Wellcome Collection, 16th June, 10.30-1700

As humans, we have an ability to empathise with one another. Reading emotions and sharing them are integral to our survival and social cohesion. But why is it that objects can also spark these feelings in us? When we watch puppets, what triggers our emotions? Is it their movement or is it simply the stories they tell? And can we be just as moved by everyday objects?

None of these questions have straightforward answers, but in this unique event we’ll uncover the latest science exploring the mysteries of empathy in puppetry and elsewhere in culture.

The morning will start with an extract of Blind Summit’s critically acclaimed performance The Table, followed by discussion about the relationship between puppeteers and puppets. Satellite performances will happen over lunch, followed by a discussion about the ways we relate to objects in the afternoon.

Consortium Director Steve Connor, author of Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things (London: Profile, 2011), will give a talk at this event entitled Feeling Things. Mistrusting our conventional mistrust of the attachment to material things, it will consider some of the emotions that objects help or even teach us to feel – disgust, curiosity, and tenderness. Perhaps, without objects, we would never learn how to love, or love to learn.

£20 full price/£15 concession including a full day of discussion and performance as well as lunch and refreshments.

To book, please call 020 7611 2222.

Static is the student-led journal of the London Consortium. Aiming to initiate interdisciplinary intellectual debate about paradoxes of contemporary culture, Static presents contributions from an international team of academics, artists and cultural practitioners. The materials, assembled for each issue around a theme, include analytical essays and articles, interviews, art projects, photographic images, etc.
Since 2012, it is accompanied by a sister blog, EcStatic.

STATIC 09: Buttons

‘Careful and curved, cake and sober, all accounts and mixture, a guess at anything is righteous, should there be a call there would be a voice.’
— Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

The humble button encompasses ideas of connectivity, intimacy, relation, precision, production (on/off), kindness and smallness. Its origin in the Latin buttare, to thrust, and in the old French boton, bud, roots the button in a potentiality that stretches and plies its usage from metaphor to technology. The domesticity of the button, its closeness to our skin in clothing or its proximity in the home, the laptop, the TV remote control, the microwave, calls us to examine our relations to objects and the ergonomics of their interactions with us. As a mediator between man and machine, how does the button inhabit this interstice and what are the implications of their prevalence within the sphere of modern living? How do buttons function within digital culture? Buttons, too, can encapsulate very real threats; the detonation of nuclear warheads or the transmission of confidential information is only a button’s press away; they can contain and express our most strident political or aesthetic positions, but what happens when these buttons are in the possession of an enemy? They have become integral to the way we communicate: phone, email and the internet all require the push of a button to generate action. Playful and tender, the button functions as ornamentation and fastening, both aesthetic and practical.
We here at Static put forth the potentiality of buttons: a haberdashery of usages.

The submission deadline is 6 May 2012. Please send your submissions to static@londonconsortium.com
Static welcomes diverse formats of submission – essays, articles, interviews, short stories, poetry, visual projects, graphic design, illustration, etc. Video and sound pieces will be included in the online version of Static 09.
Submission guidelines and further information about Static can be found at static.londonconsortium.com/submission.html.
Please contact the Editors at static@londonconsortium.com if you have any queries regarding technical details before submitting your work.

The London Sound Seminar offers an opportunity for research students and faculty in London to explore issues relating to the history and theory of all forms of sound-making and auditory culture.

