This session wishes to query the current attention to art’s contemporaneity in both theoretical and practical terms. Contemporary art can be understood as a particular temporal definition of art production in relation to the historical moment; with this in mind, we wish to address the implications or potential ramifications of the term ‘contemporaneity’ in relation to art, history, and criticism. While art practices have developed new ways of engaging the spatio-temporal continuum of experience, the notion of contemporaneity has been considered in relation to historicity and memory, ethics, and the value of the new (Groys, Agamben, Deleuze, Riegl).

In this light, we invite particular focus on how the concept of contemporaneity is problematized and interrogated in installations and works that use new time-manipulating technologies. Installation and performance art intensify the experiential dimensions of art that thematize the now. Equally, the use of new technologies re-activates an enquiry into different types of contemporaneity and the relation of art making to historicity. For their part, and responding to the immediacy of such practices, twenty-first century art institutions have developed more fluid forms of presentation and more readily-available forms of public engagement (e-bulletins, blogs, podcasts).

With this session, we encourage papers that explore the temporality of art in works (and their presentations) that themselves engage with the notion of time. How do works deal with time, engage with a particular time or instance, and negotiate their own temporal limits? Topics can include, but are not limited to:


• The use of time-manipulating technologies in art making (real-time/ raw feed, time-delays, loops)

• Information transfer and reconfigurations of experiencing the ‘now’ through artworks

• Installing and curating temporality: the politics of art practices and institutional responses

• Collective actions and stagings of time

• Philosophical reflections on temporality, experience, and criticality in the age of globalization and instant information

Intended speakers must be members of CAA. Please submit your abstracts in accordance to the CAA instructions by completing the appropriate proposal form, along with a CV and a cover letter, to the session’s convenors Ignaz Cassar (ignazcassar@yahoo.co.uk) and Eve Kalyva (e.m.kalyva@gmail.com) by the deadline 4 May 2012. For further
information, forms, and instructions see the CAA 2013 Call for Participation, available from the Association’s website www.collegeart.org.