[ARENA] Fw: Experimentality conference - Visual submissions accepted

Emílio Remelhe e.r netcabo.pt
Domingo, 6 de Dezembro de 2009 - 12:02:42 WET


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Sarah Casey" <sarahmariecasey  HOTMAIL.COM>
To: <DRAWING-RESEARCH  JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
Sent: Sunday, December 06, 2009 9:01 AM
Subject: Experimentality conference - Visual submissions accepted


International conference: The Experimental Society, Lancaster University, 
7-9
July 2010

First call for papers

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/experimentality

Experimentation, with its distinctive way of joining action and knowledge, 
has
played a crucial role in the culture and politics of modern society, but one 
that
has a number of contradictory strands.  In one strand, experimentation is
associated with the opening up of the closed medieval universe into an open
world of endless possibility.  This story would include the development of 
the
arts as an autonomous space for free exploration, and practices of social,
cultural and political experimentation that invent new ways of living.  It 
had
perhaps its leading advocate in Friedrich Nietzsche, with his notion of life 
as a
continuous experiment, but in the contemporary world it is also manifested 
in
the everyday creativity (de Certeau) with which people experiment ‘casually’
with new forms of humanity, technology, space, economic exchange and
political participation (Hayles, Stelarc, Soja, Ghosh, Rheingold, Lury).

Yet the dominant strand to the modern experiment has surely been that of
experimental science, which from the 17th century offered to solve the
problem of social dissensus by putting all truth claims to public test, 
thereby
replacing the received certainties of traditional society with the new
certainties of objective facts and natural laws (Shapin, Schaffer, Toulmin). 
In
performing the split between nature and culture that Bruno Latour calls
the ‘modern constitution’, the experiment thus started its long relationship
with social ordering, technology and power, which has helped to legitimise 
the
instrumental paradigm of modern political action (Ezrahi), drive forward the
grand projects of 20th century high-modernist statecraft (Scott), and shape
the contemporary world of evidence-based policy, clinical trials and audits.
Critiques of this development include early warnings about the iron cage of
instrumental rationality (Weber), twentieth century unease about technocracy
and the scientisation of politics (the Frankfurt school) and autonomous
technology (Ellul, Winner), and contemporary concern about the proliferation
of states of exception in which experimental subjection and the reduction of
the human to ‘bare life’ becomes the norm (Agamben).

It is time to ask whether the experiment is now too complicit with power to
act as a carrier of the hopes of (post)modernity, or whether its 
emancipatory
potential can be renewed through a sustained inquiry into the different 
forms
that it takes in science and technology, in the arts and in wider culture. 
If
experimentation and innovation have become too integrated with imaginaries
of technological control, and thereby with consequent externalisations 
(Wynne
and Felt), then further large questions arise not only for politics, but 
also for
environmental sustainability.

However, any such project also needs to be sensitive to ways in which the
key role played by experimentation in the ordering of society seems to be
shifting away from the special to the general experiment – from the
experiment as a bounded episode situated in time and space, to a 
generalised,
performative experimentality.  Driven by pervasive informationalisation, we 
can
observe a number of interlinked trends, including: the acceleration and
proliferation of feedback loops between action and reaction; the 
displacement
of fixed structures by networks and dissipative structures; the abandonment
of fixed goals for continuous repositioning; and the carrying out of 
knowledge-
work in the context of application.  Such trends can be observed in domains
as disparate as science and innovation, network-centric digital warfare,
finance capitalism, product design, software engineering, new media and
popular culture.  Do these add up to a systemic transformation of how 
society
is being ordered? Are humans no longer in control of their
experimental ‘projects’, and what does this mean for our conceptualisation 
of
the human and of politics?  Does this create the conditions in which a new
kind of experimental society might be possible? How might we imagine this,
and perhaps influence its form?

This three-day international conference is the culmination of Lancaster’s 
year-
long research programme Experimentality, which in six two-day workshops and
a range of arts events in the North West has been exploring the varieties 
and
transformations of experimentation.  It will draw on the inquiries held in 
these
events: into experimentation and eventality, into the forms of subject and
object implicated in experimentation, into the experimentality of matter 
itself
and into the social and spatial organisation of experimentation in urban 
life.  It
will draw on recent work on experimentation as having its own logic 
(Hacking),
as being shaped into experimental systems which produce novelty and surprise
(Rheinberger), as involving pervasive everyday improvisation (Ingold), as
brought to closure in different ways (Galison) and as enacted in different
experimental spaces or 'truth-spots' (Gieryn).  It will bring together 
scholars
from a range of disciplines, and practitioners from different spheres of 
social
life, to set out and debate different diagnoses and visions of the 
experimental
society.  It will be an interdisciplinary, collaborative exploration of the 
power
of experimentation to shape the future.

Questions to be pursued in the conference will include the following:

Is experimentality becoming a key trope of contemporary society?  Is it 
taking
new forms, and if so with what implications?
How can we learn from the differences between the modes of experimentality
operating within science, the arts and wider culture?
How do notions of experimentality intersect with other dominant notions of
social change, such as societal reflexivity, liquidity, knowing capitalism,
cosmopolitanism, mobility and complexity?
What dangers to human freedom are posed by new, experimental forms of
power?
If a shift is occurring in modern society's ontology, so that ‘society’ is 
itself
becoming self-interrogating, what does this mean for the social sciences?
How can the power to shape our socio-technical future be distributed more
evenly in society?  Can people and publics appropriate 'the experiment' so 
that
it operates as an engine of human freedom harnessed to the task of building 
a
common world, rather than as a tool of power?
If modern society is implicated in, perhaps dependent upon, forms of
uncontrolled, unintended or blind experiment, what forms of regulatory
ordering might be required?

Plenary speakers will include:

Ulrich Beck (London School of Economics)
Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen)
Scott Lash (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Helga Nowotny (European Research Council)
Gísli Pálsson (University of Iceland)

To submit a presentation to the conference in response to this first call,
please send an abstract (200-400 words) by 15 December 2009 to Anne-Marie
Mumford.  We also encourage proposals of sessions of three papers, and non-
standard submissions, for example those that involve the visual arts,
performance or music.

For submission of proposed papers, or further details and queries, please
contact:
Anne-Marie Mumford
Institute for Advanced Studies
County South
Lancaster University
Lancaster LA1 4YD, UK
Email: a.mumford  lancaster.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0) 1524 510816
Fax: +44 (0) 1524 510857

‘The Experimental Society’ is being organised by the Institute for Advanced
Studies (IAS) in collaboration with the ESRC Centre for the Economic and
Social Aspects of Genomics (Cesagen) and Lancaster Institute for the
Contemporary Arts (LICA).  It forms part of the 2009-2010 Annual Research
Programme of the IAS, Experimentality, which is directed by Bronislaw
Szerszynski and co-directed by Stephanie Koerner (University of Manchester)
and Brian Wynne.

Experimentality is being delivered in collaboration with the School of Arts,
Histories and Cultures, University of Manchester; the ESRC Centre for the
Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics, Lancaster University;
FutureEverything; the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and
Medicine, University of Manchester; the Max Planck Institute for the History 
of
Science, Berlin; the AHRC Research Centre for Studies of Surrealism and its
Legacies, University of Manchester; The Centre for Mobilities Research,
Lancaster University; The Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster; The Lancaster
International Concert Series; The Peter Scott Gallery, Lancaster; The Storey
Gallery, Lancaster; Lancaster Literature Festival; and CUBE, Manchester.


http://www.lancs.ac.uk/experimentality 




Mais informações acerca da lista ARENA