Educational Eliminationism and Cultural Colonization seminar, Nov 7th
Educational Eliminationism and Cultural Colonization
Friday 7th November, 2-6pm
Westminster Forum, University of Westminster, Wells St., London W1T 3UW
Fitzrovia Reading CANCELLED
CANCELLED DUE TO ILLNESS. WE HOPE TO RESCHEDULE THIS EVENT SOON.
Fitzrovia Atlas and Stepaway Magazine present an evening of new writing by Joan Byrne, Tony Rickaby, and Kate Wise.
Thursday 9 October 2014, 6-30pm
Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW
Admission FREE. All Welcome.
FITZROVIA ATLAS is a project based in the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster dedicated to exploring the literary and cultural life of Fitzrovia.
STEPAWAY MAGAZINE is an established online literary magazine that publishes the best urban flash fiction and poetry by writers from across the globe. http://stepawaymagazine.com
Bond Girls seminar
Wednesday 1 October, 4.15pm
Room 311, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T
Dr Monica Germana, University of Westminster
“Poisoned Stilettos, Diving Knives, and Lipstick Guns: Phallic Fashion and Bond ‘Girls’”
English Literature and Culture research seminars 2014
A new academic year and a new series of fortnightly English Literature and Culture research seminars, kicking off with our own Monica Germana.
All seminars will be held in room 311 in the University of Westminster’s Wells Street building at 4.15pm, followed by the obligatory retirement to The Green Man. All welcome.
Wednesday 1 October
Dr Monica Germana, University of Westminster
“Poisoned Stilettos, Diving Knives, and Lipstick Guns: Phallic Fashion and Bond ‘Girls’”
Wednesday 15 October
Dr Tommi Kakko, University of Tampere; Visiting Research Fellow, IMCC
“Dr Hibbert’s Theory of Apparitions and Hallucinations”
Wednesday 29 October
Professor Cian Duffy, St Mary’s University
“‘[T]hat voyage will not cease to stir the imagination’: Fridtjof Nansen’s Farthest North, the sublime, and the Arctic route to Romantic Nationalism”
Wednesday 12 November
Dr Andy McStay, Bangor University
“Exploring the Pharmacology of Empathic Media: Health, Wearables and Analytics”
Wednesday 26 November
Dr Daniela Caselli, University of Manchester
“Modernist Children”
Wednesday 10 December
Dr Gwilym Jones and Nigel Mapp, University of Westminster
Discussion on Shakespeare
Welcome to Tommi Kakko, Visiting Research Fellow
The IMCC is delighted to welcome Tommi Kakko as our visiting research fellow during 2014-15. Tommi is based at the University of Tampere, Finland, and has published in journals and essay collections on a variety of topics including John Dryden, Daniel Defoe, intermediality, modernism and psychedelia. While based at the Institute, he is writing a book about hallucinations in early modern medical texts, occult writings and literary criticism. The aim of the project is to examine how theories concerning naturally occurring hallucinatory experiences, visions and apparitions were first developed and how they evolved before the birth of modern psychology.
The Multi-Modal Museum seminar, July 9th 2014
Wednesday 9 July 2014, 6.30pm – 9pm
The Boardroom, University of Westminster , 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW
Annual Museum Studies 2014 Public Forum
The multi-modal museum: new initiatives on access programmes for visually impaired people and multisensory provision in museums
Speakers include:
Marcus Dickey Horley, Curator, Access and Special Projects, Tate Gallery
Dr Alison Eardley, Dept. Psychology, University of Westminster
Chaired by:
Dr Peter Ride, MA in Museums Galleries & Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster
This forum, which is free and open to the public, forms part of the Johns Hopkins Masters Program in Museum Studies London Onsite Seminar 2014.
Further details and RSVP: Alan Morrison, Director, JHU London Onsite Seminar, email: morrisa1@westminster.ac.uk
London Triptych reading group seminar
Simon Avery and Katherine M. Graham from our friends in Westminster’s Queer London Research Forum will be speaking to the Literary London reading Group about Jonathan Kemp’s London Triptych (2010) on Tuesday 24 Jun 2014, 6.00-7.30 pm in Senate House, Room 234. Jonathan Kemp’s novel charts the lives of three gay men, who all inhabit and explore London, but who do so in very different time periods. Covering 1894, 1954 and 1998, London Triptych interrogates what it means to be a gay man; what it means to be at the mercy of the law; and how London itself might be seen to facilitate a particular relationship between art and identity. The novel also asks readers to consider form, and the three narratives wind through London and through history, creating striking resonances across these times and the city.
