| Conference PROGRAM! Get it while it's HOT!!!! | |
  |
|
 | |
| We
are pleased to announce the 2009 Crisis Carnival keynote speaker, Derek
Pell. While his work is featured on the cover and in the pages of
the latest issue of Fiction International (Issue #41: Freak), Pell, and
his alter-ego Norman Conquest, have been active with experimental
writing and arts groups since the late-sixties. After leaving Chicago's
Art Institute, Pell started publishing numerous parodic
text-and-collage pieces, including the commercially successful "Doktor
Bey" books. In the eighties, Pell moved to Los Angeles, became a
proponent of correspondence art, and founded the international
anticensorship art collective Beuyscouts of Amerika, creating nearly
100 mixed-media books. Of his more extraordinary texts are Assassination Rhapsody (1989), a humorous commentary on the great modern mystery of John F. Kennedy's death; X-Texts (1994), a punster's paradise of meta-pornographic vignettes; Little Red Book of Adobe Livemotion (2001), a satirical guide to Flash animation modeled after Mao. In recent years Pell has worked as editor of the online technology review, DingBat, and is currently Editor in Chief of a photography magazine, Zoom Street. Last year he published a collection of absurdist texts called Lost In Translation & Other Works (2008), and is currently working on a book called Shoot To Thrill: A Hard-Boiled Guide to Digital Photography. | |
crisis carnival 2009   THE ECSTASY OF SPEEDApril 10, 2008 New deadline for Proposals! March 1, 2009 The Ecstasy of Speed: SDSU’s Annual Graduate Conference 2009 What do Gillette’s Mach 3 Turbo razor, Instant Oatmeal/Coffee/Messaging/ Diets, Wikipedia, V12 motor engines, ready-made products (pre-assembled, pre-packaged, pre-washed, pre-cooked), freeways, and the Fastpass option for ‘beating the line’ at Disneyland have in common? A culturally legitimized, capitalistically promoted, technologically induced need for SPEED. Ours is an age in which the rate at which a process or operation is executed (production, consumption, acceleration, modification, termination, recuperation) seems to stand alone as the definitive measure of its value. An increase in such rate, then, is directly proportional to the increased worth of that process or operation, let alone product; the faster, the better! Right? Moreover, the capacity to affect such an increase in SPEED presupposes a technological mastery of both space and time. Having as one’s goal the capacity to cover “X amount of ground in X amount of time” both relies upon a necessarily abstract, yet quantifiable type of thinking, and thereby reduces time and space into standards for the estimation of organized motile force. How does this widespread increase in rate (aka SPEED) affect the experience of human existence? For the better – seeing as ‘life-quality’ rates are also on the rise – or for the worse – as the world’s supposed shrinkage arguably entails such effects as global warming and so-called public isolation? Moreover, does speed presuppose a movement out-of one’s self, an ecstatic motion? If so, and if ecstasy in its Greek derivative sense (ecstasis) can be taken as being "beside oneself," or being-thrown (even if such is self-motivated), then an ECSTASY of SPEED intensifies the rate of such a movement out-of. Such an increase in motion out-of can be characterized in regard to the individual (among other ways) either as a positive basis for a voluntary action (a way of relating to the world) or as a negative rupture which founds the fragmentation of human identity and society. Heidegger optimistically suggests that each being “projects itself upon possibilities into which it has been thrown […] To be its own thrown basis is that potentiality-for-Being which is the issue for care” (Being and Time 330). In this case, would an intensified ek-stasis merely augment such potentiality, or rather stymie its openness to the Being of beings? Other prevalent questions may include: Are we moving with too much SPEED and in too close a proximity? Can/should/will the world get smaller, and every-thing become a standing-reserve for our proliferating purposes? Does a contemporary obsession with rate of movement (the need for SPEED) intimate that utility and efficacy determine the manner of human relations to the world, rather than a criterion of worth which rejects the making of all things into objects for ready-made, and disposable, human use? If the latter, what would such a criterion be? Would it involve a decrease in SPEED, a slowing and moving in-to, rather than out-of? How do our perceptions of time and space change with SPEED? How can an obsession with speed – regarding the transportation of both informational and biological bodies – be reconciled with a diminished emphasis on spatiality and temporality (‘get there in no time’)? What becomes of locality when a hyper-mobility (especially among the economically elite) is valued above all? Can this privileged mobility be characterized as a non-teleological tendency toward an incessant exitus (departure) lacking an accordant and (in regard to the formation of communities) responsible reditus (return)? Is this hyper-mobility an elitist fetish, or a necessary aspect of modern existence? Does a far-reaching need for SPEED contribute toward a technologically advanced nation’s disordered and tireless self-erosion, or its success, however measured? How should SPEED be understood in the context of globalization, wherein a crate of soda (or any type of goods) can circle the planet overnight, but a refugee in a camp cannot be safely moved for months? Who has access to the privilege of SPEED, and what are its effects? In a similar light, does the increase in SPEED conceal the disappearance of a destination? If SPEED is becoming, toward what do we move? This year's Crisis Carnival will examine the essential and accidental aspects of speed and will engage in interdisciplinary discussions around this theme. We encourage paper and panel proposals with a broad interpretation of SPEED in any of the following areas of inquiry: ANTHROPOLOGY ART HISTORY ECONOMICS EDUCATION FILM/MEDIA STUDIES GENDER STUDIES HISTORY LITERATURE MUSIC THEORY POLITICAL SCIENCE PHILOSOPHY PSYCHOLOGY RELIGIOUS STUDIES Too broad? Possible topics can explore issues of SPEED in relation to: AESTHETICS BLOGOSPHERE CYBERSPACE ECOLOGICAL EFFECTS FAST/SLOW FOOD GLOBALIZATION HYPERTEXTS/HYPERMEDIA INSTANT MESSAGING MEMORY MIGRATION OBSOLESCENCE ONLINE/OFFLINE ARCHIVES PHENOMENOLOGY SIMULACRA SPATIALITY SURVEILLANCE TECHNOLOGY TEMPORALITY TRANSNATIONALISM TRANSPORTATION VIOLENCE VIRTUAL REALITY Each submission should include: One cover page and one 250 word abstract for a 10-12 page paper, short story, selection of poems, art object, or 15 minute film. Please include your title, contact information, and area of study on your cover page. Artwork should be submitted as photos with the titles written on the back. Each performance piece is limited to 15 minutes; please send a DVD. The deadline for submissions is January 31, 2009! Send electronic submissions and/or questions to: sdsu.grad.conference@gmail.com Send physical submissions to: Crisis Carnival/Kevin Gossett The Department of English and Comparative Literature 5500 Campanile Drive San Diego, CA 92182.6020 | |
old call for papers!
|
Each
submission should include: One cover page and one 250 word abstract for
a 10-12 page paper, short story, selection of poems, art object, or 15
minute film. Please include your title, contact information, and area
of study on your cover page. Artwork should be submitted as photos with
the titles written on the back. Each performance piece is limited to 15
minutes; please send a DVD.