Gustav Mahler Private University for Music Klagenfurt | Forum Artistic Research

Theme

With the theme of “suspended in language?” artists and researchers are invited to investigate possible relationships between these two terms. They could also be turned around: language(s) in suspension? Such suspension of language might mean reframing temporal and linear structures within a spatial regime (e.g., a web, a hypertext, an environment). It could point to opportunities for asemic and alinguistic forms of inscription and writing. It could point to a situation we (inevitably) find ourselves in. It could also point to the act of suspending as a conscious artistic operation. Should we actively pursue it, or should we rather escape it?

Sub-themes include:

• The relationship between inscription and body
• The relationship between verbal and non-verbal modes of articulation
• The relationship between text and materiality (e.g. asemic writing)
• Text as texture (including visual, sonic, haptic textures, etc.)
• Thinking beyond and within language
• Performing linguistic structures
• Forms of spatial writing
• The limits and opportunities of computational languages and tokenisation
• Language as unique feature of humans vs language of non-human agents
• Losing the capacity to speak, gaining the capacity to babble
• Forms of resistance against / with / beyond language
  Critique of text as an agent of legitimation or delegitimation
• Suspension and language as possibilities for connecting / separating different agents or collaborators
• The possibility of shared practices through non-verbal artistic propositions
• Suspension and suspending as artistic operations
• Elasticity, gravity, and floating, either as objects of research or as epistemic metaphors

Submission

The PDF form needs to be submitted no later than Monday, 2 February 2026 to submit@forum-artistic-research.net. If you submit as multiple authors, attach an extra author form for each additional author. Upon acceptance of the proposal, at least one author must register and be present at the symposium. Submissions receive a single-blind peer review, and we plan an online publication of the proceedings based on a second call after the end of the symposium. See the  FAQ for common questions.

More information is available on the call website.