Saturday 28 November 2020, 9.30am – 1pm

Photography Beyond the Image

IMPORTANT NOTICE: The symposium, Photography Beyond the Image, which was re-scheduled online for this November, engendered some critical responses concerning the line-up of the event. Committed as we are to creating a public engagement programme based on equality, diversity, and inclusion, and appreciating that the online move of an originally UK-based event, cancelled because of COVID-19, should have been an opportunity to diversify the panels further, the decision has been made to suspend the event to consider this and are working towards developing a differently structured symposium on the topic of photographic studies beyond the visual image in the future. Apologies to those who had already booked for the event.

Recent years have seen photographic studies move beyond the analysis of the visual product. From a focus on photographs as the privileged points of access for studying photography, thus supporting a predominant understanding of the medium as a representational tool, the field is today embracing a more holistic approach. This has brought photography into a much needed interdisciplinary and intermedial analytical environment, and alerted us to the social, cultural and commercial entanglements that shape and are shaped by photographic practices.

This one-day symposium seeks to examine these intellectual trends by reflecting on their postulates, methodologies and future directions.

The event, which is free, will take place on Zoom. The Zoom link will be emailed out to everyone who has reserved a ticket on Saturday 21 November, together with a link to access the pre-recorded contributions.

12 October 2019-25 January 2020
Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre, Moss Street, Bury BL9 0DR

The North West Art School Record Machine

Part of this year’s annual Design Manchester festival, The North West Art School Record Machine has been developed out of John Beck and Matthew Cornford’s 2018-19 survey of the region’s art school buildings (exhibited at Bluecoat in Liverpool). The often grand nineteenth century art schools were intended to train workers for local industry, but after the Second World War they also served to incubate the generations of musicians and designers responsible for transforming British popular culture. The art school became, among other things, a record machine.

For this new exhibition, photographs of some of the region’s most distinctive art schools are accompanied by a display of over 100 record sleeves, selected by Bluecoat’s Artistic Director Bryan Biggs, that represent work produced by designers and musicians who all, in one capacity or another, emerged from the art schools of the North West. To complete the exhibition, the Record Machine also presents a display of unique mock-ups and material from renowned North West-trained designers Malcolm Garrett and Swifty.

Forthcoming gallery talks:

Saturday 16 November 2-4pm: John Beck and Matthew Cornford
Introduction to The North West Art School Record Machine

Wednesday 20 November 7-9pm: Bryan Biggs
Record Machine Collecting records and the phenomena of record sleeve design

Saturday 23 November 4-6pm: Malcolm Garrett and Swifty
Designing Records Two influential designers talk about designing for the music industry

Admission FREE. For more information, email artgallery@bury.gov.uk
or visit www.buryartmuseum.co.uk

UPDATE: there is now a Spotify playlist for the show: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/042eRogev6EDrajRq2GzKH

Saturday 3rd August 2019, 2.00 pm
ICA, The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH

IMCC’s Georgina Colby will speak as part of The Labyrinth: A Convening on the Work of Kathy Acker, along with writer Claire Finch, curator of the Kathy Acker Reading Room Daniel Schulz, and artist and writer Matias Viegener.

The Labyrinth centres on a series of presentations from scholars and those engaged with maintaining and furthering the legacy of Acker’s work, extending her lines of thought from artistic, literary and theoretical perspectives. Drawing on close textual readings, the symposium considers Acker’s output – and its relationship to other literary histories – as an engine for new relations, ideas and possibilities.

Details here

Monday 10th December
Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster
7:00-9:00pm

IMCC Presents An Evening of Feminist Film: Redell Olsen, Now Circa (2018) and Katharine Meynell, Elizabeth (2017)

Redell Olsen will present her short film Now Circa (2018), recently shortlisted for the AHRC Research in Film Awards 2018. Katharine Meynell will present her short film Elizabeth (2017).

Now Circa (1918), directed by Redell Olsen, 2018

Now Circa (1918) marks the one hundred year anniversary of female suffrage for some women in the UK. The film revolves around dialogues between two women and their counterparts one hundred years earlier, each on the eve of a march for women’s rights. Their conversations are interrupted by a mysterious poetic and out-of-time visitor; Joan Boadicea, whose speech and antics reflect the tensions, parallels and differences between women across time from the era of the suffragettes, to our own present in the age of Trump and #MeToo in 2018.

Redell Olsen is a poet, film-maker and academic. Her recent books of poetry include Film Poems (2014) and Punk Faun: a bar rock pastel (2012). She teaches poetry and poetics at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Elizabeth, directed by Katharine Meynell, 2017

Elizabeth concerns the life and work of typographer Elizabeth Friedlander, the only woman of her generation to have designed a Western typeface. The film takes an essay form, describing what is known of her life, using archive footage interspersed with landscape and speculative images and text, probing the practical and political life of women surviving on wit and skill in early twentieth century Europe.

