Manifesto! BBC Radio 4 August 7th-11th
Manifesto!
For our UK listeners, BBC Radio 4 is broadcasting a series of five half-hour programmes on the Manifesto this week, including contributions from the IMMC’s David Cunningham. You can catch the first programme, broadcast on Monday 7th August, here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09013tg#play Subsequent episodes are at 1.45 pm each day.
When Marx and Engels published their Communist Manifesto in 1848, their rallying cry set the tone and the rhetoric of movements and revolutions to follow – in art as well as politics. Artists adopted the form, with spectacular results. The artist’s manifesto is where art and politics meet. They gave rise, and political purpose, to some of the great avant-garde art movements of the 20th century. But they also took politics into new realms of possibility, transformation and imagination. Simultaneously apocalyptic and utopian, artists’ manifestos demanded new worlds, proclaimed new communities and upset the order of things. Over five programmes, artists, historians, authors, architects and cultural critics explore how the manifesto became a creative call-to-arms and ask whether, in this new age of discontent, it still has a place in the world today. From Futurism, Dada and the Surrealists – via the neo-avant garde movements of the 1960s, Situationism, Fluxus and Auto-Destructive art – to the present, including Gilbert and George and the Stuckists, the International Necronautical Society, Black Dada and Grayson Perry’s Red Alan manifesto. Produced by Simon Hollis and Jo Wheeler
Earth Lab: An Investigation of Earth as a Laboratory
Saturday 30 September 2017, 10am-7pm
Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW
Earth Lab: An Investigation of Earth as a Laboratory
Organised by independent curator Rob La Frenais, this colloquium brings together a number of artists, inventors and thinkers who re-imagine Earth, sea and sky from a bottom-up, post-anthropocene position, in a wide-ranging, broad-brushtroke survey of current thinking about Earth as a living laboratory. The speakers consider the sky, the oceans and the land to pursue a number of themes that investigate social and artistic approaches to scientific knowledge in a rapidly changing world. Featuring Bronislaw Szerszynski, Tomás Saraceno, Nicola Triscott, Naveen Rabelli, Rob La Frenais, Jennifer Gabrys, Lise Autogena, Joshua Portway, Carlos López Galviz, Uta Kogelsberger, John Beck, Christine Handte, Neal White and chaired by Lucy Reynolds.
Admission to the Colloquium is free. Please register here.
There will be the opportunity for participation in a selected pecha kucha and poster session over drinks. Please send a 100 word statement of intent to Rob at rob@roblafrenais.info if you would like to be considered for a pecha kucha or poster. More details here.
This event is part of Proving Grounds, a series of workshops and events led by John Beck at IMCC and Neal White at the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster. The aim of the series is to critically engage with issues of inter- and trans-disciplinarity in relation to speculative, hypothetical or experimental research at the intersections of the arts, humanities and sciences.
“Show thy queere substance”: The Queer, the Early Modern and the Now
Friday 7th & Saturday 8th July
University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW
“Show thy queere substance”: The Queer, the Early Modern and the Now
Hosted by our friends in the Queer London Research Forum at Westminster, a one-day symposium which seeks to consider two questions: firstly, what can queer frames tell us about Early Modern texts and contexts? Secondly, in what ways can the Early Modern (be it literature, culture or politics) speak to queer cultures in the present? Or, what do queer reiterations of Early Modern texts and contexts achieve in the present?
The conference begins on Friday 7th July at 5:30pm (in the Cayley Room in the 309 Regent Street building) when Andy Kesson is going to run a performance workshop, titled ‘Playing Queerness’, which showcases the work he’s been doing with director Emma Frankland, as part of the Before Shakespeare project, on John Lyly’s Galatea. The workshop will be followed by a wine reception in the foyer.
The programme for the papers on Saturday can be found at:
https://showthyqueeresubstance.wordpress.com/saturday-8th-june/
Attendance is free, but registration is required. You can register for the conference here.
Alexander Galloway at Carroll / Fletcher
May 24, 2017, 7pm
Carroll / Fletcher, 56-57 Eastcastle Street, London W1W 8EQ
£5 tickets available here.
How Did the Computer Learn to See?
Alexander Galloway
How did the computer learn to see? A common response to the question is that the computer learned to see from cinema and photography, that is, from modernity’s most highly evolved technologies of vision. In this talk Alexander Galloway will explore a different response to the question: the computer learned to see not from cinema but from sculpture. With reference to the work of contemporary artists, along with techniques for digital image compression, we will explore the uniquely computational way of seeing the world.
