Call for Submissions

Relative Time: Futurities

Relative Time is the subject of three collaborative issues conceptualized by the Dutch artist group, Bik van der Pol and Mosaic. The triptych comprises an archival issue (54.2), the proceedings of a virtual conference held in the depths of the pandemic (55.1), and finally this special issue on futurities. We pictured the period 1989-2020 as marking a decisive acceleration of capital and the window from 2020-2022 to bear the imprint of a world heavy with accumulating crises, slowing to a faltering end. With this sequential relationship providing a skeleton, we invite interdisciplinary contributions on thinking through time that are sensitive to differential speeds, granularities of time, spatial topologies that mirror and mix these temporal processes, and genealogical threads that connect them. In these uneven temporalities—ranging from socialities of modernity to Indigenous knowledges, onto ecologies and geologies—we glimpse extinctions, futures ready for reprise, and the trace of still more eventualities not as yet dreamt. Now with war readiness, technophilic plans for climate action, profit streams from Downstream MSI’s, and fuel and food security all back at the forefront of concern, is it not time for a more elastic and variable notion of time? A relative time that does not simply mobilize for the catastrophes that await, but acknowledges this future has been accumulating as a series of catastrophes for a long time, and tunes itself to these multiple and overlapping processes? We welcome feminist, queer, and bipoc contributions and we invite contributions in science, ecology, philosophy, literature, music, film, economy, and art that re-characterize our twisted relationship to time, acknowledge the many different temporalities hanging in the balance, and analyze a hungry system on repeat.

Deadline: August 31, 2023

View the full details of this call for submissions as a pdf file:

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Current Issue

Special Issue: Featuring: Frédéric Neyrat (September 2021)

Mosaic issue 54.3 is a special author issue featuring the work of Frédéric Neyrat and including essays by Naomi Mandell, Sue Lovell, Gi Taek Ryoo, and Andrew Haas. Alongside two essays by Neyrat, you will find an interview focussing on the philosopher’s book, The Unconstructable Earth (2019), and you will encounter Arne De Boever’s introduction to Neyrat’s wider project via what he describes as “philosophy’s ins—and especially its outs.”

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