SloMoCo 2021 Call for Papers

SloMoCo

Website: https://moco21.movementcomputing.org/

The SloMoCommittee is pleased to announce SloMoCo, an experiment in refiguring the conference form via global collaborations in collective knowledge-production, cybernetically informed learning-making structurations, and telematically mediated field practice. We would like to invite submissions for our Spring Phase, running January to May 2021. There are five categories: talk/papers, practice-works, micro-residencies, and seminars or courses, and an experimental category. On the SloMoCo website, you will find a list of MOCO topics as well as SloMoCo special topics.

Important Dates

• Submissions close: January 15, 2021
• Notification by: February 7, 2021
• Spring Phase: January-May 2021

About SloMoCo

MOCO is the International Conference on Movement and Computing. MOCO aims to gather academics and practitioners interested in the computational study, modelling, representation, segmentation, recognition, classification, or generation of movement information. For the last seven years, MOCO has convened research-practitioners with diverse metier in dance, somatic practice, theory, education and learning science, HCI, engineering, design, and neuroscience to share insights, findings, and provocations at the intersection of movement and computing. Over the years, the community has returned to the generative and complex inequality between the diversity of corporeal experiences and our ability to represent that movement. Our bodies seem ever eager to exceed technologies of computational, textual, and theoretical capture. And yet the MOCO community has cultivated a unique sensitivity to both the limits of representation and the expressive, performative affordances of emerging technologies.

In 2021 we return once more with a difference , attending to how this tension can inform our knowledge production practices. In the time of quarantine and lock-down, how can embodied approaches and creative practices with technology inform how we gather and convocate to share and generate research? How can we co-design and develop research and practice events that treat virtual and telematic engagement as a feature and not a bug? How can this attention to representation and abstraction of movement play a role in telematic, collaborative, and relational artistic practice? With its penchant for observing and prototyping embodied experience, technical know-how, know-what, know-when, we believe the MOCO community is uniquely situated to respond playfully to this speculative invitation.

Enter: SloMoCo 2021, a durational event-experiment sponsored by the MOCO (Movement and Computing) steering committee and community. SloMoCo is refiguring the conference form via global collaborations in collective knowledge-production, cybernetically informed learning-making structurations, and telematically mediated field practice. SloMoCo temporally (explodes, augments, prolates) the event conference as a site of knowledge production.

Timeline

SloMoCo will host events across three phases. Each phase has its own deadline. You may propose activities that stretch across phases or become active during different phases; in this case submit only one application for the first phase your submission engages.

Types of Submissions

SloMoCo is accepting submissions in the following formats. These may be helpful in articulating how your project may relate to SloMoCo; if not, perhaps the experimental category is for you. If you’re not sure where your work might fall, don’t hesitate to reach out.

For examples of projects, the proceedings of previous MOCO conferences are an excellent place to start. Furthermore, SloMoCommittee is curating an are.na channel with projects that resonate in one way or another with the SloMoCo project.

Micro-Residencies

Some work yet-to-individuate may find a good fit as a micro residency. In micro-residency, an artist, researcher, or team proposes a research/creative question, vector, proposition, speculation, performance…(?). SloMoCommittee will help micro-residents to engage with and draw on the MOCO community in order to assemble the resources to incubate, iterate, and articulate these propositions.

Micro-residencies may be proposed for any amount of time, but your proposal will justify the duration by indicating how you intend to feed your work back into the MOCO community via SloMoCo. While many residency programs provide practitioners with the opportunity to work intensively, hermetically, and esoterically, consider how the durational aspirations of SloMoCo may afford other modes of working extensively, promiscuously, and exoterically.

SloMoCommittee will work with micro-residents to help assess how SloMoCo can provide support for the ongoing project. Potential examples of support include virtual events (WIP showing, workshops amplifying calls for collaborators, brokering proposals to institutional MOCO affiliates for local space use, possibly providing modest funds for production/research/development.)