“I liked it very much indeed — cinematically and in terms of its subject matter … Elizabeth’s roots in German modernism, her exile, the familiarity of her anonymous designs” – Laura Mulvey.

Katharine Meynell has been working as an artist since the late 1970’s across material media, using moving image, performance, drawings and artists’ books.

Tickets free, register here

Saturday 17 November 2018 – Sunday 10 March 2019
Bluecoat, School Lane, Liverpool L1 3BX

The Art Schools of North West England
John Beck and Matthew Cornford

As part of their ongoing exploration of the history of art schools in the UK, this exhibition of new work by IMCC’s John Beck and artist Matthew Cornford focuses on the art schools of the North West. The core of the exhibition is a collection of over thirty photographs by Matthew Cornford of art school buildings or the sites upon which they stood. Monuments to the economic power of the region in the nineteenth century, and often the result of tangled social and cultural forces — where working class struggles for education and self-organisation collide with the industrialists’ desire for a narrowly trained and compliant workforce and growing middle class demands for local cultural institutions  — the art school buildings are markers of past social, political and aesthetic ambition and, especially in those cases where buildings have been sold off and, at best, repurposed as flats or offices, reminders of the extent to which that ambition has shrunk as it has been progressively individualised, privatised and monetised.

More information here.

Saturday 03 November 2018, 7-9pm
Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London, W1B 2HT

S A L O N – LONDON presents Carla Harryman in conversation with Redell Olsen

Carla Harryman will read from her recent works including Sue in Berlin and Hannah Cut-In. Redell Olsen will be discussing and showing extracts from her recent performance and film works.

About Carla Harryman:

Carla Harryman has authored twenty books including Sue in Berlin, a collection of Poets Theater Plays and performance texts written between 2001-2015, (PURH, 2018). Harryman’s Poets Theater, interdisciplinary, and bi-lingual performances have been presented nationally and internationally. Recent performances include Gardener of Stars, an Opera, a work for micro-electronics, piano, and speaking and singing voices composed in collaboration with Jon Raskin, with performances in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Detroit, a bilingual version of Mirror Play with actor Juliette de Laroque (Rouen, France, 2017); and Occupying Theodore W. Adorno’s “Music and New Music,” a keynote lecture-performance (with pianist Magda Mayas and composition by Jon Raskin and Carla Harryman) presented at dOCUMENTA 13. A CD of the Adorno lecture-performance with Gino Robair on piano is forthcoming from Rastascan Records.

Publications of the last ten years include the essay, Artifact of Hope, published in Kenning Edition’s Ordinance Series in 2017 Adorno’s Noise (2008), a radical experiment in the essay as form; The collaborative ten volume work, The Grand Piano: Experiments in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco 1975-1980 (completed in 2010), The Wide Road (2011) with Lyn Hejinian, an erotic picaresque in poetry and prose; and the diptych W—/M— (2013), which Tyrone Williams describes as a tracing and retracing of “the line per se as nomadic consciousness multiplying beyond the doubles that mark, and thus engender, the self-patrolled borders of identities.” Her critical writing focuses on feminist experimental writing, non/narrative, and performance. She is the editor of Non/Narrative (2011), a special issue of the Journal of Narrative Theory, and co-editor of Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker (2006).

Harryman has received numerous awards including a fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, grants from the National Performance Network and Opera America, Next Stage, and awards in poetry from the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation and the Fund for Poetry. She is a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Eastern Michigan University where she teaches in their interdisciplinary creative writing program, and she serves on the summer faculty of the MFA Program of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College.

About Redell Olsen:

Redell Olsen’s books of poetry include: Film Poems (2014), Punk Faun: a bar rock pastel (2012) and Secure Portable Space (2004). She has published critical essays on contemporary poets and poetics and produced a number of handmade artist bookworks – the most recent of which was exhibited at the Poetry Library, South Bank and involved the use of light sensitive papers. ‘Now Circa (1918)’ a short film written and directed by Redell Olsen in response to the anniversary of female suffrage in the UK in 2018 has been nominated for an AHRC award in the category, ‘Best Research Film’ of the year. Her recent performance work, ‘Observation Judgement Action’ or (Foil, Jumping, Daisies)’ responds to Black Mountain College and in particular the work of Josef and Anni Albers. It is comprised of film, text and music was shown as part of events at Kettles Yard, Cambridge, Black Mountain: A Celebration, Glasfryn, Wales and Café Oto, London. Redell Olsen is a professor of Poetry and Poetic Poetics at Royal Holloway, University of London where she teaches on the MA in Creative Writing – Poetic Practice.

