[spectre] Call: NETWORKS AND SUSTAINABILITY / SLSAeu conference stream

[Rasa Smite]

CALL FOR CONFERENCE PROPOSALS:

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The 6th European Meeting of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts


http://www.e-text-textiles.lv/SLSAeu2010/home.htm

Submission of abstract (300 words): 16 August 2009

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The SLSA-EU 2010 conference is dedicated to exploring fabrics, 
structures, surfaces, and interfaces in a world that has been 
transformed to a large extent through technoscience and networked 
media. This transformed world is highly textured, partly through 
verbal and non-verbal 'texts' but also by mixtures of human-made and 
given environments whose complexity offers resistance to symbolic 
readings.

Through the term, 'textures,' we aim to bring together transitional 
figures of thought in many fields:

     * in literary criticism: the movement from the material signifier 
to meaning, affect, and communication;
     * in the arts: the well-known 'resistance in the materials';
     * in cognitive science: the transition from the neuronal to the mental;
     * in a textile: the construction of cloth and the surfacing of a 
pattern from the interwoven material threaded lengthwise (warp) and 
widthwise (weft);
     * in painting: the emergence of a whole through the patterning of 
smaller elements; the presentation of an 'all over' composition in a 
series of canvases;
     * in sound art: the blending of running water or traffic noise 
into a continuous sonic structure;
     * with regard to the body: the perpetual becoming-other of an 
allegedly fixed and bordered identity;
     * the 'fold' in Deleuze; the 'tissue of quotations' in Barthes, 
the 'weave' in Derrida, the feminist spider's embodied writing of 
gendered subjectivity, and other materialist readings of familiar 
poststructuralist conceits;
     * etc. (please send us your ideas)

The list is meant to be suggestive, not restrictive, of the range of 
interests we hope to accommodate. As the conscious embrace of 
constraints - in science, literature and the arts - , can be 
productive not narrowing, so is our theme designed to be generative 
and to stitch together the diverse theoretical and transdisciplinary 
approaches that have long defined SLSA research.

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Stream: Networks and Sustainability

Chairs: Rasa Smite (director of RIXC, The Center for New Media 
Culture, Riga) and Armin Medosch (media artist, writer and curator, 
Vienna and London)

This stream will interrogate the complex relationships between " 
network technology" and " network society", in order to reveal the 
multilayered texture of networks and to consider what potential 
network culture contains for sustainable development in 
technological, social and cultural fields. 

After the initial privatisation of the net in the 1990s, there was a 
wide-spread believe that the decentralized structure of the net would 
remodel society. The contrary has happened and the net has come under 
ever more closer corporate and state control. Yet, while some of the 
techno-utopian ideas of the 1990s failed, many important developments 
have been made which were rooted in the network culture of those 
days. In order to take steps towards a sustainable network culture a 
deeper analysis of many of its facets is now demanded. Taking stock 
of progressive and innovative developments in network culture, we are 
asking:

*  Which approaches exist for sustainable and social development of 
technologies (merging communal and technological developments)?

*  Which projects are underway to address the alternatives of energy 
use and other environmental issues (stemming from ICT)?

*  In which ways have alternative networks been able to create and 
maintain own network infrastructures (regarding server hosting, 
bandwidth, wireless and wired community networks, etc.)?

*  What can artists learn from FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) 
communities and vice versa?

*  In which ways has network culture already transformed the ways 
artists, curators, art historians and the audience "work" together? 
And which alternative models for dealing with authorship rights and 
collective authorship exist?

*  Which (artistic) strategies have been successfully used for 
purposes of resistance, social transformations, development of 
autonomous and sustainable structures?

For this stream, we welcome papers by researchers, media theorists, 
social scientists, network activists and artists, who are engaged 
with the issues of sustainable development, ecological and 
alterantive uses of new technologies, social networking and social 
software development, etc.

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You can also submit proposals for other streams - please check out 
the SLSAeu website:

http://www.e-text-textiles.lv/SLSAeu2010/home.htm


best regards,
Rasa Smite
RIXC.LV