Talk/paper presentation event

SloMoCo maintains the effectiveness of traditional modes of knowledge dissemination such as the paper and the talk. SloMoCo maintains the effectiveness of traditional modes of knowledge dissemination such as the paper and the talk. As an experiment, SloMoCo papers won’t be published in the ACM Digital Library like the previous years. This will restart in 2022. SloMoCo represents rather an opportunity to venture into modes more playful, experimental, or provocative contribution, that may build towards a submission for 2022 MOCO ACM publication. We especially encourage students to contribute a talk or paper that could be later revised and go through the standard academic review process for publication in the MOCO ACM DL.

There is no pre-given form for texts. While authors may choose to conform to ACM formats typically observed within MOCO, texts will be published to our SloMoCo Manifold instance via GoogleDoc. Manifold, an e-publishing platform created by scholars at CUNY and the University of Minnesota Press, allows for media embeds and other expressive more-than-textual interventions; we encourage authors to consider allowing these affordances to inform their work.

Like typical conference formats, paper authors will present their work alongside related works in a telematic session. Unlike traditional conferences, we encourage authors publishing a version of their research on the Manifold ahead of their presentation so that the community can engage asynchronously. After their presentation, authors are invited to revise based on relevant comments and engagement and publish a subsequent version (Manifold affords unique versioning/iterative abilities).

For submissions, we follow more flexible humanities and arts style protocols: asking only for a short abstract. In an additional section you will describe how you imagine your work presented as part of SloMoCo. Following arts & humanities models, authors may also submit roundtables and panels organized around thematic areas. In the case of panels, each author should submit their abstract separately but indicate their inclusion in a pre-organized panel.

Roundtable submissions may be singular, but overarching themes and authors/collaborators they would like to include in the roundtable.

Seminars, Studios, and Courses

In many parts of the world, the telematic constraints of higher education will persist. For many reasons, hybrid digital-physical formats are here to stay. How are we teaching MOCO topics? How can we share our resources and energies to both lighten the load on individuals and engage the potential of our community’s diverse set of approaches?

A seminar, studio, or course you are teaching can link into SloMoCo in a number of ways. SloMoCo can co-host special events such as showcases that invite the MOCO community into your students’ feedback matrix. Some students from different institutions may even be interested to audit your course and receive reciprocal credit from their institution.

You may wish also to highlight some aspects of the course (a set of lessons, a reading list, a recorded discussion, some starter code, a data set, an instructable) and contribute them to the SloMoCo manifold instance for other instructors to use or reference. Additionally or alternatively, you may pick up some teaching materials from Spring phase, fork them, deploy them with a difference in Fall phase, and share with us the results in a paper or other event.

More immersively, SloMoCo seminars, studios, and courses can support phase-long student efforts such as writing processes, project development, or applied research. You may ask students to host their term paper drafts and final term papers on the SloMoCo commons, leveraging Manifold’s emphasis on iteration as well as reading group, annotation, and editorial functions to encourage transference of ideas and approaches between different seminars, schools, and knowledge creation communities.

Practice Works: Performance, Installation, Workshop

SloMoCo invites proposals for practice works, a loose umbrella term that includes artistic-creative production and experimentation including but not limited to performances, installations, and workshops. In general, practice work submissions will be more fully composed than residency submissions.

SloMoCo is especially interested in highlighting interactive practice works. Over the last year, the art and performing arts worlds have modulated their practices with screen-based and networked modes of convention and convocation. How can somatically informed art-creation practices leverage telematics in ways which do not simply make up the zoom room as a black box? Without the control of the blackbox or gallery, how do immersive installation practices translate into people’s homes? What toolkits, techniques, and pedagogies are sufficient for exploring these new areas?

Experimental

An experimental submission may include some aspects of different categories, or none of the above.

Contact //

With questions or other inquiries, please reach out at slomoco21 [at] gmail [d0t] com