This event is organised by IMCC in collaboration with Carroll / Fletcher. It will feature as part of a Critical Digital Humanities project run by the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster and Dartmouth College, USA, funded by the British Academy.
Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programmer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. He is author of several books, most recently a monograph on the work of François Laruelle, and is a professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.
For more information, please contact Kaja Marczewska: k.marczewska@westmister.ac.uk
Proving Grounds: Biosphere 2 – Then and Now
Friday May 19th, 6pm
University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW, Room UG04
Free admission, but please book here as space is limited.
Kathelin Gray, Biosphere 2 co-founder, in conversation with Dr Rob La Frenais, independent curator
Biosphere 2 was a massive project in the Arizona desert which, in 1991-94, completely enclosed 2 teams of humans, animals and plant life in a closed, sealed environment, creating laboratory conditions to study interactions in a biospheric system, to better understand global ecology, and as a spinoff, towards bio-regenerative conditions in space travel. When Biosphere 2 closed its doors in September 1991 for a two-year experiment in closed systems living and experimental ecology, it was, as it remains, years ahead of its time. The antagonisms which led to the termination of the Biosphere 2 experiment, in 1994, seem all the more absurd in retrospect, particularly in respect of the then involvement of Steve Bannon, now in the Trump administration.
Kathelin Gray who was involved throughout the experiments, says: “ It is ironic that with the reopening of the ‘space race’ to Mars, this work is now being re-examined and in some cases re-invented. The passage of time shows just how important this work was. We need to revisit ways in which we can demonstrate our impact on the ecology and the complex inter-relationships which make human existence on earth possible yet so fragile to our own impacts. Physiologically, culturally and chemically we are all earthlings. Our fate is indissolubly linked with the health of our fellow earthlings: microbes, soils, plants, animals, a concept that was once considered alternative thinking”.
There is still considerable debate about the continuing resonances of the largest project of this type that has ever taken place in the world. Much scientific knowledge was gained from Biosphere 2, despite controversy at the time. What was equally important was that it was also an art-science project, with the Institute of Ecotechnics as scientific coordinator. ‘Theatre of All Possibilities’ and ‘Theatre for the Reconstitution of Reality’ partnered in the experiment, bringing in an ongoing radical cultural experiment taking place inside Biosphere 2, “redefining performative architecture and the role of historical innovation on the world stage” (Gray). This collective, collaborative initiative has established multidisciplinary projects still ongoing worldwide, based in different ecosystems, with the Institute of Ecotechnics.
Rob La Frenais, curator of The Arts Catalyst for 17 years, founder editor of Performance Magazine and now an independent curator, himself visited and interviewed the Biospherians through the glass in the 90’s and will engage Kathelin Gray in a lively and provocative conversation about the legacy of Biosphere 2.
This event marks the launch of Proving Grounds, a new series of workshops and events organised by IMCC and the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) at the University of Westminster. The aim of the series is to critically engage with issues of inter- and trans-disciplinarity in relation to speculative, hypothetical or experimental research at the intersections of the arts, humanities and sciences. More information about Proving Grounds will be available at the event.
Empire II @ La Biennale di Venezia
May 13th – November 26 2017
Castello 1610/A, Riva Dei Sette Martiri, Venezia 30122
Empire II
An artist-led satellite project at the Venice Biennale this year includes work by our own Steve Smith. Curated by Vanya Balogh, Empire II will feature three chambers; beginning with an extensive library, engaging in film history and theory, curated attentively by participating artists from their personal book collections and intended for browsing and perusing; leading further on to a single screen darkroom, a pulsating digital heart, showcasing a sequence of 115 imaginative short films programmed to play on the continuous loop; and on to the final imaginary space, the Virtual Reality port which will evolve over time in collaboration with various artists.
Empire II Venice will be accompanied by a 260 pages, full colour limited edition catalogue, designed and produced by Victor Hotz Studio in Switzerland, and will host a number of intermediate events during the Venice Biennale to be announced after the inauguration week. It will feature participating artists, filmmakers, critical speakers and special guests in form of presentations, special evening screenings and outdoor projections across Venice, including talks and group discussions related to film, technology, science and art.
Further info here.
Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/425050341168709/
Exhibitionary Cultures: A Journal of Visual Culture Reader
A quick plug for the new Journal of Visual Culture Reader, a virtual themed issue, which includes material assembled from JVC’s extensive archives. To celebrate the coinciding in 2017 of the Venice Biennale, documenta, and Skulptur Projekte Münster, the ‘Exhibitionary Cultures’ reader includes – all free of charge – an array of contributions by artists, architects, academics and critics, curators, and museum and gallery educators, including David Cunningham of the IMCC’s critique (co-authored with Stewart Martin) of the Documenta 12 Magazines Project. Other pieces cover subjects as wide-ranging as the 55th Venice Biennale, the American Museum of Natural History, the Guangzhou Triennial, the Buenos Aires commons, South Africa’s Apartheid Museum, Maison des Civilisations et de L’unité Réunionnaise, the National Museum of the American Indian, the Singapore Biennale, and the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900.
