Philosophy of the Overlooked - String

ICA, 7 October 2008

The latest in a London Consortium/ICA series exploring the structures of lived experience and modes of human existence. What can be learned from other people’s experience of things we rarely think about? The seventh event in the series focuses on string: tying, knotting, measuring, adorning, playing. What are the origins of the modest string? Does an illlusionist use string the same way a musician does? Does a physicist think of string in similar terms to an artist?

Speakers: Cornelia Parker, visual artist; Mark Messenger, head of strings at the Royal Academy of Music; David S Berman, reader in theoretical physics at Queen Mary University. Chair: Martine Rouleau, London Consortium.

There will be a demonstration by John van der Put, award-winning contemporary magician and co-founder of standnotamazed theatre company.

£10 / £9 Concessions / £8 ICA Members.
Nash Room, ICA, 7.00 pm

The Thread is the London Consortium’s new radio broadcast discussion programme on Resonance FM and we want your ideas.

Seph Rodney, Matt Wraith, Ben Dawson, Miranda Gavin and Nicky Falkof plan to renew the Consortium’s longstanding collaborative relationship with Resonance by creating a series of weekly broadcasts in which Consortium students and alumni discuss topics related to their theses, giving them a popular slant and making them accessible to a non-specialist audience.

This can mean finding ways in which your ideas reflect on topical or news-related issues, or simply issues that are currently alive and active in public conversation, issues that people are thinking and talking about but which have not necessarily been looked at in quite the way you believe they should be.

The discussions will be intellectually rigorous but always relaxed and conversational. We want to find imaginative ways of introducing our topics to the wider public, neither patronising them nor assailing them with specialist academic language. Each show will typically consist of the anchor (Seph), a non-expert commentator and, hopefully, a third guest who knows something about your topic from a non-academic point of view. We will provide all these; all you need is your idea and your voice.

We believe this could be an effective way for each of us to approach the Consortium’s stated mission – at once embarrassingly ambitious and rather inspiring – to ‘create a new type of public intellectual’.

If you have any ideas please approach any of the following people:

Ben Dawson: brgdawson@yahoo.co.uk
Nicky Falkof: nickyfalkof@gmail.com
Miranda Gavin: Miranda@mirandagavin.com
Seph Rodney: sephr@earthlink.net
Matt Wraith: butcherofasilkbutton@hotmail.com

London Consortium director Steve Connor and student Lee Scrivner will be contributing lectures to Resonance FM’s Free University of the Airwaves which runs from 18-22 August 2008. Steve Connor’s ‘Taking to the Air’ will be broadcast on 104.4FM or online at on Monday 18 August at 10.00 and 19.00. Lee Scrivner’s ‘Aphorism’ will be broadcast at 12 noon on Friday 22 August.

A Conference on Interdisciplinarity and Research

Saturday 31st May, Birkbeck, University of London

Disciplinary boundaries can be both prisons and safety zones. We are often tempted to transgress the boundaries of our disciplines, but at what cost and with what consequences?

The Faculty of Lifelong Learning, Birkbeck, with Consortium Projects, invite you to a multifaceted conference celebrating and critiquing interdisciplinary work.

As well as interrogations of the very concept of interdisciplinarity, specific issues within the fields of art, architecture, film, education, law, and literature will be examined.

Speakers include

• Marko Daniel, Curator of Public Programmes, Tate Modern (Chair)
• Matthew Gandy, Professor of Geography, University College London, and co-ordinator of the UCL Urban Laboratory
• Dr Tim Boon, Head of Collections, Science Museum

Date
Saturday 31st May, 9.30am-5pm

Venue
Room B35, Birkbeck, Malet Street, University of London. See http://www.bbk.ac.uk/maps for directions

How to register
Attendance is free, but places must be booked by emailing boundariesconference@yahoo.co.uk by 5pm on Friday 23rd May 2008

Conference organisers
Ben Cranfield and Richard Martin

The Faculty of Lifelong Learning, Birkbeck offers over 900 modules across academic disciplines, attracting over 13,000 adult learners to venues across London.

Consortium Projects is a research, development and production agency comprised of current students and alumni from the London Consortium (Architectural Association, Birkbeck, ICA, Tate, Science Museum).

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:

• Keynote lecture and performance: ‘Preparing the Arrival of the Gods’ - Friedrich Kittler with Joulia Strauss and Martin Carlé
• 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 and performance: ‘Preparing the Arrival of the Gods’ - Friedrich Kittler with Joulia Strauss and Martin Carlé
– 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)

Take a Deep Breath is a three-day interdisciplinary symposium that takes a fresh look at the cultural, social and scientific meanings of breathing. Recent environmental and ethical developments are calling for a rethinking of the value of breath and its manifestations in culture and beyond.The symposium explores contemporary ways of thinking about breathing and encourages dialogue between distinguished international participants from a wide range of disciplines by featuring talks, visual art projects, performances, film screenings, and musical events.

