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This special issue of ASAP/Journal is dedicated to the concept of slowness. The title of our introduction, "As Slowly as Possible"—apart from serving as a pun on the commonplace connotation of the acronym for the Association for the Study of the Art of the Present—honors John Cage's signature 1987 piece ORGAN2/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible) by underscoring the relationality of the notion of slowness: slow is always "slow in relation to." In this issue, we explore what engaging with slowness as relational can reveal—and what it can bring to a journal specifically committed to the arts of the present. We second ASAP's observation that our increasingly complexified present urges us to constantly engage with our own contemporaneity, and we put forward the notion of slowness as highly productive in interrogating our current political and aesthetic climate, not least in terms of globalization, consumerism, media regimes, and ecology. While slowness is thus addressed as key to an art of contemporaneity in this issue, what also comes to the fore is that the manifold aesthetics and politics of slowness enable us to connect the past to the present, often in a nonlinear manner. In exploring the thick layers of various time regimes, an art of the present, as a practice of contemporaneity, cannot do without acknowledging the individual and collective histories that constitute us. Relatedly, in exploring concepts of processuality across fields and genres, this issue demonstrates the fruitfulness of bringing the various arts of the present into conversation. It reveals how the notion of slowness takes on different meanings if performed or reflected upon through different artistic media (film, video, painting, literature, music, sound, performance, and dance), and is furthermore complicated by today's manifold intermedial art practices. Taken as such, slowness as relational resonates with the increasing interdependence of the various aesthetic and political processes that inform our global contemporary society by encouraging us to acknowledge the multilayeredness of these connections.

In order to approach the concept of slowness in its relationality, we invited KEVIN HAMILTON and LUTZ KOEPNICK to engage with us in an open conversation to explore where scholarship on the topic is—or should be—headed. While this conversation is the first in which all four of us engage in the topic together, it is also a continuation of a long-term academic exchange that started in 2007 when both KATJA and KEVIN were invited for the final critiques of the MFA student projects of Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Digital + Media Department, and—ending up in the same hotel in Providence—took a long walk along the coastline together. When KATJA was asked to participate in a summer school on the topic of "The Arts and the Future" at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich in 2012, she invited KEVIN over to co-teach a class on slowness. KEVIN and KATJA presented and published their thoughts on what they called slow media art at the Media Art Histories conference in Riga in 2013 and at the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) in 2015.1 As they had been using LUTZ'S book during their conversation, they took the 2017 ASAP/9 conference in Berkeley/Oakland as a chance to organize a panel on slowness.2 In parallel, KATJA approached ERIN with the suggestion to organize an ASAP symposium on the topic of slowness at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2018.

On 6 May 2011, James Bridle — who self-identifies as ‘a writer, publisher, technologist, and artist, based in London’2 — launched a Tumblr blog entitled The New Aesthetic, featuring an initial 25 entries.3 Over the course of the following year, new entries were added to the Tumblr on a regular basis, between 100 and 150 each month. Parallel to this, Bridle presented his concept in several lectures. But the New Aesthetic only really took off in spring 2012, when it was the topic of a panel at the South by Southwest conference,4 which was reviewed for the popular online magazine WIRED.com by science fiction author Bruce Sterling (2012). From this moment on, Twitter messages and blog entries referring to the New Aesthetic increased tremendously (see, as an example, Kaganskiy 2012). In parallel, a number of further conferences and festival events on the topic were organized, including a book sprint.5 Even while the initial Tumblr blog was (temporarily) closed,6 the concept continued to spread across the digital networks and has been related to quite diverse visual and objectual, material and immaterial artefacts — in blog posts and Twitter messages all over. The New Aesthetic thus underwent a kind of viral dispersion — it resembles an internet meme (see Watz 2012), although with a proper name.

This essay investigates the concept of interactivity by means of a historical analysis of the term itself and its classification. It should be understood as complementary to the essay by Dieter Daniels (’Strategies of Interactivity’) in this volume, elaborating on the related artistic and societal contexts and discourses. Understanding the history of a term and its application to the various scientific fields helps to contextualize its denotations and interpretations. Therefore the first part of this essay sources the roots of the term interactivity, adopted by scientific fields as heterogeneous as physiology and sociology, cybernetics and computer science. The second part investigates recent attempts to go beyond a mere definition by further describing and classifying the various processes that are subsumed under the umbrella term of interactivity. The compilation of exemplary studies introduces different approaches of classification, from an ideological or technical, epistemological or aesthetic perspective. As a further step towards new ways of describing and analyzing interactive art, the final paragraph of the essay presents a research project of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research. evaluating a taxonomy for interactive art.