A welcome to Chih-Sheng Ni who is joining the Institute as a Junior Visiting Research Fellow in the Institute from March to September this year, supported by the National Science Council in Taiwan. Chih-Sheng is a doctoral student in the English Department of Tamkang University, and is working on a research project entitled “Spinning the Images of London: Space, History and Literature in the Work of Iain Sinclair,” which explores psychogeographic representations of London. Using Henri Lefebvre’s “trialectic conception”, the research focuses on the triadic dialectical relationship between material social space, language, and the creative, poetic act.

Educating Mind, Body & Spirit: Adult Education since 1838
24 and 25 April 2013

Staff and graduate students from the Institute will be contributing to the two-day conference ‘Educating Mind, Body & Spirit: Adult Education since 1838.’ Fees for the two days, including refreshments, are £60 or £30 for students/unwaged. To book, please email archive@westminster.ac.uk Other enquiries may be directed to Dr Helen Glew via h.glew@westminster.ac.uk

Day 1

10.30 Welcome/Opening Remarks

10.40 Keynote: Mark Freeman, University of Glasgow, ‘Writing the History of Adult Education: Where Next?’

11.40 Coffee

11.55 John K Walton, University of the Basque Country, Vitoria, ‘Adult Education in the Humanities: What Sort of Future?’

12.30 Lunch

13.20 Panel: Adult Education and Institutions
Contributions from Elaine Penn, Darlene Clover, Kathy Sandford, Maureen Park, Kate James, Edward Bottoms, and Jim Rahahan

15.00 Coffee

15.20 Panel: Educating Through Culture
Contributions from Alex Warwick, Neil Mattews, Sara Dominici, Tom Woodin

18.30 Reception

Day 2

9.45 Panel: Gender and Adult Education
Contributions from Helen Glew, Fay Lundh Nilsson, Mervi Kaaminen, and Lajos Olasz

11 Coffee

11.20 Panel: Adult Education Initiatives and Personalities
Contributions from: Peter Catherall, Bill Bailey and Lorna Unwin, Lawrence Goldman, and Kate Bradley

12.50 Lunch

13.50 Keynote: William Whyte, University of Oxford, ‘Still Travelling in a Strange Country? Writing Adult Education back into the History of Universities’

14.50 Coffee

15.00 Panel: Adult Education: Comparative Perspectives
Contributions from Mark Freeman, Jana Sims, Kirsi Ahonen, Darly Leeworthy, and Anders Nilsson

16.50 Closing Remarks

Body of Evidence by Tom Corby and Gavin Baily
Kasa Gallery, Istanbul, March 21 to April 20, 2013.
Visiting hours: 10:00 – 17:00 every day except Sunday

The Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture’s Governing Board member Dr Tom Corby has a fascinating and challenging exhibition entitled ‘Body of Evidence’ opening next week at Kaza Gallery in Istanbul. If you’re in the neighbourhood, check it out. You can find further information below or by following this link: http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2013/03/body-of-evidence/

Produced in collaboration with MoCC (Museum of Contemporary Cuts), Goldsmiths College, Sabanci University and the University of Westminster. Curatorial team: Lanfranco Aceti (Kasa Gallery Director and Senior Curator), Vince Dziekan (Associate Curator), Ozden Sahin (Curator) and Jonathan Munro (Curatorial Assistant)

The exhibition initiates a series of new artworks and installations designed to blur the boundaries between medicine, data, documentation, economics and art. Conceived as a complex autoportrait of the body undergoing advanced treatment for cancer, the exhibition serves as the primary site where the possibilities, visibilities and public manifestations of the body at its most vulnerable are tested to their limits. Body of Evidence forms part of a larger, multi-faceted project (Blood and Bones) in which the artist faces a complex set of questions about the meaning of life and death. These are fundamental questions that art has wrestled with for centuries. The challenge presented in the case of Tom Corby’s exhibition is how to make sense of the relationship between physicality and data; materiality and immateriality; medical intervention and metastasis (where, in the broadest material and clinical sense of the word, the death spiral of the afflicted body is mirrored by the wider economic and environmental ecologies within which it is situated).

