Following on from discussions with Gayatri Spivak, Chantal Mouffe and Richard Sennett, in the final session of the current series of Whitechapel Salon events on the theme of ‘hope’ Peter Osborne, author of The Politics of Time (1995), Philosophy in Cultural Theory (2000) and Conceptual Art (2002), and Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University, will be in discussion with his fellow editor at Radical Philosophy, and Deputy Director of the Institute, David Cunningham.

Book now to avoid disappointment! You can do so here.

Tickets: £7/£5

http://www.whitechapelgallery.org

Ezra Pound and Modern Criticism: 100 Years in London
Friday 4 December 2009, 9.30-5.00
Cayley Room (room 152), University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street

The programme is now available for the day’s anniversary celebration of Pound’s lectures at the Poly:

9.30                            Coffee/Tea

10.00                         Introduction

10.15-11.30            Session One
Massimo Bacigalupo, University of Genoa, ‘The Didactic Muse’
Walter Baumann, Ulster, ‘“Swinburne My Only Miss” (82/543): Snapshots from Pound’s London Years’

11.45-1.15             Session Two
Helen Carr, Goldsmiths, ‘Pound and “World-Poetry”’
Nick Selby, UEA, ‘“Found Full of Nomads”: Pound as American Critic in Patria Mia and Cathay’

1.15-2.30             Lunch

2.30-4.00             Session Three
Rebecca Beasley, University of Oxford, ‘Pound’s New Criticism’
David Moody, University of York, ‘This is Not A Philological Work’

4.15-5.15             Round Table and Final Discussion

Friday 5 February 2010, 10am
Room 2.05c, 4-12 Little Titchfield Street, University of Westminster, London W1W 7UW
Cost: £20/£10 concs.
Download a booking form here

Featuring Joachin Barriendos (Curator, Santa Monica Art Centre, Barcelona, Spain), Jose Luis Brea (Editor of Estudios Visuales, Madrid, Spain), Iain Chambers (University of Naples, Italy), Anna Maria Guasch (University of Barcelona, Spain), Oliver Grau (Danube University Krems, Austria), Joanne Morra (Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, England), Almira Ousmanova (European Humanities University Belarus/Lithuania), Kresimir Purgar (Center for Visual Studies Zagreb, Croatia), Vivian Rehberg (Parsons Paris School of Art + Design, France), Marquard Smith (University of Westminster, England), Oyvind Varges (University of Bergen, Norway), and Nina Lager Vestberg (Norwegian University of Science and Technology Trondheim, Norway). 

This conference is a collaboration between established and emerging scholars, curators, educators, and editors from across a number of European universities and cultural institutions with a commitment to Visual Culture Studies in Europe, and the study of visual culture. The event aims to:

•  Track the ongoing, uneven emergence in Europe of Visual Culture Studies as a field of inquiry across the Arts and Humanities.

•  Explore the ways in which these diverse trajectories in the emergence of the study of visual culture are historically and theoretically distinctive because of the unique characteristics of a specific country, location, language, peoples, their histories of migration, governmental policies, and the contexts within which universities function as sites for interdisciplinary learning.

• Interrogate some of the hazards of this distinctiveness – around, for instance, the hegemony of the Anglo-American, English as the lingua franca of the academic humanities, and questions of publishing and dissemination.

• Discuss how the advent of Visual Culture Studies, with its new ways of seeing, knowing, understanding, and participating might (1) extend our studies beyond the university (2) generate particular kinds of cultural practices, and (3) be itself responding to activities in anything from art and curating to policy making and industry initiatives.

For our Catalan friends: David Cunningham will be representing the IMCC in Barcelona this week at the Catalan Association of Art Critics’ Fifth International Symposium on Art Criticism in a Global World. His opening address to the conference, entitled ‘Global Art/Global Modernities’, will be at 4.30pm on Friday 20 November at the MACBA Auditorium.

Further details here.

Wednesday 11th November, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW

Adam Eldridge (Urban Development, University of Westminster)
‘Las Vegas and the Production of Freedom’

Free to all.

The first in the IMCC’s series of events on The Future at the David Roberts Art Foundation took place on November 5th, with talks on, among other topics, J.G. Ballard, imaging climate change, William Gibson and the 1956 This is Tomorrow exhibition leading to a vigorous discussion of science fiction and environmental politics. The next event is on November 12th, when susan pui san lok, Uriel Orlow, Sally O’Reilly and Niru Ratnam will debate whether ‘The Future is History’.

Professor Pepper’s Ghost: Six Evenings of Visual Magic
The Old Cinema, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street

A collaboration between the IMCC and the Magic Lantern Society, following on from a successful series of events in 2008, the old Polytechnic cinema at the University of Westminster’s Regent Street building, where the first ever motion picture was shown in the UK, will be hosting a series of six Thursday night lectures on pre-cinematic technologies of the visual.

All the talks start at 7pm, with doors open from 6pm, and are free of charge.

