James Tait Black Prize Judge dicusses La Rochelle

Michael Nath’s first novel La Rochelle was shortlisted for the 2011 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. At the award ceremony held at the Edinburgh Book Festival, chair of the judges Lee Spinks outlined his appreciation book in conversation with Sally Magnusson.

Money, Time, Representation: Literary Explorations (CFP)

Money, Time, Representation: Literary Explorations (CFP)

In his Philosophy of Money, Georg Simmel notes that “we invest economic objects with a quantity of value as if it were an inherent quality” but “the question as to what value really is, like the question as to what being is, is unanswerable”. The element of unaccountability in money can also be seen in Marx, although he articulated the nature of money quite differently as an expression of social relations. Literature has always been very sensitive to the contingent, hence fictional, aspect of money.

A proposed session is planned on the topic for the IAPL (International Association for Philosophy and Literature) 2012 conference Archaeologies of the Future: tracing memories/imaging spaces to be held in Tallinn, Estonia next spring. We are looking for papers where the nature of money is explored in literature, and papers that ask how and if money in literature is the same as money in philosophy. The issues can include, but are not limited to, the nature of money as representation of value, or as representation of authority, or the role of money as an expression of a temporal pact that affects our sense of time. If you are interested in the topics of money in literature and/or money in philosophy, or parallels between writing and money, please send in your abstract ASAP (max. 1000 words) to the email address below. The session can include four to five speakers. Please note that all speakers must be IAPL members by the end of September 2011. For more details, see: www.iapl.info

Dr Tiina Käkelä-Puumala, University of Helsinki, Finland
email: tkakela@mappi.helsinki.fi

Out of this world, Sept 16 2011

Science Fiction Study Day
British Library, London
Friday 16^th September 2011, 9.30am – 5.30pm

Both David Cunningham and Chris Daley will be participating in a panel on J.G. Ballard as part of the British Library’s Science Fiction Study Day, accompanying the exhibition Out of this World, on Friday 16^th September. Other speakers include Mark Bould, Roger Luckhurst and John Milner.

From utopian to dystopian visions, Futurism to Futurology, the participants will talk about recent projects that feature various aspects of science fiction discourse. Learn about the most recent research trends, methodologies and applications, and get inspired by the ideas and questions examined during the day.

Details and booking here.

RP in NY, October 21st 2011

Radical Philosophy Conference 2011
Columbia University, New York
Friday 21st October 2011, 9am – 7.30pm.

Radical Philosophy will be visiting New York for its 2011 conference, held in collaboration with Columbia University. The event is free but advance registration is essential: radicalphilosophyrsvp@gmail.com

Sessions:
Postcolonial Worlds ∙ Representing Capitalism ∙
Biocapital and Security ∙ Temporalities of Crisis ∙ Politics of Information ∙

Speakers:
Claudia Aradau; Souleymane Bachir Daigne; Tim Bewes; Antonia Birnbaum; Finn Brunton; Marilena Chaui; David Cunningham; Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui; David Golumbia; Harry Harootunian; Esther Leslie; Rosalind C. Morris; Mark Neocleous; Peter Osborne; Kristin Ross; Kaushik Sunder Rajan; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Further details including conference programme and abstracts at:
http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/uncategorized/radical-philosophy-conference-2011

Register at: radicalphilosophyrsvp@gmail.com

Whitechapel Salon: Cultures of Capitalism II, September 15

Thursday 15 September 2011, 7pm
Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1
Price: £7.00 / £5.00 concessions (includes free glass of wine).

This season’s Whitechapel Salon organised by the IMCC in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery is on ‘Cultures of Capitalism’. In the second of four events interrogating contemporary economies of art and culture, Julie Lomax, Head of Visual Arts, Arts Council England, London, Niru Ratnam, Director of Aicon Gallery, and Victoria Walsh, Research, Tate Britain, discuss The Future of Museums and Galleries: Culture, Education, and Policy. Chaired by Marquard Smith.