Employing an idiosyncratic set of approaches to the process of data visualization, the installation is composed of a series of objects related to the artist’s treatment that together act as a physical visualization of the data his illness is producing during his treatment. These data touch upon and use personal objects such as the hats he wears on a daily basis and which he documents via his blog. Together, these elements reveal a meticulous and methodically structured approach that challenges viewers to detach themselves from all emotional aspects. As the body becomes subjected to the procedures and processes of ordering, selecting, sectioning and framing, it transforms into a grand taxonomic work. In this sense, the exhibition exhibits a certain character typical of the British mindset; particularly, calling upon the indexing fetish attributable to the great scientific explorers of the Victorian era.

In this case, however, the exploration that Tom Corby is embarking upon is not across an uncharted ocean, unexplored land mass or previously unseen/inaccessible dimension of physical reality. The exhibition Body in Evidence charts the artist’s expedition inside his own body and across his own soul, exploring the existential data of a body/object subjected to medical intervention; the body as a system that while in the process of shutting down, continues to produce data. In equal parts heroic and obsessive, this project touches on attitudes to death and disease in a wider sense, namely a desire to find ways, processes and forms to transcend the act of termination and come to an accord with our feelings about it.

Tom Corby is the Director of CREAM’s Doctoral Programme, deputy Director of CREAM and coordinates the experimental media cluster research at Westminster. His interdisciplinary artworks (in collaboration with Gavin Baily and Jonathan Mackenzie) have been internationally exhibited and have won numerous awards including: nomination for the FILE Festival Digital Language award 2010; the jury nominated award at the 10th Japan Media Arts Festival in 2007; honorary mentions at the Prix Ars Electronica 2006 and 2000; honorary mention: “The Post-Cagian Interactive”, “Art on the Net” The Machida City Museum of Arts, Tokyo and the main festival prize Cynet Art 1999. In 2000 he was nominated for the “International Media Art Award 2000″, at Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany and was the artist in residence at the ICA London 1998.

ARCHIVING CHINA IN BRITAIN

Saturday 27 April, 9.30am–6pm
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

This one-day conference is co-hosted by the Department of English, Lingusitics and Cultural Studies with the University of Westminster Contemporary China Centre, keeper of the Chinese Poster Collection, an archival holding of more than 800 posters from the Mao era.

RSVP anne@translatingchina.info

For further details please visit translatingchina.info

This is Project 5 of the International Association for Visual Culture (IAVC). This project is constituted as a collaborative and Open Access forum on the possible futures of publishing. The project is published on-line and simultaneously across a number of distinct scholarly, creative, and critical research platforms: the College Art Association’s Art Journal website, the open-access journal Culture Machine, The Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture (IMCC, University of Westminster), the IAVC, the journal of visual culture’s satellite website, Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, and the Modern Language Association Commons.
Project 5’s origins are in a panel we organised in New York City in June 2012 for Nicholas Mirzoeff’s ‘Now! Visual Culture’ event, the Association’s second biennial conference. In this event’s network of relations and expectations – in the places between NYC, this non-conference, and Occupy – we watched the fermentation of something that felt new and offered new ways forward in our understanding of visual culture, and also in the ways in which it is distributed, accessed, engaged with and acted upon.
The ‘future publishing’ that we discussed coalesces around the emerging moment in the history of technologies and the adaptive strategies deployed by the disseminators of information to accommodate them. The opportunities and challenges that they seed have extraordinary implications for the distribution and consumption of information; perhaps the most radical since the development of moveable type and its consequent market in reading.
The release of easy to utilise, freely available publishing software presents both challenges and possibilities for publishing as a practice and an industry. The ability to develop and distribute multi-touch interactive ‘text books’ at no cost through iTunes, for example, at once supports and restricts ‘open source’ publishing projects and is symptomatic of developments across the sector. The development of new technologies and new platforms for dissemination like the Kindle/tablets means that both traditional formats and networks require rethinking.
Some of the questions we consider include:
• How will changes in format impact on content – the medium is the message?
• What are the challenges for the publishing industry in generating sustainable business models that support author activity?
• How will these new market conditions impact and inflect ‘open source’ publishing models?
• What are the consequences for the distribution of research and how will it maintain or re-imagine its integrity across and through less formalised, deregulated networks?
• How will authors generate income?
The panellist’s engagement with these and other questions are appended here, and we extend a huge debt of gratitude to Katherine Behar, Gary Hall, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, and Tara McPherson for their insights, as well as their willingness to formulate and realise Project 5 as a model of a paradigm for future publishing.
*
On 11th January 2013, Aaron Swartz was found dead in his New York apartment, having apparently taken his own life. He was 26. A web programmer, co-founder of Reddit, and advocate of free-data, Swartz had been arrested in July 2011, and was being sued for downloading and attempting to release 4.8 million academic articles from the digital library JSTOR. He was arrested in July 2011, charged with data theft-related crimes, and was due to stand trail in April 2013. If convicted he faced over 30 years in prison. On January 9th 2013, JSTOR announced that the archives of more than 1,200 journals were now available for, as Library Journal puts it, ‘limited free reading by the public’. Such free reading amounts to three articles every two weeks. We have a long way to go.

