Our Literal Speed (opening)

»Our Literal Speed« manifests the imperatives that materialize the theoretical and the pedagogical. No longer can we interpret forms of academic and artistic professionalism as neutral, abstract backgrounds to the aesthetic and performative. These activities have produced their own distinctive surfaces and materials: the »aesthetic« has become discursive and »discourse« has become aesthetic. Rather than a series of academic lectures, »Our Literal Speed« is imagined as a kind of »media pop opera« or a »pedagogical concept album«, implying fluid and/or jagged transitions among scholarly presentations, panel discussions, artist’s talks, performances, and an art exhibition within an academic conference. These emerging, hybrid forms demand a synthesis of collective activity (»OUR«), a self-reflexive examination of art history and its constitutive technologies (»LITERAL«), and an intense concern for the pace and texture of our movement through institutional mediation (»SPEED«). The project offers a temporary discursive laboratory in which artists and curators, art historians and media theorists can investigate non-formulaic, experientially vibrant and theoretically precise responses to the modes of distribution, consumption and circulation that drive contemporary art.