Alternate Voices: Our Literal Speed

A few would-be academics and would-be artists came up with an idea called Our Literal Speed (OLS). Mainly, OLS was a burgeoning sense among a handful of untenured, underemployed workers in the felds of visual art and higher education that mandatory artfulness and mandatory inventiveness were about to enter mainstream academia in a major way. It seemed as if a technological revolution were breaking out all around us but even though the way you communicated, the way you bought stuff, the way you travelled, were all transforming explosively, the way you’d work as an academic was still being imagined as remaining more or less the same as it was during the Ford administration. To us, this was wrong and short-sighted.

So, we began producing slightly non-standard, mildly unexpected experiences within “straight” academic contexts – and, conversely, we began producing pedagogical scenarios within that netherworld of freeze-dried political “art-ivism”, hedge fund after-after parties and rampant economic/artistic nepotism known as the art industry-scape.

We also anticipated that our distressed “Kulturbolschewismus” from the Deep South might leave a few folks perplexed along the way but that was one of the basic ideas from the beginning: we wanted OLS to make OLS. We wanted any description or synopsis of the project to come up short. We wanted something that could not be explained in a press release, advertised with a blurb or accounted for in a CV line.