Old Media/New Work: Call for Participants

Old Media / New Work: Obsolete Technologies & Contemporary Art
Saturday 1st May 2010, University of Westminster, London

Contemporary art shows renewed interest in ‘lost’, ‘obsolete’, and ‘archaic’ visual media forms and the illusion-producing processes of the past—for example: the camera obscura, the magic lantern, stereoscopy, Victorian stage illusion, shadowgraphy, optical toys, the panorama and stylised period representations such as the imagery of spiritualism, automatic writing, audio-technologies and early photographic techniques.

Co-organised by the Magic Lantern Society and the IMCC—in the wake of 2009-10’s popular public lecture series, Professor Pepper’s Ghost, at the University of Westminster—Old Media / New Work will provide a forum at which artists working with or around such ‘lost’ concepts and technologies can come together to show, discuss, and explore their own work in context of these past techniques, their contemporary relevance, and their future possibilities. The conference will also be documented and continued by a new WordPress website that will allow participants to upload images, texts and comments.

Confirmed participants include: Jonathan Allen; Geoff Coupland; Mark Ferelli; Mark Jackson; Juliette Kristensen; Susan MacWilliam; Olivia Plender; Joseph Ramirez; Aura Satz; Dan Smith; Simon Warner; Isabel White

The organisers, Mervyn Heard and Sas Mays, welcome participation from established practitioners, as well as up-and-coming artists and researchers and specialists in the field. Interested parties should send a short (250-word) description of their topic and their CV, by 14^th March 2010, to: OldMediaNewWork@live.com

Iain Sinclair talk

Thursday 4th March, 6pm
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, W1B 2UW

In the first of a new series of talks at Westminster entitled 21st Century London, exploring the challenges and opportunities the city offers to the contemporary writer, Iain Sinclair will be in conversation with David Cunningham, Deputy Director of the IMCC.  Future speakers will be Toby Litt (March 11), Diran Adebayo (March 18) and visiting research fellow at the Institute Rachel Lichtenstein (April 22).

For more information, please email Monica Germana at m.germana@westminster.ac.uk. Events are free of charge, but booking is essential: please email Sharon Sinclair at sinclas@wmin.ac.uk to book a place.

Milton, Life, Heresy

Wednesday 24th February, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW

Nigel Mapp (University of Tampere, Finland)
‘Milton, Life, Heresy’

Free to all.

The Portrait and the Novel

Wednesday 24th February, 4.15pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW

Joe Bray (University of Sheffield)
‘Conceptual Metaphor and the Language of the Early Nineteenth-Century Portrait’

Hosted by our colleagues in Westminster’s English Language and Linguistics section, Joe Bray examines the meanings generated by frequent references, both literal and metaphorical, to the portrait in the early nineteenth-century novel. As critics have noted, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century novel drew on a well-developed cultural understanding of the portrait-novel connection, and this is particularly true of the novels analysed in this paper: Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) and Jane Austen’s Emma (1816). Each novel is extensively permeated by a metaphor of the countenance, or in some cases the whole body, as a painted portrait. The mapping involved would seem to create a ‘blended space’ which suggests that the emotions on the face can be easily read and understood, and thus that the body serves as a reliable index to ‘character’. Yet the implications of transparency and legibility that the metaphor of the painted countenance evokes are challenged in various ways in each novel.

Free to all.

THE 2010 VISUAL CULTURE STUDIES CONFERENCE

THE 2010 VISUAL CULTURE STUDIES CONFERENCE
To book email info@instituteformodern.co.uk or download the booking form here 

Thursday 27 May – Saturday 29 May, 2010
Venue: The Old Cinema, 309 Regent Street, University of Westminster, London
£50/25 concessions, booking essential 

Confirmed contributors: Glen Adamson (RCA/V&A); Lisa Cartwright (UC, San Diego); Sarah Chaplin (Greenwich); Will Cobbing (Wimbledon College of Art); David Cunningham (Westminster); Mark Dunhill (Central Saint Martins); Esther Gabara (Duke); Elizabeth Guffey (SUNY, Purchase); Raiford Guins (SUNY, Stony Brook); ); Gary Hall (Coventry); Michael Ann Holly (The Clark Institute); Guy Julier (Leeds Met); Esther Leslie (Birkbeck); Stephen Melville (Ohio State); Nicholas Mirzoeff (NYU); W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago); Joanne Morra (Central Saint Martins); Keith Moxey (Columbia); Laura Mulvey (Birkbeck); Griselda Pollock (Leeds); Adrian Rifkin (Goldsmiths); Joy Sleeman (Slade); Marquard Smith (Westminster); Penny Spark (Kingston); Marita Sturken (NYU); Divya P. Tolia-Kelly (Durham); Victoria Walsh (Tate Britain); Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths)

