Excited to be a chair for the panel Imaging Chaos

Confronting Chaos - Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies Graduate Conference

Queens University

August 25-28 2022.

“The chaos of the mind cannot constitute a reply to the providence of the
universe. All it can be is an awakening in the night, where all that can be heard is
anguished poetry let loose. ”
— Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

Greek Chaos (the gap between heaven and earth) births Gaia (earth) and Eros (sexual desire) which procreate to make other deities. Under the acceleration of modernity we encounter the relentless accumulation of knowledge without understanding or grounding. We sense our own bodies and feel the threat of chaos loom in the mass of ambivalent sensations that rise into our perception. We embrace chaos and its vicissitudes, asking to be demolished by its operations so we can be reborn – or die – anew.

For our inaugural graduate conference we invite you to think of chaos as a space of potential for re-shaping dominant modes of engaging with the world. How does art diffuse or activate chaos? In what ways do mythological formulations of chaos speak to our present moment? How does your artistic/scholarly work respond to, react against, or embrace chaos?

Geopolitics and the mapping of chaos
Quantum chaos and chaos in scientific fields
Gendered and affective dimensions of chaos
Competing cosmologies and mythologies of chaos
Ontologies of chaos, e.g. Mallarme’s Un coup de dés
Chaos magic, conspiracy, and the supernatural
Politics of chaos: anarchism and its lineages
Performances of chaos, e.g. John Cage
Phenomenologies of chaos: noise, pareidolia, madness