Find the entirely gratis reader here: http://journals.sagepub.com/page/vcu/collections/virtual-issues/exhibitionary-cultures
Thomson & Craighead at Frieze New York
Carroll / Fletcher at Frieze New York 2017
Randall’s Island Park, May 5 – 7, 2017 (Booth B20)
Thomson & Craighead, Frame
Over the last two decades, Thomson & Craighead (b. 1969 and 1971, both UK) have developed a pioneering body of work, using technology as a means to explore one of the fundamental questions of our times: what does it mean to be human in the digital era? For Frieze New York, Carroll / Fletcher presents a selection of artworks that tackle subjects as varied as meme politics, the self-help industry, and the ever-more relevant notion of an impending apocalypse.
To download a copy of the press release, click here.
Making Nature walking tour
Thursday 1th May, 6.00 – 6.45 pm
Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London NW1
Making Nature: How We See Animals walking tour
Our former MA student Talita Jenman is leading a special tour of the Wellcome Collection exhibition ‘Making Nature: How we see animals‘. Talita ran the Arts & Culture programme at ZSL London Zoo before taking her MA in Art and Visual Culture. She has previously given talks at the National Gallery on artists and animals and wrote her dissertation on animals and their representation on social media.
There is no need to book (though spaces are limited). Just meet your guide beside the Information Point on level 0. Further details here.
The Return of Radical Philosophy
A piece of good news in these times: the journal Radical Philosophy, which suspended activities for a few months at the beginning of 2017, and with which the IMCC has had a long connection, is up-and-running again. Renewed, redesigned and open access. Relaunching in the autumn. Further details to be found here.
Panel Discussion on Lady Macbeth at Soho Curzon, with Monica Germana, April 25th
Our colleague Monica Germanà will be taking part in a panel discussion following a showing of the new film Lady Macbeth organised by Birds Eye View at the Soho Curzon on Thursday 25th April at 6.30pm. Other panellists include actor Florence Pugh, Alice Birch (Writer), Empire Magazine’s Terri White, The Debrief’s Sophie Wilkinson and Dr. Kaja Franck.
Lady Macbeth is directed by William Oldroyd and is based upon the novel by Nikolai Leskov. Birds Eye View is a non-profit organisation established in 2002, which is dedicated to turning up the volume of the female voice in film through “action!” not just words.
Find out more and book tickets here.
Tasty & Smelly, Tate Modern, April 27-30 2017
April 27-30 2017
Tate Exchange, Tate Modern, London
Tasty & Smelly: A different way to connect to art
Could appreciating art have more in common with savouring a cup of coffee than you thought? Could our senses of taste and smell help define who we are?
Taste and smell give us a nuanced sense of what we like and are powerfully linked to emotions and memories. Just the hint of a smell can take us back to another time and place. The tang of something on your tongue can unravel thoughts and associations. Some aspects of taste and smell are things always we carry with us and others are things we acquire over time. They can reflect our individuality and our cultural backgrounds. They reveal how we grow through our changing circumstances, histories and journeys across the globe. In Tasty & Smelly you are invited to play, explore and experiment with your senses of taste and smell, and discover how they shape your sensory world, individually and collectively. From designing multi-sensory labels for artworks, creating teas that respond to the architecture of the building, chilling out in a scented mediation pod to re-organising the Tate collection by spicyness, these events and installations encourage you to playfully engage with taste and smell and the associations that they create.
Produced by students and graduates from our MA programmes at the University of Westminster the activities aim to tease out some of the many ways we carry our tastes, preferences and cultural histories with us when we enter into an art museum. Plus, through interactive demonstrations and hands-on experiments presented by researchers from the Centre for Experimental Aesthetics, Technology and Engineering, University of London, you can discover the unexpected strategies your brain uses to make and share matters of taste, from the most sensory ones to the art-world.
