‘#Citizen Curators’
July 1 – August 27 2013, The Photographers’ Gallery, 16 – 18 Ramillies Street, London W1F 7LW

How does social media transform the way we record, share and ultimately remember major events? #citizencurators is a Twitter project co-directed by our own Peter Ride which documents the way Londoners responded to the Olympics of 2012. It aims to show how the contemporary history of London 2012 could be recorded by the people who experienced it without the filtering of an institution.

In the project, any citizen of London could become a curator using social networking and tweet their responses in words or images with the hashtag #citizencurators. These were then collected and archived by the Museum of London. On the occasion of the first anniversary of the Games, The Photographers’ Gallery presents and reanimates the many photographs and tweets created by #citizencurators.

Further details at: http://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/citizencurators

Four super current and recent MA Visual Culture students have established a new curatorial collective, 4fold , and their first public event is taking place tonight: a film screening beginning at 8pm. The programme will include a selection of artists’ films, documentaries, and archival material that explores social housing, public interaction and surveillance. It’ll takes place at Princess River, Cody Dock (11c South Crescent, London E16 4TL – map here), which is only five minutes walk from Star Lane Station (new DLR branch).

Both 4fold and Cody Dock really need your support, please feel free to attend. In this weather, it’ll be a fantastic evening for sure!

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Alexa Wright’s series A View from the Inside is the featured portfolio on Photo Monitor this month: http://www.photomonitor.co.uk/ – click on the image to get to the portfolio template.

We are delighted to announce the publication of a new book by the IMCC’s Alexa Wright, Monstrosity: The Human Monster in Visual Culture, from I.B. Tauris.

From the ‘Monster of Ravenna’ to the ‘Elephant Man’, Myra Hindley and Ted Bundy, the visualization of ‘real’, human monsters has always played a part in how society sees itself. But what is the function of a monster? Why do we need to embody and represent what is monstrous? This book investigates the appearance of the human monster in Western culture, both historically and in our contemporary society. It argues that images of real (rather than fictional) human monsters help us both to identify and to interrogate what constitutes normality; we construct what is acceptable in humanity by depicting what is not quite acceptable.

There will be a drinks reception to celebrate the launch of Monstrosity on Wednesday 26 June, from 6.30-8.30, in the café at Toynbee Studios, 28 Commercial Street, London E16AB. RSVP to Naomi French at: nfrench@ibtauris.com

Alexa Monstrosity Book Launch Invitation

Alex has also written a new piece for the IB Tauris blog. Read it here: http://theibtaurisblog.com/2013/06/25/facing-evil/

Iron Books: Poems of the Posthuman
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos

Exhibition from July 5 – 31, 2013
The Gasoline Rooms, 300 Clare Street, London E2 9HD

Thirty metal poems that trace, photographically and textually, the posthuman condition. The works originate in instagram, shot and written instantly without editing. They are here transported onto metal books that oscillate between the monumental and the fleeting.

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos is Professor of Law and Theory at the University of Westminster and a member of the Advisory Board of the IMCC.

Thursday 11 July, 7:00-9:00pm
Carroll / Fletcher, 56-57 Eastcastle Street, London W1W 8EQ

Our friends at Carroll / Fletcher, round the corner from our IMCC base, have announced their next reading group, Chapter 4: The Price of Sex, led by artist Lora Hristova on Thursday 11 July.

Chapter 4 leads on from Chapter 3: The Dialectics of Sex, that took radical feminist Shulasmith Firestone’s pioneering 1970’s text as it’s starting point, generating a lively debate led by Stella Sandford. With a focus on what twenty-first century suffragettes would fight for now, Chapter 4 explores the sex industry and sexual politics.

The reading for Chapter 4: The Price of Sex is on Hristova’s Tumblr – www.lorahri-priceofsex.tumblr.com where she asks What is the price of sex? What (and who) are we willing to sacrifice in the name of pleasure? How often is the need for physical release actually a desire for control and is having sex a human right? The discussion aims to navigate the territory of the sex industry; from its everyday reflections in heterosexual life to the heated debate around the legalisation of prostitution and the dark corners of human trafficking.

Lora Hristova’s mixed media practice engages with gendered themes of identity and sexuality, exploring issues of gender inequality and representations of women in contemporary culture in reference to universal experiences of desire and shame, intimacy and anxiety and insecurities surrounding the body. Her recent work has investigated the sex industry, and the cultural, psychological and social impact of pornography. She recently discussed her research in an Artists’ Presentation for the Zabludowicz Invites exhibition.