Noise

Wednesday 1 February, 4.30-6.00 pm [Rm 113, 43 Gordon Square]
‘The Soundproof Study: Victorian Professional Identity and Urban noise’ in John M. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp.41–81 [also look at pp.15–16 from Ch.1]

Wednesday 15 February, 4.30-6.00 pm [Rm 113, 43 Gordon Square]
Emily Thompson, ‘Noise and Modern Culture, 1900–1933′, in The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), pp.115–168

Wednesday 29 February, 4.30-6.00 pm [Rm 114 – Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square – NOTE DIFFERENT ROOM].
‘The Noise of Almost Nothing’ – talk by Hillel Schwartz (author of Making Noise)

Wednesday 14th March, , 4.30-6.00 pm [Rm 113, 43 Gordon Square]
Friedrich Kittler, extracts from Gramophone, Film Typewriter and forthcoming chapter ‘The God of Ears’ (on Pink Floyd’s ‘Brain Damage’) [selections TBC]

To subscribe to the London Sound Seminar mailing list: from the email address you wish to subscribe with, send the following command within the body of the message to listserv@jiscmail.ac.uk: SUBSCRIBE LONDONSOUNDSEMINAR Firstname Lastname

We will use the list for announcements of meetings and events, and it can be used for discussion too. To send an message to the list, simply email londonsoundseminar@jiscmail.ac.uk

Friday 27th January 7pm
BFI southbank gallery

A re-staging of Aura Satz’s  ‘Ventriloqua‘ performance with thereminist extraordinaire Lydia Kavina playing the electromagnetic waves of a pregnant body. Referencing ventriloquism, as in ‘belly-speaking’, the body becomes a musical instrument, an antenna, a medium, through which a pre-verbal, pre-vocal otherworldly voice is transmitted. Meanwhile, a flame alphabet visualizes the sounds in a secret fire-code using a Ruben’s tube.

Part of the Samsung Art+ prize at the BFI project space

Come along to this month’s Science Museum Lates on Gaming (on 28th September from around 7pm), where the Consortium speaker will be Rob Gallagher.

Science fiction meets fictional science

Many videogames borrow narrative and aesthetic tropes from science fiction. But as a medium that combines representation and simulation, digital games are also capable of supplementing science fiction with ‘fictional science’, of implementing made-up physical laws that promote a reconsideration of our relationship with science and technology.

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/visitmuseum/events/events_for_adults/Lates.aspx

Maya Deren: 50 Years On
BFI, Oct 4th – Oct 12th 2011

Curated by Elinor Cleghorn; a collaboration between BFI and the London Consortium

Fifty years after the death visionary filmmaker, theorist and proselytiser Maya Deren, the art and influence of one of experimental cinema’s most inspiring and charismatic figures is celebrated and explored. This dedicated programme of screenings and events includes ‘Maya Deren: New Reflections’ (Saturday 8th October) a one-day symposium exploring Deren’s legacy through the lenses of visual art, choreography, anthropology and film theory.

For full programme details and to book tickets please visit the BFI link here

Screening of Under the Cranes (2011), directed by Emma-Louise Williams, assistant director, Consortium alumnus Walter Stabb.

Sat 30th April at 1.30pm at the Rio Cinema, Hackney (Part of the the East London Film Festival) .

Using the script of Dalston poet Michael Rosen’s documentary play Hackney Streets, Under the Cranes is a meditation on place as central to our experience of history. Shot on location in Hackney and intercut with rare archive footage, its cast of characters includes Shakespeare, Anna Sewell, Anna Barbauld, a Jamaican builder, a Bangladeshi restaurant owner and the Jewish 43 Group taking on Oswald Mosley. Streets, parks, cemeteries and markets, both past and present, create ‘layers of lives’ that raise questions about the process of ‘regeneration’; and even while David Cameron claims that “multiculturalism has failed”, this film celebrates how “the world comes to Hackney”.

Information about tickets and festival programme here. Film reviews and information here.

Big City Stories, is a collection of film extracts depicting Black London in the twentieth century. This compilation of archive footage presents the changing lives, and, changing perceptions of Black Londoners as their place was established among the city’s diverse cultures and communities.

Big City Stories will be launched at the Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton on the 26th March as part of the cinema’s centenary celebrations; and at the BFI Southbank on the 12th April.

For more information on the project please check out the facebook page here.

Tickets for the screenings are available from the BFI website or Ritzy Picturehouse.