S A L O N – LONDON is a real and virtual site for responding to the present through experimental women’s writing. The project is directed by Georgina Colby and Susan Rudy and hosted by the Institute of Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster, and the Centre for Poetry at Queen Mary.

Free but please register at Eventbrite here.

Friday 26th October 2018, 10.00 – 18.00
The Boardroom (room 117), University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW

Soviet Cosmologies and Ontologies, 1960s-1970s

Marie Curie Foundation Symposium, Individual Fellowship, Horizon 2020
Hosted by the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster in conjunction with the Faculty of Arts, University of Wolverhampton

There is a tendency in revisiting the narratives of historical socialism to focus on the early revolutionary avant-garde and repressive post-revolutionary contexts of Soviet cultural politics, or on the destructive legacy of Stalinism and the dissident cultural non-conformisms it produced. This generates a very familiar teleology of state oppression, in which everything is subject to the instrumental logic of Stalinism. Yet, paradoxically, the political economy of the Soviet Union in the aftermath of this repressive teleology in the 1960s and the 1970s – the years that in the historiography of socialism become the embodiment of both the Khrushchev Thaw and the Brezhnevite stagnation – is underwritten by its explicit counter-capitalist sociality. This is because it was precisely in these years that the residual utopian imaginaries of the communist tradition were able to find a becalmed and reflective (albeit, materially impoverished) place in the would-be socialist relations of Soviet production. As such, these utopian imaginaries became attached to a series of radical humanist interventions into the problems of labour, sexuality, power, gender, language, culture, the unconscious, cognition, reality, the universal, etc., in a context in which the non-libidinal character of post-capitalist political economy became a defining feature of this becalmed, reflective context. The result was the production of new ontologies and lexicons of emancipation, despite the fact that ‘state socialism’ was in its decline. This one-day conference aims to map these ontologies and heterodox socialist critiques in order to inquire as to whether they have any viability in the context of gnoseology, philosophy and critical theory today.

Speakers include:
Maria Chehonadskih (Central Saint Martins)
Keti Chukhrov (Higher School of Economics, Moscow)
Nikolay Erofeev (Oxford University)
Anke Hennig (Central Saint Martins)
Alexei Penzin (Chto Delat and Wolverhampton University)
Hannah Proctor (ICA, Berlin)
David Riff (Arts Festival Steirischer Herbst)
Galin Tihanov (Queen Mary University)
John Timberlake (Middlesex University)

Download the full programme here: Soviet Cosmologies programme.

The event is free to attend and all are welcome, but it would help us to get an idea of numbers if you could sign up via our Eventbrite page: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/soviet-cosmologies-and-ontologies-tickets-51069777078

Thursday 6 September 2018, 10.00-18.30
Room D002 Université Paris 8, 2 Rue de la Liberté, 93526 Saint-Denis

Workshop: Asylum, Translation, Voice and Testimony
The objective of this international workshop is to examine the restrictions imposed upon women’s voices in the context of reporting sexual violence as part of their migration experience in the UK and in France. The workshop will bring together academics from France and the UK, immigration lawyers, and representatives from public facing bodies, women refugees and asylum seekers, and creative writers. It will facilitate a cross sector and interdisciplinary exchange of knowledge and experience in relation to taking testimonies and translation. Case studies of women’s testimonies will be examined with regard to language, translation and testimony. These will be examined alongside the current procedure of seeking asylum, in particular the interview process.

Full details can be found here

Tickets can be booked here

This event is part of a project led by Dr Georgina Colby (University of Westminster) in collaboration with Professor Jane Freedman (Université Paris 8) and Debora Singer MBE (Asylum Aid).

Feminist Representations: Sexual Violence Against Women, Asylum and Testimony

Funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust, the project aims to explore the contributions the arts and humanities may make to address institutional failures in the area of sexual violence against women and girls, with a specific focus on asylum, translation, voice and testimony. Three interdisciplinary workshops will bring together academics, practitioners, politicians, campaigners and writers. The objective is to open up avenues of expression for women when relaying their testimonies and the impact of sexual violence, and to provide feminist representation that moves beyond the parameters of legal expression. Adopting an interdisciplinary methodology, participants will examine case studies of asylum seekers’ testimonies as a means to reveal the issues of translation women meet when voicing their narratives. The project will shed light on specific issues women seeking asylum who have experienced sexual violence encounter when telling their stories. These findings will inform academics, policy makers, and writers who will address these issues in issues in scholarly and creative works.

For further information, see the project website here or email Georgina Colby.