Book your ticket at: http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/product/category_id/22/product_id/962?session_id=13148072992e2fd7d4c36c363f076298461909906a

Register now for New Ways of Working with Image, Sept 14 2011

‘New Ways of Working with Image’ Seminar and Workshop
Wednesday 14 September 2011, 11.00am – 4.30pm
Room 257, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

Update: Schedule Announced:
11.00 welcome and introductions (RS257)
11.15 opening panel (Jesse Ash, Andrew Fisher, Elena Gualtieri, Nigel Mapp)
12.30 lunch
13.30 workgroups (chairs)
Image and Performance (Marquard Smith)
Imagescapes (David Cunningham)
Imaginary Image (Jarkko Toikkanen)
Remediating Image (Lise Mortensen)
15.00 coffee
15.30 closing discussion 

How do we understand ‘image’ today, and how has our notion of the image changed over time? What is the status of the image in current theory, and how does the study of image translate into visual culture? In which ways do words and verbal communication relate to or conflict with images? Do we work differently with images today, compared to the practices of previous generations? And if we do, why? Questions such as these underlie the Institute’s autumn Workshop which focuses on a practical, hands-on angle approach to working with image today.

Participants in this experiment are invited to discuss what they understand by the notion of ‘image’ and which methods they have chosen to work with it. Instead of discussing general themes and motifs without knowledge of each other’s premises, talking about what one does, and how one does it, reduces the chance of conceptual miscommunication and provides the opportunity for learning from new viewpoints. Interested academics, scholars and postgraduate students in particular are all invited to attend!

The format of the day will be an interactive opening panel of invited speakers from art history, photographic theory, visual culture, philosophy and literary studies reflecting on their own approaches to the image in both disciplinary and transdisciplinary terms, followed by smaller group workshop sessions open to signed-up members of the audience, and concluding with general discussion. Individual workshop themes will include: (1) Image and Performance: on the nature and role of images in and as performance; (2) Imagescapes: what kinds of scenes and spaces images form and come to interact in; (3) Imaginary Image: how images condition and affect the reading experience; (4) Remediating Image: the slide and change of images between different semiotic modes.

Confirmed panel participants and workshop chairs include: David Cunningham (IMCC, Westminster), Andrew Fisher (Visual Culture, Goldsmiths College), Elena Gualtieri (Centre for Visual Fields, Sussex), Nigel Mapp (English Literature, Westminster), Lise Majgaard Mortensen (Aarhus University/IMCC), Marquard Smith (IMCC, Westminster), Jarkko Toikkanen (University of Tampere/IMCC).

This workshop is free and convened by our Visiting Research Fellows in the Institute, Lise Majgaard Mortensen and Jarkko Toikkanen. For further information or to reserve a place (numbers are strictly limited!), please email Jarkko at: Jarkko.Toikkanen@uta.fi

Materialities of text online conference

Materialities of Text: Between the Codex and the Net
An Online Conference, from October 24^th – November 4^th 2011.

Remit:
The book, in its traditional codex form, appears in transition from print media to digital media; a condition nevertheless complicated by its forms of survival, as indicated by the term ‘webpage’. Despite the epochal significance of the scroll, the codex, and the digital text, such material figures of inscription are necessarily hybrid; a hybridity that especially characterises the current historico-technical relation between print and digital media. Hybridity, of course, has been championed, for example, in postcolonial studies, as a figure of subversion, but it is also clear that hybrid text, as much as it is an object of possible democratisation within the digital public sphere, is also an object of intense capitalisation. Thus, the apparent waning of the hegemony of print is drawing questions of the politics of textual materialism into critical perception, and the need to interrogate the specificity of these materials, in their complex relations to the sensual form of paper and the ‘dispersed’ textuality of the digital medium. What, then, are the new materialities of hybrid text-media? What are the politics of digital/print hybrids, artists’ books, writing technologies, and digital publishing? How does media hybridity transform the political book, the artists’ book, or the work of literature? What effects do new materialities of text have on patterns of reading? Has media process replaced the media object? What are the sensory forms of new media materialities? How is the commodity-form of the book altered by new media platforms? What are the conditions and forms of specific media hybridities? What does new media do to the ‘perversions’ of the book – to bibliomania, to fetishism? Are we still ‘people of the book’ – what remains of the authority of the book? How has independent publishing responded to new materialities of text? What might figures of the book offer in the way of new or counter-knowledges, forms of community and communication?

