Tate Modern, 19.30, Sunday 27 May - 15.00, Monday 28 May 2007

To mark the twentieth anniversary of his death in 1987, Andy Warhol’s (1928-87) first ever film, Sleep 1963, is screened throughout the night, accompanied by the legendary musical performance that inspired it. The five and a half-hour film will be looped to provide over eighteen hours of continuous viewing, and is a meditative study of the poet John Giorno asleep in his apartment. Warhol was inspired to complete the film with a new repetitive editing structure after attending the writer and composer John Cage’s (1912-92) historic 1963 performance at the Pocket Theatre in New York of the French composer Erik Satie’s (1866-1925) epic repetitive work for piano, Vexations, 1893. This transfixing event at Tate Modern brings together two artistic landmarks from a momentous year, and will be a contemplation on stillness, repetition, time and death.

This landmark event is accompanied by a panel discussion about the relationships between Warhol, Cage and Satie.

The concept for the event came from London Consortium PhD student Lauren A Wright, and, with support from the Consortium, has been developed by her in collaboration with Tate Modern as part of the Tate Long Weekend. Full details and booking information are available on the Tate website.

The London Consortium issues an open invitation to anyone who would like to drop-in at an informal information evening, where we will discuss ‘The Possibilities of Multi-Disciplinary Study’.

Tuesday 15th May 2007
6.00-7.30pm

The Council Room, Birkbeck College main building
Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX

From 6pm, faculty and students of the Consortium will be available to discuss our programmes and the potential that multi-disciplinary study might have for your own areas of interest.

At 6.30pm, Professor Steven Connor, Academic Director, will give a short presentation.

Wine and soft drinks will be available throughout.

Terrence Malick’s 1978 film Days of Heaven will be screened in ICA Cinema 2 on Thursday 19th April at 2pm.

It is hoped the screening and following discussion will lead to the creation of a London Consortium reading/viewing group on the poetry of Wallace Stevens and the cinema of Terrence Malick.

The screening and the reading group will be open to Consortium and Birkbeck postgrad students.

A skim through Stevens’ Harmonium would be good preparation for the screening, especially the poems “O, Florida, Venereal Soil”, “The Comedian as the Letter C” and “Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb”.

Further reading: Simon Critchley, Things Merely Are (2005).

Nec manet sui similis res: omnia migrant, omnia commutat natura et vertere cogit
(Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, V. 828)

The fifth issue of Static invites critical and creative contributions on the theme of Metamorphosis. The mutability of things is a theme that has gripped people from the ancient world to the modern. This issue of Static will focus closely on the changing forms in which change of form is thought about and represented in literature, myth, and arts. Metamorphosis is the vehicle by which different cultures think concretely about the relations between form and time, fusion and undoing, the singular and the multiple, the absolute and the intermediary. Among other things, metamorphosis refers to the transformations of the body effected in body practices, cosmetic, ritual and sexual.

We invite all kinds of submissions but we particularly welcome contributions in non-textual media, be it photographic images, art projects, animation, short film, or other media.
Please contact the editorial team at static5_meta@yahoo.com in the first instance to discuss the format and other technical details before you submit your work.

The deadline for submissions is April 15, 2007.

Editorial Team
Prof. Colin MacCabe, Prof. Steven Connor, Irini Marinaki, Martine Rouleau, Konstantinos Stefanis, Vlad Strukov

About Static
Static is the London Consortium’s web resource. Edited and managed by Consortium students, it aims to presents contributions from an international team of academics, artists and cultural practitioners.
To see previous issues go to www.static.londonconsortium.com

14th and 15th October 2006

ICA in association with The London Consortium

Plug-In City, Instant City, Suitaloon, Living Pod … These were just some of Archigram’s projects, Britain’s most radical architecture group, whose continued influence on architects and artists was rewarded by the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture in 2002. To celebrate the launch of the Archigram Archival Research Programme at the University of Westminster, a series of Archigram events took place at the ICA, which hosted their first major exhibition, Living City, in 1963.

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From September 16th until the 21st a group of fourteen London Consortium students, accompanied by faculty members Richard Humphreys (Tate Britain) and Alan Walker, visited the city of Istanbul on the occasion of the opening of the 9th International Istanbul Biennial. The trip provided the opportunity of attending a world-prominent art event, in an exciting city. The participants visited exhibitions, openings, and various parallel happenings during the first days of the Biennial’s launch. Moreover, they had the chance to become acquainted with cultural practitioners from Turkey and abroad.

The Consortium delegation hits Istanbul…

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The second ICA / London Consortium short film competition. What makes this contest different from any other short film contest is that the audience bet on which film will be the winner - though bets had to be placed before the screening. All contestants were asked to write a short but informative blurb about their film and give some background information about themselves. This information, together with a still from the film, was made available to the audience 2 hours before the screening, and was the basis on which they placed their bets.