Mark Little and Marquard Smith

Future Publishing

David Cunningham’s reviews of Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s latest book, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, is currently up as a freebie on the Radical Philosophy website here.

Exhibiting Performance Conference

Date: 1-3 March 2013
University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London, W1B 2UW

The Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) of the University of Westminster is pleased to announce Exhibiting Performance, a three-day event considering contemporary issues central to the display of performance art. Following on from the Exhibiting Photography (2011) and Exhibiting Video (2012) International Conferences, this event will bring together notable artists, curators and writers, and provide a forum for a number of inter-related questions:

• On what terms has the rise of Performance in contemporary arts taken place?
• How do our museums and galleries disseminate and exhibit Performance?
• How does the live act of Performance inform questions around the body and the audience?
• How is Performance documented, archived and transacted?
• How does technology contribute to the development of Performance?

The conference will be framed by Indeterminacy, a John Cage performance by Stewart Lee, Tania Chen and Steve Beresford in the Old Lumiere Cinema, Regent Street and the exhibition of work by artists and writers responding to a live performance by Philip Lee and Cally Trench Do you remember it – or weren’t you there? at London Gallery West.

There will be four half-day themes:

Curating:
With Tate Modern opening the Tanks for performance events and Marina Abramovic’s major exhibition at New York’s MoMA in 2010, is performance art now mainstream, and on what terms? How do museums and galleries understand performance art?

Dissemination and Documentation:
How is performance documented ? If you missed the performance is that it? What value does an art work in a different medium which gives a memory of a performance have?

The Body and Audiences:
What is the role of the body in performance today ? Why do so many performance artists perform naked ? Is the naked body a sign of authenticity or does the taboo distract from meaning ? How is the relationship between artist and audience different from or similar to other areas of art?

Performance and Media:
How does technology mediate performance ? What are the ontologies of networked, mediated and recorded performance practices ? How is videoperformance ‘live’? How do different technologies of camera (webcam, surveillance, etc) and screens (CRT, flat, projection, mobile phone, computer, etc) change our concept of performance?

Confirmed Participants:
Franko B, artist; Steve Beresford, Performer and Musician, University of Westminster; Rocio Boliver, artist, Mel Brimfield, artist; Dr Gavin Butt, Goldsmith College; Jon Cairns, Central St Martins; Dr Maria Chatzichristodoulou, curator and performer, University of Hull; Tania Chen, Musician; Dr Rob la Frenais, Curator The Arts Catalyst; Professor Joram ten Brink, University of Westminster, Lois Keidan, founder, director Live Art Development Agency; Richard Layzell, artist, Middlesex University; Stewart Lee, writer and performer; Kira O’Reilly, artist University of Hull; Dr Lucy Reynolds, University of the Arts; Dr Marquard Smith, University of Westminster; Dr Margherita Sprio, University of Westminster; Gary Stevens, artist; Dr Tracey Warr, writer and curator, Oxford Brookes University; Catherine Wood, Curator, Contemporary Art & Performance at Tate; Silvia Ziranek, artist.