Tuesday April 17 2018, 6.30pm-10pm
Yurt Cafe, St, Katharine’s Precinct, 2 Butcher Row, London E14 8DS

Whose Voice is It Anyway?: Feminist Inclusivity in Practice and Theory

This event seeks to bring together writers and academics whose works engage with the intersectionality of feminist theory and practice. Organised by Isabelle Coy-Dibley and Genna Gardini, this event is part of the S A L O N – London project, a feminist environment championing solidarity and the creation of a platform that brings about change by finding new forms of feminist kinship, directed by Dr Georgina Colby and Professor Susan Rudy.

The evening focuses on the three key pillars of the project – Solidarity, Activism and Language. The event will feature an interdisciplinary panel of speakers, including Eleanor Perry, Isabel Waidner, Linda Stupart and Nala Xaba, and aims to question how inclusive feminism is, whether/how it should be inclusive, and how the works of these speakers’ challenge, transgress, problematise, experiment and interact with feminism. Through hearing perspectives and readings from our speakers, we will tackle questions such as: how does the experimental and innovative writing and readings of works engage with present forms of feminism; and how do these forms of writing challenge, resist, and actively reshape feminist practices? By viewing writing as a form of activism and a place to voice political, social and cultural issues and desires for transformation, we will investigate S A L O N’s assertion that “Experimental, multi-modal, transgender and multi-lingual languages are emerging as linguistic forms for inscribing voiceless narratives of those excluded and marginalised.”

Doors will open at 6:30pm, for a 7pm start. Wheelchair accessible.

Free, but please register here.

For more info visit https://www.salon-london.org/events/

Tuesday March 13 2018, 7pm-9pm
Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW

Laynie Browne in conversation with Andrea Brady

Laynie will be reading from three works:

Periodic Companions is a novel with characters based on the periodic table of elements. Relationships are based upon chemistry, and characters investigate poetics, contemplative practices, and outsider culture. Overwhelmed with the futility of institutional structures, and impelled to act in response to tragic acts of violence, the elemental characters create a collective action based upon chemical signalling using human tears, in the hopes of inventing a new context for non-violent protest.

You Envelop Me. A book length poetic elegy, You Envelop Me takes its title from the thirty-second psalm and explores connections between birth and loss. How does one in mourning converse with those absent, yet ever present? These poems seek to enter that sturdy edifice of emptiness, wherein time is suspended, and one is paradoxically held by the departed. How is a motherless daughter conceived? What befalls those who succumb to waves of grief akin to contractions of birth? You Envelop Me is woven from contemplative practices which permit us to approach the unimaginable. The world with the beloved removed is permanently altered, perhaps most significantly in the way the living learn that indispensible vision occurs beyond the visible world.

The Book of Moments (forthcoming 2018, in two editions, one English, one French, from Presses Universitaires de rouen et du havre, Rouen, France).This book of relatively short prose fiction/hybrid pieces is an exploration in reinvention of forms: including the found, the invented and foregrounding perception as subject and object. This book seeks the boundary between real and imagined and hovers at a location often in between. This work is inspired by the revolutionary prose of writers such as Lydia Davis, Marguerite Duras, Hélène Cixous, and others writing off the map between genres, outside conventional expectations of “story.”

A poet, prose writer, teacher and editor, Laynie Browne is author of thirteen collections of poems and three novels. Her most recent collections of poems include You Envelop Me (Omnidawn 2017) P R A C T I C E (SplitLevel 2015), and Scorpyn Odes (Kore Press 2015). Recent books of prose include the novel Periodic Companions (2018) and short fiction in The Book of Moments (2018). Her honors include a 2014 Pew Fellowship, the National Poetry Series Award (2007) for her collection The Scented Fox, and the Contemporary Poetry Series Award (2005) for her collection Drawing of a Swan Before Memory. Her poetry has been translated into French, Spanish, Chinese and Catalan. Her writing has appeared in many anthologies including The Norton Anthology of Post Modern Poetry (second edition 2013), Ecopoetry: A Contemporary American Anthology (Trinity University Press, 2013), Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006) and The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street, 2008). She teaches at University of Pennsylvania and at Swarthmore College.

Andrea Brady is a poet and Professor of Poetry at Queen Mary, University of London. Andrea’s books of poetry include The Strong Room (2016), Dompteuse (2014), Cut from the Rushes (2013), Mutability: Scripts for Infancy (2012), and Wildfire: A Verse Essay on Obscurity and Illumination (2010). At Queen Mary she runs the Centre for Poetry and the Archive of the Now.

The event is free but please register with Eventbrite

Georgina Colby has a new article on Kathy Acker in the Times Literary Supplement this week and there is also a podcast. Follow the links:

Strategic vulnerability

Podcast

Friday 3 November 2017, 7pm-9pm
The Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, 14 Wharf Road, London, N1 7RW

Redell Olsen in conversation with Carolyn Pedwell

S A L O N – LONDON, a site for reading and responding to the present through women’s experimental writing, is pleased to announce its launch event, featuring Redell Olsen, who will be reading from two recent works, ‘Woolf / Apelles’ and ‘Atomic Guildswomen’, followed by conversation with Carolyn Pedwell.

