Abstract (Long paper)

Keywords: Slowness, duration, mobility, critique, locative media, environment.

The “Slow Movement,” originally associated with conservation efforts in food consumption or city planning, has rapidly spread to many other areas of culture and commerce. This paper anticipates future articulations of “slow art” in general and “slow media art” in particular, as a path to new critiques and perspectives on the modern desire to “slow down.” As a term, Slow Media Art offers some unique opportunities for considering contemporary appeals to slowness as based in both sensation and structural understandings of social order. When viewed in light of the history of artists’ ambivalence toward modernization, and with an eye to recent scholarship on media abstention, the notion of slowness proves a useful frame for foregrounding the essentially relational nature of speed. Within such a frame, the many paradoxes and contradictions within appeals to slowness appear rather as efforts at positioning by modern subjects in relation to one another; the move to “go slow” is almost always a move to “go slower than” someone or something else. Slow Media Art, through its deep engagement with sensation, duration, and speed, helps bring such relations, and their motivations, into view.

• Kevin Hamilton is Associate Professor of New Media in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois, USA, and Dean’s Fellow in the College of Fine and Applied Arts. His current book in progress, Lookout America : the Secret Hollywood Film Studio at the Heart  of the Cold War State, examines the role of film in American nuclear weapons development.  kevinhamilton.org
• Katja Kwastek is professor of modern and contemporary art at the VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands, with a research focus on media aesthetics. Previously, she taught at LudwigMaximilians-University (Munich, DE), Rhode Island School of Design Providence, USA), LBI Media.Art.Research (Linz, Austria), and Humboldt-University (Berlin, DE).  Publications include Ohne Schnur – Art and Wireless Communication (Revolver
  2004) and Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art (MIT Press, 2013).

Full text (PDF) p. 835-842