Event Description
"Form" has reemerged as a central critical problem in recent years, as scholars re-examine what the humanistic practices of formal analysis, aesthetic description, and close reading can do in the age of machine reading, wearable AI, and continual catastrophe. As traditional formal analysis contends with the distributed, operational, or procedural forms--databases, interfaces, networks, and algorithmic aggregates--a widely polemicized "return to form" has reopened questions of what form is and what formalism does.
While critics accuse formalists of "abandoning the world," proponents argue that reading for form is a way back into politics. Form mediates how meaning and affect circulate in the world, whether form is understood as material structure, as semiotics, or both. But did form ever really leave the picture? This event invites new approaches to thinking about the material politics of form. It proposes that form has been a tenaciously generative aesthetic-conceptual category that animates several interdisciplinary imaginaries, often in ways that are non-obvious. This gathering seeks to chart the latent continuities of formalist inquiry across the heterogeneous terrains of history, materiality, ecology, the digital, and the political.
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration required. Please visit the event webpage or email [email protected] with any questions.
Hosted by the Center for Comparative Media at Columbia University.
