Tate Modern

Friday 27 June, 18.30 – 20.00
Saturday 28 June, 10.30 – 17.45; 19.00 – 21.00

Friedrich Kittler has been hailed as the ‘Derrida of the digital age’ and his work is indispensable to anyone thinking about ‘technoculture’. This landmark event brings one of today’s foremost philosophers of media to Tate Modern for an unmissable opportunity to examine the relationship between culture and technology with a range of leading thinkers and practitioners. For anyone interested in our complex interactions with the technologies that surround us this event is essential, while for those unfamiliar with Kittler it presents an opportunity to discover the work of the leading figure in the flourishing area of German media theory. Media Matters is a two-day series of events that comprises:

• A keynote lecture by Friedrich Kittler
• A symposium featuring leading thinkers in the fields of cultural theory, film and the arts. Plus a Q+A with Friedrich Kittler
• ‘Gramophones, Films, Typewriters’: audio, video and text works curated by Seth Kim-Cohen

A ticket can be purchased for all three Media Matters events priced £32 (£24 concessions). Alternatively, tickets are available for each event separately. Book tickets

This series of events is organised in association with the London Consortium, Birkbeck, Goethe Institute and iRes, University College Falmouth. See below for full programme details.

Friday 27 June, 18.30 – 20.00
Keynote lecture - Friedrich Kittler – Starr Auditorium, Tate Modern
Tickets £8 (£6 Concessions)

Friedrich Kittler is Professor of Aesthetics and History of Media at the Humboldt-University, Berlin. In the course of a long and distinguished career, he has held visiting professorships at Columbia University, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley and others. His translated works include Discourse Networks 1800/1900 and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, texts which reflect on the nature, impact and history of technologies and which have been influential not only in the fields of literary and cultural studies but also film studies, social theory, digital art and the ‘open source’ movement. His most recent work on music and mathematics traces the historical development of notation systems from Ancient Greece to today. This lecture represents a rare opportunity to hear Friedrich Kittler speak outside his native Germany.

Saturday 28 June, 10.30 – 17.45
Symposium: Media Matters, Friedrich Kittler and Technoculture –Starr Auditorium, Tate Modern
Tickets £24 (£18 Concessions)

The symposium is organised around three themes, following the structure of Kittler’s book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Each session invites a pair of speakers to engage with the notion of sound, visual and writing technologies respectively. Friedrich Kittler will then have the opportunity to respond and reflect on the day’s events in a closing dialogue.

10.00 Registration
10.30 Welcome
10.35 Introduction
10.45 ‘Gramophone’ – Steven Connor and John Durham Peters

Steven Connor is Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck, University of London, as well as Academic Director of the London Consortium. He has published prolifically and on diverse subjects, including air, flies and skin, but sound is one of his key areas of interest. His book, Dumbstruck (2000) is a cultural history of ventriloquism, and he has also broadcast a series of BBC programmes entitled Noise.

John Durham Peters is F. Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor of Media History and Social Theory, University of Iowa, where he researches and publishes on the history and theory of media. In particular he has focused on the voice and communication, publishing Speaking to the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication in 1999.

12.15 Lunch
13.30 ‘Film’ - Caroline Bassett and Alex Galloway

Caroline Bassett is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media and Film at the University of Sussex and is Director of the Centre for Material Digital Culture. Her research is focused on new media and she has published widely on gender and ICTs, narrative and new media, media innovation and the transformation of everyday life, with an emphasis on mobile and intimate media and globalization. Her forthcoming book is entitled The Arc and the Machine: Narrative and New Media.

Alexander R. Galloway is an author and programmer. He is a founding member of the software collective RSG and creator of the Carnivore and Kriegspiel projects. The New York Times recently described his work as “conceptually sharp, visually compelling and completely attuned to the political moment.” Galloway is the author of Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (MIT, 2004), Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minnesota, 2006), and a new book coauthored with Eugene Thacker called The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minnesota, 2007). He teaches at New York University.

15.00 Refreshments
15.30 ‘Typewriter’ – Mark Hansen and Pam Thurschwell

Mark Hansen is Professor of English and Cinema/Media Studies at the University of Chicago. His research ranges across a host of disciplines, including literary studies, film and media, philosophy, science studies, and cognitive neuroscience. Recent published works (New Philosophy for New Media and Bodies in Code) have focused on the way computers may be fundamentally altering the infrastructure of our lifeworld, and even changing what it means to be human.

Pam Thurschwell is Senior Lecturer in English at University of Sussex. She has worked on the intersection of psychoanalysis, the supernatural and new technologies at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. She is author of Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920. Another focus of research is writing and the figure of the secretary, and she has edited the collection Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture (2005).

17.00 Kittler in conversation with Anthony Moore.

Anthony Moore is a composer and Professor at the Academy of Arts and the Media, Cologne working on the theory and history of sound. Since 1969 he has composed a number of soundtracks for European experimental movies and from 1973 he worked in different European locations as a freelance composer, writing songs, film scores, and experimenting with sound. He has collaborated together with Pink Floyd and other musicians. Besides teaching, he continues to make music and sonic installations. Recent Publications include ‘Homage to Pink Floyd’ in a 2002 collection of essays edited by Kittler.

Saturday 28 June, 19.00 – 21.00
Gramophones, Films, Typewriters: audio, video and text works – East Room, Tate Modern
Tickets £8 (£6 Concessions)

Sounds, images, texts curated by Seth Kim-Cohen.

“Media determine our situation.” So begins Friedrich Kittler’s highly influential Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Today, twenty-two years later, such determination is even more acute. Media are everywhere. Control of sound, image, language and their dissemination is no longer the purview of the connected, moneyed, haut monde.

All this media determine the artist’s situation too. Those who work with technological media, suddenly find their world overpopulated. Those who work with traditional media (painting, sculpture, and by now we can surely include photography), must wonder if the jet pack has left the station.

The artists we present tonight hail from Germany, Ireland, Canada, the U.S and the U.K. Five of them have at one time or another called London home. Their works engage the exigencies and allowances of media: flirting with the inchoate, challenging the virtue at the root of both the virtual and the virtuoso, exploiting the transportability of the message while acknowledging its recalcitrance. We collect this multiform work under the collective title Gramophones, Films, Typewriters, but it could just as easily have been Media, Determinations, Situations.

The artists and their works:
Julian Rosefeldt – Lonely Planet (2006)
Dexter Sinister – Blazon for Moholy (2008)
Janice Kerbel – Untitled (2008), typewriter
Seth Kim-Cohen – Mise En Abyme (2008)
Lytle Shaw – Untitled (2008)
Jarrod Fowler – -ion as Rhythm (2008)
John Lely – Precision Sonics (2005)
Petrova Giberson – She Loves Everything (2008)
Richard Mosse – Untitled (Ireland) (2007)
Aliza Shvarts – Untitled (2008)