Full program available here: https://www.zdcusc.org/2025-speed.

The contemporary moment is often thought of synonymously with the idea of speed. The 20th and 21st centuries were marked by rapidly ascending rates of movement: the movement of capital, of goods, of ideas, and of information, as illustrated by the works of Arjun Appadurai, Manuel Castells, et al. While the information economy’s accelerated pace points to a culture of speed, it is also marked by an increased sense of fatigue, meaninglessness, and ennui. The solutions posited for either of these pronouncements—a radical suspension of our current pace, or an even greater impetus towards a high-speed culture. Amid these diagnoses, and concomitant prescriptions of our current moment, we ask you to explore instead—what happens if we engage with speed as an experience, ontology, infrastructure, aesthetics, value, fantasy, consciousness, affect, or, as a way of being? Rather than thinking of acceleration as a fact of modernity, or slowness as its natural or logical alternative, we invite papers that destabilize and explore understandings of speed in the present moment, and conceptions of speed past. We contend that art, images, and media objects offer us ways to dismantle speed as an ontologically stable category and as a unified mode of experience. Such objects often defy the notion of speed as a linear spectrum, challenging the binary opposition of fastness and slowness as fundamentally disparate. Further, they open up new ways of engaging with the speed of our world(s)—sometimes through forms of sluggishness or boredom. We ask, for example: does the speed we have come to associate with computation exist on the same spectrum as the temporality of burnout? Of micro-trends? How do we think about bodily experiences of speed—on roller coasters, high speed trains, and the DMV, where the promise of speed clashes with the sluggishness of bureaucracy? Does speed imply a positive movement toward improvement/development, or a negative impulse toward extinction? Here, the notion of speed reveals itself as a concept that defines and creates the contours of temporality, spatiality, and ways of being and feeling in the world.