The Chicago iteration of Our Literal Speed, the first iteration of which took place at ZKM Karlsruhe in 2008, is a conference event about the conference. Our Literal Speed shifts between several registers of meaning, including aesthetics and discourse; politics, history, and aesthetics; institutional prerogatives and collective activity; professionalization, the experiential and self-reflexivity. The project is organized primarily as a symposium of lectures, performances, and presentations, but in a destabilized system that never gives the audience a sense of positioning. The event is, at its base, procedural without authors, allowing the frisson between presentations to create multiple open meanings that reflect the issues outlined above.

Our Literal Speed: An Exhibition Accompanying a Conference, features works by Academy Records, Gregg Bordowitz, Rainer Ganahl, Sharon Hayes, Jackson Pollock Bar, Hila Peleg, The Project for the New American Century, and The Size Queens. Picasso/Braque 1989, a live theory installation by Jackson Pollock Bar; Fuck It, a lecture by Alexander Dumbadze; and Confession, a live video-assisted lecture-event presented by Art & Language, accompanied the reception. Also presented were Collective Actions ’ SLOGAN-1977 AUTHORIZED VARIANT IN ENGLISH FOR AN ENCLOSED SPACE (A TYPE OF TRANSLATION) (2009), Hamza Walker’s Nothing is Everything (2009), and TJ Clark’s The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (2006).

Our Literal Speed is presented as part of Our Literal Speed: events in the vicinity of art and history, a conference/event produced by the University of Chicago in association with Art Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Renaissance Society, and the Smart Museum of Art.

Jackson Pollock Bar, Gregg Bordowitz, The Project for the New American Century, Rainer Ganahl, Sharon Hayes, Hila Peleg, The Size Queens, and Academy Records.

Our Literal Speed is supported by the University of Chicago in association with Art Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Renaissance Society, and the Smart Museum of Art, as well as the College of Architecture and the Arts, University of Illinois at Chicago, and a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.