Redell Olsen’s poetic practice comprises poetry as well as texts for performance, film and installation. Her publications include Film Poems (Les Figues, 2014), ‘Punk Faun: a bar rock pastel’ (Subpress, 2012), ‘Secure Portable Space’ (Reality Street, 2004), ‘Book of the Fur’ (rem press 2000), and, in collaboration with the bookartist Susan Johanknecht, ‘Here Are My Instructions’ (Gefn, 2004). Her work is included in Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman, 2010), I’ll Drown My Book: ‘Conceptual Writing by Women’ (Les Figues Press, 2011) and Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK (Reality Street Press, 2016). In 2017 she published two bookworks Smock and Mox Nox. She has also published a number of critical articles on contemporary poetry and the relationship between contemporary poetics and the visual arts. In 2002 she set up the influential MA in Poetic Practice at Royal Holloway which she still runs as part of the MA in Creative Writing. From 2006 – 2010 she was the editor of How2, the international online journal for Modernist and contemporary writing by women. In 2013-14 she was the visiting Judith E. Wilson fellow at the University of Cambridge. In 2016-17, in association with other members of staff from English and Modern Languages at Royal Holloway, she led the HARC funded project ‘Nature and Other Forms of That Matter’. She is Director of the Poetics Research Centre at Royal Holloway. redellolsen.co.uk

Carolyn Pedwell is Associate Professor in Cultural Studies at the University of Kent, where she is Head of Cultural Studies and Media. Carolyn has been Visiting Fellow at the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney; the Centre for the History of Emotions, Queen Mary University of London; and the Gender Institute, London School of Economics. She is the author of Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (Palgrave, 2014) and Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice (Routledge, 2010). Her new book, Transforming Habit: Revolution, Routine and Social Change, is under contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press. Carolyn is also an Editor of Feminist Theory journal.

S A L O N – LONDON is organized by Georgina Colby and Susan Rudy. The launch of S A L O N – LONDON has been funded by the Institute of Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster, the Centre for Poetry, Queen Mary University of London, and the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London.

Please register here: Eventbrite

Saturday 30 September 2017, 10am-7pm
Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW

Earth Lab: An Investigation of Earth as a Laboratory

Organised by independent curator Rob La Frenais, this colloquium brings together a number of artists, inventors and thinkers who re-imagine Earth, sea and sky from a bottom-up, post-anthropocene position, in a wide-ranging, broad-brushtroke survey of current thinking about Earth as a living laboratory. The speakers consider the sky, the oceans and the land to pursue a number of themes that investigate social and artistic approaches to scientific knowledge in a rapidly changing world. Featuring Bronislaw Szerszynski, Tomás Saraceno, Nicola Triscott, Naveen Rabelli, Rob La Frenais, Jennifer Gabrys, Lise Autogena, Joshua Portway, Carlos López Galviz, Uta Kogelsberger, John Beck, Christine Handte, Neal White and chaired by Lucy Reynolds.

Admission to the Colloquium is free. Please register here.

There will be the opportunity for participation in a selected pecha kucha and poster session over drinks. Please send a 100 word statement of intent to Rob at rob@roblafrenais.info if you would like to be considered for a pecha kucha or poster. More details here.

This event is part of Proving Grounds, a series of workshops and events led by John Beck at IMCC and Neal White at the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster. The aim of the series is to critically engage with issues of inter- and trans-disciplinarity in relation to speculative, hypothetical or experimental research at the intersections of the arts, humanities and sciences.

May 24, 2017, 7pm
Carroll / Fletcher, 56-57 Eastcastle Street, London W1W 8EQ
£5 tickets available here.

How Did the Computer Learn to See?
Alexander Galloway

How did the computer learn to see? A common response to the question is that the computer learned to see from cinema and photography, that is, from modernity’s most highly evolved technologies of vision. In this talk Alexander Galloway will explore a different response to the question: the computer learned to see not from cinema but from sculpture. With reference to the work of contemporary artists, along with techniques for digital image compression, we will explore the uniquely computational way of seeing the world.

This event is organised by IMCC in collaboration with Carroll / Fletcher. It will feature as part of a Critical Digital Humanities project run by the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster and Dartmouth College, USA, funded by the British Academy.

Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programmer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. He is author of several books, most recently a monograph on the work of François Laruelle, and is a professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.

For more information, please contact Kaja Marczewska: k.marczewska@westmister.ac.uk

Friday May 19th, 6pm
University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW, Room UG04
Free admission, but please book here as space is limited.

