Small Forms: Aesthetics – Media – Modernity. A Transatlantic Interdisciplinary Research Colloquium

About This Event

Through a series of case studies, the Transatlantic Research Colloquium will explore how small forms have structured understandings of the contemporary since the 17th century by presenting themselves as up to date, fashionable, avant-garde, anachronistic, or timeless. The sessions will foreground 3 aspects, beginning with the aesthetics of small forms. What styles and modes of writing do writers and editors deploy to reflect experiences of temporality and to enable a critique of the present? How and when do aesthetic choices align forms with, or distance them from, new social, artistic, or technological developments? A second focus will be on media ecology. How do small forms come to be “in-formation,” and how are they themselves “informed” and formatted through the materiality, periodicity, or mobility of their dissemination? Finally, we are interested in the specific disruptions that avant-garde artists sought to achieve through the radical deconstruction of small forms.