[ecrea] Fast/Slow Symposium: Reminder and Keynotes Announced

With apologies for cross posting, we are writing to remind you that the 
deadline for submissions for the Fast/Slow symposium is 30 November, 2012.

We are also pleased to announce our two keynote speakers:

Professor Sean Cubitt
Prof. Sean Cubitt is currently researching the history of visual 
technologies, media art history, and relationships between environmental 
and post-colonial criticism of film and media, three strands that 
converge around the political economy of globalization and aesthetics. 
His publications include EcoMedia (Rodopi, 2005?), The Cinema Effect 
(MIT Press, 2004), ?Simulation and Social Theory (Sage, 2001), Digital 
Aesthetics (Sage, 1998), Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture 
(Macmillan,1993), ?and Timeshift: On Video Culture (Routledge, 1991).

Professor Karen Beckman
Karen Beckman is the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor of Cinema and 
Modern Media in the department of the History of Art. She is the author 
of Vanishing Women: Magic, Film and Feminism (Duke UP, 2003); Crash: 
Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis (Duke UP, 2010), and is now 
working on a new book, Animation and the Contemporary Art of War. She is 
co-editor of two volumes: Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography 
with Jean Ma (Duke UP, September 2008) and On Writing With Photography 
(forthcoming, Minnesota UP) with Liliane Weissberg, and is currently 
editing a book entitled Animating Film Theory, which explores the 
marginalization of animation in film theoretical discussions. She has 
published articles on a range of subjects, including feminism and 
terrorism, death penalty photography, the animated documentary, and the 
relationship between cinema and contemporary art. She is a senior editor 
of the journal Grey Room.




Call for Papers:
Fast/Slow: Intensifications of Cinematic Speed


In recent years, questions of speed have become the focus of keen and 
often polarised debate across a range of aesthetic, political, and 
critical contexts. It has become something of a truism to say that we 
live in a ‘go-faster’ world defined by the ever-increasing rapidity of 
the rhythms and cycles of media, technology, and capital. In response, a 
set of ‘slow’ cultural practices have emerged—the Slow Food Movement, 
the Slow Media Manifesto, The Idler Academy, or the recent ‘A/V 
Festival: As Slow as Possible’—which figure slowness as perhaps the 
emblematic mode of resistance for our time.

In the context of contemporary cinema aesthetics, this interest in speed 
has likewise been paralleled by a particular intensification of pace, 
temporality, and duration in both directions, from the hyper-kinetic, 
frenzied rhythms of ‘intensified continuity’ (Bordwell) or 
‘accelerationist aesthetics’ (Shaviro), to the protracted, snail-like 
pace of ‘slow’ or ‘contemplative cinema’ (Romney; Flanagan). While these 
dual tendencies have received a good deal of critical attention to date, 
discussions have at times had a tendency to polarise opinion and to 
reinforce presumed dichotomies between passive consumption and active 
viewing, Hollywood cinema and globalauteur filmmaking, distraction and 
attention, commercialisation and art.

The Fast/Slow Symposium calls for a critical re-evaluation of speed and 
intensification in the cinema. The aim of the symposium is to move 
beyond reductive binaries, and to encourage a range of fine-grained 
critical analyses that shed new light on the role of speed in cinema. 
How might we think fast/slow instead as a more complex form of 
relationality? How have fast/slow relations been forged and reconfigured 
by evolving technologies, and by socio-economic and political realities? 
How have changing sites and modes of spectatorship inflected the way 
speed is registered phenomenologically? How do new cinematic practices 
and techniques—from ‘bullet time’ and ‘cosmic zooms’ to 
‘timestretching’—create multiple, in-between temporalities, paces, and 
rhythms, which challenge the fast/slow divide? What are the affective 
and critical valences of both fast and slow cinematic practices? Is 
there an ethics of cinematic speed? How might we historicize these 
divisions, and evaluate the ideological and technological underpinnings 
of speed across cinema’s history?

Questions for consideration may include, but are not confined to, the 
following:
·       The phenomenology of speed
·       Speed and the ‘attention economy’
·       Speed and/as textuality
·       ‘Accelerationist’ vs. ‘Slow Cinema’ aesthetics
·       Speed aesthetics and politics
·       Affect and the ethics of cinematic speed
·       Fast/Slow affect/effects: boredom, stimulation, tension, sensation

Please send abstracts of 350 words or less, by e-mail attachment, to 
(bothTina.Kendall /at/ anglia.ac.uk) and (Neil.Archer /at/ anglia.ac.uk) by 30 
November 2012

The symposium will take place 4-5 April 2013 at Anglia Ruskin University 
in Cambridge

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