Someday, the Bloody Sunday March that took place on March 7, 1965, in Selma, Alabama, will be understood not only as a courageous and world-changing political act, but also as one of the great modernist achievements of the twentieth century. 7 March 1965 is dedicated to exploring why. Through varied public activities in Selma, Our Literal Speed aims to investigate the formal inventiveness and aesthetic attentiveness that defined crucial aspects of the American Civil Rights Movement. From this perspective, it is obvious that the events of Bloody Sunday will be understood in the distant future as art, as an example of collective altruism unleashed inventively and powerfully in the public sphere.

Our Literal Speed is an ongoing media opera/text-and-art enterprise located in Selma, Alabama. Appearing as “a series of events in the vicinity of art and history in Europe and North America,” the project involves collective activity and an intense concern for art's movement through social and technological mediation. Our Literal Speed has produced speeches, exhibitions, conferences, objects, soundtracks, essays, scripts, recordings, installations, reviews, performances, pedagogical concept albums, and administrative gesamtkunstwerks.

Abbey Shaine Dubin (MFA, UCLA) has performed within OLS at ZKM, Karlsruhe; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como and Milan; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Institute of Fine Arts, New York; Princeton University; the Staatsoper im Schiller Theater, Berlin; Documenta 13, Kassel; and Harvard University. Dubin received the Epson Fondazione Antonio Ratti Prize for Artistic Research, as well as a Fleck Fellowship at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff, Canada. She recently led an artist's residency at the Banff Centre.

Christopher Petty Heuer teaches in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University.

Matthew Jesse Jackson teaches in the Departments of Visual Arts and Art History at the University of Chicago.