Kinesis & Stasis 'un'Conference 

27th Nov 2015 9:00am-6:00pm 

Kinesis and Stasis, movement and stillness, embody an essential component of human life, and a fundamental dialectic within any culture. All entities move, and their social milieu evolve with them. Ever-newer waters flow onto those who step into the same river. Yet the constant state of flux and perpetual kinesis of our living world ultimately evokes an enduring stillness: change is the only permanence. Culture is an ever present yet ever evolving form of sociality. Creativity is a moment of reflection and a moment of action, a mode of doing and being.

Through the theme of Kinesis and Stasis we hope to explore a wide range of interdisciplinary interpretations. Responses may be as literal or figurative as preferred. Potential topics might include but are not limited to the following:

Art and music: relationships between tradition and the avant-garde, interactions of conservation and innovation (of styles, themes, models, forms of expression). Kinesis and stasis in the crafting of musical rhythms (rests as moments of stillness that define the groove and flow of the beat). The painting as a static representation of the brushstroke’s motion.

Dance and performance studies: to move or not to move? The socio-cultural effects provoked by the literal, corporeal interrelation of kinesis and stasis on stage. Avant-garde performance as a catalyst for both social progression and tension.

Film studies: cinema as founded on the paradoxical simultaneity of motion and stillness. The individual frame as the projected film’s best-kept secret: a grand optical illusion wherein stillness hides into the illusion of movement on screen. Motion pictures as stills in action: a series of frames projected in rapid succession that simulate smooth motion.

History: relations between a past and present reality explained through a dynamic between what survives unchanged (what is still) and what evolves (what is on the move). Historiographic studies as attempts to document and express in a still written form the movement and development of a society.

Philosophy and psychology: the self as an individual who whilst forever changing and different ultimately remains the same person. Memory as a faculty that in one sense permits the impression that the past can survive inside our minds in a still form, yet in another engages in a fluid and unstable process that never ends, and whose contents are constantly modified by new stimuli of the present.

Psychonautics: kinesis and stasis as the enigma of travelling without moving, evoking a journey through the mind and the exploration of inner space. Research and knowledge through phenomenology, epistemology and ontology.

Texts and interpretation: meanings generated through fluid and shifting contexts that allow texts, which in their own appearances remain still, to develop new and contemporary interpretations.