Dear colleagues,

We invite you to submit proposals for the conference:

Delete: Strategies of Negation in the Age of Data Suffocation

Where: BLOC Cinema, Queen Mary University of London 

When: 17–18 September 2026

Apply until 31 March: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdIk0FttwN7BI9Q0QlLw6_rWDt_S_ZM4CuW6gHIyDF4eKIZcQ/viewform

Read CfP: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/arts/research/research-events/items/delete-strategies-of-negation-in-the-age-of-data-suffocation-call-for-papers-.html 

Keynote speakers: Neta Alexander (Yale University), Thomas Dekeyser (University of Southampton)

Seventeen years ago, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argued that deleting is indissolubly linked to our capacity to survive and move forward (Schönberger 2009). Yet even then, a paradox emerged: while digital technologies expanded possibilities for erasure, deletion’s critical and subversive function was already eroding. With growing storage capacities and tracking mechanisms, deletion has become reduced, contested, or even impossible. How has its status changed, as AI slop and global political turbulence render this gesture seemingly futile?

In the late 2000s, deleting still carried weight: we removed media to free space and erased posts to avoid embarrassment, while glitchy images and sounds remained worth preserving. By 2026, deletion has largely lost urgency. Entertainment is accessed via subscription platforms, files are dispersed across drives and clouds, and interactions (on social media or with AI models like ChatGPT) are effectively permanent and extractable. We are surrounded by lossless media, and even failures have become pauses between updates (Alexander and Appadurai 2019). Meanwhile, disruption itself appears co-opted by Big Tech, limiting its value for cultural production (Owens 2024).

This conference revisits deletion as both a tool of power and a practice of resistance, refusal, and negation. Current research shows how online regimes delete memories, histories, subjectivities, and labour (Lingel 2021; Thylstrup 2025), while creative strategies attempt to rupture the deluge of digital content (Dekeyser and Culp 2023; Klik 2026).

Bringing together scholars, artists, archivists, and activists, the conference aims 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.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to): 

• Aesthetics of Deletion and Absence
• Media Obsolescence and Forgotten Technologies
• The Politics of Digital Forgetting
• Creative Erasure in Videographic Scholarship
• Failures, Errors, and Digital Loss on Streaming Platforms
• Events and Impact of Social Media Going Dark 
• Histories of Digital Deletion
• Media Preservation and the Fight Against Digital Deletion
• Cognitive Tools and the Deletion of Traditional Memory Functions
• Algorithmic Deletion and Digital Bias 
• Global vs. Local Practices of Deletion and Digital Memory
• AI and Deletion

All the best, 

Veronika Hanáková, Jiří Anger, and Daniel O’Brien