Tickets £5.00 including refreshments.
To book go to carrollfletcher.eventbrite.com

Thomson & Craighead’s Never Odd Or Even has been chosen as Show of the Week in Time Out, which, in a review awarding the exhibition five stars, remarks that this ‘mini-survey makes a strong case for the duo being two of our most forward-looking and underrated artists’. The show itself has been extended until Saturday 13 July, so there’s still a chance to visit before the gallery takes an extended summer break until the next exhibition in September.

Their first ever survey show, featuring seminal works such as ‘More Songs of Innocence and of Experience’ (2012), and ‘Time Machine in alphabetical order’ (2011), Never Odd or Even also includes a new work that grows day by day: ‘London Wall W1W’ (2013) is the artists’ physical manifestation of Tweets drawn from within a one-mile radius of Carroll / Fletcher, which are then turned into propaganda-style posters and adhered to the gallery wall. Keep up to date with the latest tweets from W1W on @CarrollFletcher and tclondonwall.tumblr.com.

From 7pm on Wednesday 10 July, the artists are repeating the popular tour of the show they gave in June. Bookings can be made at carrollfletcher.eventbrite.com.

Memory and Restitution
Friday 5 July, 9.30-6.30 and Saturday 6 July, 9.30-1.30, 2013,
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

Full programme at: www.memoryandrestitution.co.uk/programme/

Keynotes: Stef Craps (Ghent), Lyndsey Stonebridge (UEA) and Anna Reading (King’s College London)

Panels on: Restitution and Resistance; Landscapes of American Memory; The Natural History of Memory; Transcultural Memory After 9/11; Rethinking Restitution

Following recent attention to the “cosmopolitan” or “multidirectional” dimensions of memory, this colloquium foregrounds commemorative practices as global positioning systems that enable individuals and collectives to situate themselves (temporally and spatially, emotionally and intellectually, politically, and ethically) in relation to others. Interrogating the implicit hierarchies of life encoded in disparate forms of historical reckoning, the colloquium considers whether it is possible to imagine a universal model of restitution, or whether processes of redress are necessarily a product of the cultural and historical context in which they arise.

Organised by: Lucy Bond (Westminster), Rick Crownshaw (Goldsmiths) and Jessica Rapson (Goldsmiths)

Co-sponsored by the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture and Goldsmiths

Admission is free, but please reserve a place: info@memoryandrestitution.co.uk

FORECLOSURE
Brunel University & University of Westminster
1st Joint Researching the Arts/Social Sciences Conference for Research Students

The Pavilion, University of Westminster, 115 New Cavendish Street, London
June 17 & 18, 2013, 10:30-5pm

Keynote: Oren Ben-Dor, University of Southampton
‘Placial [in]justice: reflections on the wounded origin of political affectation’

Please join us at this two-day interdisciplinary conference Foreclosure that aims to bring together law, art and politics.  We understand foreclosure as the art of ordering and securing a common ground for the unfolding of a common experience; the exchange of affects and perspectives; and the performance of bodies and spaces. Art, Law and Politics habitually build walls around their concepts and practices. Foreclosure aims to encourage the exploration of practices and performances of law, art and politics through the prism of their shared operation; the investigation of the juncture between their disciplinary fences; and the unfolding of the fragility of their mechanisms. This is our aim: to dissect, dismantle and improve the operations of art, law and politics in order to locate cracks, produce apertures, and ride the lines of flight where new potentialities are generated.  The conference programme is attached.

Admission is free but places are limited. RSVP at foreclosuresconference@gmail.com

The Mediated City
Two multidisciplinary conferences examining “the city”… a virtual, filmic, social, political and physical construct.

The Mediated City examines the metropolis as a contested concept. It offers a platform for multiple and diverse examinations of the city. It aims to bring together people from diverse backgrounds to fragment, multiply and reconfigure our readings of the city; to offer multiple and conflicting discipline perspectives. The intention is to share views of the city as physical entity, online community, film set, photographic backdrop, geographical map, sociological case study, political metaphor, digital or video game etc.. – to examine it as a mediated and shared phenomenon.