Thursday 12 November 2009
‘Professor’ Mervyn Heard, ‘Phantasmagoria-mania’

Thursday 26 November 2009
Simon Warner, ‘Lavater – The Shadow of History’

Thursday 10 December 2009
Dr Frank Gray, ‘Visualising the Marvellous: G.A. Smith and his film Santa Claus’

Thursday 28 January 2010
Paul Kieve, ‘Grappling with Ghosts: Staging Ghost Effects in the Modern Theatre’

Thursday 11 February 2010
Mark Butterworth, ‘Geared to the Stars: Victorian Astronomy through the Magic Lantern’

Thursday 25 February 2010
Stephen Herbert, ‘From Anorthoscope to Zoopraxiscope: An A-Z of Victorian Animated Cartoons’

Download the programme here.

Watch the Old Cinema slideshow on the BBC News website here.

Ezra Pound and Modern Criticism: 100 Years in London
Friday 4 December 2009, 9.30-5.00
Cayley Room (room 152), University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street

Celebrating the centenary of Ezra Pound’s lectures on Romance literature at the Polytechnic Institute in Regent Street, this one-day symposium, co-organised by the IMCC, brings together a range of speakers to discuss both Pound’s time in London and his contribution to modern literary criticism.

Speakers include: Massimo Bacigalupo (Genoa), Walter Bauman (Ulster), Rebecca Beasley (Oxford), Helen Carr (Goldsmiths), David Moody (York), Nick Selby (UEA)
Introduced by: David Cunningham and Leigh Wilson

FREE ADMISSION!

SURREALISM, POST-WAR THEORY, AND THE AVANT-GARDE

Friday 27 – Saturday 28 November 2009

17.15 – 19.00, 27 November

10.00 – 18.30, 28 November (with registration from 9.30)

Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London

Special Keynote Address: Professor Allan Stoekl (Penn State), ‘The Drift: Surrealism, Situationism and Postsustainable Strategies of Gleaning’

Friday 27 November, 17.30-19.00, followed by reception

Saturday Speakers: Lucy Bradnock (Getty Research Institute), David Cunningham (University of Westminster), Jonathan Eburne (Pennsylvania State University), Jill Fenton (Queen Mary, University of London), Patrick ffrench (Kings College, University of London), Steven Harris (University of Alberta, Edmonton), Alyce Mahon (Trinity College, Cambridge), Gavin Parkinson (The Courtauld Institute of Art), Michael Richardson (independent scholar).

Ticket/entry details: £10. Please send a cheque made payable to ‘Courtauld Institute of Art’ to: Research Forum Events Coordinator, The Courtauld Institute of Art Research Forum, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN, clearly stating that you wish to book for the ‘Surrealism, Post-War Theory and the Avant-Garde conference’. Or call 020 7848 2785/2909 to make a credit card booking. Or, for further information, send an email to ResearchForumEvents@courtauld.ac.uk

Programme can be downloaded here.

THE FUTURE 
A series of events programmed by the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster, at The David Roberts Art Foundation Fitzrovia as part of their current exhibition ‘Sculpture of the Space Age’, curated by Raimundas Malasauskas.

Thursday November 5^th 2009, 6:30-8:30: THE FUTURE

Tom Corby (new media artist; cultural ecologist; University of Westminster)
David Cunningham (academic, aesthetician, University of Westminster)
Benjamin Noys (author of The Culture of Death and Georges Bataille, University of Chichester)
John Timberlake (painter, photographer, Head of BA Fine Art, Middlesex University)

Thursday November 12^TH, 2009, 6:30-8:30: THE FUTURE IS HISTORY

Jon Cairns (fine arts, Central Saint Martins College, University of the Arts)
Sally O’Reilly (art critic, Founder of Implicasphere, author of The Body in Contemporary Art)
Uriel Orlow (multi-media installer, historian, narrator of the impossible, University of Westminster)

Saturday November 21^st, 2009, 2-4: THE FUTURE IS TOMORROW

Lennard J. Davis (author of books on normalcy, obsession, and genetics, University of Illinois at Chicago)
Chris Horrocks (author of books on Foucault, McLuhan, and Baudrillard, Kingston University)
Ben Watson (independent music critic, Marxist theorist, poet, and author of books on Frank Zappa, art and class, and Derek Bailey)

Thursday November 26^th, 6:30-8:30: THE FUTURE IS NOW

Garin Dowd (Deleuzian commentator on film & writing, Thames Valley University)
Sue Golding (philosopher of time and space, University of Greenwich)
Stephen Melville (critic of modernity and the avant-garde; Ohio State University)

Chair: David Cunningham and Marquard Smith, University of Westminster, London

Friday 20th November 2009
2:00 pm – 6: 00 pm
Room 352, 309 Regent Street, University of Westminster

Giovanni Aloi, Editor of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, Queen Mary, University of London
Dr Nicola Anderson, Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies, Macquarie University, Australia
Professor Lennard J. Davis, Professor of the Arts and Social Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
Dr Rob La Frenais, Curator, The Arts Catalyst, London
Nicola Triscott, Director, The Arts Catalyst, London
Dr Joanna Zylinska, Reader in Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London
Chair: Dr Marquard Smith, Director, Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture