Consortium fellow Tom McCarthy is speaking in the symposium on Futurism and the Avant-Garde taking place at Tate Modern on 27th June 2009, to coincide with the recently-opened Futurism exhibition. His talk, entitled ‘These Panels Are Our Only Models for the Composition of Poetry, or, How Marinetti Taught Me How to Write’, asks what characteristics a genuinely Marinettian contemporary literature might have. Other contributors include Lutz Becker, Mary-Ann Caws, David Cottington, Alex Danchev and Matthew Gale.

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.

This term, we will be combining field trips with more sedentary reflections. All meetings will be in room 308, 30 Russell Square, London WC1

Monday 1st June, 5.30
We will be discussing Bill Fontana’s Silent Echoes, at the Haunch of Venision, 1-30 May.

Friday 12 June, 12.00
The seminar will constitute a pilot study for Jonathan Gross’s ethnography of musical listening, focussing on the experience of the Festival Hall concert of 11 June, featuring performances of Alban Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra and Mahler’s Symphony no. 7.

Thursday 18 June, 12.00
Setting Sound. A series of listenings exploring the theoretical implications of ‘noise’ along with other non-standard forms of music, curated by Matt Clements. ‘My main point of concern is the capacity of listeners to contract ostensibly arbitrary dissonant, or contingent sound-events into relationships and patterns that invoke musical meaning, whilst extending beyond the immediate moment of consciousness. A provisional list of composers includes Bernhard Gunter, Ivan Fedele and Kevin Drumm.’

Thursday 25 June, 5.00
Steven Feld, ‘Sound Worlds’, in Sound, Patricia Kruth and Henry Stobart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.173-200.
Steven Feld, ‘Communication, Music, And Speech About Music’, in Steven Feld and Charles Kiel, Musical Grooves: Essays and Dialogues, 2nd edn (Tucson, Arizona Fenestra Books, 2005 [1994].) pp. 77-95.
Copies of these texts are available in 30 Russell Square photocopy room.

Wednesday 1 July, 12.00
Glenn Gould, The Idea of North (1970).
extract

If you would like to join the London Sound Seminar or help develop its activities, please contact Steven Connor

Tate Modern Saturday 20 June 2009, 14.00-21.30

Saturday 20 June 2009, 14.00–21.30

14.00–17.00 symposium 18.00–21.30 dinner in the East Room

In short, this event brings together practitioners and theoreticians of the humanities, arts and sciences to extol or berate, to discuss, explore and explain shortness in all its spatial and temporal manifestations.

Shortness tackles topics ranging from aphorisms, txt msgs and short attention spans to nanophilology, sampling, ephemeral relationships, punch lines, short narratives and other short-lived entities and phenomena (insects and fashion).

The short conference is followed by a long dinner in Tate Modern’s East Room. Dinner guests will be entertained by short speeches and the whole event is supplemented by short films, performances and various interventions.

Conference speakers: DJ Spooky, Sadie Plant, Dan and Lia Perjovschi and Tom Shakespeare. Dinner speakers include Clare Wigfall and Steven Connor amongst others. The compère for the dinner will be Nicholas Parsons.

Organised by Tate Modern Public Programmes in collaboration with Irini Marinaki and Konstantinos Stefanis (London Consortium) and Ricarda Vidal (Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies)

In collaboration with The London Consortium and with additional support from LCACE
Tate Modern Starr Auditorium
£15 (£10 concessions), booking required
£50 (£45 concessions) for dinner and conference

For more information about the event and to book tickets, please visit Tate’s website http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/symposia/18189.htm
book online or call 020 7887 8888.

www.shortness.co.uk

The Thread will be on summer hiatus during the months of July-September.  Our third series will start in either October or November, subject to scheduling.  An updated schedule of shows will be posted to the website upon availability.  We appreciate your listening and look forward to another season of engaging discussion.

The notion of transparency has achieved a continued, if varied, currency in architectural discourse throughout the twentieth-century. Along with a multitude of material attributes, transparency advocated a shifting, yet ever-present, ideological sensibility. Towards the latter part of the twentieth century, however, the general notion of transparency as an ideological mechanism became to decline. Today, while a literal sense of transparency remains, its ideology (purportedly) does not. This symposium aims to resurface questions of ideology in (contemporary) architectural discourse by creating dialogues around the following questions:
- As the notion of transparency appears to be superseded by the immateriality of the digital, how can contemporary architectural research address transparency’s role as a technological innovation, as a mechanism for design, and, above all, as an ideological device?
- Do new design technologies and media produce more transparent systems of communication?
- Despite the apparent displacement of ideology in current architectural arguments and projects, what are the subjacent ideologies that remain and how might we be able to scrutinise them?

Date:
Friday 8th May 2009

Organising Committee:
Doreen Bernath, Nerma Cridge, Eva Eylers, Kris Mun, Emanuel de Sousa, Tania Lopez Winkler, Kirk Wooller

AA PhD Dialogues is an annual international event organised by students of the PhD Programme at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London. AA PhD Dialogues is the follow-up event to the 2008 AA PhD Symposium, The Critique of the New: Questioning the Legitimization of Newness Through Technology, with Mark Wigley (Columbia GSAPP) as keynote speaker. Each year a theme is selected based upon a particular set of terms that address current questions within contemporary architectural discourse. This theme operates as an umbrella under which individual PhD research can be collectively discussed in an international forum.
www.aaphdsymposium.net
www.aaschool.net

Call for Submissions - Shortness, Tate Modern, 20 June 2009

shortness - a very short conference and a very long dinner

Deadline: Friday 20 March 2009

This event will bring together practitioners and theoreticians of the humanities, arts and sciences to extol or berate, to discuss, explore and explain shortness in all its spatial and temporal manifestations.

Topics that Shortness aims to cover include: aphorisms, txt msgs, short attention spans, nanophilology, music samples, ephemeral relationships, short narratives, punch lines, orgasms and other short-lived entities and phenomena (insects and fashion).

The conference itself will only last a few hours and will be followed by a very long dinner. Guests will be entertained by short dinner speeches and the whole event will be supplemented by short films and various interventions.

This call invites submissions for presentations or performances of up to 7 minutes to take place during the long dinner. Please note that we cannot cover any expenses incurred nor can we accommodate installations.Speakers include DJ Spooky, Sadie Plant, Tom Shakespeare, Clare Wigfall and Steven Connor amongst others. The Compère for the dinner will be Nicholas Parsons.

Please send an abstract of no more than 200 words to the organisers and include a short bio of no more than 100 words.

Contact:

short.at.tate@googlemail.com

Shortness is organised by Irini Marinaki, Konstantinos Stefanis, Ricarda Vidal and Tate Modern Public Programmes in collaboration with The London Consortium and the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, School of Advanced Study (University of London).

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.

During the Spring term 2009, we will be reading and discussing a number of key texts in sound theory. All meetings are in room 308, School of English and Humanities Building, 30 Russell Square, London WC1

Monday 26th January, 12.00
Jacques Attali, ‘Recording’, from Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985)

Monday 9 February, 12.00
Michel Serres, ‘Boxes’, from The Five Senses, trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley (London: Continuum, 2008)

Monday 23 February, 12.00
Alain Corbin, Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thom (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press), pp. 95-158, 298-308

Monday 23 March, 12.00
T.W. Adorno, ‘The Radio Symphony’, ‘The Curves of the Needle’, Music in the Background’, from Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone, 1997), pp. 225-29, 248-54, 258-61; Minima Moralia: Reflections From A Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), p. 247

If you would like to join the London Sound Seminar or help develop its activities, please contact Steven Connor

10:30 Welcome & Introduction

10:35 Marcus du Sautoy, ‘Mathematics: The Bridge Between the Two Cultures’.
C. P. Snow’s great friend the mathematician G. H. Hardy described mathematics as a creative art as much as a useful science. In this talk I will explore how mathematics is a language that underpins both cultures.

Marcus du Sautoy is Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. He has research interests in prime numbers and symmetry and is the author of many publications, including Finding Moonshine: A Mathematician’s Journey Through Symmetry (2008). In 2008 he wrote and presented The Story of Maths for BBC TV

11:05 Anthony Grayling - Title TBC
Anthony Grayling is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has written and edited many books on philosophy and other subjects; among his most recent are a biography of William Hazlitt and a collection of essays. He is a frequent broadcaster on radio and writer for newspapers, including a writing a regular column for the New Scientist.

11:35 Coffee

12:05 Gillian Beer ‘Cultures of Extinction: Darwin and the Present’.
We currently view extinction with dismay and even horror and are encouraged to do so by specialist commentators and popular media alike. Darwin saw extinction as ordinary and as necessary to evolutionary change. What was the importance of extinction in Darwin’s theory? Why have our attitudes to it changed? Can this example help us to understand ways in which scientific, social and bodily cultures combine to shift meaning?

Gillian Beer was King Edward VII Professor at the University of Cambridge. Among her books are Darwin’s Plots and Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter. A third edition of ‘Darwin’s Plots’ with new material is appearing at the end of March 2009.

12:35 Roundtable 1

13:30 Lunch

14:30 Introduction
14:35 Jonathan Miller in conversation.
Jonathan Miller is a neurologist, writer, television presenter, photographer, curator and director of many plays and operas. In 2004, he presented Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief for BBC TV. He will talk with Colin MacCabe about the relationships between his artistic and scientific lives.

15:05 Ben Goldacre - The Humanities and the Public Misunderstanding of Science
In the time of Snow, science was only marginalised and ignored. Now we must contend with a vast army of humanities graduates in the media, who feel entitled to pass comment on matters about which they know nothing. With great authority and enormous influence, they promote the public’s misunderstanding of evidence: their self-indulgence comes at a very great cost.

Ben Goldacre is a writer, broadcaster, and medical doctor who has written the weekly Bad Science column in the Guardian since 2003. He appears regularly on Radio 4 and TV, and has written for the Guardian, Time Out, New Statesman, and the British Medical Journal as well as various book chapters. His book Bad Science appeared from Fourth Estate in 2008.

15:35 Tea

16:05 Alan Sokal, ‘What Is Science And Why Should We Care?’
I shall discuss what I see as the importance for society of a “scientific worldview” — a concept that goes far beyond the specific disciplines that we usually think of as “science”. I shall argue that clear thinking, combined with a respect for evidence — especially inconvenient and unwanted evidence, evidence that challenges our preconceptions — are of the utmost importance to the survival of the human race in the twenty-first century.

Alan Sokal is a Professor of Physics at New York University and Professor of Mathematics at University College London. His main research interests are in statistical mechanics and quantum field theory. He is co-author with Jean Bricmont of “Intellectual Impostures” (Profile Books, 1998). His most recent book is “Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture” (Oxford University Press, 2008).

16:35 Roundtable 2

17:30 End

Programme

Thursday 22 January 2009; Birkbeck, Clore Management Centre, B01

10-11am – Keynote lecture: Patricia Waugh (Durham University)

11-12.30pm - Two Cultures in History
Justin Sausman (Birkbeck): ‘Before the Two Cultures: Popular Science, Magic
and Literature in the 20s and 30s’
Nicolas Tredell (Sussex University): ‘Snow and the Science Wars’
Daniel Wilson (Birkbeck): ‘Two’s Company, Three’s a Crowd: Engineers in the History of the Two Cultures’

12.30-1.30pm – Lunch

1.30-3pm – Information and Communication
Gill Partington (Birkbeck): ‘Technology, Print and the “Two Cultures’”
Matt Wraith (London Consortium): ‘Noise and Aesthetics in Modernism’
Judith Simon (University of Vienna): ‘Expertocracy or the Cult of the Amateur?’

3-3.30pm - Coffee

3.30-5pm– Modelling Interpretation/Modelling Knowledge
Murray Smith (University of Kent): ‘”The Pit of Naturalism”: Reflections on Neuroscience and Naturalized Aesthetics’
Matthew Clements (London Consortium): ‘”Of thine eye I am eyebeam”: Biosemiotics and the Culture of Seeing’
Paul Crosthwaite (Cardiff University): ‘Financial Exchange and Death: The Limits of Scientism in the Study of Financial Markets’

5-5.30pm – Closing Remarks: Steven Connor

Friday 23 January 2009: Dana Centre

9.30-10am – Registration

10-11am – Keynote Lecture: George Rousseau (Oxford University)

11-12.30pm – Institutional Shapes of the Two Cultures
Sharon Babaian (Canada Science and Technology Museum): ‘Where the Two Cultures Meet but Don’t Always Talk’
Nicola Buckley (Cambridge University): ‘Two Cultures in Public Engagement?’
Shonagh Manson (Wellcome Trust): ‘Insight and Exchange: The Sciart Story’

11-12.30pm - Art/Science
Stephen Webster (Imperial): ‘Talking Collaboration: How Scientists View their Work with Artists’
Nicola Triscott (Arts Catalyst): ‘Performative Science in the Contemporary Arts’
Rachel Chapman (University of Sharjah): ‘Uncommonalities: Observations from the Field’

12.30-1.30pm – Lunch

1.30-2.30pm – Keynote Lecture: Robert Bud (Science Museum)

2.30-3.30 – Third Cultures
Deborah Cameron (Oxford University): ‘Popularizing Science or Scientizing the Popular? The Two Cultures and the New Science of Sex-Difference’
Jeff Thomas (Open University): ‘Embracing the Social’

3.30-4pm - coffee

4-5pm – Keynote Lecture: John Dupré (University of Exeter)

6.30-8.00pm Reception, Wellcome Collection
Attendees from the Birkbeck and Science Museum conference sessions are invited to a reception at the Wellcome Collection. The evening will include complimentary drinks, the chance to see the current War and Medicine exhibition and to view the permanent Medicine Now and Medicine Man galleries. The Collection will also be offering free guided tours of War and Medicine. If you would like to attend, please RSVP by 19th Jan to d.taplin@wellcome.ac.uk Please ensure your message subject line reads ‘Art & Science Now reception’, and include your full name, affiliation or organisation (if applicable) and position.

