Alexa Wright at Digital Aesthetic, Oct 5-6

Alexa Wright is taking part in Digital Aesthetic³ 2012, an international exhibition and conference which explores the impact that the digital has on our sense of self and our relationship to the physical world. The exhibition is housed in the Harris Museum & Art Gallery, and the University of Central Lancashire’s PR1 Gallery in Preston. It demonstrates some of the diverse ways that artists are utilising digital technology, including projection, digital print, 3d work, screen based video work, touch panel installation, and a live interactive website. The conference takes place over Friday Oct 5^th and Saturday Oct 6^th. In a great line up, other participants include Mark Amerika, Sean Cubitt and Sophie Calle.

Further details at: http://digitalaesthetic.org.uk/

English Literature and Culture Research Seminars Oct-Nov 2012

Advance news of the next series of English Literature and Culture research seminars taking place in the first semester this year.

Seminars are fortnightly on Wednesday afternoons, from 4pm to around 5.30pm, and will be held in room 106 in the University’s Wells Street building.

Wednesday 17^th October
Christopher Daley (University of Westminster)
‘Too Many Machines’: British Science Fiction Film and Television of the 1950s

Wednesday 31^st October
Zara Dinnen (Birkbeck College)
Did we Miss it? The Legacy of Cyberculture in Contemporary Representations of Digital Technology

Wednesday 14^th November
Bianca Leggett (Birkbeck College)
Englishness Elsewhere: Considering Cosmopolitanism in the English Travel Novel

Wednesday 28^th November
Martin Eve (University of Sussex)
‘Opening children’s eyes’: Pynchon, Bolano, Overloaded Forms and the Didactic Function

The Institute welcomes three new members

The Institute is delighted to welcome three new members who are joining the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies this academic year.

Georgina Colby joins us as a Lecturer in Contemporary Literature. She is the author of Bret Easton Ellis: Underwriting the Contemporary (Palgrave), and is currently working on a second book on the author Kathy Acker. She has also published widely on the intersections of literary practice and visual culture in contemporary US art, and is presently organising a major series of events to be held in London on ‘Death and the Contemporary’.

Lucy Bond is joining us as post-doctoral research and teaching fellow. Her PhD at Goldsmiths focused on the commemoration of 9/11 in the American public sphere, looking particularly at memorial practices embodied in literature and material culture, and at the ways in which a reification of the discourse surrounding the attacks has limited the production of a successful counter-narrative able to critique the attacks’ appropriation and manipulation by the institutions and individuals of the wider hegemonic sphere.

Matt Charles is also joining us as post-doctoral research and teaching fellow. Matt’s PhD thesis was completed at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, now based at Kingston University, titled ‘Speculative Experience and History: Walter Benjamin’s Goethean Kantianism’. He is also a member of the editorial collective of the journal Radical Philosophy. Matt’s current research concerns theories of mass education, and the recent pedagogical turn in theory, and he will be organising a major conference on Walter Benjamin’s pedagogic materialism at Westminster later next year.

New Journal Launch: Architecture_Media_Politics_Society

ARCHITECTURE_MEDIA_POLITICS_SOCIETY is a new on-line, fully peer reviewed academic journal.

The journal is a forum for the analysis of architecture in the mediated environment of contemporary culture. It seeks to expand an understanding of architecture and its relationship with media, politics and society in its broadest sense. One international paper is published each month that deals with an issue or theme relevant to the journal. Dual language publications are encouraged. Selected authors are also invited to submit articles for a printed version of the journal.

Currently, the journal forum operates as a platform for a research project entitled Architecture as Political Image; an investigation into the use of architecture in political campaign imagery in the United States and the United Kingdom. It is run in affiliation with Ravensbourne (University College), London, and Florida State University, Tallahassee.

ISSN 2050-9006 For details about submissions visit the web site: www.architecturemps.com

UPDATE: The second volume of issue one has just been published entitled Mythopoetics of the Kunsthalle. The issue contains an article arguing for a major reconsideration of the architectural profession that uses the notion of the Kunsthalle as its theoretical framework. The author, Manuel Schartzberg, is an architect and tutor currently working in the US. Previously, he worked for David Chipperfield Architects in the UK and his paper is partly based on his time there. You can read it at the web site: www.architecturemps.com

Rorschach Audio talks

Joe Banks, former AHRC Research Fellow at the Institute, is out and about over the next month or so, promoting his Rorscach Audio project. The Times Literary Supplement has reviewed the “Rorschach Audio” book as “engaging… packed with interest” (TLS 5707, page 30), the project’s research archive is also on-line, and talks are now confirmed for The ICA, London, 15 Sept 2012 (as part of the closing events for Bruce Nauman’s exhibition “Days”) and at the Liverpool Biennial, 6 Oct 2012, organised by Mercy.