Platform / Participants:
In keeping with its theme, the project will centre on an online conference, held on this website, which will allow the uploading of short texts and images, and user-generated commentary and debate. The organisers invite responses to texts and related questions from thinkers in all disciplines: literary-cultural studies, art-practice, critical theory and philosophy, book and publishing history and practice, etc.

Abstracts of included texts: Janneke Adema & Gary Hall (Coventry University): ‘(Im)materialities of Text: The Book as a Form of Political & Conceptual Resistance in Art and Academia’; Richard Burt (University of Florida): ‘Shelf-Life’; Johanna Drucker (UCLA): ‘Diagrammatic Writing’; Davin Heckman (Siena Heights University): ‘The Politics of Plasticity: Neoliberalism, Deliberation & the Digital Text’; Sas Mays (University of Westminster) ‘Mnemopolitics: Philosophy & the Archive in the Digital Public Sphere’; Daniel Selcer (Duquesne University): ‘Invisible Ink: Atomizing Textual Materialism’; Nick Thoburn (university of Manchester): ‘Materialities of Political Publishing’.

The organisers – Sas Mays (IMCC, Westminster) and Nick Thorburn (Manchester) – intend this forum to allow discussion that may be included within the second form of dissemination, and may feed into contributors’ articles within it: a special issue of the journal New Formations to be published in 2012.

Contemporary Vernacular Photographies symposium

New Radical Philosophy website

A plug for the new website for Radical Philosophy. The address remains the same – http://www.radicalphilosophy.com – but as well as updating the way the website looks and works, every single item from the back catalogue has now been added to the online archive, from the first Radical Philosophy published in Spring 1972 through to the very latest issue.

Subscribers continue to have full access to and unlimited downloads from the archive, including all articles, interviews and reviews now available from RP1 to the present. Non-subscribing readers will enjoy free access all the commentaries, obituaries, conference and news reports, plus highlights from back issues and new access to hundreds of items from the expanded archive. A new feature of the website will also allow non-subscribers to purchase and download pdfs of individual items from the archive at an affordable price of £3 for any article or interview and £2 for the reviews sections from recent issues.

When the first issue of Radical Philosophy was published in January 1972, it sought – in the wake of the rise of the New Left and the student movements of the 1960s – to challenge the institutional divisions that it saw as contributing to the impoverishment of contemporary philosophical practice: divisions that existed between academic departments, between teachers and their students, and between the university and society. “Our main aim,” the Editorial Collective declared, “is to free ourselves from the restricting institutions and orthodoxies of the academic world, and thereby to encourage important philosophical work to develop: Let a Hundred Flowers Blossom!”. In the ensuing forty years much has changed about contemporary philosophy, in the UK and elsewhere.  But as testified by recent dossiers on transdisciplinarity, campaign reports on the revitalized student movement, and regular philosophically-informed commentaries on contemporary social and political issues, those problematic disciplinary, pedagogical and social divisions continue to be challenged by those writing in Radical Philosophy.

To access the expanded archive, subscribe to the journal, check out selected content from the latest issue, or download the current free gift from the back catalogue – Jacques Rancière’s ‘On the Theory of Ideology’ (originally published in RP7, Spring 1974) – simply click here.

