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.

Reflections on the Anglo-Chinese encounter

16-19 June 2008

Patrick Wright has written four 15 minute talks for ‘The Essay’ slot on BBC Radio 3. They will be broadcast at 23.00 on consecutive evenings, 16-19 June 2008.

1. ‘A Museum of Embryos’: The Great Exhibition and London’s Chinese Junk.

2. Limehouse Chinatown: The Opium Wars Brought Home.

3. ‘Dumb-Walking-Man’: Chiang Yee becomes The Silent Traveller.

4. ‘China Stands Up’: From Maoist Peasant to English Leveller.

Static, the online journal of the London Consortium, launches a call for submissions for two forthcoming issues, Static 7 Catastrophe and Static 8 General http://static.londonconsortium.com/

STATIC 7 CATASTROPHE

“What happened, has not happened: thus spoke patience, that the end might not be hurried.” Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of The Disaster
The catastrophe takes care of everything: from Greek tragedy to sci-fi, from ethics to (an)aesthetics, from architecture to game theory, from opera to snuff. Static 7 aims to reconstruct the contradictions and oppositions of the catastrophic narrative, which is peripheral yet at the centre of all things, consigned to the past and always to be reinstated. Catastrophe is both a central cultural narrative and the point at which all narratives and cultures implode and disappear. The destructive topos par excellence, it has also been instrumental in the development of many of the concepts and categories, from psychology to history, ethics to aesthetics. Static 7 aims to pace the epistemic disaster zone, reading its debris through contributions which explore the notion of catastrophe in literature, architecture, art, politics, science, music and economics, drawing on sources as diverse as Aeschylus and Virilio, Kant and Beckett, financial risk analysis and nuclear reactor meltdown.

The submission deadline is 1 April 2008. Please send your queries and submissions to mailto:static.catastrophe@googlemail.com

Static 7 Catastrophe welcomes diverse formats of submission. Please contact the editors, Chrystalleni Louidzou, Jonathan McKay and Roger Orwell, regarding technical details before submitting your work. Submission guidelines and further information about Static can be found at www.static.londonconsortium.com.

STATIC 8 GENERAL

The general gender [Obs.] = The common sort (of people). (OED) Hamlet.

The general constitutes both the site of a universal quality as well as a collection of the particular. As an idea or shape, it is commonly understood as an inferior mode of description yet the general, uneasily allied with both despotism and democracy, wields an ambiguous authority of its own. Static 8 sets out to probe the power and authority of the general while recognizing the potential for open possibilities that lie in what might be referred to as the undefined, indistinct or even unexceptional. ‘Never alone / Did the King sigh,’ says Shakespeare’s Claudius ‘but with a general groan’ (Hamlet, III, 3). The King, like the military general, is someone who has overall authority but whose supremacy rests dubiously on the plurality and willed consensus of those whose voices are contained in his command. By what means does the general give form? Does it unite, highlight, corrode or simply blur the points of distinction? And what role does it have in the ethos of liberty and coercion? Bearing on the condition of the interdisciplinary in its implicit invocation of ‘General Studies,’ this issue of Static invites contributors to address the possibilities and paradoxes embodied by the general.

The submission deadline is 1 June 2008. Please send your queries and submissions to mailto:staticgeneral@gmail.com

Static 8 General welcomes diverse formats of submission. Please contact the editors, Christien Garcia and Alice Gavin, regarding technical details before submitting your work. Submission guidelines and further information about Static can be found at www.static.londonconsortium.com.

Static is the online journal of the London Consortium, a collaboration between the Architectural Association, Birkbeck College, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Science Museum, and Tate.

See www.londonconsortium.com for more information.

Betting on Shorts invited filmmakers from across the world to respond to our theme “Mad or Bad”:
“Break the conventions, break free, break your heart or someone else’s, take drugs, become a criminal, become a victim, wherever your fancies take you – are you mad, or are you just bad? You could look at trick or treat, crime and punishment, genetics and eugenics, or: simply consider Michael Jackson.”

Of almost 400 submissions a programme of 18 runners-up and 16 finalists have now been selected.

The finalists will be screened simultaneously in 10 cities and will be judged by a panel of local film-curators, directors, actors or cultural critics in each city. The overall favourite is awarded a prize.