Reception Invitation: JVC’s ‘Ways of Seeing 40th Anniversary Issue’, 8th September at King’s College, University of London‏

Please come along, we will be hosting a reception to celebrate the publication of Journal of Visual Culture’s ‘The Ways of Seeing 40th Anniversary Issue’, published this month. Join us on Saturday 8th September from 4:00-5:00 at King’s College, University of London to raise a glass (or two). The launch coincides with the three-day ‘Ways of Seeing John Berger’ conference organized by King’s and the British Library. You can find details of the venue for the Reception, and the conference more generally here: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/ahri/centres/lifewriting/berger/index.aspx

Edited by Raiford Guins, Juliette Kristensen, and susan pui san lok, our ‘Ways of Seeing 40th Anniversary Issue’ includes contributions from: Mieke Bal, Geoffrey Batchen, Sonia Boyce, Alan Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Lisa Cartwright, Jill H. Casid, Laurie Beth Clark, Mike Dibb, Clive Dilnot, Jennifer A. González, Raiford Guins, Ben Highmore, Richard Hollis, Martin Jay, Guy Julier, Louis Kaplan, Juliette Kristensen, susan pui san lok, Peter Lunenfeld, Tara McPherson, Tom Overton, Griselda Pollock, Adrian Rifkin, Julian Stallabrass, Marita Sturken, John Timberlake, and Ming Wong. Further details can be found here: http://vcu.sagepub.com/content/current

Lao She in London out now!

We’re delighted to announce the publication of Anne Witchard’s new monograph from Hong Kong University Press, Lao She in London. Focusing on one of China’s great modern writers, the book contributes to the rethinking of modernism as an event outside the boundaries of a single language, a single historical moment, or a single national formation.

“A beautifully written book that combines literary biography with a remarkably succinct account of British modernism and an evocative portrait of interbellum London, as viewed through Chinese eyes. Anne Witchard reminds us eloquently of the key role played by Chinese influences—both classical and modern—in literary modernism, and makes a great contribution to our understanding of Lao She’s London years.” — Julia Lovell, Birkbeck College, University of London

Details at: www.hkupress.org/book/9789888139606.htm

August 2012  188 pp.  14 b/w illus.
Paperback ISBN 978-988-8139-60-6

Thomson & Craighead shortisted for Jarman Award

We’re excited to announce that Thomson and Craighead been shortlisted for this year’s Jarman Award amid a fantastic group of artists. You can find more info on the shortlist here: http://flamin.filmlondon.org.uk/projects/projectscurrent/jarmanaward/jarman_award_12

In other news, Thomson and Craighead are premiering their series of karaoke videos as part of the Film & Video Umbrella exhibition, ‘Our Mutual Friends’ launching online and for an event at Jerwood Space, London on 30th August 2012. The videos take a fresh look at unsolicited spam emails and their affinities with notions of romanticism and realism. You can view online versions of the videos here: http://www.youtube.com/user/songsofinnocence100

The duo have also been commissioned to make a new installation for this year’s Brighton Photo-biennial: a documentary artwork that looks at the burgeoning Occupy movement and its explosion worldwide during October 2011. The recent documentary artwork, ‘Belief’ is streaming online as a single screen work at Animate Projects alongside an interview and an essay by Morgan Quaintance.  Finally, ‘The Time Machine in alphabetical order’ is showing as part of ‘Trans Adriatic Grey Area’ exhibition at LAMPO in Italy. The exhibition is curated by Darko Fritz for Lampo Net & Contemporary art Exhibition, D’Annunzio Room, Aurum, Pescara from August 25th – September 24th 2012.

Reminder:China in Britain #3: Theatre & Performance

China in Britain: Myths and Realities
Theatre/Performance and Music

July 18^th 2012, 9:45am – 5:30pm
The Old Cinema, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

You are warmly invited to the third in this University of Westminster/AHRC funded series. The day will present an eclectic programme with presentations from actors and broadcasters and academics. Dongshin Chang (City University of New York), Diana Yeh (Birkbeck College and University of East London), Simon Sladen (University of Winchester) and Ashley Thorpe (University of Reading) will present research that restores the history of China and Chineseness to the English stage, from Regency Extravaganzas, such as Chinese Sorcerer to chinoiserie theatre in the 1930s and Lady Precious Stream. We will look at subversive pantomime in Thatcher’s Britain, Poppy, and more recently Anna Chen’s Steampunk Opium Wars and Damon Albarn’s opera Monkey: Journey to the West.

