Our Literal Speed: Performative Discourse - Conference: February 29 - March 2, 2008 :: ZKM_Lecture hall and ZKM_Media Theater :: Exhibition: February 29 - May 25, 2008 :: ZKM | Media Museum, Atrium 8 :: Opening: February 29, 6 pm :: ZKM | Foyer.

Our Literal Speed manifests the imperatives that materialize the theoretical and the pedagogical. No longer can we interpret forms of academic and artistic professionalism as neutral, abstract backgrounds to the aesthetic and performative. These activities have produced their own distinctive surfaces and materials: the aesthetic has become discursive and discourse has become aesthetic. Rather than a series of academic lectures, Our Literal Speed is imagined as a kind of media pop opera or a pedagogical concept album, implying fluid and/or jagged transitions among scholarly presentations, panel discussions, artist’s talks, performances, and an art exhibition within an academic conference. These emerging, hybrid forms demand a synthesis of collective activity (OUR), a self-reflexive examination of art history and its constitutive technologies (LITERAL), and an intense concern for the pace and texture of our movement through institutional mediation (SPEED). The project offers a temporary discursive laboratory in which artists and curators, art historians and media theorists can investigate non-formulaic, experientially vibrant and theoretically precise responses to the modes of distribution, consumption and circulation that drive contemporary art.

With: Art & Language, Walter Benjamin, John Bock, Tania Bruguera & The Weather Underground, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Anthony Cokes, Darby English, Andrea Fraser, Rainer Ganahl, Boris Groys, Charles Harrison, Sharon Hayes, Christopher P. Heuer, Matthew Jesse Jackson, Jackson Pollock Bar, David Joselit, Juliet Koss, Miwon Kwon, Porter McCray, WJT Mitchell, Hila Peleg, Andrew Perchuk, The Project for the New American Century, Tino Sehgal, The Size Queens, Anton Vidokle, Anne M. Wagner, Peter Weibel.

OUR LITERAL SPEED will be continued with further conference-events at the University of Chicago (2009), and at The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2010).