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.

Friday 25th May, 2007, 1.30-4.00pm
Room 101, 30 Russell Square
Seminar open to all

One of the largest growth areas in the arts and humanities is ‘practice research’ (also known as ‘practice-led research’, ‘practice-based research’, ‘research by practice’ and other terms). In practice research, creative practice, for example in the making of visual, literary, sonic, performative, conceptual or installation works, constitutes the principal method and outcome of the research.

This raises some intriguing questions and possibilities, which we will explore in this seminar.

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The 2007 European Summer School will take place in Giessen and Heidelberg, between 30th July and 4th August. This year’s theme will be ‘Ways of Worldmaking: Narratives, Archives and Media’.

2007ESSCallforPapers

Up to 6 members of each collaborating institution will attend to present papers, with travel and accommodation expenses paid. London Consortium students and recent postdoctural graduates wishing to participate should submit titles and abstracts for proposed papers to the Consortium office by 31 March.

The European Summer School is a collaboration of The Copenhagen Doctoral School in Cultural Studies, The Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, The London Consortium, The University of Oslo, and The International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture at the University of Giessen. Between 2007 and 2010 the venture is supported by funding from the European Commission.

For further details, visit the European Summer School website.

24th-25th November 2006

A collaborative graduate conference organised by Queen Mary, University of London and The London Consortium, supported by funding from the AHRC. View the conference website here.

6th-8th October 2006

In association with Birkbeck College, Goldsmiths College, the London Centre for Arts and Cultural Enterprise and Tate Modern.

During the centennial year of his birth, this collaborative conference looked at Samuel Beckett’s influence on the arts. View full information here.

7th-11th August 2006

The European Summer School is a collaboration between the London Consortium and four other European graduate institutions institutions: the Copenhagen Doctoral School in Cultural Studies, The Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, the Programs in Arts and Culture in Norway, and the Giessener Graduiertenzentrum. Each year, one of the institutions acts as hostand up to six students from each institution attend to present paper and take part in other activities. The 2006 Summer School, themed ‘Climates and Territories: Human Environments in Art and Culture’, took place in Oslo. View full details here.

20th March 2006
In association with NODE.London and the ICA

A panel of professionals with differing relationships to media arts considered the significance of the apparent prevalence of networks in media arts. Speakers included Ruth Catlow, artist, co-founder and co-director of Furtherfield.org and HTTP [House of Technologically Termed Practice]; Kelli Dipple, integrated media and performance artist and Webcasting Curator at Tate; Shu Lea Cheang, digital artist working in the field of net-based installation, social interface and film production; Tom Corby, artist, writer, curator, academic at the University of Westminster, and editor “Network Art: Practices and Positions,” (Routledge); and Helen Sloan, director of SCAN, the new media art agency in the South of England. This event was organised as part of the NODE.London media arts festival taking place during March 2006.

4th February 2006

The London Consortium supported this one-day conference in contemporary aesthetics, organised by Naked Punch Magazine in honour of the work of Arthur Danto.

Speakers included:
Arthur Danto – Embodied Meanings as Aesthetic Ideas
Richard Shusterman – Ars Erotica: Transfiguration of the Commonplace
Nicolas Vieillescazes – The Return of the Hegelian Repressed
Jear-Pierre Cometti – Being and Doing: Aesthetics at the Crossroads

www.nakedpunch.com

9 December 2005. In association with the ICA

As a tribute to the philosopher Gillian Rose on the 10th anniversary of her death, the London Consortium and the ICA presented an evening exploring the idea of philosophy as radical thought. At a time when the project for radical political transformation has been shaken to its core, what should be the role of the radical philosopher? Should it be the ethical work of mourning, or keeping the radical political project alive through critique?

Speakers included The Rt Revd Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury; Maggie Gee, novelist; Jacqueline Rose, Professor of English, Queen Mary College, University of London; Howard Gaygill, Professor of Cultural History, Goldsmiths College and literary executor of Gillian Rose. Chair: David Held, Professor of Political Science, LSE.

15 September 2005

Legendary maverick American composer and godfather of sound art, Alvin Lucier, presented an exclusive seminar for students of the London Consortium and the Royal Academy of Music. Organised by Consortium student, Seth Kim-Cohen.

More on Lucier: http://alucier.web.wesleyan.edu/

24th June 2005

This event brought together, among others, Tilda Swinton, Hanif Kureishi and Alan Yentob to examine the value of failure in a variety of creative and administrative contexts. It was organised by the London Consortium (for its tenth anniversary) jointly with the New York Public Library, where a second event on the same topic will be held later in 2005.

