XIV NYU/Columbia Graduate Conference
Casa Hispánica, Columbia University
THE EPHEMERAL AND WHAT REMAINS: THINGS, ABSENCES, NETWORKS
April 22-23, 2016
Keynote Speakers TBA
Through different forms of arts and documenting practices, there has been a constant effort to craft certain types of traces designed to endure the course of time. At the same time, innumerable objects have been and are constantly produced to circulate for brief periods of time. Some constitute minor genres, others materially challenge any attempt at conservation, and others suddenly become valuable commodities.
Focusing on ephemerality–its conservation (or destruction), the circulation of ephemeral things and the infrastructures that permit their circulation–allows us to understand better what communities have valued in different times and spaces, and how these practices have been constantly constructed, transformed and contested. It also allows us to consider a variety of practices that consistently resist any sustained attempt at apprehension.
Academic and creative works are welcome.
Proposals should be sent to ephemeral.conference@gmail.com by January 30, 2016. They should be no more than 250 words and include the author’s name, institutional affiliation and contact information. Papers in Spanish, Portuguese and English are welcome.
Topics for the conference might include:
• The body in movement – performance, performance art, and social movements
• Migration and circulation networks
• Annotations, marginalia and more
• Oral traditions and history
• Convergences and spaces – multitudes and abandoned places
• Techniques of conservation – conservation and destruction
• Religion and mysticism: invoking ephemeral presences
• Ephemeral encounters online, missed connections
• Screening technologies
• Challenging ephemera – building and preserving archives
• Pleasure, desire, affect and intimacy
• The archive and its alternatives (digital humanities, digital archives)
• Canonicity and the constitution of minor genres
• Book materiality/ephemerality, how books (texts) are designed for ephemerality
• Planned obsolescence
• Violence and the body, chronobiopolitics
• Memory, forgetting, and post-memory
• Ephemeral structures and architecture
• Wearable ephemerality, wearable technologies