In his dystopian novel Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami describes two parallel worlds—one similar to our contemporary capitalist society, the other a counterfactual world where people have no names but rather distinguish each other by their professions. One particular occupation, “Dreamreader,” is assigned to read old, distant, and unremembered dreams through the touch of self-illuminating unicorns’ skulls. Situated in what seems to be the only conceivable reality, we oftentimes limit ourselves to one conventional discourse or frame of thought, and forget alternative possibilities; we forget to cross the very thin line connecting one universe to another, where the potential to read and to be illuminated by multiple dreams is promised.

Binghamton University’s Art History Graduate Student Union seeks Dreamreaders and others, from multiple disciplinary backgrounds, for the 26th annual Crossing the Boundaries conference, which will engage the concept of [pl.]: Exploring the Multiple. The recent return to issues of the real and unreal, stimulated by discourses around art objects, techno-culture, and systems theory, prompts continued searching for multiple, unstable, even incoherent statuses and possibilities, and their relocation within an ocean of networks. The making of such alternative constellations is the aim of this gathering.

Today, when dreamlands seem to be so far out of reach, we wish to invite scholars and researchers from different fields to join this exploration of the multiple: to cross discursive boundaries, to add an “-s” to every term we engage, and to once more hold close our seemingly remote dreams. The 2018 Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference Crossing the Boundaries XXVI invites proposals for academic papers / creative practices from MA and PhD students, independent scholars, and artists. Potential topics for discussion include, but are not limited to:

Accidents and the accidental
Architectural free-spaces
Archived and unarchived histories
Corporeality / -ies and materiality / -ies
Counterfactuality
Cultural techniques
Dispositifs: cinematic, exhibitionary, photographic, or theatrical apparatuses
Ecological humanities
Heterotopias
Observation vs. ontology: working against speaking on images in ontological terms
Humanism and post-humanism
Soft architectures

The conference is scheduled for March 16-17, 2018 at Binghamton University and features keynote speakers Dr. Edward Eigen, Associate Professor of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and Dr. Jeffrey Kirkwood, Assistant Professor of Art History at Binghamton University.

Those interested in participating in the conference should send a one-page abstract (no more than 250 words), CV, and cover page with institutional affiliation, if relevant, and contact information (phone number and email address) to: buctbconf@gmail.com