London Conference
April 1-3 2014, Ravensbourne College

Los Angeles Conference
October 2014 (tbc), Woodbury University

London Conference deadlines
15 September 2013: abstracts / initial proposals

Possible Formats:
20 minute presentations
60 minute panel discussions on selected themes
Workshop collaborative sessions
Screenings / Q&As

For full details visit: http://architecturemps.com

An Encounter with Agnes Heller

Tuesday 11^th June, 11am – 7pm
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Organised by our friends in the Centre for the Study of Democracy

10.30-11.00 Registration

11.00-1.00 Roundtable I
Bethania Assey (Rio de Janeiro), Laura Boella (Milan), David Cunningham (Westminster), David Roberts (Monash)

2.30-4.30 Roundtable II
Albena Azmanova (Kent), Steglinde Rosenberger (Vienna), Kate Soper (London Met), Simon Tormey (Sydney)

5.00-6.30 Public Lecture by Agnes Heller
“What went wrong with the religion of Reason?”
Chaired by Chantal Mouffe

This is a free event but registration is required.
Registration link: csdagnesheller.eventbrite.com

E. gemma.jamieson@my.westminster.ac.uk

Walter Benjamin, Pedagogy and the Politics of Youth

Friday 31 May & Saturday 1 June 2013
Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London, W1B 2UW

Friday 31^st May

13.15-14.00 Registration
14.00 –14.30 Welcome
14.30-15.30 Antonia Birnbaum (Paris 8), ‘The Life of Students is a Great Transformer’
16.00-17.00 Howard Caygill (CRMEP), ‘Attunement and Interference:
Benjamin’s Hölderlin Reading’

Saturday 1^st June

09.45-10.30 Registration
10.30-11.30 Milan Jaros (Newcastle), ‘Quo Vadis? Knowing and being in the digital age’
12.00-13.00 Élise Derroitte (Louvain), ‘Chockerlebnis and Education: Learning from Modern Experience’
13.00-14.15 Lunch
14.15-15.15 Mike Neary (Lincoln), ‘Student as Producer’
15.30-17.00 Howard Eiland (MIT), ‘Education as Awakening’, with Response by Peter Osborne (CRMEP)

The conference is free, open to all and there is no need to pre-register. Attendance on each day will be allocated on a “first come, first served” basis: the registration desk will be open on Friday 31st May from 13:15 – 14:00 and on Saturday 1st June from 9:45 – 10:30 and will be located in the main entrance hall to the University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London.

Further details: http://benjaminpedagogy.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/conference-announcement/
Help publicise the conference: http://www.facebook.com/events/339458196165504/

Saturday 8 June, 3pm-5pm
Clore Creative Studio, Whitechapel Gallery, London E1 7QX

The Whitechapel Salon: Between Philosophy and Practice

We are pleased to announce a one-off Whitechapel Salon organised by the IMCC in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery and the Institut Français, London.

From the classroom to the studio, what is the status of philosophy in contemporary art teaching and practice? With guests Elie During, Stewart Martin and Jean-Marie Schaeffer. Hosted by David Cunningham and Marquard Smith (Westminster).

Elie During is Maître de Conférences in the Department of Philosophy at the Université de Paris Ouest – Nanterre La Défense. His publications include La Science et l’Hypothèse: Poincaré (2001), Faux raccords: la coexistence des images (2010), Bergson et Einstein: la querelle du temps (2013), and, in collaboration with Dominique Gonzales-Foerster, Donatien Grau and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Qu’est-ce que le curating? (2011). He is on the editorial board of the journal Critique.

Stewart Martin is Senior Lecturer in Modern European Philosophy, Aesthetics and Art Theory at Middlesex University. He has published widely on Critical Theory, capitalism and philosophy, and contemporary art in journals including Mute, Oxford Art Journal and Third Text. He is a member of the editorial collective of the journal Radical Philosophy.

Jean-Marie Schaeffer is Directeur d’études at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and Directeur de recherche at the Centre International d’Etude de la Philosophie Française Contemporaine. His publications include Petite écologie des études littéraires (2010), La fin de l’exception humaine (2007), Why Fiction? (2011; originally in French, 1999), Art of the Modern Age (2000; French, 1992), and, in collaboration with Nathalie Heinich, Art, création, fiction. Entre philosophie et création (2004).

Tickets £8/6 concessions (£4 Members). Booking is essential.

Book your ticket at: http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/product/category_id/22/product_id/1644?session_id=13694768703e937a4cd471a409be17f1ad7f6d57df

Wednesday 29 May, 2013, 17.00 pm
Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

UK Premieres of Farewell 1999 (25’) and The Dream Never Sets (74’), directed by Wu Wuna
Followed by conversation between Wu Wuna, Professor Harriet Evans and Dr. Kiki Yu

Following up on Farewell 1999 about her mother, The Dream Never Sets is another highly personal documentary from Wu Wuna, this time focusing on her father, who has claimed to be an inventor of note for as long as she can remember. A somewhat lighter, though equally complex offering, the film reviews her difficult relationship with the man who introduced sex toys to Taiwan and who now dreams of marketing the ultimate food blender around the world. The film sees Wu laying bare their often strained father-daughter bond in an effort to understand it herself, matters being made more difficult when she learns that he is seriously ill.

