wildpop 2025

Corporate interests dominate how we consume culture, what we listen to, what we watch…. Yet underground, DIY and fringe cultures have the grass-roots spontaneous intensity that can challenge that dominance. Don’t they?

November 6-8 2025
Newcastle University, Star & Shadow Cinema, Newcastle Upon Tyne

Wild Pop is performance and production in music, film, beat-making and the immediacy of online platforms; it collapses formal distinctions between composition and improvisation, between invention and appropriation… between consumption and production, taking and making…

wildpop 2025 seeks to explore and expand debates around spontaneity, intuitive creation and counter-corporate cultural production through panel presentations and discussions alongside live performances, screenings and multimedia presentations. While popular music will be core to those discussions, the extent to which digital technology and online dissemination have rendered disciplinary distinctions increasingly hard to define is clearly recognised.

The widespread perception of ‘pop’ – along with the majority of academic study of it – is overwhelmingly dominated by music and media that are corporate-invested. It has long been customary to casually dismiss such music as ‘commercial’ and/or ‘mainstream’. Yet both terms are too reductive and narrow to accommodate what corporate investment in popular culture is about: it’s not just about profit; corporate interests promote and reinforce world views, attitudes and politics that improve the conditions for those interests. To what extent can we consider them to have nurtured an increasingly widespread and entrenched sense of powerlessness?

The majority of contemporary creative practice pedagogy tends to take the corporate foreground as a given, failing to explore beyond the commercial mainstream and formally established canons treated as orthodoxies. This has yielded a context wherein numerous approaches and styles that don’t fit within the relatively narrow formal paradigms of Western music (predominantly Euro-American rock and pop) remain severely under-represented, both in terms of public visibility and education. Above all, improvisation, collage/sampling, spontaneity and intuitive expression – and any styles where they are central and undisguised – are at best significantly marginalised, obscured or, at worst, overlooked altogether.

wildpop 2025 welcomes proposals for critical-discursive paper presentations, panels, artistic performances, mixed media and film screenings. Areas of interest, but not exclusively, will be:

1. Improvisation, spontaneity and intuitive decision-making as central dynamics in performance, recording, deconstructed club, digital online video and film
2. Sampling and collage in music, film and text
3. Power, space and marginalised identities, particularly the ways wildpop and DIY cultures might facilitate queer, trans, feminist, racialised and/or crip resistance/alternate imaginaries
4. The vulnerabilities of physical spaces for ‘pop’ (including but not limited to studios, performance spaces, storage etc.)
5. The ecologies and economies of DIY, fringe cultures and ‘exilic’ spaces
6. ‘Disciplined’ spontaneity vs. AI’s synthetic aggregation of the already-understood
7. Anti-professionalism, creative research outside academia, disavowing bogus orthodoxies around cultural production
8. Expanded cinema and inscription as performance
9. Wild practice as an activism of urgent agency
10. Music and film as performative means to engage with struggle, resistance and as means to survive the increased fragmentation of administration and organisations

wildpop 2025 will be hosted on campus at Newcastle University and at Star & Shadow Cinema, and will include evening programmes.

Please send proposals, abstracts and/or media to [email protected] before midnight on 31^st August 2025

Programming updates plus links to relevant writings and media can be found at wild-pop.org