To register for one of the workshops or activities or to find out more email: tastyandsmellyevent@gmail.com Or see: https://www.facebook.com/tastyandsmelly/
Reminder: Researching, Writing and Exhibiting Photography, April 8th
Saturday 8th April, 10.00 am – 6.00 pm
University of Westminster, 115 New Cavendish Street, London W1W 6UW
Researching, Writing and Exhibiting Photography
Speakers: David Bate (University of Westminster); Benedict Burbridge (Sussex); Sara Davidmann (UAL); Anna Dannemann (Photographer’s Gallery); Christopher Morton (Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford); Russell Roberts (University of South Wales); Karen Shepherdson (Canterbury Christ Church); Kelley Wilder (De Montfort)
This one-day symposium seeks to explore current practices of researching, writing and exhibiting photography, three activities central to the production of knowledge about photography. The symposium will consider the intertwined relationships between these activities from two main standpoints. The first is the ways in which the practices of researching, writing and exhibiting photography draw from, influence and critique one another as they produce our understandings of the photographic. The second is the ways in which the photographic, understood here as technical forms and associated images, operates as a transformative force within society, and in doing so produces the field for researching, writing and exhibiting photography.
Unfortunately, this event is now FULLY BOOKED. However, please complete the form in the link below if you would like to be added to the waiting list. We will be in touch if places become available:
http://rwepsymposium.weebly.com/contact.html
You can find further details of the programme on the RWEP website here.
Further information from Sara Dominici at: s.dominici1@westminster.ac.uk
New Kluge Digital Resource Project
The Data Futures project is pleased to announce the establishment of the Kluge Digital Resource (KDR). Based on the IMCC’s collaboration with the Alexander Kluge Foundation, dating back to 2014, the Kluge Digital Resource, which comprises texts, images, out of print books, and more than 3,000 films and videos, is being made available to the wider academic community. The KDR is currently being delivered to collaborating institutions including the Universities of Princeton and Westminster, but will eventually form a public service supporting the emerging field of Kluge Studies, and has recently welcomed Cornell University Library as a founder member, so confirming the KDR as the comprehensive international reference for Kluge Studies.
Watch this space for further information …
Cornell University Library joins the Kluge Digital Resource (KDR) project press statement: https://www.data-futures.org/dl/cornell_press.pdf
Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure – seminar, April 5th
Wednesday 5th April, 5.00 – 6.30 pm
Room 206, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW
Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure
David Wilkinson (Manchester Metropolitan University)
As the Sex Pistols were breaking up, Britain was entering a new era. Punk’s filth and fury had burned brightly and briefly; soon a new underground offered a more sustained and constructive challenge. David Wilkinson’s new book Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain situates post-punk in its historical and political context, showing how residual flickers of utopianism illuminated the movement’s monochrome gloom. The book also locates post-punk in the crossfire of a key ideological struggle of the era: a battle over pleasure and freedom between emerging Thatcherism and libertarian, feminist and countercultural movements dating back to the post-war New Left. Tracing these tensions through a series of case studies on bands such as Scritti Politti, The Fall and the Slits, the book concludes by examining how the struggles of post-punk resonate down to the present.
The seminar will be followed by our last visit of the semester to the Green Man pub … All welcome!
Language and the Problem of Female Authority, Deborah Cameron, Friday 28 April
Friday 28th April 2017, 5.30 pm
Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW
Language and the Problem of Female Authority
Professor Deborah Cameron (Worcester College, Oxford)
The inaugural public lecture hosted by the Westminster Forum for Language and Linguistics.
Professor Cameron is Professor of Language and Communication and a Fellow of Worcester College at Oxford University. Her research interests are Language, gender and sexuality; language attitudes/ideologies and ‘verbal hygiene’; discourse analysis; language and globalization. She is also actively involved in communicating with a wider audience about language and linguistic research. Parts of her book The Myth of Mars and Venus were serialized in The Guardian newspaper and she has contributed to numerous BBC radio programmes, including Woman’s Hour, Word of Mouth, Thinking Allowed and Fry’s English Delight.
Reserve your free ticket here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/language-and-the-problem-of-female-authority-tickets-33205721206
Technostalgia Launch at Carroll / Fletcher, March 23rd
March 23rd 2017, 6.30 – 8.00 pm
Carroll / Fletcher, 56-57 Eastcastle Street, London W1W 8EQ
Technostalgia Launch Event, with Alison Craighead in Conversation
To mark the opening of the Moving Museum’s new platform of web-based anthologies, Alison Craighead of Thomson & Craighead and the IMCC will be in discussion with Professor Beryl Graham, Professor of New Media Art at University of Sunderland, and co-founder and editor of CRUMB at Carroll / Fletcher in London. Moderated by Carroll / Fletcher Associate Director Coline Milliard.