The UK’s most high profile British Chinese actor, David Yip, remembered by many for his role as Detective Sergeant John Ho in The Chinese Detective will be talking about his new multimedia show Gold Mountain. There will be performances from comedienne, poet and political pundit, Anna Chen (aka Madame Miaow), actor David Lee-Jones, currently the lead in Richard III – the first British Chinese actor to be cast as one of Shakespeare’s English Kings – and Resonance Radio’s Lucky Cat DJ, Zoe Baxter, playing Korean Punk, Chinese Hip Hop and Reggae, Japanese Ska, Thai Country, and Singapore 60’s pop.

Entrance – including lunch and refreshments – is free of charge so for catering purposes it is essential to book your place by emailing: anne@translatingchina.info

La Ronde: A Circular Conversation on Love

Sunday, 22 July 2012, 2:30-5pm

La Ronde: A Circular Conversation on Love
Carroll/Fletcher Gallery, 56-57 Eastcastle Street, London W1W 8EQ

Speakers: John Douglas Millar, Leon Redler, Stella Sandford, Hilary Koob-Sassen, and Sarah Turner.

A quick plug for an excellent-looking Sunday afternoon organised by our friends and neighbours at the Carroll/Fletcher Gallery. In an era of political, financial and environmental uncertainty, it seems vital to give time and focus to the subject of love. Inspired by the structure of Arthur Schnitzler’s play of 1897, La Ronde, this roundtable conversation will consist of a circular series of one-to-one exchanges. Each conversation will begin with a question that includes the word ‘love’ with the answer taking the form of a conversation. Twenty minutes will be allotted to each pairing, with an extra ten minutes for audience questions. While the original La Ronde explored the sexual mores of fin-de-siècle Vienna, we anticipate that our version will consider love in its many guises and from diverse perspectives.

Refreshments provided during breaks
£5, booking essential as places are limited: carrollfletcher.eventbrite.co.uk

More details at: www.carrollfletcher.com

#Citizencurators: collaboration with Museum of London

#Citizencurators is a history project that will record the experience of Londoners during the Olympic fortnight. Created for the Museum of London, #Citizencurators will collect tweets, moments and images using social networking to tell the story of everyday life in the capital. Directed by the IMCC’s Peter Ride and the Museum of London’s Hilary Young, with a project team made up of students from the MA Museums, Galleries and Contemporary Culture at Westminster, the aim is to investigate how new media/ social networking can provide alternative approaches to supplement contemporary collecting. As action research project, it is also designed to result in knowledge that can assist the Museum in the collection and management of ‘born digital’ material.

#Citizencurators explores what it is like to live in London during the Olympic fortnight (27 July – 12 August). The established narrative of the Olympics is focused on the experience of the athletes, participants, employees and tourists. However a larger part of the Olympic experience in London is not being articulated. This is the daily experience residents whose lives are inevitably caught up in the Olympics but who are ‘bystanders’. What will the Olympics mean to the single mum with a young family in Stratford, the work commuter who uses the Jubilee line, the resident in an apartment block partially occupied by the army, the young club-goer intending to enjoy a summer of fun, the foreign student or to the Starbucks barista? Will the Olympic experience unfold as community-strengthening activity or a headache of disruptions and an overflow of tourists?

To take part, simply tweet like you normally do and use the #citizencurators hashtag. Ultimately by following typical tweeters the team want to collect streams that document peoples’ lives in London during the Games in a way that reflects the normal use of social media, not something out of the ordinary.

For further details, see: http://citizencurators.com/

Design Diplomacy seminars

Two very interesting panel discussions taking place this week, as part of the Design Diplomacy series associated with the International Architecture and Design Showcase in Westminster’s P3 gallery at Marylebone.

Expanded Territories
Thursday 5th July, 2.00–4.00pm

This colloquium invites the audience to engage in a gallery talk and dialogue with participants of the Ambika P3 International Architecture and Design Showcase around questions of architecture’s role in (de)colonization, social (re)construction, national identity formation, human development and global (dis)integration in their countries. Participants include: Phillip Luell, Zahira Asmal, Bryan Bullen, John Allsop and Kevin Talma

Post-Colonial Legacies: South Africa and Namibia
Friday 6th July, 6.00–8.00pm

This panel discussion will exchange knowledge, ideas and experience about the agency of design (urban, architectural, industrial, fashion, graphic) in transforming life in cities in Namibia and South Africa since the end of apartheid. These will include questions of design’s agency in overcoming socio-spatial legacies of the past; design’s complicity in the recolonisation of cities by neo-liberal and market forces; the impact of mega events on host cities and priorities for design education to meet contemporary challenges. Panelists include: Marion Wallace, Guilermo Delgado, Diana Mitlin, Zahira Asmal, Yvette Gresle, Lesley Lokko and Philip Luehl.

