Posts tagged magic

Modernism and Magic

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

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

Old Media/New Work: Speakers

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Old Media / New Work: Obsolete Technologies & Contemporary Art
Saturday 1st May 2010, 9am-6pm
Portland  Hall, University of Westminster, 4-16 Little Titchfield St, London W1W 7UW

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 and early photographic techniques. A platform for engagement with such ‘old media’ has been provided by the Magic Lantern Society’s popular public lecture series, Professor Pepper’s Ghost, at the University of Westminster this year. As a further development, the conference ‘Old Media / New Work’ will concentrate on art and artists working with or around such ‘lost’ practices, in order to show, discuss, and explore such work in context of contemporary relevance and future possibilities.

Speakers:
Madi Boyd (Independent): ‘Pepper’s Ghost for the 21st Century’
Ignaz Cassar (Leeds / Nottingham Trent): ‘The Image of, or in, Sublation’
Mark Ferelli (Independent): ‘Michael Reeves Directs’
Mark Jackson (IMT Gallery): ‘Audiobooks of the Dead: William Burroughs & Konstantīns Raudive’
Ben Judd (Independent): ‘Magic, Belief, and Immersion’
Naomi Kashiwagi (Independent): ‘Reinventing the Reel: Reclaiming the Everyday’
Wiebke Leister (LCC): ‘Towards an Iconography of the White Face’
Olivia Plender (Independent): ‘A Stellar Key to the Summerland’
Peter Ride (Westminster): ‘When Everything Old is New Again’
Aura Satz (London Consortium): ‘Sound Seam: Gramophone Grooves & Primal Sound’
Dan Smith (Chelsea): ‘October Outmoded: Utopian Failure & Technological Possibility’
Simon Warner (Independent): ‘Isolating V5: Towards a Human Zoetrope’

Entrance is free but, as places are numbered, please contact the organisers, Sas Mays (IMCC) and Mervyn Heard (Magic Lantern Society), for a place: oldmedianewwork@live.com

Old Media/New Work: Call for Participants

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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 14th March 2010, to: OldMediaNewWork@live.com

Six evenings of visual magic

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Professor Pepper’s Ghost: Six Evenings of Visual Magic
The Old Cinema, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street

A collaboration between the IMCC and the Magic Lantern Society, following on from a successful series of events in 2008, the old Polytechnic cinema at the University of Westminster’s Regent Street building, where the first ever motion picture was shown in the UK, will be hosting a series of six Thursday night lectures on pre-cinematic technologies of the visual.

All the talks start at 7pm, with doors open from 6pm, and are free of charge.

Thursday 12 November 2009
‘Professor’ Mervyn Heard, ‘Phantasmagoria-mania’

Thursday 26 November 2009
Simon Warner, ‘Lavater – The Shadow of History’

Thursday 10 December 2009
Dr Frank Gray, ‘Visualising the Marvellous: G.A. Smith and his film Santa Claus

Thursday 28 January 2010
Paul Kieve, ‘Grappling with Ghosts: Staging Ghost Effects in the Modern Theatre’

Thursday 11 February 2010
Mark Butterworth, ‘Geared to the Stars: Victorian Astronomy through the Magic Lantern’

Thursday 25 February 2010
Stephen Herbert, ‘From Anorthoscope to Zoopraxiscope: An A-Z of Victorian Animated Cartoons’

Download the programme here.

Watch the Old Cinema slideshow on the BBC News website here.