Kathelin Gray, Biosphere 2 co-founder, in conversation with Dr Rob La Frenais, independent curator

Biosphere 2 was a massive project in the Arizona desert which, in 1991-94, completely enclosed 2 teams of humans, animals and plant life in a closed, sealed environment, creating laboratory conditions to study interactions in a biospheric system, to better understand global ecology, and as a spinoff, towards bio-regenerative conditions in space travel. When Biosphere 2 closed its doors in September 1991 for a two-year experiment in closed systems living and experimental ecology, it was, as it remains, years ahead of its time. The antagonisms which led to the termination of the Biosphere 2 experiment, in 1994, seem all the more absurd in retrospect, particularly in respect of the then involvement of Steve Bannon, now in the Trump administration.

Kathelin Gray who was involved throughout the experiments, says: “ It is ironic that with the reopening of the ‘space race’ to Mars, this work is now being re-examined and in some cases re-invented. The passage of time shows just how important this work was. We need to revisit ways in which we can demonstrate our impact on the ecology and the complex inter-relationships which make human existence on earth possible yet so fragile to our own impacts. Physiologically, culturally and chemically we are all earthlings. Our fate is indissolubly linked with the health of our fellow earthlings: microbes, soils, plants, animals, a concept that was once considered alternative thinking”.

There is still considerable debate about the continuing resonances of the largest project of this type that has ever taken place in the world. Much scientific knowledge was gained from Biosphere 2, despite controversy at the time. What was equally important was that it was also an art-science project, with the Institute of Ecotechnics as scientific coordinator. ‘Theatre of All Possibilities’ and ‘Theatre for the Reconstitution of Reality’ partnered in the experiment, bringing in an ongoing radical cultural experiment taking place inside Biosphere 2, “redefining performative architecture and the role of historical innovation on the world stage” (Gray). This collective, collaborative initiative has established multidisciplinary projects still ongoing worldwide, based in different ecosystems, with the Institute of Ecotechnics.

Rob La Frenais, curator of The Arts Catalyst for 17 years, founder editor of Performance Magazine and now an independent curator, himself visited and interviewed the Biospherians through the glass in the 90’s and will engage Kathelin Gray in a lively and provocative conversation about the legacy of Biosphere 2.

This event marks the launch of Proving Grounds, a new series of workshops and events organised by IMCC and the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) at the University of Westminster. The aim of the series is to critically engage with issues of inter- and trans-disciplinarity in relation to speculative, hypothetical or experimental research at the intersections of the arts, humanities and sciences. More information about Proving Grounds will be available at the event.

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

Thursday 27 October 2016, 6.30pm – 8.30pm
Arts Catalyst Center, 74-76 Cromer Street, London, WC1H 8DR

£3 – book here

Experiments and Incidents – Julie Martin and Barbara Steveni in Conversation with Neal White

A reunion between two pioneers in experimental and incidental art practices

IMCC and CREAM at the University of Westminster and Arts Catalyst are delighted to host a reunion between two pioneers in experimental and incidental art practices, Julie Martin (Director of Experiments in Art and Technology) and Barbara Steveni (Artist Placement Group / O+I), chaired by Professor Neal White (University of Westminster).

Pushing at the limits of radical ideas and art practice since 1966, these two women have helped change the landscape of where and how art has been made. This is a unique opportunity to hear both in dialogue, reflecting on not only the past, but the future for art which has an experimental and incidental focus.

This collaboration between the University of Westminster and Arts Catalyst has been developed as part of Arts Catalyst’s season of events that mark the 50th anniversary of E.A.T. and the project the led to their founding 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, titled 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engeneering Revisited 1966/2016.

In addition to this talk, the programme also includes an exhibition reflecting on the work of Experiments in Art and Technology at Arts Catalyst Centre for Art Science & Technology, a talks programme developed in collaboration with Afterall and Side Effects, a major new performance commission by Robert Whitman (co-Founder of E.A.T.).

This 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engeneering Revisited 1966/2016 programme is supported by Arts Council England, Cockayne – Grants for the Arts, The London Community Foundation, PACE, Afterall, Central Saint Martins, UAL, King’s Cross and Goldsmiths, University of London, University of Westminster, London: The Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) with the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture (IMCC) and The Performance Studio.

Zodiac, drawing and wall mural (2015).

Wednesday September 14th, 2016, 7-9pm.
Carroll/Fletcher Gallery, 56-57 Eastcastle Street, London, W1W 8EQ.

£5 Tickets available here.

