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Call For Presentations: The Final McGill ICASP Conference!

PROPOSALS ARE BEING ACCEPTED UNTIL JULY 1ST, 2013.

Call for Presentations

Time Forms: The Temporalities of Aesthetic Experience
September 18-21, 2013

To celebrate the final McGill ICASP conference we are partnering with IPLAI and other Montreal based organizations to run a major three-day event. This will not be a "standard" conference, and in keeping with ICASP's emerging focus on practice-based research, will be a site for experimenting with new methods of both research dissemination and conference interactions. ICASP will have a dedicated session on temporality in/and improvisation, but much of the conference will address, both directly and more obliquely, this subject.

General Statement of Purpose: This event aims to explore forms in time and the ways time forms experience by bringing together scholars and creators of artistic media that intimately involve a temporal dimension in the experience they engender. Participants will explore different concepts, kinds and components of experiential temporality as they are manifested in a variety of artistic forms. The event itself is designed to have a large-scale temporal structure that modulates the temporal experience of continuity, immersion and distraction over the whole event, within which are embedded smaller structures with an interleaving of thought-provoking scholarly presentations, performances or presentations of art forms, creative workshops, and moments of repose, reflection and nourishment or other modes of distraction such as moving around space to get to different events, thereby discovering spaces in between the events.

Some of the questions we hope to be addressed implicitly or explicitly include:

  • What concepts of time are relevant to the experience of art?
  • What are the ways in which time plays a role in such experiences?
  • At what different scales of time do these aspects manifest themselves?
  • How do periodicities at various time scales create coherence in a work?
  • Can time itself be considered as an artistic medium?
  • How do memory processes and acquired knowledge schemas that generate expectancies interact with perception in artistic experience, linking the past, present and possible future of the work and providing a sense of continuous experience?
  • How does experience as a multidimensional shape in time emerge from the texture of a work?
  • What in a work conditions the experience of the speed of passage of time or the sense that time has become suspended, i.e. how does a work's structure and a spectator's relation to it result in different temporal elasticities?
  • What qualities are specific to time-based arts?
  • How do temporality and spatiality affect each other?
  • Can time itself be considered as an artistic medium?
  • How might new technologies for artistic creation/participation provide new opportunities for temporal experience?

    • We invite proposals to seed the temporal structure of the event. Rather than pre-determined formats for content delivery, "Time Forms" aims to shape the event to the times that thought takes. Potential participants are thus asked not only to describe what their intervention (artistic, curatorial or academic) might concern, but to think creatively about what time form is relevant to the intervention as well. All proposals are welcome, from Pecha-Kucha style bursts of thought to durational performance, from singular presentations to work that relies on repetition. Proposals should indicate not only the desired "time form", but also a preliminary list of any materials required, including any special needs for venues. We anticipate that as part of the event we will have "time-outs" to regroup participants for conversations about the time tactics deployed over the course of these days.

    Confirmed/Planned Events:

  • The whole event will be a performance of a graphic score, which can be read as both (partially) determining behaviors/actions of the participants, and as musical notation. All participants will be asked to follow the score at all times. It will also be performed, simultaneously, by a rotating group of musicians.
  • A real-time interactive sound-map of the event will be created, that all participants will be able to add to at their leisure via mobile devices.
  • A multi-media installation by a number of leading video/installation artists (Matthew Rankin, Richard Kerr, Dominic Gagnon, Francois Miron, Jeremy Schmidt) on the theme temporal change in society.
  • Performance of George Lewis’s, Mnemosis, with a telematic discussion with the composer.
  • Lecture by Georgina Born.
  • Keynote lecture by Roger Reynolds (and workshop) and performance of Kokoro with Mark Menzies.
  • Maintenant: Now, as Holding the Present by Eleanor Stubley (with live sculpture).
  • An evening cabaret with Dayna McLeod “First Times.”
  • Urban derive with Will Straw.
  • “Time Lab”, Immediatons: Media, Art, Event, with Alanna Thain and others.
  • Canon-scope: How to Construct a Canon, with Andy Costello.
  • Site-specific “Dance-Walk” with the Dutch dance company Vloeistof.

    • And many other events to come!

    ICASP will have a dedicated time-slot for presentations related to improvisation and time. We ask that you send your proposals by July 1, 2013 to Eric Lewis.

    Proposals can include a standard oral paper presentation of up to 30 minutes, but, ideally, will also include others media/forms of presentation. You can also propose “interventions” or other events/happenings that might require or have a less standard temporal structure. Please be as specific as possible in regards to what you would like to do, and what your technical/space needs might be. This will be an exciting event!

    For a PDF version of this Call For Presentations, please click here.

    For a link to the ICASP web hub for this conference, click here.

    Improvisation is a human right

    – Muhal Richard Abrams