True Lies of War
Group for War and Culture Studies Seminar

Hongping Annie Nie, University of Oxford
“China’s War with Japan (1937-1945): A Study of Chinese History Textbooks”

Dr. Hongping Annie Nie (MA in Education, Calvin College, USA; Ph. D. in Cross-cultural Education, Biola University, USA) is currently Faculty Tutor of Chinese Politics at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. She is also a core member of the Leverhulme funded China’s War with Japan Project, History Faculty, University of Oxford. Her research interests include moral/ideological education, mass communication, patriotism, and national memory. Among her publications are The Dilemma of Moral Education Curriculum in a Chinese Secondary School (University Press of America, 2007) and “On-line Gaming, Ideological Work, and Nationalism in China” (Journal of Contemporary China, forthcoming).

Celine Righi, London School of Economics
“Memory in post-Civil War Lebanon under artistic scrutiny: a space for individual and social autonomy in the public debate?”

Celine Righi completed a Master in Political Sciences at Science Po Lyon in 2000 and a Master in Social Psychology at Paris IX Dauphine University in 2001. After working for a think tank in Paris and Lyon in the field of social and economic development, Celine embarked in her PhD in 2008 at the Institute of Social Psychology at London School of Economics.

Entrance free. To reserve a place, please R.S.V.P. Dr Caroline Perret: C.Perret@westminster.ac.uk

A quick plug for the London Reading Club, a new blog for the book group attached to the MA Writing the City at the University of Westminster, which is run by our own Monica Germana. Check out posts that discuss London writings ranging from Virginia Woolf to Monica Ali here: http://thelondonreadingclub.wordpress.com/

An Ecology of Mind: A Film by Nora Bateson
Monday 27 February 2012, 18:30-22:00 pm
Old Cinema, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Tickets: £9.50; £3.50 (student/unwaged/Westminster staff)
Book your ticket from: http://anecologyofmindlondon.eventbrite.co.uk/

The Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture (IMCC) at the University of Westminster is proud to host the London premier of Nora Bateson’s An Ecology of Mind: A Daughter’s Portrait of Gregory Bateson. The screening will be followed by an interdisciplinary panel and audience discussion with Nora Bateson, and will end with a wine reception in the Regent Street foyer.

Panel with Nora Bateson; Iain Boal (Birkbeck College); Jody Boehnert (Brighton University); Ranulph Glanville (American Society for Cybernetics); Peter Reason (Action Research); and Wendy Wheeler (London Metropolitan University). Chaired by Jon Goodbun (IMCC and Architecture, Westminster)

“Tell me a story” … of life, art and science, of systems and survival. Gregory Bateson’s way of thinking – seeing the world as relationships, connections and patterns – continues to influence and provoke new thinking about human social life, about ecology, technology, art, design and health. Nora Bateson, Gregory’s youngest daughter, introduces Bateson’s ideas to new audiences in her film An Ecology of Mind, using the metaphor of a relationship between father and daughter, and footage of Bateson’s talks.

Each screening, too, hosts a discussion between Nora and a wide range of people working in depth with Bateson’s ideas: artists, architects, action researchers, ecological activists, mental health practitioners, scientists, urban designers, cyberneticians. These screenings and discussions intend to show a way of thinking that crosses fields of knowledge and experience, one that can lead out of the ecological crisis and towards a more sound way of living.
 
Awards for the film:
Gold for Best Documentary, Spokane International Film Festival, 2011
Audience Award Winner, Best Documentary, Santa Cruz Film Festival, 2011
Winner, Media Ecology Association, John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis, 2011 

Event organised by Jon Goodbun (Westminster), Wallace Heim, Kevin Power (Centre for Action Research, Ashridge Business School) and Eva Bakkeslett

To book a ticket go to: http://anecologyofmindlondon.eventbrite.co.uk/

The Third Visual Culture in Europe Meeting, Trondheim, 6-7 September 2012

Contributions are invited which address the relationship between ecology and visuality in the broadest sense. On the one hand several discourses have come to revolve around what Susan Sontag described in On Photography as an ecology of images, a perspective which raises both epistemological and ethical questions concerning our interactions with the image. On the other hand there are presently several indications of a pressing need for the field of visual culture studies to address what we might call the visualities of ecology, or the place of environmental issues in contemporary visual culture. Topics may include but are by no means limited to:

Images and Ethics // “Ecology” as a Metaphorical Nexus in Visual Studies // Visual Culture within and without the Ecology of Disciplines // Consumerism and Visual Culture/The Visual Culture of Consumerism // Climate Change in/and Visual Culture // The Rhetorics of Environmentalism in Media and/or Art // Apocalyptic Narratives in Visual Culture

To submit a proposal for a paper presentation, please email an abstract of approximately 200 words to the conference organisers, Nina Lager Vestberg (nina.vestberg@ntnu.no) and Øyvind Vågnes (ov@nomadikon.net), by 7 March 2012.

