04/30/2026
USC Department of Cinema and Media Studies
October 23-24, 2026
KEYNOTE Eugenie Brinkema: Color and the Frenzy of Difference
DEADLINE: June 1, 2026
Please submit a presentation proposal via this form: https://forms.gle/JtGKbxDhCMFBS6Ab6
Coming from the Latin, delirare, or ‘to go off the furrow,
’ initial uses of DELIRIUM implied a
deviation from a path, a straying from the straight line. Delirum named early medical conditions of
‘disordered states of mind and madness
’ that manifested physically through restlessness, dizziness, and
vertigo in early Greek and Roman societies. T o be delirious (also the title of Eddie Murphy
’
s first
stand-up special) might be to rave, to be filled with laughter, violent excitement, or mad rapture. It
might be to join Dziga Vertov
’
s Enthusiasm, enter Andrei T arkovsky
'
s Zone, see Jordan Peele
'
s alien
and Bi Gan’
s monster, to meet Roberta Breitmore, or walk through Rem Koolhaas
' New York.
Delirium has been used to describe the effects of Capitalism (Marx, Deleuze), and might intimate
arrivals of new political realities.
Delirium points to what might want our attention. T o phenomena at the limits of perception and
language. For First Forum 2026, we seek to bring our many deliriums together. We invite writers and
practitioners across disciplines making sense where sense may no longer be, nor have ever been.
Whether such phenomena are material or conceptual, dream or illusion, hallucinated, imagined,
actual, social, or political, they are united by an inability to be easily articulated and by an inherently
contradictory nature. Appearing in multiple discourses without one prescribed history or meaning,
delirium evokes epistemological questions, can serve as a model for crisis, and be analyzed as a formal
principle. We seek to approach delirium as a productive force, and to put it to work in its relationship
to politics and aesthetics. When states are collapsing, when crisis is chronic, when the image is
undergoing profound shifts in its ontological dimensions, when the everyday is no longer recognizable,
could conversations about our various states of confusion, frustration, discontent, disillusionment,
and curiosities, our delirium, be productive? How might research, thought, writing, and visual practice
tussle with and attend to this?
We ask participants to approach delirium not only as a theme but as a method to engage with the
questions that animate your research. Is there a way to enact delirium reflexively on scholarship and
artistic work? What is it to be and act delirious in our current social and political moment? Is delirium
an individual or collective experience? We invite both researchers and practitioners to explore and
engage with the multifaceted notion of delirium in the context of our contemporary moment and your
ongoing research, to offer a form through which delirium might be glimpsed.
We invite papers and creative projects that emerge from a range of disciplines and methodologies across
the humanities and social sciences that consider, but are not limited to, the following:
KEY WORDS
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Genre, and genre blur
Excess (as both negativity and a space
of possibilities)
Loose ends, borders and limits
Capitalist delirium
Moving image, sound
Hallucinations, the realm of dreams,
dejà vu
Media, transportative media
experiments, alternate states
Ecology, economies
Reality, indexicality, mimesis,
generative imaging
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Representation, mediation, form
Love, paranoïa, folie à deux
Deviation, disorder, distortion
Archive, information, illegibility
Disciplinary Delirium
T emporality, contemporaries, histories
Language, large language models,
systems
Hysteria, war
Conceptual history, art in history
Multiplatforms, windows, desktops,
environment, landscape
Contact: [email protected]
Please fill out this form to apply for the 2026 First Forum Conference on Delirium Proposal deadline: June 1, 2026 Conference dates: October 23-24, 2026 Location: Cinema and Media Studies Department, University of Southern California KEYNOTE: Eugenie Brinkema / Color and the Frenzy of Difference ......
