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• 2005 Lake Forest Literary Festival
• &NOW 2004

APRIL 5-7, 2006

This conference is the merger of the second annual Lake Forest Literary Festival (LFLF) with the second iteration of Notre Dame University’s &NOW festival for 2006.

We are pleased to announce that two-time National Book Critics’ Circle Award winner William H. Gass will be one of &NOW’s featured writers.

This three day festival will celebrate contemporary aesthetic practice in its most inventive forms: writing, visual, and multimedia art that is aware of its own institutional and extra-institutional history, that is as much about its form and materials—about language—as about subject matter. Such practices provide ways to express the world 200 years after Ivanhoe, 100 years after Freud, 50 years after Picasso, Elvis, and Faulkner, and 10 years after the birth of www....

&NOW/LFLF will bring together a range of artists interested in exploring the possibilities of form and the limits of expression; artists working to emphasize text as a medium and as an influence; and artists articulating the material nature of expression.

&NOW/LFLF is also a festival invested in the idea that aesthetic choices are political, or otherwise pronounce convictions about the world.  While institutions tend to limit the definition of what counts as art or literature, &NOW/LFLF will feature work that deliberately keeps these definitions unresolved.

Sometimes called experimental, conceptual, avant-garde, hybrid, surfiction, fusion, radical, slip-stream, avant-pop, postmodern, self-conscious, innovative, or alternative, the work of &NOW/LFLF shares an ethos with contemporary thought, taking its own medium as part of its subject matter, working against the assumptions of the status quo—especially as conceived in commercial terms:  the art of &NOW/LFLF will speak by employing a variety of games, slippages, puzzles, parodies, talking animals, historical disjunctions, discursive juxtapositions, appropriations, spatial plays, collage techniques, and other strategies and constraints.

If traditional, mainstream art and literature are the equivalents of 19th century still-life, innovative production might be the sculpture that uses the medium of genetically engineered cells, assemblages more interested in using form to produce fantastic machines of art, rather than to create a transparent window to a world that no longer exists.

By bringing together innovative writers and artists concerned with the issues outlined above, &NOW/LFLF will take stock of this "other" tradition—and perhaps offer a glimpse of where it is going.