[Commlist] Delete: Strategies of Negation in the Age of Data Suffocation, CFP

We invite you to submit proposals for the conference:
*Delete: Strategies of Negation in the Age of Data Suffocation*
*Where: *BLOC Cinema, *Queen Mary University of London *
*When:* 17–18 September 2026
*Apply until 31 March:* 
_https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdIk0FttwN7BI9Q0QlLw6_rWDt_S_ZM4CuW6gHIyDF4eKIZcQ/viewform 
<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdIk0FttwN7BI9Q0QlLw6_rWDt_S_ZM4CuW6gHIyDF4eKIZcQ/viewform>_
*Read CfP:* 
_https://www.qmul.ac.uk/arts/research/research-events/items/delete-strategies-of-negation-in-the-age-of-data-suffocation-call-for-papers-.html 
<https://www.qmul.ac.uk/arts/research/research-events/items/delete-strategies-of-negation-in-the-age-of-data-suffocation-call-for-papers-.html>_ 

*Keynote speakers: *Neta Alexander (Yale University), Thomas Dekeyser 
(University of Southampton)
Seventeen years ago, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argued that deleting is 
indissolubly linked to our capacity to survive and move forward 
(Schönberger 2009). Yet even then, a paradox emerged: while digital 
technologies expanded possibilities for erasure, deletion’s critical and 
subversive function was already eroding. With growing storage capacities 
and tracking mechanisms, deletion has become reduced, contested, or even 
impossible. How has its status changed, as AI slop and global political 
turbulence render this gesture seemingly futile?
In the late 2000s, deleting still carried weight: we removed media to 
free space and erased posts to avoid embarrassment, while glitchy images 
and sounds remained worth preserving. By 2026, deletion has largely lost 
urgency. Entertainment is accessed via subscription platforms, files are 
dispersed across drives and clouds, and interactions (on social media or 
with AI models like ChatGPT) are effectively permanent and extractable. 
We are surrounded by lossless media, and even failures have become 
pauses between updates (Alexander and Appadurai 2019). Meanwhile, 
disruption itself appears co-opted by Big Tech, limiting its value for 
cultural production (Owens 2024).
This conference revisits deletion as both a tool of power and a practice 
of resistance, refusal, and negation. Current research shows how online 
regimes delete memories, histories, subjectivities, and labour (Lingel 
2021; Thylstrup 2025), while creative strategies attempt to rupture the 
deluge of digital content (Dekeyser and Culp 2023; Klik 2026).
Bringing together *scholars, artists, archivists, and activists*, the 
conference aims to collectively reflect on and experiment with 
infrastructures, methodologies, and epistemologies in which deleting can 
once again operate as a meaningful cultural and political act.
*Possible topics include (but are not limited to): *

  * Aesthetics of Deletion and Absence
  * Media Obsolescence and Forgotten Technologies
  * The Politics of Digital Forgetting
  * Creative Erasure in Videographic Scholarship
  * Failures, Errors, and Digital Loss on Streaming Platforms
  * Events and Impact of Social Media Going Dark
  * Histories of Digital Deletion
  * Media Preservation and the Fight Against Digital Deletion
  * Cognitive Tools and the Deletion of Traditional Memory Functions
  * Algorithmic Deletion and Digital Bias
  * Global vs. Local Practices of Deletion and Digital Memory
  * AI and Deletion


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