During this colloquium, the fellows participating in the CAS project In Sync: How Synchronization and Mediation produce Collective Times , Then and Now will introduce themselves and their work, as well as discuss their plans and goals during their one-year stay at CAS. 

Registration for the event is now closed.

Programme:

August 28
9.00 - 9.10 Camilla Serck-Hanssen, Scientific Director of CAS

• Welcome

9.10 - 9.30 Helge Jordheim & Espen Ytreberg

• Introductory Remarks

9.30 – 10.15 Geoffrey Bowker

• Life at the Femtosecond

10.30 – 11.15 Rana Issa

• Synchronic Bibles

11.15 – 12.00 Lunch

12.00 – 12.45 Thomas Hylland Eriksen

• The Eternal and the Ephemeral: Temporalities on the Internet

13.00-13.45 Anne Jerslev

• David Lynch’s Sense of Temporality

14.00-14.45 Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay

• Syncing Futures

15.00-15.45 Stefan Tanaka

• Meiji 17 (1884): a Digital History, without Chronology

16.00-16.45 Helge Jordheim

• Synchronization - A Research Framework

August 29
9.00 – 09.45 Lucian Hölscher

• Empty and Embodied Time in Modern Historiography

10.00 – 11.45 Leonoor Borgesius

• Engieneering Natures: The Temporalities of Land Reclamation Practices in the Netherlands

12.00 – 12.45 Staffan Ericson

• Extra Time: On the Survival of Television, Cold Wars, and History

12.45 – 13.30 Lunch

13.30 – 14.15 Jon Inge Faldalen

• Times In and Out of Sync: How the MPEG Compression Codec Produces Collective Times of Then, Now, and Soon

14.30 – 15.15 Einar Wigen

• Epidemic Synchronisations and Turkish Anti-Vaccination Campaigns

15.30 – 16.15 Espen Ytreberg

• Three Arguments on the Mediation of Historical Events

About the project:

Living in a society means doing and experiencing things together. Collectives are formed by people performing similar or related actions at the same time, in sync, so to speak. Synchronized collective actions and experiences include political elections, sports events, demonstrations, parades, as well as other public rituals or performances; however, they are by no means limited to these kinds of spectacular happenings. On the contrary, all forms of social action are in some way or another based on collective and synchronized times. But these synchronized collective times do not exist in and by themselves. They are always the result of work, and this work crucially involves and employs a wide range of communicative genres carried by different media.

This discovery of the link between synchronization and mediation represents the starting point of the project In Sync, as well as its research goal: During its stay at CAS, the project aims to explore and explain how social collectives are constituted through mediated synchronization, by which different and often conflicting time frames and temporal regimes are adjusted and adapted in order to form a collective and shared time. This work of synchronization takes place within or across social and cultural contexts by means of a set of media, both printed and electronic, both analogue and digital. The close connection between synchronization and mediation will be studied both across time, from the 18th century till today, and across space, in different cultural and geographic contexts. Broadly situated within the interpretive humanities and social sciences, the project is interdisciplinary, with an emphasis on cultural/conceptual history, media studies, and ethnography.