For further details go to: http://designdiplomacy.blogspot.co.uk/

Nuclear Criticism

Great piece by Chris Daley in the new online journal Alluvium about nuclear criticism. Here’s the first paragraph:

In 1984, the journal Diacritics set out to define what it labelled as the developing academic terrain of ‘nuclear criticism’. The opening section of the journal entitled ‘Proposal for a Diacritics Colloquium on Nuclear Criticism’ established that ‘critical theory ought to be making a more important contribution to the public discussion of nuclear issues’ and proceeded to list a series of nuclear themes that required immediate consideration. Among these were an examination of the nuclear arms race and the ‘dialectic of mimetic rivalry’ it provoked, ‘the power of horror’ and most pertinently ‘the representation of nuclear war in the media as well as in the literary canon’. This last topic was all the more powerful for a mid-eighties audience as the early years of the decade had seen a re-emergence of nuclear anxieties that were reminiscent of the fears twenty years earlier during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and his subsequent verbal assaults on the ‘evil empire’ of the Soviet Union, energised the ferocious ideological divide between the two superpowers that had ebbed and flowed in intensity throughout the Cold War. Meanwhile, in both the United States and Britain a variety of cultural and media productions speculated on the consequences of such intense political rhetoric. While these texts were predominantly non-canonical and therefore often overlooked by the nuclear critics, they nonetheless question and evaluate the purpose of the nuclear referent in the political power struggle of the Cold War.

Read further at: http://www.alluvium-journal.org/2012/07/01/nuclear-criticism/

Anne Witchard on Making History

A chance to listen to our own Anne Witchard on BBC Radio 4’s popular history programme Making History in which listener’s questions and research help offer new insights into the past. Anne talks to Tom Holland about how the Victorians disapproved of the ballet, how some artists and poets became infatuated with it, and how London street-dancing may well have influenced the Parisian ‘Can-Can’. First broadcast on June 12 2012. Listen to the podcast here.

Welcome to our new Junior Visiting Research Fellow: Yuthika Sharma

It’s with pleasure that we welcome our new Junior Visiting Research Fellow, Yuthika Sharma, who will be hosted by the Institute from 25th June until 25th October 2012. Yuthika is finishing her PhD on the visual culture of Mughal and British Delhi, India between 1750-1857, at the Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University, New York. She is co-curator and co-editor, with William Dalrymple, of Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707-1857 Asia Society, New York, February 6 -May 7, 2012 (Yale University Press, 2012). While resident at the Institute, Yuthika is writing about the historical transition from painting into photography in Victorian Delhi, and on contemporary ‘Mughal’ paintings by marginalized artist guilds in present-day north India.

Reminder: Soho Poly Theatre Festival begins

Soho Poly Theatre Festival
40th anniversary celebrations
19-21 June, 2012

A reminder that the Soho Poly Festival opens tonight, with a short talk by Fred Proud (the first ever artistic director of the theatre) then Robert Holman introducing his short play ‘Coal’. A short and sweet evening all round – plus you get to see our amazing reclaimed space!

For details of further events this week, go to: sohopolyfestival.blogspot.com

Alan Moore and the Gothic seminar

Saturday 30^th June, 2-4pm
Room 261, 2^nd Floor, Institute of English Studies, Senate House

Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition

Our own Monica Germanà is one of the speakers at a special Contemporary Fiction Research Seminar to launch the anthology Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition (Manchester University Press, 2012), edited by Dr. Matthew J.A. Green.  All welcome.  Other speakers include Tony Venezia (Birkbeck) and Maggie Gray (Middlesex)

China in Britain #3. Theatre and Music, July 18th

China in Britain: Myths and Realities
Theatre/Performance and Music

July 18^th 2012, 9:45am – 5:30pm
The Old Cinema, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

You are warmly invited to the third in this University of Westminster/AHRC funded series. The day will present an eclectic programme with presentations from actors and broadcasters and academics. Dongshin Chang (City University of New York), Diana Yeh (Birkbeck College and University of East London), Simon Sladen (University of Winchester) and Ashley Thorpe (University of Reading) will present research that restores the history of China and Chineseness to the English stage, from Regency Extravaganzas, such as Chinese Sorcerer to chinoiserie theatre in the 1930s and Lady Precious Stream. We will look at subversive pantomime in Thatcher’s Britain, Poppy, and more recently Anna Chen’s Steampunk Opium Wars and Damon Albarn’s opera Monkey: Journey to the West.

