Collective Forms

This 1-day symposium brings together researchers who deal with collectives of all kinds as well as creative practitioners whose work engages with and emerges from collectivity. From the communist cell to the religious congregation, collectives and the experience of shared purpose have invariably given rise to attempts to represent aesthetically the goals, ideals, and promises of a group. This one-day symposium seeks to reflect on collectives as both the subject and condition of art, examining the ways in which shared purpose is communicated, examined, and extended through creative expression. In doing so, we conceive of the collective broadly in its artistic, religious, political, and (inter)national forms and are particularly interested in the melding of these categories within specific collectives and works. We ask how collectives are used as ways of imagining, incarnating, and consolidating durable community. We are also interested in how navigating multiplicity emerges as a formal feature of work through, for example, the use of choral speech or group movement.