Visual Culture Studies in Europe: An Update

Visual Culture Studies in Europe

Friday’s international conference entitled ‘Visual Culture Studies in Europe’, hosted by the Institute, was a huge success. A stella cast of leading academics, curators, and editors from Austria, Spain, Croatia, Norway, Belarus, Italy, England, and France including Iain Chambers, Oliver Grau, and Adrian Rifkin came together to discuss the study of visual culture within the context of European universities, art colleagues, and cultural institutions. The audience, a talkative mix of staff and students from Westminster as well as welcome guests from elsewhere in London, Brighton, and as far away as Lithuania, had a day to remember. The conference speakers, members of the Visual Culture Studies in Europe Network, plan to meet again next year, this time in Barca!

Veneers of science

Wednesday 10th February, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW

Jonathan Cranfield (University of Kent)
‘Veneers of Science: Science and Ideology in The Strand Magazine’

Free to all.

Last chance to book: VISUAL CULTURE STUDIES IN EUROPE 5 FEB

Friday 5 February 2010

Room 2.05c, 4-12 Little Titchfield Street, University of Westminster, London W1W 7UW

Cost: £20/£10 concs.
Download a booking form here

10:00 Introduction

10:15-12:30 Session 1: Cartographies of Power
Iain Chambers, University of Naples, Italy
Joachin Barriendos, Curator, Santa Monica Art Centre, Barcelona, and Professor Anna Maria Guasch, University of Barcelona, Spain
Dr Almira Ousmanova, European Humanities University, Belarus/Lithuania

12:30-1:30 Lunch

1:30-3:45: Session 2: Education, Education, Education
Professor Adrian Rifkin, Goldsmiths, University of London, England
Lorraine Audric and Professor Andre Gunthert, Laboratoire d’histoire visuelle contemporaine, L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
Dr Nina Lager Vestberg, Norwegian, University of Science and Technology Trondheim, Norway

3:45-4:15 Break

4:15-6:30: Session 3: Projects
Dr Oyvind Vagnes, University of Bergen, Norway
Kresimir Purgar, Center for Visual Studies Zagreb, Croatia
Professor Oliver Grau, Danube University, Krems, Austria

The game of war

Tuesday 16th February, 3.00-5.00pm
Westminster Forum, 5th Floor, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW

Richard Barbrook (University of Westminster)
‘What’s the actual title? The Game of War: Understanding Situationist’

Hosted by our nextdoor neighbours in the Centre for the Study of Democracy, colleague and fellow traveller Richard Barbrook talks about Guy Debord and Class Wargames. Free to all.

Find out more about Class Wargames here.

J.M. Coetzee talk

Wednesday 27th January, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW

Peter Johnston (Royal Holloway, University of London)
‘The Mathematical Contexts of J.M. Coetzee’s Early Poetry (1958-1964)’

Free to all.

Visual Culture Studies in Europe Programme Announced

Friday 5 February 2010

Room 2.05c, 4-12 Little Titchfield Street, University of Westminster, London W1W 7UW

Cost: £20/£10 concs.
Download a booking form here

10:00 Introduction

10:15-12:30 Session 1: Cartographies of Power
Iain Chambers, University of Naples, Italy
Joachin Barriendos, Curator, Santa Monica Art Centre, Barcelona, and Professor Anna Maria Guasch, University of Barcelona, Spain
Dr Almira Ousmanova, European Humanities University, Belarus/Lithuania

12:30-1:30 Lunch

1:30-3:45: Session 2: Education, Education, Education
Dr Joanne Morra, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, England
Lorraine Audric and Professor Andre Gunthert, Laboratoire d’histoire visuelle contemporaine, L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
Dr Nina Lager Vestberg, Norwegian, University of Science and Technology Trondheim, Norway

3:45-4:15 Break

4:15-6:30: Session 3: Projects
Dr Oyvind Vagnes, University of Bergen, Norway
Kresimir Purgar, Center for Visual Studies Zagreb, Croatia
Professor Oliver Grau, Danube University, Krems, Austria

Public Lecture: Toby Miller

Wednesday January 13th 2010, 5.00pm
Cayley Room (room 152), University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street

Professor Toby Miller (University of California, Riverside)
“Cultural Policy Redux”

Toby Miller is editor of the journal Television & New Media, and author of many books including Spyscreen (Oxford University Press), Television (Routledge), Television Studies (BFI), Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Sage), Technologies of Truth (University of Minnesota Press), The Avengers (BFI), and The Well Tempered Citizen (The Johns Hopkins University Press).