Technostalgia, the inaugural anthology edited by Coline Milliard, will go live next week and explore the aesthetics of early technologies, their legacy and impact, as well as their fetishization and appropriation in a contemporary artistic context. Participating artists include Cory Arcangel, Constant Dullaart, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Peter Luining, Lorna Mills, Paper Rad, Mark Richards, Gustavo Romano, Evan Roth, Paul Slocum, Thomson & Craighead, and Ubermorgen.
The event will be live streamed by this is tomorrow
Please RSVP@themovingmuseum.com
Jackie Chan vs. Walter Benjamin seminar, March 8th 2017
Wednesday 8th March, 5.00 – 7.00
Room 206, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T
Jackie Chan vs. Walter Benjamin: Postcolonial ‘utopias of the body’ in kung fu comedy cinema
Luke White (Middlesex University)
In the late 1970s, Hong Kong martial arts cinema took a turn from the tragic-heroic register to that of comedy, propelling Jackie Chan – the genre’s pioneering and most successful kung fu comedian – to first local and regional, and then global, superstardom. Many critics have read the rise of the kung fu comedy, which coincided with a shift away from the militant nationalist or anti-colonial themes of movies such as Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury (1972), as turning away from politics, reflecting the waning of the turbulence of the 1960s and the new accommodation to a globalised neoliberal order. The research project from this paper derives, however, explores the performing body as a key site where a continuing politics is played out.
The paper analyses Jackie Chan’s performance style in the film Project A (1983) in relation to Walter Benjamin’s readings of the slapstick violence of Mickey Mouse cartoons and American silent-era performers such as Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. The ‘utopia of the body’ that Benjamin discovered in these both offered a critique of capitalist modernity and also promised to fulfil the emancipatory potential lodged within it. The paper sets out to rethink the relevance of Benjamin’s arguments to the specifically postcolonial situation of Chan’s filmic production in 1980s Hong Kong, and to consider what kind of a response (both accommodated and also subtly subversive) his performances might constitute.
All welcome! Followed by the usual drinks in the Green Man.
Spatial Justice at the Tate
Saturday 4th March, 12.00 – 6.00 pm
Tate Modern, London
Spatial Justice Workshop
Friend of the IMCC, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, is playing the leading part in a great day’s events at the Tate this Saturday, organised by the Westminster Law & Theory Lab with Tate Exchange and People’s Bureau. Free to all – including tea and cake!
Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos defines spatial justice as the conflict that emerges when one body wants to move into the space of another body. This opens up questions of symbiosis, creative confluence and regeneration, but also issues of power imbalances. The event hopes to explore ideas about the role of developers, art institutions and artists in dealing with issues of spatial justice and productive ways of reflecting them in their practices. The programme includes a Clay Workshop and Tea Trolley Dances, as well as an interview and discussion with Andreas.
Researching, Writing and Exhibiting Photography Symposium, Saturday 8th April 2017
UPDATE: This event is now FULLY BOOKED. Please complete the form in the link below if you would like to be added to the waiting list. We will be in touch if places become available:
http://rwepsymposium.weebly.com/contact.html
Saturday 8th April, 10.00 am – 6.00 pm
University of Westminster, 115 New Cavendish Street, London W1W 6UW
Researching, Writing and Exhibiting Photography
We’re delighted to announce details of the upcoming Institute of Modern and Contemporary Culture’s one-day symposium on Researching, Writing and Exhibiting Photography.
Speakers: David Bate (University of Westminster); Benedict Burbridge (Sussex); Sara Davidmann (UAL); Anna Dannemann (Photographer’s Gallery); Christopher Morton (Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford); Russell Roberts (University of South Wales); Karen Shepherdson (Canterbury Christ Church); Kelley Wilder (De Montfort)
This one-day symposium seeks to explore current practices of researching, writing and exhibiting photography, three activities central to the production of knowledge about photography. The symposium will consider the intertwined relationships between these activities from two main standpoints. The first is the ways in which the practices of researching, writing and exhibiting photography draw from, influence and critique one another as they produce our understandings of the photographic. The second is the ways in which the photographic, understood here as technical forms and associated images, operates as a transformative force within society, and in doing so produces the field for researching, writing and exhibiting photography.
Organised into three successive panels – “Researching Photography”, “Writing Photography” and “Exhibiting Photography” – the event brings together researchers, writers and curators working in academic and commercial contexts, and whose interests span from photographic archives to contemporary photographic practice. The symposium will provide a platform to discuss conceptual, theoretical and practical approaches to the study, discourse and display of photography; and how their intertwined relationship(s) can offer reflections on approaching the opportunities and challenges presented by working in the arts and humanities today.
You can find further details of the programme, and can book your free ticket, on the RWEP website here.
Further information from Sara Dominici at: s.dominici1@westminster.ac.uk