PROGRAMME AND REGISTRATION
http://www.westminster.ac.uk/research/a-z/cream/events/exhibiting-performance-conference

This conference will take place from 4.00pm on Friday 1 March to Sunday 3 March 2013. The fee for registration will be:
Full conference: Standard rate £85. One day rate £50
Full conference: Student rate £40. One day rate £30.
Performance only: £10 – Student Rate £5

PERFORMANCE
Indeterminacy, a John Cage performance
Sunday 3 March 2013, 6.30pm
Stewart Lee, Tania Chen and Steve Beresford
Regent Street Cinema
University of Westminster
309 Regent Street
London W1R 8AL

EXHIBITION:
Do you remember it – or weren’t you there?
Philip Lee and Cally Trench
31 January 2013 – 3 March 2013
London Gallery West, School of Media, Art and Design
University of Westminster, Watford Road, Harrow
Middlesex HA1 3TP

The IMCC is delighted to welcome John Beck who is joining us this month from Newcastle as Professor in Modern Literature based within the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at Westminster. John’s main research interests lie in American literature and culture as well as photographic theory and visual culture. He is on the editorial board of the journal Cultural Politics, and his most recent book, Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Literature, was winner of the Western Literature Association’s Thomas J. Lyon Prize in 2010.

A quick notice that Vol 2, no. 2 of ARCHITECTURE_MEDIA_POLITICS_SOCIETY is now available on-line.

Ten years ago this month Daniel Libeskind won the competition for Ground Zero. It was a story of politics, economics and media manipulation. In this month’s edition of the journal, he looks back on the most emotive and polemic architectural project of recent times and discusses the relationship between politics and architecture in the context of trauma.

Read it at: http://architecturemps.com/

1. 6th February 2013, 4pm – 5.15pm, Room 106, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW.

Professor Danny Nicol, School of Law, University of Westminster
‘Legitimacy and Globalised Law in Dr Who’ (Joint seminar, with English Literature and Culture)

All Welcome. RSVP Chris Daley.

2. 12th February, 2013, 4pm – 5.30pm, Room 2.05a, 4 Little Titchfield Street

Dave Griffiths, C.E.O King CNUT Clothing
‘I fought the (fashion) law: F.C.U.K vs C.N.U.T’

3. 26th February 2013, 10am-12.00pm, Room 2.04 Riding House Street. NB Enter through 4 Little Titchfield Street W1W 7UW.

Professor Christian Armbruester, Freie Universität Berlin
‘Celebrity Rights to their Own Image – a Civil Law Perspective’

All Welcome: RSVP Chris Ellins (C.J.Ellins@westminster.ac.uk)

4. 5th March 2013, 5pm – 6.30pm, Room 2.05a, 4 Little Titchfield Street, W1W 7UW

Daniel Geey, Solicitor Field Fisher Waterhouse, Editor ‘On the Ball’
‘Contemporary Issues in Sports Broadcasting’

Any queries or for more information on the Series please contact Guy Osborn (G.Osborn@westminster.ac.uk). If you are not a member of staff or student at the University you are welcome to attend but please contact Guy Osborn to confirm.

Queer London Conference
Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies
University of Westminster
Saturday 23rd March 2013

Keynote Speaker:
Dr. Matt Cook (Birkbeck College, University of London)

REGISTRATION NOW OPEN

This one-day conference is dedicated to a consideration of London and its role in creating, housing, reflecting and facilitating queer life. It will bring together scholars from a variety of different disciplines and backgrounds to examine representations of queer London and how London itself represents queers.

That London is a focus and centre for queer life and culture can be seen on its stages; in its bar and club scenes; in its film festivals and its representations in film; in its performance art; in its political life; in its gyms; in its history; in its book groups and book shops; and in its representations in the contemporary queer fiction of writers like Alan Hollinghurst and Sarah Waters. That London is a hub and an axis goes without saying. What the ‘Queer London’ conference offers is an opportunity for further analysis and investigation of these representations/representational platforms and consideration of the socio-cultural role that London plays in queer life.

The conference focuses on the period 1885 to the present and includes papers on topics as diverse as 1920s lesbian London; modes of queer activism; the art and photography of Francis Bacon; London’s drag scenes; Alan Hollingshurst’s queer London; queer Soho; and London’s queer sex work.

The conference programme will shortly be posted here – http://queerlondonconf.wordpress.com/

The conference will be from 10.30am until 7pm and will be held in the University of Westminster’s building at 309 Regent Street.

The conference will be FREE to attend but places are limited. In order to reserve a place, please email queerlondonconf@gmail.com, including your name, contact details and affiliation.

If you have any questions, please get in touch with Dr. Simon Avery (s.avery@westminster.ac.uk) and Dr. Katherine M. Graham (k.graham1@westminster.ac.uk).

