The new aesthetics of biomaterial

Networks and Sustainability

Chairs: Rasa Smite ( director of RIXC, The Center for New Media Culture, Riga) and Armin Medosch ( media artist, writer and curator, Riga and London)

This stream will interrogate the complex relationships between " network technology" and " network society", in order to reveal the multilayered texture of networks and to consider what potential network culture contains for sustainable development in technological, social and cultural fields.

After the initial privatisation of the net in the 1990s, there was a wide-spread believe that the decentralized structure of the net would remodel society. The contrary has happened and the net has come under ever more closer corporate and state control. Yet, while some of the techno-utopian ideas of the 1990s failed, many important developments have been made which were rooted in the network culture of those days. In order to take steps towards a sustainable network culture a deeper analysis of many of its facets is now demanded. Taking stock of progressive and innovative developments in network culture, we are asking:

• Which approaches exist for sustainable and social development of technologies (merging communal and technological developments)?

• Which projects are underway to address the alternatives of energy use and other environmental issues (stemming from ICT)?

• In which ways have alternative networks been able to create and maintain own network infrastructures (regarding server hosting, bandwidth, wireless and wired community networks, etc.)?

• What can artists learn from FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) communities and vice versa?

• In which ways has network culture already transformed the ways artists, curators, art historians and the audience "work" together? And which alternative models for dealing with authorship rights and collective authorship exist?

• Which (artistic) strategies have been successfully used for purposes of resistance, social transformations, development of autonomous and sustainable structures?

For this stream, we welcome papers by researchers, media theorists, social scientists, network activists and artists, who are engaged with the issues of sustainable development, ecological and alterantive uses of new technologies, social networking and social software development, etc.

LIEPAJA

Art as Research ( Liepaja, 19/20 June)

Chair: Aija Druvaskalne-Urdze - the stream in Liepaja is organized by the Art Research Lab, Liepaja University(LV) in cooperation with Y (Institute for Transdisciplinarity) of the Berne University of the Arts (CH) and the td-net for Transdisciplinary Research of the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences.

Researching art, talking about art. Researching through art, talking through art. We call the first activity the science of art, while the second is currently evolving under the banner of 'artistic research' or 'art as research'. This slight reformulation via a prepositional shift is not a mere trifle. It is a way of affirming that the arts produce knowledge, and that they have the right to lay claim to being an alternative form of knowledge and research on a par with other sciences.

In our workshop "Art as Research" we want to collect general positions in dealing with artistic-research practice and focus especially on questions of methodology and the process of peer reviewing. We invite contributions that address the following issues:

General approaches:

• How to combine art and research? - On the theory of artistic research

• What does art know? - On the epistemological potential of the arts

• Why should we do artistic research? - On the explicit and implicit reasons for artistic research

Methodology:

• How to combine artistic and scientific knowledge production?

• Which are the methodologies for doing art as research?

• How can the arts contribute to the development of innovative inter- and transdisciplinary methods in research and teaching in general?

Peer reviewing:

• If artistic production wants to be research, how then to evaluate the presentation of nonverbal results?

• Examples of PhD-projects in the Arts.

• Examples of peer reviewing processes of artistic projects in national research funding programmes