Before the show begins the audience can bet on who will be the grand winner.

From 21 November clips of the films are streamed on the Betting on Shorts website www.bettingonshorts.com Background info, blurbs and stills are available 30 minutes before the screening. Those who have bet on the right film can win a prizes like annual memberships, DVDs, books or cinema tickets.

The winners will be announced in the bar as soon as all the juries’ decisions are in.

Runners-up will be screened
21 November in London: ICA, Cinema 2, 8.45 pm
28 November in Barcelona: Cineclub VoidZelig, 9.30 pm

Preview of the 16 finalists
23 November, Barcelona at l’Alternativa Independent Film Festival: Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona, 10.00pm

The grand finale
28 November 2007 ICA, Cinema 1, 8.30pm
And simultaneously in Athens, Berlin, Istanbul, Maribor, Novi Sad, Paris, Poznan and Rostov-on-Don

Betting on Shorts is supported by the London Consortium.

‘A little alarm now and then keeps life from stagnation.’
- Fanny Burney, Camilla (1796)

The London Consortium invites contributions for the sixth issue of Static (to be published in December 2007), on the theme of ALARM.

Static: ALARM is devoted to the sound, the signal, and the response: the ways in which sounds have triggered gatherings and scatterings; the connections between signs and dangers real and imagined. As the rolling “r” of “alarum” has slackened to the lulling sound of “alarm”, the ringing of alarms has become part of our aural wallpaper. Alarm is hard-wired into us – but has the constant clanging and wailing of alarms, the repeated sounding of “wake-up calls”, induced a collective state of numbing tinnitus?

We welcome all kinds of contributions, and are particularly keen to include sound art, which will be published online. Please contact the editors at static6_alarm@yahoo.com to discuss the format and other technical details before submitting your work.

Submission guidelines and further information about Static can be found on the website: www.static.londonconsortium.com. The deadline for submissions is Monday 1st October 2007.

The editors of Static: ALARM are Thomas Mansell, Richard Osborne, and Katherine Hunt.

The Cine Club is a series of film screenings organised by PhD students around a specific theme. This year the Club is exporing the theme of ‘the still image in moving pictures’. The screenings take place fortnightly in the ICA cinemas and are followed by discussion. Ideas for background reading are suggested and also discussed. The screenings are open to all Consortium and Birkbeck postgrad students.

Entry is free. All screenings take place in ICA cinema 2. Please arrive early as the films will begin promptly at the advertised time.

Next screening: Thursday 5th July, After Life (Hirokazu Koreeda, 1998)

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Betting on Shorts is a film contest with a difference, as it requires audience members to place bets on which film will be the winner. Established in 2005 as part of activities for the London Consortium’s European Summer School, Betting on Shorts has taken-on a life of its own. 2007 will see the third annual contest, and this time it’s taking place across Europe and beyond - a Eurovision of short film. This year’s theme is ‘Mad or Bad?’

See the Call for Submissions here..

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London Consortium Research Fellow, Hilary Powell’s film The Games is being screened twice during Architecture Week. The film is a 15 minute surreal exploration of the current landscape of the area in East London now being developed for the 2012 Olympics.

The film can be seen and discussed at both these events:

London Architecture Week event, Wednesday 20th June

Space Studios / Museum of London event, Olympic Artists, Saturday 23rd June

Static (the London Consortium’s online journal, http://static.londonconsortium.com/ ISSN 1754-5374) is inviting teams of guest editors to submit proposals for the sixth and subsequent issues. Static issue 05 is due to come out at the beginning of July 2007. Static issue 06 will be expected to go online in November 2007.

Guest editors will be responsible for circulating call for papers, editing submissions and putting the issue online. Assistance on all stages will be provided by the current members of Static’s editorial board (Prof. Steven Connor, Irini Marinaki, Martine Rouleau, Konstantinos Stefanis, Vlad Strukov and Matthew Taunton)

Please, send your proposals (theme, possible format, or any other information relevant to your project) of no longer than 250 words to static@londonconsortium.com.

The deadline for submissions is Friday 22nd of June 2007.

Please note that this is open to London Consortium’s students, alumni and faculty only.