A collaboration between the London Consortium and Live at the New York Public Library

Thursday 9 June 2005
Room 101, Clore Management Centre, 25-27 Torrington Square

Open to London Consortium and Architectural Association students only

Paul Carter
Writing Public Space: Design, Philosophy, Art

Among the factors explaining the emotional poverty of contemporary urban spaces is the dissociation of those who think, design and adorn them. Using his experience in designing high profile public artworks in Australia, notably Relay (Homebush Bay, Sydney, 2000 Olympics), Nearamnew (Federation Square, Melbourne) and Solution (Docklands, Melbourne), Paul Carter argues that a new dialogue between designers, philosophers and artists is urgently needed. The basis of this dialogue will be an expanded notion of graphicality, a new engagement with the discursive character of public space, and the evolution of post-representationalist art practices that make surface the psychic violence and cultural waste involved in the provision of new, functionally-defined ‘places’.

Paul Carter is an artist and writer who has pioneered ‘spatial history’, the study of the mythopoetic mechanisms of place-making. Born in England, he worked in Italy and Spain before moving to Australia in 1980. He is currently Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. His books include The Road to Botany Bay (1987), The Lie of the Land (1996), Repressed Spaces: The Poetics of Agoraphobia (2002) and Material Thinking: The Theory and Practice of Creative Research (2004). His latest book, Mythform: The Making of Nearamnew at Federation Square (Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Publishing, 2005) is a fully-illustrated account of the collaboration with Lab architecture studio that produced a 7,500 square metre ground design, incorporating 70 s. m. of interlocked, stone typography. Parrot, his study of what we have done to parrots and what they have done to us, appears from Reaktion later this year.

A Multidisciplinary Conference
London, Tate Modern, 27-29 January 2005

The London Consortium in collaboration with
Tate Modern, Goethe-Institut, London and Institut Français, London

In choosing the somewhat broad terms, Heaven and Earth, we aim, in the words of Goethe, ‘to stroll with careful haste from the high heavens through the world to hell’. If there can be a heaven on earth, then Earth can also certainly be hell. Heaven and Earth can be opposites – or they can melt into one. To some, they are romantic concepts, bordering on kitsch – to others (theologians, Marxists), they are palpable realities with profound material implications.

As a theme, ‘Heaven and Earth’ lies at the heart of the most pressing and unshakeable theoretical/philosophical questions (transcendentalism, metaphysics, materialism, teleology). Alternatively, Heaven and Earth can be read as relating to the distinction between artistic reception (Heavenly judgment) and production (Earthly toil). Culture, as a whole, is always a product of the intertwining strands of the secular and the sacred. Heaven and Earth also act as tropes in the everyday rhetoric of popular culture and advertising.

In conjunction with Heaven & Earth, The London Consortium will present three cultural events which are open to the public: an artist talk with Bjørn Melhus and Matthieu Laurette; a screening of artists films; and a sound performance with Luc Ferrari, Kaffe Matthews, David Grubbs and others.

A multidisciplinary configuring of the Object

A conference and international cultural studies exchange organized as the 02-03 MRes/PhD1 collaborative end-of-year project. Sponsored by the London Consortium.

July 4, 5, 6 2003, TATE Modern/Britain and Limehouse Townhall

A three-day conference of rigorous cross-cultural and interdisciplinary academic discussion.

Event webpage: click here

The object can be concrete, graspable — like the art object or the fetish object — but at the same time it can be abstract– like the grammatical object. The “object” is at once abstract and concrete.

Object (i) Object was jointly organized by postgraduates from the London Consortium and the Berlin Graduiertenkolleg (the Universitat der Kunste, Freie Universitat, Humboldt-Universitat, Berlin and the Universitat Potsdam).

London Consortium-Pittsburgh Conference
9-13 September, Tate Modern

Co-organized with the Department of Cultural Studies at Pittsburgh University
EXCLUSIVE TO CONSORTIUM STUDENTS

Conference and season of screenings at the ICA
Organizers: Travis Miles and Michael Uwemedimo
2-11 June 2000, Birkbeck College and the ICA

A season of screenings exploring the border-zones of documentary and delirium, art and anthropology. Masterpieces from Rouch, Resnais, Buñuel, Deren, Marker, Viola, Huston, Tsuchimoto, and others are brought together with rarely screened experimental and ethnographic footage. The season culminated in a three-day international conference on the work of seminal French filmmaker and ethnographer, Jean Rouch, whose films redefined the documentary and kickstarted the New Wave.

Participants included: Jean Rouch | Albert Maysles | Richard Leacock | Colin Young | Laura Mulvey | Peter Wollen | Brian Winston | C. Thompson | Dick Fontaine | Michael Eaton | Ian Christie | Pascal Schöning | Arthur Howes

Conference and exhibition organized by the AA
Sponsored by the London Consortium
1-13 March 1999, Architectural Association

The exhibition, in conjunction with a two-day conference, provided an opportunity to consider how London’s urban landscape has been influenced by the process of migration. Examining this impact on many levels, the exhibited works presented a rich and diverse response to a subject central to the culture and history of London.