SCREAM HOWL SPEAK!
Kusum Normoyle, Alan Tomlinson, Steve Beresford + Disinformation
Live at Usurp, Tues 8 Nov 2011, 7pm sharp
Usurp Gallery, 140 Vaughan Road, London HA1 4EB

What is the connection between the works of French burglar and prostitute Jean Genet and of the 19th century Swiss crystallographer Louis Albert Necker? As an articulation of Jean Paul Sartre’s discourse on Genet’s embodiment of “the negative”, Disinformation remixes audio samples from the final interview with one of modern France’s most notorious writers, exploring perceptual ambiguities which link experiences of auditory and visual illusions.

Alan Tomlinson is a trombonist “who manages to be simultaneously the best & the funniest you have ever seen”. Alan was a long time member of Barry Guy’s London Jazz Composers Orchestra, has his own trio with Dave Tucker and Phil Marks, a trio in Berlin, and a duo with Romanian poet Virgil Mihaiu. Recent solos have been with a glass trombone, accompanying a fish & chip van and in the River Seven.

Kusum Normoyle works with extended vocal technique and noise for both performance and installation. Central to her practice is the idea of public space, intervention, and the displacement of normal expectations of the female body and voice, performing brief high-intensity vocal incursions which are extremely physical, dragging the audience into a hard, fast displays of screaming, amplification and feedback.

Internationally known as a superb free improviser on piano and electronics, Steve Beresford also composes scores for feature films and numerous TV shows and commercials. Steve has worked with hundreds of musicians, including Christian Marclay, Derek Bailey, Han Bennink, Ivor Cutler, Ray Davies, Najma Akhtar, Evan Parker, Adrian Sherwood, Otomo Yoshihide and John Zorn.

Further info at: http://www.usurp.org.uk/events/scream_howl_speak/

See: http://instituteformodern.co.uk/2011/neurogenesis-by-disinformation-usurp-signature-version

A quick plug for a superb blog by IMCC affiliate Emma McEvoy, about late eighteenth-century gothic music and performance, on Stirling’s The Gothic Imagination site. As Glennis Byron puts it in the Comments: ‘The post, is, people, pretty amazing … As we plod along, talking about Twilight and True Blood and Zombies and all that ephemeral rubbish, and repeating the same old points about gothic over and over and over and over, some people are actually doing real research’. Read it here.

IMAGE=GESTURE
The 2011 Nomadikon Conference
Bergen, November 9-11, 2011

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Martin Jay (UC Berkeley)
Wendy Steiner (University of Pennsylvania)
Libby Saxton (University of London)
More TBA.

Images seduce. Images deceive. Images conceal. Images reveal. Images make icons. Images break icons. Images are agents of political struggle. Images are sacred. Images are secular. Images are powerful. Images are powerless. Images are banal objects. Images are aesthetic artefacts. Images embody cultural concepts materially. Images create concepts. Images are bodies without organs. Images are photographic. Images are cinematic. Images are digital. Images are real. Images are reality. Images are mimetic. Images are amimetic. Images are currency. Images are worthless. Images want something from us. Images witness. Images haunt us. Images are fundamentally unknowable. Images are entelechial. Images travel. Images are boundless. Images are transmutable. Images are ephemeral. Images are excessive. Images are inadequate. Images are mute. Images are language. Images are beyond language. Images disturb us. Images hurt us. Images are destructive. Images are redemptive. Images are transcendental. Images are transparent. Images are opaque. Images are worth more than a thousand words. Images are primitive. Images are historical. Images are poetic. Images are synechdochic. Images are rhetorical. Images shape the imaginary. Images are neural. Images are neutral. Images are ubiquitous. Images are haptic. Images are spiritual. Images are matter. Images matter. IMAGE=GESTURE.

Nomadikon now invites paper proposals that relate to the overall conference topic and to one or more of the streams below. Abstracts should not exceed 400 words. Please include a short bio. Deadline for submitting abstracts: November 10, 2010. Nomadikon also intends to publish one or more anthologies of articles based on material from the conference.

As a critical and heuristic trope, the gestural galvanizes many of the most pertinent areas of inquiry in contemporary debates and scholarship in visual culture and related disciplines:

a) Ethics: Images and their values and affects.
b) Ecology: Iconoclastic gestures and spaces of conflict.
c) Experience: The human as acts of mediation/product of the gaze.
d) Epistemology: Archive, document, memory.
e) Esthetics: From visual essentialism to transesthetics and synesthesia.

As both a cultural phenomenon and a philosophical concept, the notion of gesture straddles several disciplines, such as anthropology, linguistics, performance, theater, film and visual studies. At once a codified and natural expression, the gestural is peculiarly and somewhat ambiguously situated between the realm of the discursive and the realm of the instinctual, between the culture-specific and the universal, and between the corporeal and the visual. As a mode of mediation the gestural also traverses the distinct, albeit interrelated spheres of the political, the aesthetic and the everyday. A space of visual articulation in which rhetoric and semiotics intersect, the gestural produces movements and energies of eloquence capable of generating ideas, perceptions and affect.

Within the context of the present event, we would like to suggest that gesture could also rewardingly be re-deployed as a metaphorical and figurative concept. As among others Hans Belting has shown, there is a rather intimate connection between bodies and images, and if bodies can convey gestures, maybe images can too. Thus, we would like to ask: How may one speak not only of the gestures of the body but also of the gestures of the image? What constitutes gesturality in the image and, more broadly, what are the gestures of the aesthetic itself? In W.J.T. Mitchell’s already canonical postulation, pictures must be considered animated beings with drives, demands and desires of their own. They are, however, also in a sense mute beings incapable of speaking the hegemonic vernacular of logocentric discourses. But while pictures cannot speak in the literal sense, perhaps they have a gestural language of their own?

Job_Description_Programme_Coordinator

Theatre for a Young Audience in the UK

Karian Schuitema, a PhD student at Westminster, has organised a one-day conference to be held at the University on Friday 16th July. 

Keynote Speakers:
Wolfgang Schneider (University of Hildesheim, Germany. ASSITEJ President)
Matthew Reason (York St John University)
Jeanne Pigeon and Roger Deldime (Université Libre De Bruxelles. Founder of Centre de sociologie du théâtre and founders of Théâtre La Montagne Magique)

 Further details, including full programme on Karian’s website here.

The Whitechapel Salon: Matter Matters II: Performance Matters
Thursday 1^st July, 7pm
Study Studio, Whitechapel Gallery, London E1 7QX

Spanning art, architecture, performance and sustainability, this year’s series of four Salon discussions focus on the matter of ‘matter’ – its nature, substance and the productive forces that govern it. For July Gavin Butt (Goldsmiths College, London), Adrian Heathfield (Roehampton University), and Lois Keidan (Director, Live Art Development Agency) consider Performance Matters.

Co-organised by the IMCC and Whitechapel Gallery. Book now to avoid disappointment!

Tickets: £8/£6 (includes free glass of wine)

http://www.whitechapelgallery.org