Thursday 16 February 2012, 7pm
Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1
Price: £7.00 / £5.00 concessions (includes free glass of wine).

This season’s Whitechapel Salon organised by the IMCC in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery is on ‘Cultures of Capitalism’. Our fourth discussion focuses on future of education under contemporary capitalism, with guest participants Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism, Andrew McGettigan, author of the arts and humanities blog Critical Education, and Andrea Phillips, Reader in Fine Art Practice and Director of Research Studies, Goldsmiths. Chaired by Marquard Smith.

Book your ticket at: http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/product/category_id/22/product_id/1120?session_id=1325609439457568b84811bd9f97bb2cb619476b46

A heads up on the line up of speakers and list of dates for this semester’s series of English Literature and Culture seminars. All will take place from 1.15-2.30pm on Wednesday lunchtimes in the University’s Regent Street building (room 359).

8th February 2012
Morgan Daniels (Queen Mary, London)
‘Satire and Childishness’

22nd February 2012
Anthony Paraskeva (University of Dundee)
”Wyndham Lewis, Cinema Hypnotism and the Frankfurt School’

7th March 2012
Matthew Taunton (Queen Mary, London)
‘Socialism, Literature and the Radiant Future: Before and After 1917′

21st March 2012
Aisling McKeown (Westminster)
‘Once Upon a Time in the West: Rural Idyll in Contemporary Irish Fiction and Film’

Further details at: http://seminarserieswmin.wordpress.com/2012/01/11/semester-two-seminars-unveiled/

Agit Disco
Conceived & compiled by Stefan Szczelkun,
edited by Anthony Iles

We’re very pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of Stefan Szczelkun’s new book Agit Disco, which collects the playlists of its 23 writers to tell the story of how music has politically influenced and inspired them. The book provides a multi-genre survey of political musics, from a wide range of viewpoints, that goes beyond protest songs into the darker hinterlands of musical meaning. Each playlist is annotated and illustrated. The collection grew organically with an exchange of homemade CDs and images. These images, with their DIY graphics, are used to give the playlists a visual materiality.

Almost everyone makes selections of music to play to themselves and friends. Agit Disco intends to show the importance of this creative activity and its place in our formation as political beings. This activity is at odds with to the usual process of selection by the mainstream media – in which the most potent musical agents of change are, whenever possible, erased from the public airwaves.

Agit Disco Selectors: Sian Addicott, Louise Carolin, Peter Conlin, Mel Croucher, Martin Dixon, John Eden, Sarah Falloon, Simon Ford, Peter Haining, Stewart Home, Tom Jennings, DJ Krautpleaser, Roger McKinley, Micheline Mason, Tracey Moberly, Luca Paci, Room 13 – Lochyside Scotland, Howard Slater, Johnny Spencer, Stefan Szczelkun, Andy T, Neil Transpontine, Tom Vague

Publication Date: January 2012. RRP: £11.99. ISBN: 978-1-906496-51-7

Mute books, 46 lexington st, london, w1f 0lp. www.metamute.org
Contact: Caroline Heron, caroline@metamute.org, 020 3297 9005

AND

Monday 12th December 2011, 18:30 onwards
309 Regent Street Gallery, University of Westminster, London W1B 2UW

‘AV London’ and ‘Through the Lens: Embodying the City’ are curated by students on MA Cultural and Critical Studies, MA Museums, Galleries & Contemporary Culture, and MA Visual Culture, University of Westminster

Following the event, a report entitled ‘Situating Korean Fine Art Practice in a Western Context’ written by Dr John Cussans came to our attention. It is attached here, many thanks to John for making it available, and our apologies for the delay in posting it:

SITUATING KOREAN FINE ART

It is a pleasure to announce Dr Victoria Walsh as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster, for 2011-12.

As a Visiting Research Fellow and Co-investigator of the Tate research project ‘Art School Educated: Curriculum Development and Institutional Change in UK Art Schools 1960-present’, Victoria will be developing her work on the emergence and impact of practice-led research within the Institute. This position and partnership builds on Westminster’s longstanding collaboration with the Tate across research and programming including the current collaboration on the MA Museums, Galleries and Contemporary Culture and the Johns Hopkins Summer School programme.

