Thursday 2nd February 2017, 5.00 – 6.30 pm
Room 351, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London

The Return of the Art and Tech Lab: Transdiciplinary Gravy or Neoliberal Grey Goo?
John Beck (IMCC)

Kicking off the new series of Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities Cross-Disciplinary Research Seminars at Westminster is our own John Beck, Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, discussing the perils of transdiscplinarity. With a response from Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos.

Future seminars (same place and time) will run weekly as follows:

February 9th: Andrew Linn, “19thC Mass Migration and 21stC Technology”, with respondent Dan Conway

February 16th: Matt Fluck, “Transparency in International Relations, Law and Politics”, with respondent Eleni Frantziou

February 23rd: Danilo Mandic, “When Concepts Become Norm: Copyright Law Through Conceptual Art”, with respondent Kaja Marczewska

March 16th: Ludivine Broch, “The History of Objects in Post-War France”, with respondent Debra Kelly

Thomson and Craighead are currently on show at the Young Projects gallery in Los Angeles with the exhibition Wake Me Up When It’s Over. The exhibition will feature nearly a dozen works spanning the years 1996-2016, thereby presenting an in-depth look into the couple’s practice and methodologies.

For the better part of the past two decades Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead have been “digging deep,” as curator Marc Garrett once described their practice, “into the algorithmic phenomena of our networked society; its conditions and protocols (architecture of the Internet) and the non-ending terror of the spectacle as a mediated life.” In the process they’ve employed web cams, data feeds, networks, movies, images, sound and text in their many installations, videos and art-objects–often with a wide array of art-historical reference points, including 1960s systems art, 1970s structuralist film-making, and the compositional experiments of the literature group, Oulipo.

Works featured in the exhibition include: A Short Film about War (2009/2010); Apocalypse (2016); Belief (2012); Common Era (2016); Flipped Clock (2009); Help Yourself (2016); Television Fan (1996); The Time Machine in Alphabetical Order (2010); Trooper (1998); Untitled (Balloon Work) (2016).

More details here.

Wednesday 25th January, 5.00 – 7.00
Room 206, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T

“Literature on Credit: The French Novel Today”
Emmanuel Bouju (Université de Rennes 2)

For the past twenty years, French literature has lived on credit, or, rather, on the credit of the last century. Placed at the heart of a crisis of trust in public speech, in democracy (which is still undergoing a state of emergency), and in social economics, it now has decreased in fiduciary value. Nevertheless this talk will plead for a new strength and a new authority for the French novel: a strength and an authority that are related to a gradual shift from “the indiciary paradigm” to the “fiduciary paradigm”.

Emmanuel Bouju is currently Professor of Comparative Literature at the Université de Rennes 2 and Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He has also been a Visiting Professor at Harvard University in 2012, 2014 and 2015. He is the director of the “Groupe phi”, a research group dedicated to historical and comparative poetics. He is also an editor for the Classiques Garnier (Coll. “Littérature, Histoire, Politique”) and for the Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Professor Bouju’s publications include Réinventer la littérature : démocratisation et modèles romanesques dans l’Espagne post-franquiste (with a préface by Jorge Semprún, 2002), La transcription de l’histoire. Essai sur le roman européen de la fin du vingtième siècle (2006) and Fragments d’un discours théorique (2015).

Thursday 26 January 2017, 4-6pm
University of Westminster, The Boardroom, 309 Regent Street

DIY: Start Your Own Journal, Press, or University
Workshop led by Professor Craig Saper (University of Maryland Baltimore County)

Looking at a series of experiments in publishing scholarship, this workshop asks participants to propose venues and modes of presentation appropriate to the scholarly questions they seek to ask.

Based on Craig Saper’s research on Intimate Bureaucracies and on his co-founding Electric Press and Textshop Experiments, founding Roving Eye Press, and starting experimental venues for emerging forms of knowledge, like the online reading machine that simulates a modernist project from 1929, as well as participating in others’ experiments in publishing including Punctum Books and the media-making journal HyperRhiz, this workshop asks participants to propose venues and modes of presentation appropriate to the scholarly questions they seek to ask and invites us to consider publishing as scholarship and not merely a conduit for research.

Admission is free, but please register here