This conference features invited presentations from renowned scholars and practitioners of improvisation in various disciplines, focused on the theme of time. The conference regards improvisation as an inherent part of our being and behaving in the world and, therefore, as an inherently multidisciplinary field of inquiry, encompassing not only music, dance, literature, and other artistic practices, but also architecture, design, philosophy, critical theory, identity, and organizational theory, among others.
Improvisation’s situated nature also emphasizes process and time: improvisation occurs in time. This temporality relates in various ways to the aforementioned interdisciplinarity—practices such as music appear to embrace process and time, while others suggest more oblique relations. Our event embraces diversity in scholarly approaches and presents variegated points of view that offer unique perspectives on improvisation and its relation to time, and vice versa.
To put it simply, this conference combines the multidisciplinarity of critical improvisation studies with the theme of temporality to provoke new ways of examining our world and our conceptions of it.
This event is supported by Columbia University's Department of Music and the Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience program. Please contact the group organizers, Marc Hannaford ([email protected]) and Jessie Cox ([email protected]), for additional details. The event link will be provided to all attendees registered via Eventbrite. The conference program is available via Dropbox.
