Dear colleagues, We invite you to submit proposals for the conference: Delete: Strategies of Negation in the Age of Data Suffocation Read the full CfP and apply by 31 March: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/arts/research/research-events/items/delete-strategies... Where: BLOC Cinema, Queen Mary University of London When: 17–18 September 2026 Keynote speakers: Neta Alexander (Yale University), Thomas Dekeyser (University of Southampton) Seventeen years ago, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger made an argument about deleting as indissolubly linked to our capacity to survive and move forward (Schönberger 2009). At the time, this claim pointed to a paradox: while digital technologies offered unprecedented possibilities for erasure, the critical and sometimes subversive function of deletion as a form of negation was already beginning to erode. With the rapid expansion of storage capacities and tracking mechanisms, deletion has since become increasingly reduced, contested, or even impossible. How has the status of deleting changed from then to the present, when the daily rise of AI slop and the turbulence of world politics render this gesture seemingly futile? Back in the late 2000s, we could argue that deleting still carried some weight. We regularly got rid of films, songs, games, or apps to free up space on hard drives. We erased blog posts or discussion forum conversations to avoid future embarrassment. At the same time, glitchy or pixelated images and sounds were still considered worth preserving and sharing. Fast forward to 2026, and we hardly even care enough to delete something. We can access all the entertainment we “need” through subscription platforms like Netflix, Spotify, or Steam, and the files we keep are often dispersed across multiple drives and clouds. Our social media interactions and exchanges with AI models like ChatGPT are effectively permanent, marked in digital ink and accessible for extraction by others. We are surrounded by lossless, high-resolution images and sounds, and even systemic failures have turned into mere pauses between updates (Alexander and Appadurai 2019). At the same time, many claim that the very logic of disruption has become fully co-opted by Big Tech, and therefore has little value for cultural production and its persistence (Owens 2024). With all these problems in mind, our conference proposes to revisit current strategies of deletion both in the service of power (however we may define it) and for the purpose of resistance, refusal, or, more radically, as forms of negation of existing power structures. There are efforts across disciplines to showcase both how the current online regime deletes certain memories, histories, subjectivities, and forms of labour (Lingel 2021, Thylstrup 2025) and how creative strategies may rupture or perforate the relentless deluge of images, sounds, and texts (Dekeyser and Culp 2023, Klik 2026). The conference aims to bring together media scholars, artists, archivists, and activists to examine how these opposing dynamics might be understood and mobilised. Instead of treating deletion as a lost or purely technical operation, we ask how it might regain critical relevance. Our aim is to collectively reflect on, and experiment with, infrastructures, methodologies, and epistemologies in which deleting can once again operate as a meaningful cultural and political act. Best wishes, Jiří Anger Jiří Anger British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (2024-2026) School of the Arts Queen Mary University of London https://qmul.academia.edu/JiriAnger Towards a Film Theory from Below: Archival Film and the Aesthetics of the Crack-Up<https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/towards-a-film-theory-from-below-9798765107263/> Bloomsbury Academic, 2024 BAFTSS Awards 2025: Runner-Up, Best Monograph Cycles of Labour: In the Metaverse, We Will Be Housewives<https://necsus-ejms.org/cycles-of-labour-in-the-metaverse-we-will-be-housewives/> Co-authored with Veronika Hanáková and Martin Tremčinský NECSUS, 2023 BAFTSS Awards 2025: Winner, Best Videographic Criticism