The Aesthetics and Politics of Slowness: A Conversation

In order to approach the concept of slowness in its relationality, we invited KEVIN HAMILTON and LUTZ KOEPNICK to engage with us in an open conversation to explore where scholarship on the topic is—or should be—headed. While this conversation is the first in which all four of us engage in the topic together, it is also a continuation of a long-term academic exchange that started in 2007 when both KATJA and KEVIN were invited for the final critiques of the MFA student projects of Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Digital + Media Department, and—ending up in the same hotel in Providence—took a long walk along the coastline together. When KATJA was asked to participate in a summer school on the topic of "The Arts and the Future" at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich in 2012, she invited KEVIN over to co-teach a class on slowness. KEVIN and KATJA presented and published their thoughts on what they called slow media art at the Media Art Histories conference in Riga in 2013 and at the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) in 2015.1 As they had been using LUTZ'S book during their conversation, they took the 2017 ASAP/9 conference in Berkeley/Oakland as a chance to organize a panel on slowness.2 In parallel, KATJA approached ERIN with the suggestion to organize an ASAP symposium on the topic of slowness at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2018.