Organised as part of the 2013 Chinese Visual Festival.

The past two decades have witnessed a large increase in academic interest in all visual phenomena, including those strictly visual – from painting and film to experimental video and multimedia installations – as well as all the forms of applied arts: graphic and industrial design, fashion and advertising. In many countries, this interest in visual practice is accompanied by the interest in visual theories, primarily in the new discipline of visual studies that keep acquiring academic legitimacy at universities worldwide.

Visual studies have emerged as a result of parallel expansion that occurred respectively in the fields of art history and film studies, whose radical members have converged particular theories of still and moving images, towards an integral science of images. After W.J.T. Mitchell and Gottfried Boehm have sanctioned the pictorial turn as the basic interest of hyper-mediatized society, it became clear that various visual phenomena demand a much wider theoretical platform, one which would take into consideration the definitive erasure of borders between high and low art, between elite and popular culture, as well as between creators and consumers of visual messages.

For the first time in history, the users of images became the producers of images, within an unrestrained circular process, wherein images yield new insights, while insights demand their instantaneous pictorial foundation. The development and expansion of telecommunication technologies have transformed the traditionally understood technical images into a new communication code that is accessible to everyone. However, does this accessibility simultaneously presume that the new communication code is intelligible to everyone using it? Do we really know what are the images telling us, what do they want from us or what is it that we want from them? Do we know in which manner the most recent researches in technosciences prove, by the way of visualization, their radical tenets on biocybernetic complex systems, and how is the notion of image inscribed into the performative bodies of art and fashion today?

The International Scientific Conference Visual Studies as Academic Discipline aims to gather a wide circle of university oriented theorists, so that they can jointly consider the ways in which they deliberate and teach about images, primarily about their overlapping meanings, that arise through the intermedia networking of various visual practices, as well as through the transdisciplinary analyses of contemporary theories. This symposium wishes to examine the theoretical legitimacy of a wide field of visual representations: art, film, photography, design, fashion and performance. It also wishes to consider the disciplinary status of actual visual studies as an (established) scientific paradigm.

We invite all the concerned colleagues to submit their presentations on one of the proposed subjects:

1. The theoretical and disciplinary status of visual studies – two decades after the pictorial turn
2. Visual studies as a “radical” version of art history or a critical detour?
3. The epistemological aspects of visual studies in university curricula
4. The potentials of the applied science of images: interactions between art, film, design, fashion and performance
5. “Non-disciplinarity” as an approach to the multimedia image of the world
6. Fashion studies today: from the theory of fashion to the design of body

Presentations are limited to 20 minutes. In order to participate at the Conference, please send abstract of your paper (150 words) together with short CV to email: purgar@vizualni-studiji.com and zarko.paic@zg.t-com.hr until 21st of July 2013. The scientific board will notify you of the status of your proposal until 25th of July 2013.

Keynote speaker:

W.J.T. Mitchell, University of Chicago, USA

Plenary speakers:

Michele Cometa, University of Palermo, Italy
Marquard Smith, University of Westminster, London, GB

Members of the workgroup Visual Culture in Europe:

Nina Lager Vestberg, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
Øyvind Vågnes, The Bergen Center for Visual Culture, Norway
Joaquín Barriendos, Columbia University, New York, USA
Ana Maria Guasch, University of Barcelona, Spain
Safet Ahmeti, Center for Visual Studies, Skopje, Macedonia
Max Liljefors, Lund University, Sweden
Almira Ousmanova, European Humanities University, Vilnius, Lithuania

Scientific and organisational board:

Žarko Paić, PhD, Associate Professor, Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb
Krešimir Purgar, PhD, Center for Visual Studies, Zagreb
Sandra Bischof, PhD, Dean of Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb
Katarina Nina Simončič, PhD, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb
Nikola Petković, PhD, Professor, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka
Leonida Kovač, PhD, Assistant Professor, Academy of Fine Arts, University of Zagreb
Suzana Marjanić, PhD, Senior Research Associate, Institute of Ethnology and Folklore, Zagreb
Goran Sergej Pristaš, Associate Professor, Academy of Dramatic Art, University of Zagreb
Silva Kalčić, Lecturer, Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb
Petra Krpan, MSc, Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb
Laura Potrović, MSc, Academy of Dramatic Art, University of Zagreb
Nikola Devčić, Director of the Association “White Wave”, Zagreb

Organizers:

Center for Visual Studies, Zagreb; Tvrđa – Magazine for theory, culture and visual arts; Croatian Writers’ Society; Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb; Association “White Wave”, Zagreb

The Conference will take place at the Faculty of Textile Technology in Zagreb, from 7th to 9th November 2013. Details will be regularly updated on the web site www.visual-studies.com.

