Christopher Howard

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“The Slowest Kinetic Artist”
As Slowly as Possible: A Symposium of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Amsterdam, the Netherlands
May 24–26, 2018

The 2018 international Association of the Study of the Arts of the Present symposium will be hosted by the CLUE+ Interfaculty Research Institute for Culture, Cognition, History and Heritage at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and dedicated to exploring notions of slowness.

Contemporary ideas of slowness, as introduced by such movements of the 1980s including Carlo Petrini’s “slow food” and other projects, have gained increasing relevance in our ever-accelerating present. Far from denoting merely a claim to slow down, slowness encourages us to address the complexities of contemporary production and reception processes with a heightened sensibility to multilayered interrelations from the economic to the ecological. The relational nature of speed can serve as a fruitful metaphor for the complex interrelations of spatial/geographical and temporal/historical orders, as well as aesthetic and political discourses. Its relationality encourages us to question other binary notions of hot versus cold media, digital versus analogue, culture versus nature, local versus global, as well as any categorization of the arts according to disciplines, genres, or media.