cfp.english.upenn.edu

Understanding the Loop: Music, Literature and the Visual Arts, March 3-5, 2011

The University of Liège’s Interdisciplinary Center for Applied Poetics (CIPA: www.cipa.ulg.ac.be) will hold its fifth international conference on March 3-5, 2011.

The conference will explore the loop in a transdisciplinary perspective, with a special, but not exclusive, emphasis on literature, music and the visual arts. Of particular interest will be the extent to which the loop can be considered as a specific manifestation of repetition.

Potential topics could be drawn from the following list, which is intended to be merely suggestive rather than exhaustive:

- the loop in 20th- and 21st century experimental music (from Varèse to Pierre Henry, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Terry Riley, the Beatles, Can, Kraftwerk, rap, electronic music, Neu, Radiohead and beyond) ;
- the different avatars of sampling and « (re)mixing » as they appear not only in music and the visual arts but also in literature (James Joyce, literature under constraint, Guy Tournaye, …) ;
- the uses of the loop as a form which « returns upon itself » in contemporary art and literature (Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Bill Viola, Rodney Graham, Martin Arnold, David Lynch, Eugène Savitzkaya, and other forms of serial or “repetitive” art) ;
- how can the loop be identified and distinguished from other forms of repetition, from the talea of Guillaume de Machaut to the algorithms of Autechre ?;
- the various ways of understanding and consuming the loop in a museum space (installations, video art, …) ;
- theories about the loop and repetition (Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, …) ;
- the relationships between the history of the loop and that of related technological advances and constraints ;
- the palindrome (Georges Perec, Peter Blegvad, Gustav Deutsch, …) ;
- the precinematic loop ;
- the loop in comic books and graphic novels (one thinks, for example, of the formal experiments of OUBAPO).

Please submit an abstract of 250 words to mdelville@ulg.ac.be, cpirenne@ulg.ac.be and Livio.Belloi@ulg.ac.be by April 20, 2010. If accepted, plan on a presentation of 25 minutes.

Livio Belloï, Michel Delville et Christophe Pirenne
University of Liège/CIPA (http://www.cipa.ulg.ac.be), Belgium