Wolf Conference 2023 | Temporal Mediations in Digital Capitalism

Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts

Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center 

3420 Walnut Street 

 

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Supported by a Dick Wolf Cinema and Media Studies Fund, this conference seeks to interrogate temporal practices and time-based media forms shaped in the current technological environment of digital capitalism. With the spread of digital networks, data, and algorithms, there has been a shared sense that clock time - a spatialized and rationalized modern conception of time symbolized by the clock - is insufficient for understanding the experiences and politics of time within the current form of global capitalism. Building on the interdisciplinary scholarship on time, media, and technology, this conference hopes to push the conversations about contemporary temporal mediations further in two directions:

 

I) To negotiate multiple, differential, and multiscalar temporalities: we hope to combine attention to technologically-determined temporalities with investigations into histories, institutions, and power dynamics that differentiate time for global populations divided along lines such as race, class, gender, and locality. We acknowledge that digital time, network time, or algorithmic time interact with deep time, historical time, postcolonial time, and personal time, resulting in the uneven organization of work and consumption across the Global North and South. Attending to such “messy” temporalities, the conference will consider both the structural and the lived, the infrastructural and the phenomenological of digital capitalism.

 

II) To connect studies of time-based digital media forms with the political economy of time, labor, and technology: the conference hopes to bring together scholars working from the interpretive traditions of film studies, art history, and cultural studies, and scholars applying social scientific methods to the study of media, technology, information, and communication. Bridging such a methodological divergence, the conference posits the investigations of creative forms and questions of technological and economic bases as mutually enriching. We encourage participants to delineate various neoliberal subjects, and examine the ways in which patterns of work, rest, consumption, and affects interact and unfold in lived temporalities.