.

Foreclosure

Joint Brunel University and University of Westminster Conference for Research Students
University of Westminster, June 17 and 18, 2013

Doctoral students are invited to submit a proposal for the 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 conference invites you to take up this task, to think, write, speak, draw and perform ways to disclose the foreclosures; to propose artistic, political and legal modes able to unleash the potentialities often imprisoned within their [individual] apparatuses.

This call is for PhD students only and invites papers or per­formances from all areas in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Papers can be critical articles, fieldwork reports, creative readings or/and performance/presentation (including sound, film, installation, theatre, exhibition, etc) of no longer than 20 minutes in length. Please send a 200-word proposal including the title of your project along with a short biography to: foreclosuresconference@gmail.com.

Deadline: February 28 2013

With regards from the student committee: Caterina Nirta, Danilo Mandic, Andrea Pavoni, Serena Volpi, Jessica Worden, Roswitha Gerlitz

Confirmed Participants:
Franko B, artist; Steve Beresford, Performer and Musician, University of Westminster; Mel Brimfield, artist; Gavin Butt, Goldsmith College; Jon Cairns, Central St Martins; Maria Chatzichristodoulou, curator and performer, University of Hull; Tania Chen, Musician; Rob la Frenais, Curator The Arts Catalyst; Richard Layzell, artist, Middlesex University; Stewart Lee, writer and performer; Kira O’Reilly, artist, University of Hull; Marquard Smith, University of Westminster; Margherita Sprio, University of Westminster; Gary Stevens, artist; Tracey Warr, writer and curator, Oxford Brookes University; Silvia Ziranek, artist.

Exhibiting Performance Conference, 1-3 March 2013
University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London, W1B 2UW

The Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) is convening Exhibiting Performance, a three-day event considering contemporary issues central to the display of performanceart. Following on from the Exhibiting Photography (2011) and Exhibiting Video (2012) International Conferences, this event will bring together notable artists, curators and writers, and provide a forum for a number of inter-related questions: On what terms has the rise of Performance in contemporary arts taken place? How do our museums and galleries disseminate and exhibit Performance? How does the live act of Performance inform questions around the body and the audience? How is Performance documented, archived and transacted? How does technology contribute to the development of Performance?

The conference will be framed by the exhibition of work by artists and writers responding to a live performance by Philip Lee and Cally Trench, Do you remember it – or weren’t you there? at London Gallery West, and Indeterminacy, a John Cage performance by Stewart Lee, Tania Chen and Steve Beresford.

There will be four half-day themes:

Curating: With Tate Modern opening the Tanks for performance events and Marina Abramovic’s major exhibition at New York’s MoMA in 2010, is performance art now mainstream, and on what terms? How do museums and galleries understand performance art?

Dissemination and Documentation: How is performance documented ? If you missed the performance is that it? What value does an art work in a different medium which gives a memory of a performance have?

The Body and Audiences: What is the role of the body in performance today ? Why do so many performance artists perform naked ? Is the naked body a sign of authenticity or does the taboo distract from meaning ? How is the relationship between artist and audience different from or similar to other areas of art?

Performance and Technology: How does technology mediate performance ? What are the ontologies of networked, mediated and recorded performance practices ? How is videoperformance ‘live’? How do different technologies of camera (webcam, surveillance, etc) and screens (CRT, flat, projection, mobile phone, computer, etc) change our concept of performance?

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION
Please send a 200-word abstract by 11 February, 2013. Successful applicants will be notified by 15 February, 2013. They must include the presenter’s name, affiliation, email and postal address, together with the paper’s title. Please send abstracts to Amanda Wheeler A.Wheeler@westminster.ac.uk

PROGRAMME AND REGISTRATION
This conference will take place from 4.00pm on Friday 1 March to Sunday 3 March 2013. The fee for registration will be:
Full conference: Standard rate £85. One day rate £50
Full conference: Student rate £40. One day rate £30.
Performance only: £10
This covers all conference documentation, refreshments, receptions and administration costs. Registration will open at the begining of February 2013.