Dawn Poetics: Caroline Bergvall in Conversation with Marina Warner

Artist, writer and performer, Caroline Bergvall, will perform and present a few video documents from earlier works of which Ghost Cargo (2011), Drift (2014) before introducing her performance Ragadawn (2016). Ragadawn, Caroline’s much anticipated new work is a sunrise performance, which explores the crossing of boundaries and altered states of being through vocal composition, rhythmical speech patterns and recorded languages. Following the presentation and screenings, Caroline will join Professor Marina Warner in conversation to talk about dawn poetics, metamorphosis, liminality, gendering, and darkness and light.

Ragadawn (2016) will premiere in the UK as a one-off performance at the Estuary Festival, Sunday 18th September, 2016, 6:38am. The work is co-produced by Metal, Southend-on-Sea, and Festival de la Batie, Geneva. Ragadawn will embark on an international tour in 2017. Ragadawn is supported by Ville de Genève, Etat de Genève, Fondation Wilsdorf, Fondation Göhner and Royal Norwegian Embassy, London.

This event is part of the series Experimental Writing @ Carroll Fletcher, hosted by the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture in collaboration with Carroll Fletcher Gallery. For more information about the event, please contact Georgina Colby at g.colby@westminster.ac.uk

CAROLINE BERGVALL is an artist, writer and performer who works across artforms, media and languages. The recipient of many awards and commissions, her work frequently develops through exploring material traces, literary documents and linguistic detail, language and literary history, sites and histories, hidden or forgotten knowledges. Her sparse textual, spatial and audio works often expose hidden or difficult historical/political events. She is especially noted for her researched multigenre textual work and her strong verbal and vocal performances. Projects alternate between books, printed matter, audio pieces, collaborative performances, site-specific installations. Caroline is based in London and Geneva.

Most recent project: DRIFT (2013-2015): Texts, drawings and maps published as Drift by Nightboat Books (NY, 2014). A collaborative performance involving voice, percussion, datawork toured the UK and Scandinavia (2014) and premieres in Geneva Switzerland (2016). Solo show of graphic works and audio compositions at Callicoon Fine Art gallery (NY, 2015) and CAC (Geneva, 2016). New audio commission TOGETHER (2014), voicework in 3 parts, Swiss radio RTS2 & MAMCO Museum of Contemporary Art (Geneva). Premieres as a performance at Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse, Oct’16.

Other available publications: Meddle English: New and Selected Texts (Nightboat Books, 2011), Middling English (John Hansard Publications, 2010), DVD of installations, Ghost Pieces: five language-based installations (John Hansard Publications, 2011).

Various selected solo and group shows: Whitney Biennial (NY), Tate Modern (London), Louisiania Literature Festival (Copenhagen), Khoj Art Centre (New Delhi), MCA (Denver), The Power Plant Gallery (Toronto), Norrlandsoperan (Sweden), Actoral (Marseille), Poetry International (Southbank Centre), Fundacio Tapiès (Barcelona), Hammer Museum (LA), KUMU (Tallinn), MOMA (NY), Samtidsmuseet (Oslo), Villa Bernasconi (Geneva), Shorelines Literature of the Sea (Southend).

Caroline was Judith E, Wilson Fellow, University of Cambridge (2013-2014), Writer-in-Residence, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2014), Visiting Professor, School of Art and Design, Geneva (2014-2015). Currently a Collaborative Arts Mellon Fellow, Logan Center, University of Chicago (2016).

MARINA WARNER is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London and a Professorial Research Fellow, SOAS, 2014-2017.

Marina Warner’s mother was Italian and her father an English bookseller; she was brought up in Egypt, Belgium, and Cambridge, England. She has been a writer since she was young, specialising in mythology and fairy-tales, with an emphasis on the part women play in them. Her award-winning books include Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976), Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (l982), From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1994) and No Go the Bogeyman (1998). In 1994 she gave the BBC Reith Lectures on the theme of Six Myths of Our Time. Her books include Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media (2006), and Stranger Magic: Charmed States and The Arabian Nights (2011). She also writes fiction: The Lost Father (1988), was short listed for the Booker prize, and in 2000, The Leto Bundle (2000) was long-listed. She has curated exhibitions, including The Inner Eye (1996), Metamorphing (2002-3), and Only Make-Believe: Ways of Playing (2005). She chaired the Man Booker International Prize for 2015, and from 2013-15 she was a Two Year Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale (OUP, 2014) will be coming out in paperback later this year. A collection of short stories Fly Away Home was published by Salt in autumn 2015. She is currently working on the theme of Sanctuary and culture in times of dislocation and diaspora, and is writing a memoir-cum-novel set in Cairo in the Fifties.

She is a Fellow of the British Academy, and of the Royal Society of Literature. She was made DBE in 2015, and the same year was awarded the Holberg Prize in the Arts and Humanities.