A selection of extracts and the Afterword from the novel are available for download through the dropbox links below. Or you can get a copy from Gay’s the Word bookshop on Marchmont Street, which we are reliably informed is the only queer bookshop left in the UK .
Extracts: https://www.dropbox.com/s/nmmiuk5flldo38r/Extracts.pdf
Afterword:https://www.dropbox.com/s/104ny599ynrrmzs/Afterword.pdf
Michael Nath’s British Story – published July 2014
Order your copy of Michael Nath’s cracking new novel, British Story, now!
Details at: http://www.route-online.com/all-books/british-story.html
What’s haunting Kennedy? He believes that literary characters exist just like you or me, but he’s getting nowhere trying to prove it. His Falstaff project is an embarrassment; Barbara’s wanting a baby; there’s that trouble from last autumn; he can’t even tell a story. His fortunes change when he’s befriended by Arthur Mountain, a larger-than-life Welshman with a peculiar take on history and a grand distaste for the modern world. Together with his trainspotting wife, snooty secretary and trusty machete, Arthur opens Kennedy’s soul.
Philosophical, frightening and hilarious, British Story is an adventure in imagination and a rallying cry for wonder. With this witty and critical examination of contemporary life, Michael Nath has called up the lost spirit of resistance. The stoplines are operational!
There will be a launch party for British Story in an upstairs room of a Central London pub that is a key setting in the novel. Monday 23 June, 6pm. It will be an epic literary evening. If you are in the vicinity and would like to join us for a drink, we’d love to see you. Email Route for further details: info@route-online.com
Reading: Simon Perril at the ICA, Thursday 19th June
The idea of cinema in the mind of a painting: poetry, film, collage
Thursday 19 June, 6.30pm
ICA Studio, The Mall
, London
SW1Y 5AH
Free admission
As part of IMCC’s Print Screen: Writing and the Moving Image series, poet Simon Perril will be reading at the ICA next Thursday, followed by a drinks reception. All welcome.
Simon is a poet, critic, and programme leader for Creative Writing at De Montfort University, Leicester. His poetry publications include Archilochus on the Moon (Shearsman 2013), Newton’s Splinter (Open House 2012), Nitrate (Salt 2010), A Clutch of Odes (Oystercatcher 2009), and Hearing is Itself Suddenly a Kind of Singing (Salt 2004). He has also published in magazines such as P.N. Review, Jacket, Poetry Wales, Shearsman and Angel Exhaust. He is the editor of The Salt Companion to John James and Tending the Vortex: The Works of Brian Catling, and has also written on Tom Raworth, J.H. Prynne, John Tranter, and Peter Riley, among others. For the last decade he has made visual collages, and has a collage ‘novel’ in progress called Under Austerity Rubble, Ancient Bird Folk Lay Future Eggs.
Whitechapel Salon this Thursday 12th: Digital Futures
Thursday 12 June, 7pm-9pm
Clore Creative Studio, Whitechapel Gallery, London E1 7QX
The Whitechapel Salon: The Future of Theory III: Digital Futures
How does the digital radically transform art ‘theory’, and vice versa? With guests Professor Gary Hall (Director of the Centre for Disruptive Media at Coventry University, and co-founder of Culture Machine and Open Humanities Press) and Dr Cornelia Sollfrank (new media artist and Lecturer at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design). Chaired by Dr Marquard Smith
Tickets £8/6 concessions (£4 Members). Booking is essential.
Book your ticket at: http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/product/category_id/1/product_id/1915
Alex Warwick Does the Monster Mash…
Alex Warwick’s review of David McNally’s Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism is currently up as a freebie on the Radical Philosophy site. Read or download here: http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/web/do-the-monster-mash
“It is no longer necessary to begin, as it might have been ten years ago, by pointing out that we live in Gothic times, and going on to detail the Gothic’s many and various manifestations in contemporary culture. Even the bluntest of critical responses have moved beyond ‘mankind’s deepest fears’ – though often not much beyond them – to recognition of more than an idea of unchanging human nature. Part of the problem lies in the sprawling category that Gothic has become, perhaps always was, in its blurry designation of architectural form, novelistic subject matter, visual effect, subcultural style, musical genre and metaphorical trope. Because of the jumbling together of different phenomena, Gothic is everywhere and nowhere. Indeed, this is partly the point of David McNally’s book: that, as he says, ‘the essential features of capitalism, as Marx regularly reminded us, are not immediately visible … we are left to observe things and persons … while the elusive power that grows and multiplies through their deployment remains unseen, uncomprehended.’ [Read On…]”
Book Launch at Architectural Association, Friday 6 June
Architecture Against the Post-Political book launch
Friday 6 June 2014, 6.30pm
The Book Shop, Architectural Association
36 Bedford Square, Bloomsbury, London WC1B 3ES
A general welcome to the launch of two books edited by our friend Nadir Lahiji at the Architectural Association in London: Architecture Against the Post-Political: Essays in Reclaiming the Critical Project (Routledge, 2014) and The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy With Architecture (Bloomsbury, 2014)
Join Nadir in conversation with the IMCC’s David Cunningham, along with other contributors to the collections, including Douglas Spencer, Libero Andreotti and Uta Gelbke.