Emma McEvoy on Gothic Music and Performance

A quick plug for a superb blog by IMCC affiliate Emma McEvoy, about late eighteenth-century gothic music and performance, on Stirling’s The Gothic Imagination site. As Glennis Byron puts it in the Comments: ‘The post, is, people, pretty amazing … As we plod along, talking about Twilight and True Blood and Zombies and all that ephemeral rubbish, and repeating the same old points about gothic over and over and over and over, some people are actually doing real research’. Read it here.

online education: museums, galleries, and the university

The University of Westminster’s Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies, in association with the Masters Program in Museum Studies, Johns Hopkins University, invite you to:

‘ONLINE’: What can Museums and Galleries learn from online education in Universities, and vice versa?
A Round Table discussion with keynote speaker Phyllis Hecht (Johns Hopkins University)
Wednesday 20 July 2011, 6.30-8 p.m.
The Board Room, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Entrance free. RSVP Sharon Sinclair, email sinclas@westminster.ac.uk

Phyllis Hecht is Director of the Master of Arts in Museum Studies program at Johns Hopkins University, USA. She is the Chair of the Committee on Museum Professional Training (COMPT) of the American Association of Museums (AAM). Most recently she co-edited and contributed to The Digital Museum: A Think Guide (2007), an anthology on museums and technology. Phyllis will discuss how the MA program at JHU is using social networking, including incorporating Facebook and Twitter into its learning strategy.

This event is part of the JHU Museum Studies London Onsite Summer Seminar held at the University of Westminster. The Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture launches its new MA programme in Museums, Galleries and Contemporary Culture in September 2011.

Upcoming Westminster Literature Research Seminars in Oct-Nov 2011

An early heads up on the line up of speakers and list of dates for next year’s first semester series of English Literature and Culture seminars. All will take place from 1.15-2.30pm on Wednesday lunchtimes in the University’s Regent Street building (room 359).

12th October 2011
Helen Glew (History Project, University of Westminster)
“Women at the Regent Street Polytechnic, 1882 – 1945”

26th October 2011
Anna Katharina Schaffner (University of Kent)
“Havelock Ellis and the Literary Imagination: On Sexology and Fiction”

9th November 2011
Caroline Edwards (Surrey University)
“Fictions of the Not Yet”

23rd November 2011
Samuel Thomas (Durham University)
“The Gaucho Sells Out: Thomas Pynchon, Nation Building & Argentina”

Further details at: http://seminarserieswmin.wordpress.com/

Post-Bollywood? India Media Centre, international Indian Cinema conference, 8th-9th July

‘What’s New? The Changing Face of Indian Cinema: Contemporary and Historical Contexts’
Friday 8th and Saturday 9th July 2011
Marylebone Campus, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS

Invited speakers include: Filmmakers, Anurag Kashyap and Rituparno Ghosh, Rachel Dwyer (SOAS, London), Shohini Ghosh, (Jamia Millia Islamia University, Delhi), Lalitha Gopalan, (University of Texas at Austin).

Is mainstream Indian cinema moving into a ‘post-Bollywood’ era?  In recent years a growing number of popular (and not so popular) films made for commercial release have been challenging the conventions of the mainstream multi-genre, song and dance extravaganzas. These films are being made – both within and outside the prevailing studio system – in Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata and elsewhere. From ‘Dev D’ to ‘Just Another Love Story, Udaan’ or ‘Peepli Live,’ cinematic language is being explored, songs are disappearing or being used in different ways, and strong alternative storylines are presenting a new face of modern Indian society.  These films’ hybrid sensibilities are increasingly appealing to the global aspirations of India’s urban ‘multiplex’ generation.

The London Indian Film Festival was set up in July 2010 to showcase this trend, bringing cutting edge Indian films and filmmakers to London audiences. Alongside this summer’s festival, the India Media Centre at the University of Westminster, in association with the London Indian Film Festival, is hosting a conference that will bring together filmmakers, industry professionals and academics to explore this new phenomenon within both a contemporary and an historical context.