Hidden
A six-week, multi-disciplinary course at Tate Modern
Saturdays 5 March – 19 April 2011
Led by Lucy Scholes and Richard Martin

Contemporary culture is fascinated by the ‘hidden’ – “ the idea that secret desires and covert activities are taking place behind closed doors. This new six-week course places architectural, cinematic and psychoanalytic theories of interiority alongside the models explored by modern and contemporary artists within the Tate Collection. Concepts of containment and concealment will be assessed across a range of contexts and media with some key questions in mind: In what sense are our memories and desires housed? Do individuals contain a chamber of secrets waiting to be unlocked? What remains truly ‘hidden’ to us?

The course begins with Michael Haneke’s film Cache (2005), which has provoked widespread debate over its representation of personal and political concealment. In the weeks that follow, we will investigate the psychology of hidden spaces, Freudian theories of narrative, the role of family life, and the myths of the modern media. The course ends with a trip to Tate Britain to see Mike Nelson’s labyrinthine installation The Coral Reef (2000), which explores the unseen layers of contemporary society. Each weekly session will pivot around a central theme, with film clips, illustrated presentations and short handouts offering suggestive directions of inquiry.

Booking details, and a full course outline, are available here.

In the first three months of 2011 a series of four talks will explore the nexus of ‘sound’, ‘noise’ and ‘music’ from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. In the context of a bourgeoning sensitivity to the auditory across a range of disciplines, these talks will consider how particular formulations of these interdependent notions transform ‘sound’ from an isolated attribute of sensory experience into a embedded, ecological means of world-inhabitation.

As has been an ongoing tradition for the London Consortium, the series will be held in the Wheatsheaf pub (25 Rathbone Place, W1T 1DG) – a favourite of 1930s writers such as George Orwell and Dylan Thomas – a venue that will also provide a great opportunity for continuing informal discussion following each paper.

The current series has been organised by London Consortium and Birkbeck College postgraduate students Matt Clements and Jonathan Tee, and is also associated with the London Sound Seminar. It is free and open to all.

If you would like more information about these events please contact: Jonathan Tee (jonathantee [at] cantab [dot] net) or Matt Clements (m.clements [at] bbk [dot] ac [dot] uk).

Wednesday, 19th January, 7pm
Eric Clarke – ‘Musical Meaning: an Ecological Approach’
Eric Clarke went to the University of Sussex to read for a degree in Neurobiology, and graduated with a degree in Music. In 2007 he was elected to the Heather Professorship of Music at Oxford, and is currently an Associate Director of the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music. For 10 years he was a member of the improvising string quartet The Lapis Quartet. Eric Clarke’s research embraces a number of areas within the psychology of music, music theory, and musical aesthetics/semiotics. He is the author of a recent monograph on listening (Ways of Listening. An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning OUP, 2005) and co-editor of a volume on Empirical Musicology (OUP, 2004). He has also published more than 60 papers and book chapters on music related topics.

Tuesday, 1st February, 7pm
David Toop – ‘A Sinister Practice: The Uncanny Space Between Improvisation, Composition, Live Performance and the Digital Domain’
David Toop is a composer/musician, author and curator who has worked in many fields of sound art and music, including improvisation, sound installations, field recordings, pop music production, music for television, theatre and dance. He has published five books, including Ocean of Sound, Haunted Weather, and Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. He has released eight solo albums, including Screen Ceremonies, Black Chamber and Sound Body, As a critic he has written for many publications, including The Wire, The Face, Leonardo Music Journal and Bookforum. Exhibitions he has curated include Sonic Boom at the Hayward Gallery, London, Playing John Cage at Arnolfini, Bristol, and Blow Up at Flat-Time House, London. Visiting Professor at the University of the Arts London, he is a Senior Research Fellow at London College of Communication.