Tagged as Architecture, politics, radical philosophy, Urban
Call For Papers: The Anarchival Impulse
To mark the launch of Mnemoscape Magazine – edited by two former students at the IMCC – which coincides with the ten years anniversary of the publication of Hal Foster’s essay ‘An Archival Impulse’ (2004), the editors would like to prompt a reflection on the notion of the ‘anarchival’.
‘An Archival Impulse’ has establish itself as a seminal essay tackling the emergence of a specific archival tendency in contemporary art. However, as Foster noticed, this trend could perhaps be better defined as an ‘anarchival impulse’. The first issue of Mnemoscape Magazine would like to return to Foster’s early intuition and propose an epistemological shift in the study of archival art practices, one that privileges their anarchival disposition, while speculating on the positive and liberating aspects of forgetting.
Submissions are invited of single-authored or joint papers, interviews, reviews of art exhibitions and art projects that are concerned with the anarchival impulses. Send a 300 words abstract and CV to: mnemoscape@gmail.com Deadline: 30 June 2014
http://mnemoscape.wordpress.com/magazine/
Welcome to Rowena Clarke, Junior Visiting Research Fellow
The Institute is delighted to welcome Rowena Clarke as our Junior Visiting Research Fellow for Summer 2014.
Rowena is a doctoral student at Boston College in the United States where her research is focused on the cultural production of space through literary and filmic texts. She is particularly interested in popular genres and forms, and the role they play in helping to construct postwar conceptions of home, particularly in relation to suburbia and social housing. While at the IMCC, Rowena is hoping to carry out research on the British comic book 2000 AD, and on J.G. Ballard’s suburban fiction.
CSD Accelerationism Workshop, May 23rd
From our friends in the Centre for the Study of Democracy:
Accelerationism: A Workshop
May 23rd 2014, 11.00-4.30 (Closed Workshop), 6-8 (Open Plenary)
University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London
The Centre for the Study of Democracy invite you to a workshop on the emerging theme of ‘accelerationism’ – an attempt to recuperate the liberating potential of reason, technology, and modernity. In the wake of ongoing economic, environmental, and social crises, accelerationism argues that the proper response requires unleashing these potentials from their current strictures, and avoiding tendencies towards localism, primitivism, and romanticism. Accelerationism seeks to name a general disposition already underway in disparate fields such as politics, philosophy, science, engineering, and design.
This workshop aims to open and extend a discussion on accelerationism: bringing together the supportive, the sceptical and the curious to debate the philosophical underpinnings and political implications of the concept as well as ‘actually existing accelerationisms’. Speakers include: Benjamin Noys, Patricia Reed, David Cunningham, Helen Hester, Benedict Singleton, Richard Barbrook, Ben Woodard.
This will be followed by an open plenary in The Boardroom at Regent Street entitled: ‘Occupy the Future: Is a Promethean Politics Possible?’, with Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams (authors of Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics), Rachel Armstrong and Craig Gent (Plan C).
Tagged as radical philosophy, technology, The Future
Photography and Abstraction May 9th Programme Announced
Photography and Abstraction: A Symposium
REGISTRATION NOW CLOSED. Apologies – we have been inundated with an unexpectedly large number of RSVPs and can no longer fit in any further attendees.
Friday 9 May 2014, 10.00 – 6.00 (followed by drinks)
Room 501, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW
PROGRAMME:
10.00 Coffee
10.30-12.30 Panel 1
Mark Dorrian (Edinburgh), “Medium/Violence/Abstraction”
Andy Fisher (Goldsmiths), “On the Scales of Photographic Abstraction”
David Bate (Westminster), “Daguerre’s Abstraction”
Chair: David Cunningham (IMCC)
12.30-1.30 Lunch
1.30-3.30 Panel 2
Clare Birchall (King’s, London), “Aesthetics of the Secret”
Peter Adey (Royal Hollway), “Capture and Testimony in the Art of Levity”
Ella Chmielewska (Edinburgh), “Writing Between the Photograph and Abstraction”
Chair: John Beck (IMCC)
3.30 Coffee
4.00-6.00 Panel 3
Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths), “Photography After the Human”
John Roberts (Wolverhampton), “Ideation and Photography: Critique of Laruelle’s Concept of Abstraction”
Chair: Sas Mays (IMCC)
6.00 Drinks
Free Entry. All Welcome. RSVP: cunninda@wmin.ac.uk
Janine Rogers seminar and masterclass
Westminster’s Centre for the Study of Science and Imagination has a visiting scholar in residence immediately after the Easter break. Professor Janine Rogers will be with us from Canada and will be giving a seminar on the importance of literature for science writers, including a discussion of Chaucer and Brian Cox, on Monday 28 April at 5pm in the University of Westminster’s Regent Street building (room UG05), and a masterclass on form in literature and science scholarship on Wednesday 30 April at 3pm in Wells Street (room 206).