Full conference: Standard rate £150. One day rate £100
Full conference: Student rate £65.  One day rate £45.
There is an early bird discount if you pay by Thursday 30 June:
Full conference: Standard rate £125. Student rate £50

This covers all conference documentation, refreshments, lunches, a reception, reduced cinema ticket prices to LIFF events, free entry to the final night party, and administration costs.

To register please download the registration form from: http://www.westminster.ac.uk/whats-new_080711

General enquiries: please contact Helen Cohen at: H.cohen02@westminster.ac.uk
Academic enquires: please contact Daisy Hasan at: D.Hasan@westminster.ac.uk
Conference team: Rosie Thomas, Daisy Hasan, Radha Dayal, Helen Cohen.

Monday July 4th, Contemporary China Centre event on Mao, then and now

Our friends in University of Westminster’s Contemporary China Centre present:

Through Time and Space with Chairman Mao:? The Afterlife and Global Impact of the Great Helmsman
A panel discussion with Pankaj Mishra and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, chaired by Harriet Evans
Monday, July 4, 2011, 5.00 p.m. – 6.30 p.m.
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

How is Mao thought about in contemporary China and in other parts of Asia? In what ways have debates about his legacy and posthumous uses of his image paralleled or diverged from those of other larger-than-life figures associated with independence movements from Nehru to Nasser and from Ho to Che? What should we make of the “red song” movement sweeping through the PRC, which can be treated as fueled by nostalgic yearning or attributed to political manoeuvring?

Pankaj Mishra is the author of The Romantics: A Novel, which won the LA Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, and Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond. His new book The Rise of Asia and the Remaking of the Modern World will be published next year.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Professor of History and Chair of the Department at UC Irvine, where he also serves as the Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies. His books include Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China (1991), China’s Brave New World (2007), Global Shanghai, 1850-2010 (2009), and China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (2011). He is a co-founder of the “China Beat” blog/electronic magazine.

Harriet Evans is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies, and Director of the Contemporary China Centre, University of Westminster, and is curator of the exhibition ‘Poster Power: Images from Mao’s China, Then and Now.’

Contemporary China Centre
www.westminster.ac.uk/schools/humanities/research/asian-studies

For enquiries about the Contemporary China Centre, please contact
Professor Harriet Evans: evansh@westminster.ac.uk

‘Korean Contemporary Art on British Soil’ at Korean Cultural Centre, Friday 1st July

The Nomad Artist in a Transnational Era: Korean Contemporary Art on British Soil
Friday 1^st July 2011,14:30-19:00 pm
Multi-purpose Hall, Korean Cultural Centre UK in London, Grand Buildings, 1-3 Strand, London, WC2N 5BW (Main entrance on Northumberland Avenue)

The Institute’s Visiting Research Fellow Dr Young-Paik Chun (Hong-Ik University, Seoul) has programmed this exciting forthcoming event.

14:30 – 15:00
Digital Film Screening
Interview with Eemyun Kang
4482 Korean Contemporary Artists Group Exhibition

15:00 – 16:15
Session 1. Theoretical approaches
Chair: Marquard Smith (Director, IMCC, University of Westminster)
Speaker: Young-Paik Chun (Art History and Theory, Hong-Ik University, Seoul)
Commentator: Edward Allington (Head of Graduate Sculpture, Slade School of Fine Art)

16:15 – 16:30 coffee break

16:30 – 17:40
Session 2. Panel Discussion in Art Practice I – Curatorial Practice
Chair: Jade Keun-Hye Lim (Independent Curator / APG in Museum Studies, Leicester University)
David A Bailey (Director, International Curators Forum)
Ji-Yoon Lee (Director, Suum Contemporary Art Project & Academy)
Sook-Kyung Lee (Curator, Tate Liverpool)

17:50 – 19:00
Session 3. Panel Discussion in Art Practice II – Making Art Works 
Chair: Stephanie Seung-Min Kim (Director, Iskai Contemporary Art)
Mee-Kyung Shin (artist)
Chan-hyo Bae (artist)
Jin-Kyun Ahn (artist)

New Ways of Working with Image workshop, September 2011

‘New Ways of Working with Image’ Seminar and Workshop
Wednesday 14 September 2011
University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London

How do we understand ‘image’ today, and how has our notion of the image changed over time? What is the status of the image in current theory, and how does the study of image translate into visual culture? In which ways do words and verbal communication relate to or conflict with images? Do we work differently with images today, compared to the practices of previous generations? And if we do, why? Questions such as these underlie the Institute’s autumn Workshop which focuses on a practical, hands-on angle approach to working with image today.