EXHIBITION:
Do you remember it – or weren’t you there?
Philip Lee and Cally Trench
31 January 2013 – 3 March 2013
London Gallery West, School of Media, Art and Design
University of Westminster, Watford Road, Harrow
Middlesex HA1 3TP

PERFORMANCE
Indeterminacy, a John Cage performance
Sunday 3 March 2013, 6.30pm
Stewart Lee, Tania Chen and Steve Beresford
University of Westminster
309 Regent Street
London W1R 8AL

Our friends in the Art, Globalization, and Interculturality research group in the Department of Art History, University of Barcelona, are pleased to announce a ‘call for papers’ for their upcoming international conference entitled ‘Critical Cartography of Art and Visuality in the Global Age’. Please see further details below.

1st INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
Critical Cartography of Art and Visuality in the Global Age.

April 26-27, 2013, Barcelona, SPAIN

AULA MAGNA. Department of Art History, University of Barcelona (UB)
AUDITORIUM. Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA)

The First International Conference Critical Cartography of Art and Visuality in the Global Age aims to engage with the complexities of the new status of art and visuality in contemporary art practice in the context of “globalization”. Focusing on the paradigms of identity, alterity, memory, locality and interculturality, as well as on new ways of understanding the political, ecological, technological, economical and scientific dimensions of the current age, the conference seeks to locate the topos from which each of these paradigms forges links between theoretical concepts and innovative work methodologies.

Scholars, artists, and research students working in the field of global art are invited to submit proposals for one of the following panel themes:

1. Media Art Documentation. New Tools for the Humanities.
Convenor: Carles Guerra, Keynote: Oliver Grau

2. The Utopian Globalists
Convenor: Anna Maria Guasch, Keynote: Jonathan Harris

3. Labor, Woman and Politics
Convenor: Juan Vicente Aliaga, Keynote: Angela Dimitrakaki

4. Art and the Post-Natural Condition
Convenor: Joaquín Barriendos Rodríguez, Keynote: T.J. Demos

Each panel will be comprised of four speakers, each allocated 20 minutes for their presentation, with the convenor encouraging debate among the presenters.

All abstract submissions (even if not selected for a panel presentation) will be considered for the publication Critical Cartography of Art and Visuality in the Global Age. New Methodologies, Concepts, and Analytic Scopes, an edited collection resulting from the conference to be published by the University of Barcelona.

A completed application form including a 300 word abstract and a brief CV should be submitted to Nasheli Jiménez del Val at artglobalage@gmail.com by February 18, 2013. Authors will be notified of acceptance for the panel, the publication, or both, by March 8, 2013.

http://artglobalizationinterculturality.com/activities/conferences/conference-2013/

30 January 2013 in room MG14 Marylebone Campus, Marylebone Road

Our friends in Westminster’s School of Architecture and the Built Environment are hosting an event next week entitled ‘What is the role of culture in the regeneration of the areas around the Olympic Park?’ The event draws together practitioners and academics from a variety of professional backgrounds who will share their experiences and perspectives of cultural projects in the areas around the Olympic Park.

6.10 Introduction – Chair: Marion Roberts – Professor of Urban Design – University of Westminster

6.20 Dr Nancy Stevenson – Programme Leader: Tourism and Events – The Cultural Olympiad and cultural legacy

6.35 Ceryl Evans – Head of Museums and Culture, London Borough of Hackney – Mapping the Change

6.50 Dr Isaac Marrero Guillamón – Post Doctoral Researcher, Birkbeck – Critical art and the Olympic State of Exception

7.05 Adriana Marques – Principal Advisor for Arts and Culture, London Legacy Development Corporation – Culture at the heart of the Olympic Legacy

7.20 Liza Fior – Partner, Muf Architecture/Art – Future project and proposals

7.35 Questions and Discussion

Contact Details: For further details and to book please follow this link
http://culturalolympicpark.eventbrite.com

We are delighted to announce the publication of The Art of Nick Cave: New Critical Essays, edited by our colleague John Baker and published by Intellect Books.