Seasonal Greetings

An Encounter with Charles Taylor

Friday 15 January 2010, 10am-4.30pm with public lecture at 5pm
Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street

Our next door neighbours in the Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD) are hosting their annual CSD Encounter on Friday 15^th January 2010. Following recent encounters with Julia Kristeva and Stuart Hall, this year’s one-day event will be focused on the work of Charles Taylor, with two workshop sessions followed by a public lecture by Professor Taylor himself on ‘Secularism and Multiculturalism’. Workshop speakers include Grace Davie, Steven Lukes, Tariq Modood, Chantal Mouffe and Stephen Mulhall.

For further information and to RSVP email: Jessica.schmidt@my.westminster.ac.uk

The Future Papers, Part Three: Stephen Melville

The third and final part in a short selection of transcriptions of talks from the recent series on ‘The Future’ at the David Roberts Art Foundation. Here’s Stephen Melville’s paper, which constituted a fitting finale to the series. Is the future now?

4. The Future is Now, Now is the Future
Stephen Melville

The two earlier discussions in this series that I was able to attend both seemed to turn quite strongly on a contrast between modern and postmodern representations of the future, more or less as they appear to line up with the contrast between so-called Golden Age and New Wave science fiction. It’s been hard for me, at least, not to hear bits of Beckett stammering in the background, so I was happy to hear Krapp’s Last Tape surface briefly on Saturday. The overall contrast seemed, roughly, one between a future fully distinct from the present and underwritten by a certain faith in science, and a future underwritten by technology and threatened with imminent collapse into the present (or, as one speaker put it, having the shape of an endless intensification of the present) – thus tending also toward a contrast between the utopian and the simulacral, as well as between progress and repetition, and – at least I’ve tried to suggest this – between a certain assumption of shared human being or community and a skepticism about other minds registered, among other places, in a shift in the understanding of the material basis or medium specificity of film from a photographic practice to a form of animation. This last maybe permits an expansion of the postmodern/New Wave text to take account of our apparent current interest in various forms of the undead, and most notably the emergence of the postmodern speed zombie. Neither of these representations seems satisfactory: the Golden Age is, as it were, too much future and in that sense doomed to fail, while the New Wave seems finally not a future at all. Both politics and religion have remained for the most part discreetly in the background, especially religion – which is odd to the extent that one of our continuing interests in the future is, I think, broadly redemptive (certainly notions of apocalypse and the post-apocalyptic, of things more or less shaped like the end of history or the end of the world have put in appearances). It’s perhaps worth opening the contrast a little further off its native ground by taking note of the evident difference between a modern stock market in which one invests for a future that must be awaited, and a postmodern stock market in which futures themselves become a primary commodity and one dreams – sometimes of course in real money – of a present profit made by strip-mining the contingency of the future. Our moment seems to be one that wants to read the phrase ‘the future is now’ – a phrase that I think goes back to the 1950s as a way of naming the new marvels of the present – as ‘now is the future,’ thus as a promise of no more marvels.

Continue reading The Future Papers, Part Three: Stephen Melville

The Future Papers, Part Two: Garin Dowd

The second part in a short selection of transcriptions of talks from the recent series on ‘The Future’ at the David Roberts Art Foundation. Here’s Garin Dowd’s paper from the final night, seamlessly drifiting from Beckett to Ballard, Deleuze to Daney.

3. ‘Replay: conducts of time x 4 (interstitial pedagogies)’
Garin Dowd

I borrow the idea of conducts of time from Eric Alliez. Conducts would refer to behaviours – and suggest an ethology – but also to channels. Conducts of time are also ‘gaits’ of time, postures of time in movement; equally they might inhere in the pas au-delà, the step which is also a pas – a not, in Jacques Derrida’s formulation (via Blanchot). Conducts of time may give rise to systole or diastole, to condensations and saturations, as in running on the spot, and to disseminations. It may produce reifications and consolidations, or it may liberate blocs of becoming.