Participants include Steven Connor, Lise Autogena, Cornelia Parker, Jane Boston, Max Streicher, Katerina Gregos, Michael Clark, Nikos Navridis, Mark Cousins, Richard Craig and Mikhail Karikis.

Take a Deep Breath will take place at Tate Modern from 15th to 17th November 2007.

The event was conceived and organized by London Consortium students Irini Marinaki, Martine Rouleau and Konstantinos Stefanis and is being held in association with Tate Modern.

Drinks receptions are kindly supported by Boutari Wines and Cypressa.

For a full list of sessions and speakers and information about how to book, please go to http://www.londonconsortium.com/take-a-deep-breath.

The Homebodies Conference takes place at Birkbeck College on 9th and 10th November. The conference has been organised by students from the London Consortium and the School of Art History, Film and Visual Media at Birkbeck.

HomeBodies is about complex situations of not feeling-at-home. International artists, curators, and architects are contributing to this process-oriented project to reconfigure the notion of ‘home’. Starting with a conference, the results of productive exchanges will determine how the project further develops into 3 basement exhibitions in San Francisco, Frankfurt am Main, and London. On the first day of the conference, thinkers such as Frederick J. Kiesler and Gaston Bachelard will be revisited in the light of discourses surrounding ‘the home’. On the following day, meanings will be made through dialogue with curators and visual and performing artists about what it means to be ‘at-home’.

FRIDAY | 09 November | Body in the Home
Room B036 Birkbeck building Malet Street WC1

3-5pm| Presentations
Shumon Basar, Writer / Curator / Lecturer
B. A. Irawati Firth, London Consortium
Ida Wentzel Winther, Department of Educational Anthropology, Danish School of Education, Copenhagen

7-9pm| Film screening
Centre for Film and Visual Media, 43 Gordon Square WC1
‘The Secret Beyond the Door’ (1948), 99 minutes, Fritz Lang
Teresa Gilepse, ‘On Gordon Street’ (Installation), 2007

SATURDAY | 10 November | Home in the Body
Room B035 Birkbeck building Malet Street WC1

11am-6pm | Presentations
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects, Serpentine Gallery
Marko Daniel, Curator Public Programmes, Tate Modern
Linda Gieres, Dancer / Choreographer, London Consortium
Aura Satz, Artist / Writer, London Consortium

To find out more and to register go to:
http://www.annabelleshome.eu/

Tate Britain, 19th & 20th October 2007.

Recently, the notion of the sublime has received a new lease of life, enjoying attention from major writers in diverse disciplines. In this context, the 250th anniversary of the publication of Edmund Burke’s “Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime
and Beautiful” (1757), a key work that cemented the importance of the term in modern thought, offers an occasion for celebration, reappraisal and critique.

This symposium asks: Why the Sublime now? What is its legacy today? In what ways has the Sublime acquired an added urgency in our new millennium? And to what extent is this concept a useful or dangerous tool for the understanding of contemporary culture and history?

Friday 19th October (6.30-8:30pm)
‘The Ecological Sublime’: with Jane Bennett, Esther Leslie, Cornelia Parker.

Saturday 20th October (10am-6pm)
‘Experiencing the Sublime’: with Cornelia Klinger, Jan Rosiek
‘Sublime Bodies’: with Marina Wallace, k r buxey, Jamal Jumá
‘The Sublime and the Politics of Terror’: with Gene Ray, Iain Boal
The day will also include an introduction by Peter De Bolla, a screening of Isaac Julien’s True North (2004), and a final panel discussion.

Tickets £35 (£25 concessions). Book online via the Tate website.

This symposium has been jointly organised by Tate, and students and faculty of the London Consortium and Middlesex University.

Take a deep breath
A conference at Tate Modern, in association with the London Consortium
15 - 17 November 2007

Call for Submissions

Nikos Navridis, Difficult breath #9, 2004. Courtesy Bernier/Eliades Gallery
© The artist

Breathing is a vital practice, yet most of us hardly ever think of the process. Recent environmental and ethical developments are calling for a rethinking of the value of breath and its manifestations in culture and beyond.

Take a deep breath is an interdisciplinary conference on the social, cultural and scientific ramifications of breathing. It will explore the influence of breath on the work of various theorists and practitioners and encourage a critical discussion by featuring talks, visual art projects, performances, film screenings, and musical events.

We would like to invite contributions from a wide range of disciplines, including: visual and performing arts, literature, architecture, music, philosophy, theology, biomedical and environmental sciences and sports.

Deadline for submissions: 10 September 2007

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Tate Modern, 15.00-17.00 Sunday 27 May 2007

This panel discussion, taking place to accompany the performance Sleep: Warhol/Cage/Satie, examines the little-discussed relationship between the work of Andy Warhol, John Cage, and the composer Erik Satie. The panel includes Gavin Bryars, art historian Branden W Joseph, Cage expert Professor David Nicholls, John Giorno and will be chaired by art historian, Professor Pamela M Lee.

The panel and the performance and screening form part of Tate Modern’s Long Weekend. Full details and booking information are available on the Tate website.