Participants in this experiment are invited to discuss what they understand by the notion of ‘image’ and which methods they have chosen to work with it. Instead of discussing general themes and motifs without knowledge of each other’s premises, talking about what one does, and how one does it, reduces the chance of conceptual miscommunication and provides the opportunity for learning from new viewpoints. Interested academics, scholars and postgraduate students are all invited to attend.

The format of the day will be an interactive opening panel of invited speakers from art history, photographic theory, visual culture, philosophy and literary studies reflecting on their own approaches to the image in both disciplinary and transdisciplinary terms, followed by smaller group workshop sessions open to signed-up members of the audience, and concluding with general discussion. Individual workshop themes will include: (1) Image and Performance: on the nature and role of images in and as performance; (2) Imagescapes: what kinds of scenes and spaces images form and come to interact in; (3) Imaginary Image: how images condition and affect the reading experience; (4) Remediating Image: the slide and change of images between different semiotic modes.

Confirmed panel participants and workshop chairs include: David Cunningham (IMCC, Westminster), Mick Finch (Fine Art, Central Saint Martins), Andrew Fisher (Visual Culture, Goldsmiths College), Elena Gualtieri (Centre for Visual Fields, Sussex), Nigel Mapp (English Literature, Westminster), Lise Majgaard Mortensen (Aarhus University/IMCC), Luke Skrebowski (History of Art, Cambridge), Marquard Smith (IMCC, Westminster), Jarkko Toikanen (Tampere University/IMCC)

This workshop is convened by our Visiting Research Fellows in the Institute, Lise Majgaard Mortensen and Jarkko Toikkanen. For further information or to reserve a place (numbers are strictly limited!), please email Jarkko at: Jarkko.Toikkanen@uta.fi

The Institute welcomes Dr Nina Lager Vestberg, its new Visiting Research Fellow

The Institute is pleased to welcome Dr Nina Lager Vestberg from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, who will be a Visiting Research Fellow at IMCC from 13^th-30^th June.

Nina is an Associate Professor of Visual Culture at NTNU, and a Founding Member of the Visual Culture in Europe Network. She was educated in the UK, where she studied photography and multimedia at the University of Westminster (BA Hons), and history of art at Birkbeck College, London (MA and PhD). Nina has published articles on French photography and cultural memory, the indexicality of the photographic archive, and issues of copyright. Her current project investigates the cultural implications of the transformation of the photographic archive from an analogue, physical and visual environment to a digital, virtual and largely textual one. This will be the focus of her work during her stay in London, where she will be consulting primary sources in various London-based archives and collections of photographs.

W.J.T. Mitchell at University of Westminster on 13th June from 2-6, in The Board Room, 309 Regent Street.

The eagerly awaited ‘Audience with W.J.T. Mitchell’ will take place in The Boardroom, 1^st Floor, 309 Regent Street, University of Westminster, on Monday 13^th June 2011 from 2-6. All are welcome, and attendance is free, but you must RSVP to Sharon asap here: sinclas@wmin.ac.uk

Cloning Tom: An Audience with W.J.T. Mitchell

Monday 13^th June 2011, 2:00-6:00pm , 309 Regent Street, University of Westminster

To celebrate the publication of Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (University of Chicago Press), the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture is thrilled to host an audience with Professor W. J.T. Mitchell. Mitchell will deliver a presentation entitled ‘The Historical Uncanny:  Phantoms, Doubles, and Repetition in the War on Terror’. His presentation will be followed by a Roundtable with contributors including Maxime Boidy (Strasbourg), Abdelwahab El-Affendi (Westminster), Eyal Weizman (Goldsmiths), and Mitchell himself. The event will be chaired by Dr Marquard Smith (Westminster).