Wednesday, 16th February, 7pm
Henry Stobart – ‘Saturating the Soundscape? Conceptualizing Sound and Silence in the Andes and Beyond’
Henry Stobart is Reader in Music/Ethnomusicology in the Music Department of Royal Holloway, University of London. His research has principally focused on indigenous music of the Bolivian Andes; examined from a wide range of perspectives. His books include the monograph Music and the Poetics of Production in the Bolivian Andes (Ashgate, 2006) and several edited volumes: The New (Ethno)musicologies (Scarecrow, 2008), Knowledge and Learning in the Andes: Ethnographic Perspectives (co-edited with Rosaleen Howard; Liverpool University Press, 2002), and Sound (coedited with Patricia Kruth; Cambridge University Press, 2000). He is currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled Digital Indigeneity and has been invited to write a theoretical volume on ethnomusicological perspectives to Music and Environment.

Tuesday, 1st March, 7pm
Karin Bijsterveld – ‘Car Sound Ecologies: A History of Listening to and in the Automobile’
Karin Bijsterveld is historian and professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society Studies, Maastricht University. She is author of Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (MIT Press 2008), and co-editor (with José van Dijck) of Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices (AUP 2009). With Trevor Pinch, she is working on The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. She has recently been awarded with a NWO-VICI grant for the project Sonic Skills: Sound and Listening in Science, Technology and Medicine, 1920s-now.

Creating an ethereal resonance between sound and vision, ‘Sound Seam’ begins by enticing the viewer through the mouth of a series of gramophone horns, like a portal into another place and time. The film invokes the idea that every surface, in particular parts of our anatomy, is potentially inscribed with an unheard sound or echo of voices from the past. The process of exposing these hidden sounds is mirrored by the various processes associated with record cutting, record playing, overwriting and erasing technologies, as the seemingly infinite grooves are seen spinning and distorting at high magnification, with a dizzyingly hypnotic effect.

‘Sound Seam’ is created by Consortium fellow Aura Satz with funding from the Wellcome Trust Arts Award grant scheme. It runs as a single screen projection in the Forum at Wellcome Collection from 9 December 2010 to 16 January 2011. For more information see the Wellcome website.

A small publication with contributions from Steven Connor and Tom McCarthy will also be available during the exhibition.

According to the critic Laurence Rickels, ‘every point of contact between a body and its media extension marks the site of some secret burial’.

On 4 December at 2pm artist Mark Leckey and novelist and Consortium fellow Tom McCarthy discuss the importance to their own work of the three-way relationship between selves, technological media and practices of mourning.

The conversation will take place at Chisenhale Gallery at 64 Chisenhale Road, London, E3 5QZ. To reserve a place please contact: mail@chisenhale.org.uk

Mark Cousins’s Friday Lecture Series begins Friday October 22nd, at 5pm in the AA Lecture Hall. It is entitled ‘Technology and the First Person Singular: Homer and the voice’. You can find more details here. The following Friday, October 29th, his talk is entitled ‘Technology and the First Person Singular: Inscription and Spacing’ – more details here. Further dates for this series will be November 12th and November 19th for which you should refer to the AA website for more information.

Histories of Hatred free film screening and wine reception7pm, Friday 22 October, Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PDIt is a problematic theme, and one that is rarely discussed: what is our responsibility when it comes to writing histories of hatred? How can we talk about hatred? Do we merely sanction and further discourses of violence by engaging with them? When does documentation become participation? Should we be chroniclers, or should we get involved?This summer the London Consortium convened a panel of academics, artists and critics to tackle these questions. Drawing on their own experiences in diverse fields and disciplines – from medieval Christian visual culture to contemporary litigation – they offered a series of compelling reflections on ethics and practice. This 30-minute documentary reviews key moments from the discussion with conference organiser Noam Leshem, and features speakers including Anthony Julius, Deborah Lipstadt, Pratap Rughani, Senam Okudzeto, Anthony Bale and Joanna Bourke.Histories of Hatred was filmed and edited by Lily Ford (PhD Humanities and Cultural Studies, London Consortium) and Jonathan Law (PhD History and Philosophy of Art, University of Kent). As part of the LCACE Inside Out Festival, there is a free screening at Birkbeck Cinema at 7pm on 22 October 2010, followed by a free wine reception.To attend, please register by following this link: http://www.insideoutfestival.org.uk/2010/details/histories-of-hatred.html

