fw: Pass the Time / call for papers, performances, experiments

[claudia westermann]

EXPERIENCE OF TIME AND AESTHETICAL PERCEPTION

Adress: Hauspostfach 162 a, 60629 Frankfurt/Main,
Tel.: 069/798-33115 or 069/798-33116 Fax: 069/798-33116
e-mail: zumzeitvertreib at gmx.net
URL: http://www.uni-frankfurt.de/zumzeitvertreib

Speaker: Prof. Dr. Hans-Thies Lehmann,
Prof. Dr. Burkhardt Lindner

Contact person: Anke Zechner    e-mail: zechner at em.uni-frankfurt.de


CALL FOR PAPERS

We invite you To Pass the Time: a conference of the post-graduate
programme Experience of Time and Aesthetical Perception in June 2003,
from Thursday the 19th to Sunday the 22nd. The international and
interdisciplinary conference will pass away three days of time
treating this item:

At the first glance pastime seems to serve an urge to escape time; as
a means to escape from a certain perception of time and to negate or
to kill a resisting, a suspended time, a time that stands still. This
time may appear as waiting time or as the expanded time of boredom;
it may break the time flow by enabling the spectres of the past to
assemble as well as by making a projection into a meaningful future
seeming suddenly impossible.

But if one tries to regard pastime in terms of cultural history one
will have to remark immediately that his use fulfils different
functions in each epoque and is valued each time in a completely
different way: then, aspects of the phenomenon pastime may be
illuminated that cannot simply be subordinated under a "negation of
time" - in ancient times, for example, work was considered as
unworthy of a free man and only leisure, the pastime, performed with
dignity, was considered appropriate to him. Watching how this term is
woven into the contemporary cultural context, one is also faced with
the question if the practices of pastime do only signify a lack in
the ability of sensual experience - a lack which should immediately
be faded out through action: Is pastime to be located on the side of
productivity, of efficiency, of measurable time - this is, as
rationalized, socially sanctioned (controlled) form of the rest time
of economy, which is dedicated to the reproduction of labour? Or does
it withdraw itself from such an economy? Can it be positioned beyond
the teleological conceptions of time or is it founded "essentially"
in a completely different understanding of time? Fundamentally, the
question has to be posed if pastime is only driven by a certain urge
to negate time or if it also and at the same time opens up the
possibility of an experience of time completely and positively
different from all kinds of "reified" or objected time, pastime as
playful experience of potentiality or as threshold to a different
quality of experiencing time?

Questions which we ask ourselves and which put into question us! We
want to approach the matter of time not only on a theoretical, but
also a practical approach. That's why not only lectures, but also
performances, performance lectures, time-experimentations and others
idea to pass the time are highly welcomed!

A description of a lecture and/or a project in a length of about 1
page should reach us until the end of January.