The event is FREE but booking is essential so please RSVP to Sharon Sinclair: sinclas@wmin.ac.uk

Professor W. J. T. Mitchell is Editor of Critical Inquiry and the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, the Department of Art History, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of seminal books including What Do Pictures Want? and Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, and editor of collections such as Against Theory, Landscape and Power, On Narrative, and Picture Theory.

Maxime Boidy is the French translator of W.J.T. Mitchell’s Cloning Terror (with S. Roth) and has also translated books by Susan Buck-Morss and Mike Davis, as well as Mitchell’s Iconography. He is a doctorial candidate in the Laboratoire Cultures et Sociétés en Europe at Université de Strasbourg.

Dr Abdelwahab El-Affendi is Reader in Politics at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster and co-ordinator of the Centre’s Democracy and Islam Programme. He is also currently an ESRC/AHRC Fellow in the Global Uncertainties Programme working on a project entitled ‘Narratives of Insecurity, Democratization and the Justification of (Mass) Violence.’ Dr El-Affendi is author of books including About Muhammad: The Other Western Perspective on the Prophet of Islam, The Conquest of Muslim Hearts and Minds, For a State of Peace: Conflict and the Future of Democracy in Sudan, Rethinking Islam and Modernity, and Who Needs an Islamic State?

Dr Marquard Smith is Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster, and Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Visual Culture.

Dr Eyal Weizman is Director of the Centre of Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. His work includes buildings and stage sets in Israel/Palestine and Europe. Weizman works with a variety of NGOs and Human right groups in Israel/Palestine. He co-curated the exhibition A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, and co-edited the publication of the same title. These projects were based on his human-rights research, and were banned by the Israeli Association of Architects. They were later shown in the exhibition Territories in New York, Berlin, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Malmoe, Tel Aviv and Ramallah. His books include Lesser Evils, Hollow Land, A Civilian Occupation, and the series Territories 1,2 and 3.

The Institute puts itself on display…

Any local flâneurs passing recently by the IMCC’s Wells Street base may have noticed the legend ‘All That Is Solid Melts Into Air’ beaming out of our side window. We can no longer keep it a secret! The IMCC is delighted to announce the installation of the Institute’s very own public display screen, provided courtesy of our friends and collaborators at Blip Creative, which will, once fully operational, be streaming a changing array of staff and student work at our site.

The state-of-the-art wall-hanging LED installation is our contribution to The International Distributed Display Initiative, which currently links together screens at Westminster, Central Saint Martins and Princeton, and is part of the Institute’s New Media Theory research project, coordinated by Peter Cornwell at Blip with Alison Craighead and David Cunningham at the IMCC. Using an interface that has been designed such that no prior programming skills are assumed, staff and students will be making work for this experimental new media laboratory that will allow them to explore in hands-on fashion what it means to translate, phenomenalize, or even perform media-theoretical issues as, and in, new media. When fully operational, the screen will then be part of a permanent internet link between installations at various international sites, allowing each collaborating institution to load and display and, using a webcam, observe content at the sites of the other organizations.

We will be staging an official launch soon, as well as announcing further details of staff and student artworks and curated exhibitions for the screen. Long live the Democratic Billboard! Watch this space …

Scarcity Exchanges: Iain Boal and Lydia Mehta

Scarcity Exchanges: Iain Boal and Lydia Mehta
Wednesday, 1 June 2011, 6.30 pm
University of Westminster, Maylebone Campus 

A reminder that, fresh from his appearance at the last of the Institute’s Matter Matters Whitechapel Salons, our friend Iain Boal is taking part in the Scarcity Exchanges organized by the Architecture Department this Wednesday, along with Lydia Mehta from Sussex. More info here.