The action of Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape is famously set, according to the stage directions, on ‘a late evening in the future’. While it is anecdotally recorded that the motivation behind this direction was Beckett’s concern that, without such a prompt, what would be required of the audience is the performance of the retrospective science fiction to permit tape recorders to exist prior to their invention (the aged Krapp listens to a recording of himself aged 39, while the play was first staged in 1958), there seems to be much more at play than simply a peculiar concession to verisimilitude. Nonetheless the precession, at once announced and elided by Krapp’s Last Tape, of this particular archival technology, reminds one also that it is the cataloguer of the famous precession of simulacra, Jean Baudrillard, who tells us much, inadvertently, about Beckett’s concerns in this play. In La Gauche Divine we read that ‘le rêve d’une conductibilité absolue [de l’information] ne peut etre qu’excrémentiel’: the dream of an absolute conductibility [of information] can only be excremental. The dream of an absolute conductibility of information is also the predicament or the opportunity of the protagonist in Krapp’s Last Tape. How to phrase; how to gather; how to memorialise ‘eschatologically’ (his last tape) and/or scatalogically (his ‘unattainable laxation’): these issues trouble Krapp, and trouble him in a way which is, in Derrida’s sense, archival. In this respect the play reminds us of what Derrida identifies as the archive’s relationship to the future: ‘the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future’. So on our particular late evening in the future, the future now or round about now, I want to introduce 4 conducts of time.

Continue reading The Future Papers, Part Two: Garin Dowd

Epistemic encounters

For our Dutch friends: Director of the IMCC, Marq Smith, is contributing to Epistemic Encounters, on the future of the Graduate Art School, at MaHKU (The Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design) this Friday 11 December, as part of an ongoing research project exploring the specificity of artistic knowledge production in the context of exhibition making, art in public space projects, and the significance of research-based practices for the (reformulation of the) curriculum in the current art academy. Why not join him…

Further details here.

The Future Papers, Part One: Cunningham & Noys

As promised, we present here the first in a short selection of transcriptions of talks from the recent series on ‘The Future’ at the David Roberts Art Foundation. In the following post we have David Cunningham’s introduction to the series along with Ben Noys’s Ballard paper (which can be found up on his own blog). Further papers by Stephen Melville and Garin Dowd will be posted soon. Enjoy.

1. ‘Introduction: The Tomorrow That Never Was’
David Cunningham 

I want to begin with a short story by the writer William Gibson, entitled ‘The Gernsback Continuum’ and published in 1981. You can read it here. In the story, Gibson’s narrator (a hack photographer) is engaged to work on an illustrated history of ‘American Streamlined Moderne’, with the working title The Airstream Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was: ‘“Think of it … as a kind of alternate America: a 1980 that never happened. An architecture of broken dreams”,’ one of the story’s characters tells him. ‘And as I moved among these secret ruins’, the narrator continues, ‘I found myself wondering what the inhabitants of that lost future would think of the world I lived in.’ Thus progressively propelled into a state of half-paranoiac and half-melancholic delirium, accompanied by hallucinations of a ‘dream Tucson thrown up out of the collective yearning of an era’ – a city ‘soaring up through an architect’s perfect clouds to zeppelin docks and mad neon spires’ – the narrator is only finally returned to the sanity of the present by an immersion in the very seediest aspects of a very contemporary reality. 

Continue reading The Future Papers, Part One: Cunningham & Noys

Call for Papers: Temporality and the Archive

The Hole in Time: German-Jewish Political Philosophy and the Archive.

A call for papers for a workshop organised by the Centre for German Jewish Studies at Sussex and the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at Westminster
23^rd – 24^th June 2010

Abstracts by the end of January 2010 to: theholeintime@live.com

Left discussions of politics and history owe much to German-Jewish theories of temporality that emerged in response to the political crises of twentieth-century Europe; yet, other than in the attention paid to issues of technological memory in Benjamin, there has been relatively little discussion of the archival ramifications of, for example, Adorno, Bloch, Celan, Rosenzweig, and Simmel, as well as other canonical Marxist thinkers. While Benjamin’s thought has often been mobilised to think the revolutionary potential of the archive, less has been done to think through the archival attitudes and implications of the work of such other thinkers, or the extent to which such attitudes are specifically predicated upon German and Jewish philosophical and political tradition. Continue reading Call for Papers: Temporality and the Archive

Journal of Visual Culture launches new satellite site…

Journal of Visual Culture has launched its new WordPress site. Please go to http://www.journalofvisualculture.org/ for details of recent/forthcoming issues such as its current ‘Questionnaire on Barack Obama’, free content, and information on related projects, conferences, and events. Join jvc on Facebook, etc.