music from Our Literal Speed Soundtrack Recordings, Sweater by The Size Queens

Our Literal Speed manifests the imperatives that materialize the theoretical and the pedagogical. 

No longer can we interpret our manifold professional performances as neutral, abstract backgrounds to the academic and the aesthetic. These activities now produce their own distinctive textures, surfaces and procedures — the "aesthetic" has become discursive and "discourse" has become aesthetic.

Since 2006, as a series of events in Europe and North America, Our Literal Speed has offered a kind of “quasi-infinitely long-playing pedagogical concept album,” or a “mixed-media art-pop opera,” or an “administrative Gesamtkunstwerk.” This atmosphere of scholarly presentations, panel discussions, art objects, essays, grant proposals, book reviews, artist’s talks, performances, scripts, managerial initiatives, theory installations, soundtracks, lectures, and art exhibitions within academic situations has demanded syntheses of collective activity (our), self-reflexive examinations of contemporary public life (literal), and intense concern for the pace and texture of our movement through institutional and technological mediation (speed). 

 

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