Further details on the SCIMAG website here: http://www.westminster.ac.uk/scimag/events
Natural History of Memory Inaugural Seminar
The Natural History of Memory Inaugural Seminar (hosted by the Cultural Memory Seminar Series, sponsored by the Department of English, Linguistics, and Cultural Studies, University of Westminster)
17th May, 11 am – 4 pm. Room G37, Senate House, University of London.
Speakers:
Professor Anna Reading (King’s College London), ‘Where Do Clouds Come From? A Natural History of Digital Memory’
Dr Frank Uekoetter (University of Birmingham), ‘The Boll Weevil, the Post-Slavery Plantation, and the Global World of Monoculture’
Dr Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen (UCL), ‘London Submerged: Eco-Fictions of a Vanishing Present’
Chairs: Drs Lucy Bond (Westminster), Rick Crownshaw (Goldsmiths), Jessica Rapson (King’s)
The Natural History of Memory explores the ways that environments register and mediate the memories of catastrophe and injustice. Moving beyond Walter Benjamin’s conception of natural history as the naturalization of historical events and their representation in teleological fashion, the project examines the manifold imbrications of landscape and the lived experience of violence over time. While memory studies typically positions historical sites and landscapes as the places where past catastrophes unfolded, this project understands these environments as the very media through which these disasters took place, lent agency and co-opted by the perpetrators of those events, thereby enabling their occurrence. Challenging the construction of ‘nature’ as a passive canvas for the inscription and organization of history, this research seeks to develop an environmental literacy for reading (or reconstructing) memory where landscapes and experiences have become indistinct. The Natural History of Memory thus frames strands of research that seek to examine environmental agency in both catastrophic events and their remembrance.
The Natural History of Memory Partner Institutions: Goldsmiths University of London, King’s College London, University of Westminster, and University of Ghent.
The Art School and the Culture Shed book
For a copy of the book, please contact Dean Kenning, Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture, Kingston University (D.Kenning@kingston.ac.uk).
For further information on Beck and Cornford’s art school project, email John Beck (j.beck@westminster.ac.uk) or Matthew Cornford (m.cornford@brighton.ac.uk).
Photography and Abstraction: A Symposium, May 9th
Photography and Abstraction: A Symposium
Friday 9 May 2014, 10.00 – 6.00 (followed by drinks)
Room 501, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW
Participants include:
Peter Adey (Royal Holloway)
David Bate (Westminster)
Clare Birchall (Kings)
Ella Chmielewska (Edinburgh)
Mark Dorrian (Edinburgh)
Andy Fisher (Goldsmiths)
John Roberts (Wolverhampton)
Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths)
Hosted by:
John Beck, David Cunningham, Sas Mays (IMCC, Westminster)
There are at least two ways in which photography might be said to address abstraction. The first is at the level of appearance: photographs that are not recognisable as straightforward representations. This mode of abstraction might include the deployment of modernist strategies of abstraction; photographs that appear to be abstract due to issues of scale, such as aerial or microscopic images; the direct capture of light without a camera; the combination of photographic images with other media; the use of found images; the manual or electronic manipulation of images; the framing of images to stress formal arrangement.
Alongside this category of abstract photographs or photographs that depict abstract form, a second dimension to the relationship between photography and abstraction is associated with issues of the visible and the invisible. This involves photography’s capacity to give form to unseen relationships and to register otherwise undetectable currents, flows, and networks. How does photography visualize the real abstractions of capitalism? In what ways are photographic images deployed to capture and control data through, for example, electronic monitoring devices? How is the indexical function of the photograph mobilized in order to serve as evidence across a range of scenarios, including military and police action, juridical, biopolitical, and radical political modes of representation? Can, then, photography address and give visible form to the quasi-ontological abstractions that structure economic and social relations? Finally, is there a relationship between the two scenarios outlined above? In other words, what, if any, is the relationship between non-figurative images and photography’s political, institutional, or theoretical histories?