Wednesday 29 June 2016, 7pm, Carroll/Fletcher, 56-57 Eastcastle Street, London, W1W 8EQ
Tickets £5, available here

Nick Thurston, an artist and critic, will discuss the work of Information as Material, an independent publishing project, which he co-edits with Simon Morris and Craig Dworkin. Thurston will address questions of materiality of language and independent and experimental publishing, and explore ideas about appropriated and subverted technologies of communication.

The talk will be followed by a conversation between Nick and critic and academic, Stephen Voyce.

This is the fifth event in the Experimental Writing @ Carroll/Fletcher series. Organised by the Institute of Modern and Contemporary Culture at University of Westminster and Carroll/Fletcher, the series showcases contemporary developments in experimental writing and their relationship to the visual arts.

Nick Thurston has exhibited and performed internationally at Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, Toulouse Museum of Contemporary Art, The Laurence Sterne Museum, Whitechapel Gallery, and Bury City Art Gallery, amongst others. He is the author of numerous publications ranging from poetry to prose essays. Since 2006, he has been a co-editor of Information as Material (iam). iam operates as a collective of writer-editors and as an independent imprint that publishes work by artists who use extant material — selecting it and reframing it to generate new meanings — and who, in doing so, disrupt the existing order of things. The imprint’s activities involve writing, publishing, exhibiting, curating, web-based projects, lectures and workshops. iam’s publications and editions are held in private and public collections around the world including Tate (UK), National Library of France (FR), and MoMA (USA). Nick’s own work is collected by the Electronic Poetry Center (University of Buffalo and University of Pennsylvania), which archived his work in 2015. The collection includes his poems, short writings, interviews and book extracts (2006-2014). Nick is a Programme Director of interdisciplinary undergraduate Fine Arts programme at the University of Leeds and a Visiting Fellow in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania.

Stephen Voyce is Professor at the English Department at the University of Iowa, where he also holds appointments in the Digital Studio for the Public Arts & Humanities and the Center for the Book. He is the author of Poetic Community: Avant-Garde Activism and Cold War Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2013), the editor of a book of variations: love – zygal – art facts (Coach House Books, 2013), and the Director of the Fluxus Digital Collection. His work also appears in journals such as Jacket2 Magazine, Modernism/modernity, Criticism: A Quarterly Journal for Literature and the Arts, Postmodern Culture, and Open Letter. Voyce’s primary teaching and research interests include twentieth-century poetry, media studies, Marxist criticism and theory, and critical digital studies. Before joining the University of Iowa, he worked in the music industry and as a SSHRC-postdoctoral fellow at the Modern Literature and Culture Research Center in Toronto, Canada.

For more information, please contact either Kaja Marczewska: k.marczewska@westminster.ac.uk
or Asya Bachelis: asya@carrollfletcher.com

Image courtesy of Derek Beaulieu

Thursday 30 June 2016
Parasol Unit, 14 Wharf Road, London N1 7RW

In the Editorial for the first issue of Art-Language (1969) Terry Atkinson raised questions about a possibility of combining creative and critical practice: ‘can this editorial,’ Atkinson wrote, ‘in itself an attempt to evidence some attributes as to what “conceptual art” is, come up for the count as a work of conceptual art?’ Forms of Criticism takes Atkinson’s idea as its starting point to engage with issues of criticism and form and interrogate limits between creative and critical practice.

In poetry, fine art, film making, performance – in the creative sector – we are familiar with and applaud – or tolerate, in the very least – experiments which blur or transgress boundaries of genre, form, or creativity. Similar possibilities of formal experimentation remain significantly underexplored with respect to critical practice, although a growing interest in probing the limits of criticism can currently be observed. Forms of Criticism proposes to think about critical practice as a creative experiment with form in its own right and invites a re-examination of the relationship between research and forms adopted for presenting, communicating, and disseminating it. By considering diverse sites of critical and creative production the project focuses on experimenting with modalities of criticism and ways of addressing formal critical-creative hybridity.

The event brings together artist, curators, writers, critics and scholars addressing questions of hybrid creative-critical forms in theory and practice though talks, performances, screenings, readings and installations. Speakers include: John Beck (IMCC), Kate Briggs (American University in Paris), Eric Cazdyn (University of Toronto), Ducks!, Gary Hall (Coventry University & Open Humanities Press), Peter Jaeger (poet and critic, Roehampton), Kristen Kreider (poet and artist, Royal Holloway), Richard Misek (filmmaker), Simon Morris (Leeds Beckett University), Jo Collinson Scott (musician and musicologist), Marquard Smith (Journal of Visual Culture and Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam), and Nick Thurston (artist, University of Pennsylvania and Leeds).

The event is free and open to all but places are limited and booking is essential. For more information about the event and to reserve tickets please go to: http://www.formsofcriticism.net/

For more information, please contact Kaja Marczewska: k.marczewska@westminster.ac.uk