ASAP’s launch conference “ASAP/1: Arts of the Present” was held October 22-25, 2009, downtown Knoxville, Tennessee, at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. The conference featured work by more than 115 scholars and arts practitioners working in the visual, literary, and performing arts. The conference organizer for ASAP/1 was Amy J. Elias, Professor of English at the University of Tenneseee, and the conference was hosted by the University of Tennessee’s Department of English.

The conference kicked off with an opening night reception and plenary talk by international artist Anton Vidokle at the Knoxville Museum of Art, which featured his installation “Night School.” The second plenary speaker was Sianne Ngai, who was at the time Associate Professor of English at UCLA. The keynote speaker was Kenyan novelist and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Irvine, who spoke on “Language and the Arts of the Present.”