The UK’s most high profile British Chinese actor, David Yip, remembered by many for his role as Detective Sergeant John Ho in The Chinese Detective will be talking about his new multimedia show Gold Mountain. There will be performances from comedienne, poet and political pundit, Anna Chen (aka Madame Miaow), actor David Lee-Jones, currently the lead in Richard III – the first British Chinese actor to be cast as one of Shakespeare’s English Kings – and Resonance Radio’s Lucky Cat DJ, Zoe Baxter, playing Korean Punk, Chinese Hip Hop and Reggae, Japanese Ska, Thai Country, and Singapore 60’s pop.

Entrance – including lunch and refreshments – is free of charge so for catering purposes it is essential to book your place by emailing: anne@translatingchina.info

Reminder: Thomas Levin on surveillance, June 6th

Wednesday 6^th June 2012, 4pm
Room 358, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Professor Thomas Y. Levin
Princeton University / IKKM Bauhaus University, Weimar

“Ghostly Surveillance: Some Stabs in the Ciné-Narratological Dark”

Simultaneous with the increasingly widespread use of surveillance as a narrative device in contemporary cinema – its most obvious manifestation being the rise of so-called “real-time” transmission characteristic of CCTV systems in films such as The Truman Show — we are also witnessing a curious proliferation of ghosts within the surveillant machinery, from disturbing videocasettes desposited mysteriously on doorsteps (Lost Highway, Caché) to the re-appearance of people who are supposedly dead on the screens of corporate security systems (Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet [2000]) and the documentation of the presence of demons by means of home surveillance cameras (Paranormal Activity).  While it could be argued that at least since Bentham, there has always been a ghostly dimension to surveillance (the panoptic tower functions despite the complete inability to determine whether anyone is actually really inside), what might these ghostly apparitions reveal about the assumptions we make about surveillance images, indeed about cinema as such?

Thomas Y. Levin teaches media theory and history, cultural theory, intellectual history, and aesthetics. His essays have appeared in October, Grey Room, New German Critique, Screen, The Yale Journal of Criticism, and Texte zur Kunst. He translated and edited the critical edition of Siegfried Kracauer’s The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (1995). He was part of the curatorial collective responsible for the first exhibition on the Situationist International at the Centre Pompidou, ICA London and the ICA Boston in 1989. Levin also conceived and curated the exhibition CTRL [SPACE], Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother which opened at at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe in October 2001 and edited the catalogue under the same title (with Ursula Frohne and Peter Weibel). His more recent curatorial activities include Anxious Omniscience: Surveillance and Contemporary Cultural Practice (Princeton University Art Museum, 2002), 911+1: The Perplexities of Security (Watson Institute, Brown University, 2002) and The Arts of the Future will be Radical Transformations of Situations, or They will be Nothing’: Guy Debord Cineaste (Slought Foundation, Philadelphia, 2006).

Open Call: Delfina Foundation, Videobrasil and Casa Tomada

Our friends at the Associação Cultural Videobrasil in partnership with Delfina Foundation and Casa Tomada (São Paulo, Brazil) are pleased to invite applications from visual artists living and working in Brazil and the Middle East, North Africa & South Asia (MENASA) for a three-month artistic residency split between São Paulo and London. The Videobrasil em Contexto Prize (Videobrasil in Context) is focused on artists, under the age of 35, whose practice involves a strong element of research and production. Two artists (one from Brazil and another from MENASA) will be selected to undertake the three-month residencies from mid-September 2012 and produce a new works in response to Videobrasil’s Collection.

The Collection available for each artist are the works that have been part of the Southern Panoramas show each year since 1990, when Videobrasil focused on the geopolitical South.  An overview of this 20+ year selection is available for the applicants at:  www.videobrasil.org.br/vbonline During the residencies, various public platforms will be created for the artists in São Paulo and London.  At the end of the residency, the artists will be asked to prepare a presentation of their projects to be part of the activities of the 30th Anniversary of the International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil in October 2013.

– Deadline for applications: 8th June 2012
– Artists shortlisted: June 15th, 2012
– Interviews with shortlisted artists through Skype: June 20th to July 22nd, 2012
– Announcement of Selection: 2nd July, 2012
– Program Length: September 17th – December 29th, 2012
[São Paulo: September 17th – October 29th, 2012; London: October 29th – December 17th, 2012]

For more information on the programme and selection process, please download an application form here in English.