Patrick Wright will discuss his new book Passport to Peking (published by Oxford University Press 27 October) with the journalist and historian Neal Ascherson at the London Review Bookshop. The conversation will be held Thursday, 21 October at 7.00 p.m. The book, which has been described as a hodgepodge of literary styles: travelogue, cultural history, and comedy, details the story of four British delegations setting off to Beijing in 1954 at the invitation of then Chinese prime minister, Chou En-Lai. The Bookshop is located at 14 Bury Place, London, WC1A 2JL, near Holborn tube station.

The London Sound Seminar offers an opportunity for research students and faculty in London to explore issues relating to the history and theory of all forms of sound-making and auditory culture.

All meetings are in room 112, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1

Wednesday 6 October, 4.30-6.00
Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening (New York: Fordham University Press 2007), pp.1-18.

Wednesday 20 October, 4.30-6.00
Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Geneviève James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp. 2 – 8, ‘The Object of the Book’; pp. 12 – 14. ‘Noise’ and ‘Sea Noise’; pp. 19 – 22, ‘Ichnography’ and ‘The Foot’; pp. 25 – 26. ‘The Apparition of Forms’; pp. 57. – 70. ‘Dovetail’, ‘Demons’ and ‘Vortex’.

Wednesday 3 November, 4.30-6.00
Rudolf Arnheim, Radio:An Art of Sound, trans. Margaret Ludwig and Herbert Read (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), pp. 211-25
Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Film and Radio, trans. and ed. Marc Silberman (London: Metheun, 2001), pp. 41-46 Session led by James Emmott.

Wednesday 17 November, 4.30-6.00
Samuel Beckett, Embers.
Donald McWhinnie, The Art of Radio (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), pp. 21-28, 34-36, 77-93.

Wednesday 1st December, 4.30-6.00
Historical Soundscapes
Mark M. Smith, Bruce R. Smith and John Picker. Session led by Katherine Hunt. Texts to be notified.

To subscribe to the London Sound Seminar mailing list:

From the email address you wish to subscribe with, send the following command within the body of the message to listserv@jiscmail.ac.uk:

SUBSCRIBE LONDONSOUNDSEMINAR Firstname Lastname

We will use the list for announcements of meetings and events, and it can be used for discussion too. To send an message to the list, simply email londonsoundseminar@jiscmail.ac.uk

Brunelleschi Lacan Le Corbusier: Architecture, Space and the Construction of Subjectivity (Routledge, 2010)

A major new interpretive work on the structure of spatial experience, this book is for theorists of Architecture, Art, and Visual Studies. It interprets the fifteenth century demonstration of perspective for today by putting it in relation to contemporary theories of subjectivity. It explores a link between Architecture and Psychoanalysis that has not hitherto been elaborated, and opens the way for the Lacanian critique of architecture that is now a familiar feature of discourse in the other arts and social sciences.

The text argues that perspective is the paradigmatic form of spatial consciousness. This explains why perspective remains such a satisfying representational form – the form of space that we tend to call real – and why it remains the primary visual form of architectural space, despite recent experiments in representation that claim to challenge this canon. This link between the inner world of the psyche and the exterior world of architectural space is as fundamental as it is problematic, and is perhaps therefore inevitable.

Lorens Holm is Reader in Architecture and Director of the Geddes Institute for Urban Research at the University of Dundee. He has taught architecture at the Architectural Association, University College London, and at Washington University in St. Louis. Prior publications on Lacan and Architecture have appeared in the Journals Perspecta (2010), Haecceity (2008 & 2007), Critical Quarterly (2000 & 2007), and Assemblage (1993).

Further details are available here.