The Conference is organized within the activities of the workgroup Visual Culture in Europe, and is the fourth such event, following previous ones held in London (2010), Barcelona (2011) and Trondheim (2012).

The Conference Visual Studies as Academic Discipline is endorsed by The International Association for Visual Culture.

Memory and Restitution
July 5-6 2013, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

Conference website at: http://www.memoryandrestitution.co.uk/

Keynotes:
Professor Stef Craps, University of Ghent
Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge, University of East Anglia
Professor Anna Reading, King’s College London

Following recent attention to the “cosmopolitan” or “multidirectional” dimensions of memory, this colloquium foregrounds commemorative practices as global positioning systems that enable individuals and collectives to situate themselves (temporally and spatially, emotionally and intellectually, politically, and ethically) in relation to others. Having conceptualised memorative processes thus, we seek to investigate the complex relationship between memory and restitution in the aftermath of both human and natural destruction.

Interrogating the implicit hierarchies of life encoded in disparate forms of historical reckoning, the colloquium considers whether it is possible to imagine a universal model of restitution, or whether processes of redress are necessarily a product of the cultural and historical context in which they arise. We ask how memorial discourses contribute to official and unofficial forms of justice through their imbrication with the diverse institutions of the public sphere.  We analyse the ways in which memory may be shaped by the medium of representation and redress, asking whether different types of disaster (environmental, genocidal, terrorist) demand disparate modes of restitution and/or commemoration and articulation.

Organised by: Lucy Bond (Westminster), Rick Crownshaw (Goldsmiths) and Jessica Rapson (Goldsmiths)

Co-sponsored by the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture

For more info, please contact: memoryandrestitution@gmail.com

Walter Benjamin, Pedagogy and the Politics of Youth

Friday 31 May & Saturday 1 June 2013
Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London, W1B 2UW

Provisional programme now announced:

Friday 31^st May

13.15-14.00 Registration

14.00 –14.30 Welcome

14.30-15.30 Antonia Birnbaum (Paris 8), ‘The Life of Students is a Great Transformer’

16.00-17.00 Howard Caygill (CRMEP), ‘Attunement and Interference:
Benjamin’s Hölderlin Reading’

Saturday 1^st June

09.45-10.30 Registration

10.30-11.30 Milan Jaros (Newcastle), ‘Quo Vadis? Knowing and being in the digital age’

12.00-13.00 Élise Derroitte (Louvain), ‘Chockerlebnis and Education: Learning from Modern Experience’

13.00-14.15 Lunch

14.15-15.15 Mike Neary (Lincoln), ‘Student as Producer: a pedagogy of the avant-garde; or, how do revolutionary teachers teach?’

15.30-17.00 Howard Eiland (MIT), ‘Education as Awakening’, with Response by Peter Osborne (CRMEP)

The conference is free, open to all and there is no need to pre-register. Attendance on each day will be allocated on a “first come, first served” basis: the registration desk will be open on Friday 31st May from 13:15 – 14:00 and on Saturday 1st June from 9:45 – 10:30 and will be located in the main entrance hall to the University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London.

Further details: http://benjaminpedagogy.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/conference-announcement/

Help publicise the conference: http://www.facebook.com/events/339458196165504/

Never Odd or Even

Carroll-Fletcher, 56 – 57 Eastcastle St, London W1W 8EQ
May 24 – July 6 2013

This is the first survey exhibition by Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead in the UK, bringing together a range of new and recent works.

Interested in how information about the world is filtered through the prism of the world wide web, and other forms of information technology, Thomson & Craighead play with this data to create poetic, compelling works that ask fundamental questions about what it is to be human.

Encompassing small-scale quotidian encounters, as well as works that point up the smallness of humankind in the vastness of the universe, there is a lyricism and lightness of touch that enables the artists to address major political and social themes from unexpected angles.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication with an essay by David Auerbach. The publication can be purchased from the gallery or via the online shop. The essay can be downloaded here.