Known for his work as a performer and songwriter with the Birthday Party, the Bad Seeds, and Grinderman, Australian artist Nick Cave has also pursued a variety of other projects, including writing and acting. This collection of critical essays provides a comprehensive overview of his multifaceted career. The contributors, who hail from an array of disciplines, consider Cave’s work from many different angles, drawing on historical, psychological, pedagogical, and generic perspectives. Illuminating the remarkable scope of Cave’s achievement, they explore his career as a composer of film scores, a scriptwriter, and a performer, most strikingly in Ghosts of the Civil Dead; his work in theatre; and his literary output, which includes the novels And the Ass Saw the Angel and The Death of Bunny Munro, as well as two collections of prose. Together, the resulting essays provide a lucid overview of Nick Cave’s work that will orient students and fans while offering fresh insights sure to deepen even expert perspectives.

You can order the book here: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/books/view-Book,id=4900/

A new piece by Chris Daley in the excellent online journal Alluvium about railway fiction. Here’s the first couple of paragraphs:

Railways are news. On the one hand, they are the source of consternation as above inflation fare rises couple with the perceived drudgery of commuting to characterise the railways as a site of soaring ticket prices and overcrowded, invariably late trains. But this sentiment lives alongside whimsy and romanticism, be it through preservation lines or the restoration of ageing steam engines. This paradoxical image of the railway system is, however, nothing new within the British popular imagination and as Ian Carter (2000) points out, this may have something to do with the railways’ historical link to contested areas of modern everyday life: “So much that we take for granted today was invented or perfected in the nineteenth century to facilitate railways’ development, or to limit their potential for political, fiscal or physical mayhem: standardised time, a disciplined and uniform labour force, large-scale bureaucratic organisation, joint-stock industrial corporations, close State regulation of private capitalists’ activities.”

Similarly, British fiction has maintained an ambivalent relationship with railways. Confronted with a new revolutionary transport system, Victorian novelists offered the most sustained exploration of the potentialities of trains, yet by being, as Nicholas Daly (1999) puts it, ‘the agent and icon of the acceleration of the pace of everyday life’ (463) in the mid-nineteenth century, the railways were also a source for the countless anxieties of industrialisation. Contemporary fiction, in Britain at least, is curiously quiet on the railways, with their appearance often limited to neo-Victorian narratives that attempt to reignite the energy of the steam age. However, to mark the 150 year anniversary of the London Underground, Penguin will release, in March, a series of railway writings that could, perhaps, ignite an imaginative investigation of a transport system that is often seen as mundane, yet is simultaneously a potent symbol of transformation. It is therefore apt to briefly map the terrain of railways in fiction and popular culture in order to anticipate where any future speculation may venture.

Read further at: http://www.alluvium-journal.org/2013/01/12/railways-and-fiction/

The IMCC is delighted to welcome Martin Willis who is joining us this month as Professor in Science, Literature and Communication based within the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at Westminster. Martin’s main research interests lie in the intersections between Victorian literature and science, in particular the literary imagination’s response to marginal sciences such as mesmerism and spiritualism, and by literature’s interrogation of scientific sites and conflicts, from the laboratory and seance room to debates in disease theory and vivisection controversies. He is also Editor of of the Journal of Literature and Science, a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to scholarship exploring the cross-fertilisation between literature and science across all literary periods.

Martin’s most recent book, Vision, Science and Literature, 1870-1920: Ocular Horizons, was published by Pickering and Chatto in 2011 and was winner of both the 2011 British Society for Literature and Science Book Prize and 2012 European Society for the Study of English Cultural Studies Book Prize. Drawing on science, technology, and literature, the book aims to analyse the interaction between science, sight and the literary imagination in order to understand better how vision was continually transformed as its boundaries were breached by scientific and technological innovation.

We’re delighted to announce the publication of Leigh Wilson’s new book Modernism and Magic: Experiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult (Edinburgh University Press), which we will be launching at the Green Man pub in Riding House Street on Thursday 10th January.

The book presents a new account of the relation between modernism and occult discourses. While modernism’s engagement with the occult has been approached by critics as the result of a loss of faith in representation, an attempt to draw on science as the primary discourse of modernity, or as an attempt to draw on a hidden history of ideas, Wilson argues that these discourses have at their heart a magical practice which remakes the relationship between world and representation. As she demonstrates, the courses of the occult are based on a magical mimesis which transforms the nature of the copy, from inert to vital, from dead to alive, from static to animated, from powerless to powerful. Modernism and Magic explores the aesthetic and political implications of this relationship in the work of those writers, artists and filmmakers who were most self-consciously experimental, including James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Dziga Vertov and Sergei M. Eisenstein.