Victoria is also Visiting Research Fellow in the Arts and Media Department at London South Bank University which builds on her role as Co-investigator of the AHRC funded-project ‘Tate Encounters: Britishness and Visual Culture’ (2007-10) which was led by LSBU, and includes the completion of the project’s publication Post-critical Museology: Theory and Practice in the Art Museum (Routledge 2012).

Prior to this, Victoria was Head of Adult Programmes at Tate Britain (2005-11) where her work spanned both the Research and Learning departments. Previously, she worked as a freelance curator, project manager and research consultant in the fields of visual arts and architecture including the project-management of the competition to select an architect for Tate Modern, the relaunch of the Fourth Plinth Project in Trafalgar Square for the Mayor’s Cultural Office, and as Curatorial Consultant the exhibition ‘Open Systems: Rethinking art since 1970′ (Tate Modern, 2005). She holds an MA in Art History (Courtauld), in Curating (RCA 1995) and a doctorate on the artist Whistler (Oxford Brookes 1996) and has published on post-war British artists Nigel Henderson, Francis Bacon, Gilbert & George and architects Alison and Peter Smithson. As Programme Consultant on the 5th Year Diploma Course ‘History and Theory’ at the Architectural Association she is currently teaching the ‘The Independent Group: Tracing the Parallels in Visual and Urban Culture’.

We really do look forward to working with Victoria in the forthcoming year.

Our friends in the Africa Media Centre at University of Westminster, in conjunction with London African Film Festival, are organizing a conference entitled: ‘Women and Film in Africa Conference: Overcoming Social Barriers’

Saturday 19 and Sunday 20 November 2011
University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London, NW1

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Jihan El-Tahri is an Egyptian-French writer, Director and Producer of Documentary films. Her award-winning films include documentaries filmed in the Congo, Angola, Zambia, Tunisia and other parts of the world, including Saudi Arabia. Her latest film Behind the Rainbow deals with the transition of the ANC from a liberation organization into South Africa’s ruling party.

Yaba Badoe is a Ghanaian-British documentary maker, journalist and novelist; she is a visiting scholar at the University of Ghana. Her directing and producing credits include the award-winning documentary The Witches of Gambaga the story of a community of women condemned to live as witches in Northern Ghana.

“Women and film in Africa: Overcoming Social Barriers” is the exciting topic of the University of Westminster’s Africa Media Centre’s next event to be held at 35 Marylebone Road, London from 19-20 November 2011. It will deal with the contemporary and historical role played by women in the film, television and video industries in Africa. From Arab North Africa, West Africa, Central and East Africa, through to Southern Africa, women have emerged from the double oppression of patriarchy and colonialism to become the unsung heroines of the moving image as producers, directors, actresses, script writers, financiers, promoters, marketers and distributors of film, television and video in postcolonial Africa. Sadly, such immense contributions by women are underrepresented, both in industry debates and academic research. There are now many cases in which African women in front of and behind the camera have overcome social barriers, yet this is often sidelined. This conference delegates will include students, practitioners, academics and researchers to debate how women have contributed to film, television and video markets in Africa from the pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial eras. It is expected that the event will help focus existing industry and academic work on the ways female audiences in Africa have engaged with film, television and video texts. The conference will include a session with leading female filmmakers.

REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN

Full conference: Standard rate £135. One day rate £95
Full conference: Student rate £55. One day rate £40.
Fees cover: conference pack, lunch, coffee/tea, a wine reception and administration fees.

Please follow the link: http://www.westminster.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/2011/women-and-film-in-africa-conference-overcoming-social-barriers

Film copyright © Joe Banks & Poulomi Desai 31 Oct 2011
Headphones or external loudspeakers essential

The Canadian psychologist Albert Bregman’s theory of Auditory Scene Analysis describes how the human mind is able to identify, focus on, isolate and extract streams of actually or potentially meaningful sound information, which it recognises as emanating from discreet sources, using analysis of what amounts to the musical content of specific “melodic streams” within environmental noise. In terms of evolutionary biology, the theory suggests that our capacity for appreciating music may have evolved at least in part as a by-product of the mechanism that enables us to identify sound-streams that come from, say, a distant river, particular types of bird-song, or the call of a potentially hostile predator etc; and in human communications this faculty is most obviously in evidence as a contributory factor in enabling us to perceive individual speakers in crowded social environments (the Cocktail Party Effect). In terms of everyday experience, the isolation of such streams may seem deceptively simple, but in information theoretic and signal processing terms, the level of computational power required to extract such invariants* from the distorting influences of complex and rapidly-changing real-world sound environments still challenges engineers and computer scientists. Problems associated with extracting invariants from noisy environments are of particular relevance to air traffic control, military fighter and helicopter communications and battle management systems. Generalities aside, the soundtrack used in the Disinformation + Usurp “Sun Rays” film is a direct recording of the real sound-ambience of the film’s location, “composed” using sharp graphic-equalisation only, to reproduce the subjective experience of the melodic streams that were perceived in the extraordinarily atmospheric ambience of that underground space (and, totally coincidentally, the title of this film, which is taken from the footage itself, is also the name of the Indian Air Force military aerobatics demonstration team).

Filmed in New Delhi, Oct 2011. (J. Banks, IMCC Westminster, 1st Nov 2011).

*The term “invariant” was coined by the American psychologist JJ Gibson

We are pleased to report that the winner of the first Blip Prize for Creative Technologies was announced last night. The prize is awarded, courtesy of Blip Creative, to the best student project design for the IMCC’s new public display screen at Wells Street. The 2011 winner was Sophie Meter for her beautiful butterfly animation. Runners up were Kristian Agustin, Eleni Tziourtzia, David Itzcovitz and Yen Ooi. The winning videos can be seen (when opened in firefox) at http://www.blipcreative.com/blog.html Or, of course, you can check them out live on the corner of Wells Street and Booths Place.

The Blip Prize is the latest stage in the IMCC’s development of exciting content for the extraordinary state-of-the-art wall-hanging LED installation that is our contribution to The International Distributed Display Initiative, and which is part of the Institute’s New Media Theory research project, coordinated by Peter Cornwell at Blip with Alison Craighead and David Cunningham at the IMCC. Using an interface that has been designed such that no prior programming skills are assumed, staff and students will be making work for this experimental new media laboratory that will allow them to explore in hands-on fashion what it means to translate, phenomenalize, or even perform media-theoretical issues as, and in, new media.

Watch this space!

UPDATE: Video of the awards ceremony courtesy of David Itzcovitz:

Wednesday 9 November, 1.15pm – 2.30pm
Room 359, 309 Regent Street, University of Westminster

Caroline Edwards (University of Lincoln)
‘Fictions of the Not Yet’

As the first decade of the twenty-first century comes to a close, there is a growing critical awareness of the current fascination with alternative and future worlds in contemporary British fiction. In addition to the continuing popularity of – and growing scholarly interest in – speculative and genre works, an emerging body of “literary” fictions is revealing a wide-ranging preoccupation with narratives of apocalypse, transmigration and haunting. Writers like David Mitchell, Jeanette Winterson, Jim Crace, John Burnside, Marina Warner, Maggie Gee, Jon McGregor and Sam Taylor are thus shifting the parameters of realist literary fiction and its generic borrowings, and in the process articulating a shared concern with the question of temporality. We need to develop a new strategy of reading such fictions in order to examine the formal innovations executed by these visions of temporal alterity and futurity. This paper will outline a refunctioning of Ernst Bloch’s category of the “Not Yet” (Noch Nicht) in order to provide a methodological framework that can draw out the distinctly utopian implications that are prevalent in the contemporary British novel. This refunctioning not only reconsiders the relationship between philosophical discourse and narrative imaginaries, but also helps us outline the distinctive structural, thematic and stylistic characteristics shaping an emerging caucus of fictions.

David Cunningham’s review of Jacques Ranciere’s The Politics of Literature, published in the latest issue of Radical Philosophy, is currently up as a freebie on the website. You can read it here: http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/uncategorized/flaubert%e2%80%99s-parrot

ADVENTURES IN NIGHTLIFE: PAUL KHERA
Thursday 3 November 2011, 19.00 – 23.00
AMBIKA P3

EXHIBITION-FILM SCREENING-MUSIC
Presenting the work of Paul Khera in an evening of film, music and photography on the theme of London nightlife.

EXHIBITION
One off prints featuring intimate moments of London nightlife

FILM SCREENING – 8.00 pm
‘Being Continued’, 37mins
Part film-noir, part meditation, a cinematic discourse on the journey of wisdom, there’s greed, violence, kidnapping; love, tranquility and revelation. This is a film that follows the cycle of human comprehension, gathering knowledge, being perplexed by it, testing wisdom with experience, suffering at the hands of greed, expanding and condensing knowledge, and finding peace. The story is part of the folklore of the himalya, it can be applied to society as a whole, or in the case of this film to an individual.

MUSIC:
Late Night tunes by Maxology

Paul Khera has worked across the full spectrum of the visual arts. He started his career taking stills at Channel 4, playing in a band, and designing sleeves for another. Through a chance meeting at college, he started working for the ICA in London, designing posters and catalogues, for amongst others Jake & Dinos Chapman, Lawrence Weiner, William Wegman and Damien Hirst. After the Arts came fashion, a short stint at Elle, and then Vogue. Following that was a period at corporate design heavyweights Ideo, on large-scale projects for P&G in Geneve and Vodaphone in Lisbon. Interspersed were a few projects for the British Council, which took him from Tokyo (an interactive project, describing Britain to the Japanese) to Damascus to Kano (an attempt to foster Muslim Christian tolerance through typography). Lately the projects have mainly been self-motivated, he designed a Hospital in rural India, using only local know-how and vernacular and is currently working on a six year scheme, a hand built retreat in the Himalayas; in which he designed everything from the building to the interior and the furniture… in the meantime he found time to write a book on philosophy and folklore, and a suite of music to go with it. Khera has also been commissioned to follow around the rock band Suede for a year, taking photographs at various gigs from the 100 club to the Royal Albert Hall documenting their return to fame, as well as build up a riveting portfolio of portraits from the nightlife of London.

AMBIKA P3, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS
Entrance free.

http://www.p3exhibitions.com/

http://www.paulkhera.com/

Neurogenesis by Disinformation + Usurp (Signature Version)
Copyright © Joe Banks & Poulomi Desai 24 Oct 2011

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurogenesis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Chtcheglov

Emmanuel Alloa on Visual Studies in Byzantium, David Cunningham on the Metropolis; Willem Flusser on the gesture of photographing, Tom Holert on Bildwissenschaft, Esther Leslie on liquid crystals, Lev Manovich on visualization, Lynda Nead on boxing, Jacques Ranciere on cinema, Nicole Starosielski on transoceanic cables, Janet Wolff on the power of images, Winnie Wong on appropriation in Chinese visual culture.

Forthcoming themed issues include:

In 2012

Ways of Seeing: 40 Years On, with contributors including: Mieke Bal, Jon Bird, Lisa Cartwright, Jill H. Casid, Hazel Clark, Laurie-Beth Clark, Mike Dibb, Jennifer Gonzalez, Dick Hebdige, Richard Hollis, Elizabeth Guffey, S. Heller, Ben Highmore, Martin Jay, Guy Julier, Louis Kaplan, Peter Lunenfeld, Tara McPherson, Marita Sturken, Griselda Pollock, Adrian Rifkin, Vanessa Schwartz, and Ming Wong.

In 2013:

The Archives R Us issue, with contributors including: Raiford Guins, Gary Hall, Chris Horrocks, Tom Holert, Juliette Kristenesen, susan pui san lok, Joanne Morra, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Vivian Rehberg, Marquard Smith, and Nina Lager Vestberg

Brixton Calling!
28 October-21 December 2011, weekdays 10am-5pm
198 Contemporary Arts & Learning, Brixton

This exhibition is the final stage of Brixton Calling! archiving and community project that connects contemporary Brixton to its past through the history of the late Brixton Art Gallery & Artists Collective in the 1980s. Exhibition opening: Thursday 27 October 2011, 6.30-10pm.

UPDATE: Further details on the 198 website here: http://198.org.uk/pages/currentexhibition.htm

Brixton Calling! events at 198 

Saturday 19 November, 2-4pm,  Curators/artists talk
Friday 25 November, 7-9pm, Brixton Fairy Night
Saturday 26 November, 1-5pm, Radical Printing
Saturday 10 December, 2-5pm, Black Art

Other Brixton Calling! events:

’80s Women Lens Based Media Event
Brixton Village, Thursday10 & Friday11 November, 7-12pm, Saturday12 November, 10am–9pm
For more information contact: info@198.org.uk

Women Artists Feminism in the 80s and Now
Goldsmiths, University of London 3rd December, 10am-5pm, in collaboration with the Women’s Art Library
For more information contact: a.greenan@gold.ac.uk

Archive installation by Stefan Szczelkun and Oral History documentary on show continuously along with many other sub-projects!