Second international conference: "Audioliterary Poetry between Performance and Mediatization"

4 April 2023

Photo: Goethe-Institut Budapest

The second international and interdisciplinary conference of the ERC project "Poetry in the Digital Age" will be held on the topic "Audioliterary Poetry between Performance and Mediatization" from May 11-13, 2023 at the Warburg-Haus in Hamburg. The conference has been conceptualized and organized by Marc Matter, Henrik Wehmeier, and Clara Cosima Wolff from sub-project 1 “Audioliterary Poetry between Performance and Mediatization”.

The current popularity of poetry has to do with new forms of poetry performance that are often closely connected to processes of mediatization: live formats such as spoken word and poetry slam continue to attract large audiences, recordings of readings and performances are shared on platforms such as YouTube and TikTok, and sound poetry experimentally explores the potentials of digital technology. Most recently, the Covid-19 pandemic led to manifold attempts to move poetry readings and discussions to streaming and online platforms.

These developments shed new light on discussions about the relation between "liveness" and "mediatization", raise questions about the relationship between different adaptions of poetic works in different media, and, finally, challenge established definitions of poetry. The conference will focus on, among other topics: the techno-poetic environments of audioliteral poetry and its posthuman orality, the performative embodiments and multisensory encounters of performed poetry, the media transgressions and transcriptive movements of recorded poetry performance, and the new networks of poetic activism.

The conference will be held in English and German. The program of the conference can be found here: https://www.poetry-digital-age.uni-hamburg.de/en/veranstaltungen/tagungen/sp1.html