Posts from December 2015

Floating Points at Ambika P3

Written by on Wednesday, posted in Exhibition, News (No comments yet)

FLOATING POINTS
Gavin Baily, Tom Corby 

Ambika P3, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS

Exhibition Opening hours:  Saturday 19th Dec – Monday 21 Dec, 12.00-6.00
Private view:  6.00 pm Friday 18th December

A new exhibition by Gavin Baily and Tom Corby consisting of 3 screen-based projects and an installation set within P3’s underground galleries. The Northern Polar Studies (2015) and Minima, Maxima (2015) are premiered, while The Southern Ocean Studies (in collaboration with Dr Jonathan Mackenzie 2010), and Cyclone (2005 – 2015) are uniquely shown together for the first time. All 4 works employ various forms of climate or meteorological data to visually and physically condense the aleatory, hidden and the systemic aspects of sites and landscapes as large-scale data animation or installation.

Art has long found ways to make tangible the Earth’s exhalation of atmospheres and climates. This exhibition can be seen as part of this tradition, but breaks from it by bringing contemporary scientific technologies, data and institutions to bear to show how universal concepts of human relations with landscape are still pertinent in a contemporary context of accelerating climate change.  Additionally, the complex entanglements of the social, material, atmospheric and geographic explored throughout these works, extend our feel for landscape and also our sense of how time functions in it. Landscape through its laminations, layering and morphologies, is conceived in this work as a recording device that tracks the Earth’s changing energy signatures. This movement of time and matter reimagines environmental terrains as extended temporal forms resultant from long-term changes; which we might propose of as ‘deep time landscapes’.

http://digital-realism.net/296-2/

Exhibiting the Medium Formally Known as Photography at ZHdK

Written by on Friday, posted in Event, News (No comments yet)

For any Swiss readers: Peter Cornwell, Director of the Data Futures project based in the IMCC, is giving a lecture this evening (Friday 11th December) with Duncan Forbes, Director and Curator of Fotomuseum Winthertur, on “Exhibiting the Medium Formally Known as Photography”.

The talk is at ZHdK (the Zurich University of the Arts) at 6.00 pm in room 6.K04.

The last decade has witnessed dramatic changes in the exhibition of photography in response to the rise of so-called post-photography and the distributed or transitive nature of photographic media. The idea of photography as one medium is increasingly impossible to sustain, as images flood across different platforms, combining still and moving forms, and offering new modes of reception and creative interaction. Nowadays the photograph is as much data as it is aesthetic or narrative, forging a new paradigm of algorithmic vision. What does it mean for photography and its audiences when the ‘traffic in photographs’ is transformed by global networks and the management of big data?

Taking Fotomuseum Winterthur as a case study, this lecture explores what these changes mean for curatorial practice and the institution of the photography museum. What would a post-photographic exhibition programme look like and what are the challenges of installation and interpretation? How should a photography museum position itself today, in relation to both physical and virtual audiences? What does it mean for the infrastructure of the museum as online platforms and retina displays proliferate and preservation-quality digitization becomes the norm? Is the institutional production of algorithmic vision sustainable and what are the creative possibilities? And what does a culture of ubiquitous, and sometimes disorienting, change mean for the staging of the history of photography?

New article by Sara Dominici on Tourist Photographers at the Poly

Written by on Tuesday, posted in News, Papers (No comments yet)

We’re pleased to announce that a new article by Sara Dominici, Post-Doctoral Fellow in the IMCC, has just appeared in the journal Photography and Culture. Entitled ‘Tourist Photographers and the Promotion of Travel: The Polytechnic Touring Association 1888-1939’, the article traces the ways in which the PTA’s passage from viewing tourists as citizens to educate, to customers to please, paralleled the move from using photography-based images to mixed media. While such a development was certainly a response to unprecedented market demands, Dominici argues that it should also be considered in relation to the widening of photographic perceptions engendered by the democratization of the medium, to which the PTA responded, first as educator, then as service provider. In doing so, the article raises several questions about the shifting relationship between “high,” or established, and “low,” or emerging, forms of culture, as mass photography and the mass marketing of tourism developed.

You can find Sara’s article here.

In Process opening

Written by on Saturday, posted in Event, Exhibition, News (No comments yet)

In Process Private view

Thursday 10 December, 6.00 pm
Gallery West – Project Space, University of Westminster, Harrow Campus

In Process (2015) is the inaugural exhibition from the Centre for Research and Education in Art and Media (CREAM) doctoral caucus based at the University of Westminster, including work by our own Steve Smith. The exhibition is a showcase of the various vibrant strands of interdisciplinary research being undertaken at the university. The focus is on modes in which CREAM students further practice-based modes of inquiry as means of art-making and producing contributions to knowledge and contributions to experience. Students undertaking principally theoretical research will also present elements of their research using practical modes. The exhibition will present work from ten doctoral students in the Project Space of Gallery West, and will be paralleled by a programme of film showings and performances.

Estéfani Bouza, Cinzia Cremona, Sue Goldschmidt, Alexandra Jönsson, Mirko Nikolić, Fathima Nizaruddin, Alexa Raisbeck, Bhavna Rajpal, Arne Sjögren, Steve Smith.

University of Westminster, Watford Road, Harrow, Middlesex HA1 3TP
Nearest Tube station: Northwick Park (Metropolitan line)

10 December 2015 – 8 January 2016
Opening times: 10am – 10 pm daily

Further details: www.westminster.ac.uk/inprocess

‘Take this Instant’: Sacrifice, Testimony and the Gift of My Death

Written by on Thursday, posted in Event, News (No comments yet)

bricks

Wednesday 9 December, 5pm
Room 105, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW

‘Take this Instant’: Sacrifice, Testimony and the Gift of My Death
Shela Sheikh (Goldsmiths), with a response by Elinor Taylor

In Aporias: Dying—Awaiting (One Another at) the “Limits of Truth”, Jacques Derrida poses the question: ‘My death—is it possible?’ How is this question to be understood, and who can pose it? And if my death is properly mine, how am I to account for—in fact, to give an account of—this? This paper responds to these questions by turning to accounts of both being-towards and surviving death in Maurice Blanchot’s fictional/autobiographical récit, ‘The Instant of my Death’, but also the phenomenon of pre-recorded video-testimonies in which the subject announces his/her own death, and does so from a temporality that is at once past, present and futural. Through a reading of technically-mediated performances of accounting for and bearing witness to one’s ‘own’ death—and with this a consideration of the logic of sacrifice, radical passivity, the gift of death, and the contemporary conjunction between religion, geopolitical conflict and media—Sheikh proposes that such accounts bears witness to what Derrida identifies as the anachronistic ‘history of death’ in the Christian West, before supplementing this focus on the West with further consideration of what Nelson Maldonado-Torres names ‘the coloniality of being’.

All welcome and entrance free. Non-Westminster guests can sign in at reception.
Followed by drinks in the Green Man…