ASAP/9: The Arts of the Present
October 26-28, 2017
Hosted by the University of California, Berkeley
at the Oakland Marriott City Center

Call for Papers

ASAP/9 invites proposals from scholars and artists addressing the contemporary arts in all their forms since the 1960s—literary, visual, performing, musical, cinematic, design, and digital. We are interested in work across disciplines and media that examine the formal, cultural, social,
and political dimensions of the arts today.

• What roles can we imagine for the arts in relation to forms of social action and political resistance now?
• What conditions of risk and precarity inform contemporary artistic practice, reception, and community?
• What sense of the world at various scales—global, local, national, and more—can we discover in the particular sites and wider networks that define the arts today?
• What defines the environments and ecologies of the present, and how do we understand the duration and futurity of human action over time?
• What flows of people, capital, and power shape the arts today, and how do experiences of migration and displacement register in national and transnational contexts?
• What technologies, genres, platforms, or systems distinguish the contemporary arts, and what media archaeologies do we discover in the material histories of the present?
• What performances of affect, attention, and fandom characterize the arts of the present, and how do different modes of distribution (serial, streaming, viral) address their audiences?
  

Proposals assessing the current place and past legacies of the Bay Area in the arts are especially welcome, as well as those considering comparative, hemispheric or transpacific figures, movements, and formations with Bay Area connections. The program committee is interested in sessions that explore the recent histories of activism, protest, innovation, and change that have long distinguished the communities of Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco, California, and the Pacific Rim.

Participants are encouraged to think as broadly and imaginatively as possible about the intersections between and among the contemporary arts and their institutions, economies, policies, and traditions. Proposals may focus on individual artists, writers, designers, composers, or performers; they may consider artistic movements, collectives, and local scenes,
including those online, or underground; they may discuss any theoretical, intellectual, or aesthetic formation that figures in the world of the arts as we know them now.

SESSION FORMATS: We welcome and encourage creative and alternative presentational styles, alongside traditional papers and panels. Seminars, workshops, panel debates, artist discussions, films, installations, visual displays, and PechaKucha sessions will all be considered. Seminar leaders are asked to propose topics by the deadline and to submit the full roster of
participants by April 22, 2017. Seminars normally meet for a single session, and papers are circulated among participants in advance of the conference.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: MARCH 15, 2017
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES AND INFORMATION: http://www.asap9.org/
QUESTIONS AND HELP: asap9berkeley@gmail.com