Saturday 24 January 2009, 10.30am-5.30pm, Starr Auditorium, Tate Modern

A day of lectures and discussion from leading figures in the field of the arts and sciences.

Gillian Beer
Marcus du Sautoy
Ben Goldacre
Anthony Grayling
Jonathan Miller
Alan Sokal

On 7 May 1959, C. P. Snow delivered the Rede Lecture in Cambridge. His influential and controversial address on the subject of ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’ condemned the widening gap of knowledge and understanding between ‘literary intellectuals’ and ‘natural scientists’.

Fifty years on, The London Consortium is bringing together the Science Museum, Tate Modern, the Wellcome Trust and Birkbeck, University of London, in a three-day conference. The conference will consider whether Snow’s critique has been addressed by the increase in multi-disciplinary work and research and the emergence of new cultural forms. Have the distinctions between and within the two cultures become further entrenched? How have the terms of the debate changed?

Programme

Thursday 22nd January, Birkbeck, University of London. Room B01, Clore Management Centre, Torrington Square, London. 9.30am-5.30pm.

A day of academic papers from leading and emerging scholars in the field.
Keynote address: Professor Patricia Waugh (University of Durham).
Please contact Laura Salisbury to book a place: l.salisbury@bbk.ac.uk

Friday 23rd January, Dana Centre, Science Museum, Exhibition Rd, London. 9.30am-5.30pm.

A day of lectures and discussion from leading figures in the arts and sciences.

Professor George Rousseau (Oxford University)
Dr Robert Bud (Science Museum)
Professor John Dupré (Exeter University)
To book a place, go to:
http://www.danacentre.org.uk/events/2009/01/23/460

Friday 23 January, 6.30-8.00, Reception at the Wellcome Collection.

Saturday 24th January, Tate Modern, Bankside, London. 10.30am-5.30pm.

A day of public lectures and conversation from renowned figures in the field.

Gillian Beer
Marcus du Sautoy
Ben Goldacre
Anthony Grayling
Jonathan Miller
Alan Sokal

Book tickets at:
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/symposia/16580.htm

The fourth annual Betting on Shorts short film competition, organised by Consortium students Ricarda Vidal, Irini Marinaki and Konstantinos Stefanis, came to a great climax on Friday 21st November 2008 at the ICA. The audience watched a programme of 17 wonderful short films on the theme of ‘Money, Money, Money’, which were simultaneously being seen in 12 other European cities - Athens, Barcelona, Bucharest, Istanbul, Maribor, Naples, Novi Sad, Paris, Poznan, Stockholm, Thessaloniki and Wiesbaden. The London jury chose as its winner Paul Cotter’s Last Hand Standing, finding it ‘perfectly conceived and executed, in such a way as to pack a full-length feature into 7 minutes’ and calling it ‘a film fable that educated its viewer out of cynicism into joy’. The overall winner across Europe was Mischa Leinkauf and Matthias Wermke’s Trotzdem Danke. Watch trailers from all the films in this year’s competition on the Betting on Shorts website.

The University of Hertfordshire’s School of Art and Design is running a conference examining the concept of luxury. The conference, entitled “In Pursuit of Luxury: commercial and academic perspectives on luxury”, intends to expand the parameters of the debate around the concepts of luxury to provide a refreshing context to construe the familiar debates surrounding the subject.

By discussing the history of luxury against contemporary issues, the event seeks to focus on a range of issues. These include: what do we understand by the term luxury and can it or should it be applied to luxury branded goods today? Does contemporary branding allow such goods to remain luxurious, even though they have been mass-produced? What do the terms such as value, consumerism, fashion, taste or connoisseurship really tell us about modern spending habits?

The conference will be held on Friday 19th June 2009 at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in Central London. Keynote speakers are confirmed as Emanuel Ungaro and Professor Chris Berry. Registration is open from Monday 26th January 2009.

A call for papers has opened with a deadline of Monday 15th December; the conference organisers invite submissions under a range of broad headings. Possible strands may include:
• Sociology and luxury
• Luxury and emerging economies
• Ethics, politics and luxury
• Luxury and craft
• Luxury and popular culture
• Luxury, globalisation and branding
• Luxury and design
• Luxury and fashion
• Luxury and jewellery
• Luxury and the history of consumption

For more information please see the following websites:
http://www.inpursuitofluxury.com/
http://www.herts.ac.uk/events/In-Pursuit-of-Luxury-Commercial-and-Academic-Perspectives-of-Luxury.cfm

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

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 ResearchSaturday 31st May, Birkbeck, University of LondonDisciplinary 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 ModernFriday 27 June, 18.30 – 20.00
Saturday 28 June, 10.30 – 17.45; 19.00 – 21.00Friedrich 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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