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Thursday 8th June 2006, AA.

This book by Seth Kim-Cohen, former Consortium PhD student, contains transcripts of conversations he conducted on Resonance FM with theorists, musicians and artists about their one chosen piece of music. Speakers at the event included Christoph Cox, David Toop, Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud), Steven Connor, and John Parish. More about the book here.

Films chosen by students to link in with common research areas or topics discussed in class.

Screenings included:
25 February, Little Otik, Jan Svankmajer (2000)
11 March, Running on Karma, Johnnie To and Wai Ka Fai (2003)
6 May, Tampopo, Juzo Itami (1985)
20 May, Suna no onna (Woman in the Dunes), Hiroshi Teshigahara (1964) and A Short Film About Love, Krzysztof Kieslowski (1988)
3 June, Brief City (1952), Listen to Britain, Humphrey Jennings (1942) and Man in the White Suit , Alexander Mackendrick (1951)
1 July, Climb Every Mountain, Alan Yentob (no date), America, America (aka The Anatolian Smile), Elia Kazan (1963) and Mercedes, Simos Korexenidis (2004)

Between 2001 and 2003 the London Consortium published a journal, Room 5. Students were entirely responsible for proposals, editing and designing the yearly volume. All issues of Room 5 draw together work that reflects the commitment of the London Consortium to multidisciplinary work. To purchase copies of any of these volumes, contact the Consortium office at loncon@ica.org.uk

Issue 1: Whiteness

Journal designed by Chris Hight

Issue 1: Whiteness
The purity of whiteness is generally acknowledged as a thing to be desired. Against this convention, this anthology addresses its implicit economy of violence. Whiteness at once engenders the invisible, and increases visibility. It is that which we wish at once to hide and to reveal, to possess and to destroy.

An event in collaboration with Tate Modern and the Goethe Institute, as part of the Consortium’s Heaven and Earth conference. Created and curated by Consortium student, Seth Kim-Cohen. To find out more and to hear the event visit the Tate website.

Special issue devoted to the London Consortium
Volume 42, No 2, Summer 2000
To order, please contact: Blackwell Publishers Journals, PO Box 805, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1FH

Sponsored by the London Consortium and Tate
8-25 July 2002, Various venues across London

The Consortium joins forces with Tate Modern to present a summer school. Three new courses spanning three weeks in July 2002 offered participants from home and abroad the opportunity to learn about cutting edge contemporary culture in London, as well as providing a taster of the Consortium’s programme and faculty research.

Participants attended classes featuring leading figures from the disciplines of art, architecture, film, history, literature and fashion. These were complemented by site visits to key cultural institutions and landmarks in London, as well as evening events, exhibition openings and film screenings.

Click here for the 2002 Summer School Pages

Exhibition organized as the 01-02 MRes/PhD1 collaborative end-of-year project
Sponsored by the London Consortium
28-30 June 2002, The Nash Room, ICA, London

The London Consortium 2002 MRes and PhD1 students present Slice, a collaborative exploration in contemporary cultural production. Slice serves up visual arts, sound and cultural analysis exposing connections between image, word and object.

Participants included: Ricardo Domizio, Sunday Ellis, Bridget Holroyd, Dean Kenning, Nina Krieger , Brandon LaBelle, Nick Lambrianou, Eva Heath, Colette Meacher, Aoife O’Brien, Aviva Schultz, Aaron Schuman, Gemma Starkey, Gary Walker, Stephen Wheeler, Noel Yeates

Do critical descriptions of female urinals and edible architecture relate to the notion of hypothermia as a primary fantasy of death? What do scatological elements in the work of Schwitters have in common with Fragonard’s gravitational fantasy and the architecture of the museum? Many different answers are possible here, but is not the fundamental question whether the questions need to be asked at all? This volume is to be read and enjoyed for the pleasures and virtues of its heterogeneity.

Journal designed by Christopher Packer

Arcade is a collection of essays, discussions, architectural design and graphic projects that come together as disparate things and people do in an arcade, in their communal attempt to escape the rain.

ISBN 0 85315 950 5
£14.99, illustrated paperback
224pp publication April 2002

contributions: Kathy Battista, Robert Clough, Pierandrea Gebbia, Francis Gooding, Lorens Holm, Catherine James, Mark Morris, Toby Newton, Barbara Penner, Segal, Weizman & Herz Architects, John Tercier, Fabrizio Trifiro and Bernard Vere.

• Only books I’ll never read aren’t tedious, Francis Gooding
• Female Urinals: taking a stand, Barbara Penner
• Architecture, Yum!, Mark Morris
• Fragonard’s Swing: themes and variations, Catherine James
• Time in hell: Benjamin, gambling and the character of modern experience, Robert Clough
• Rejoinders1: the scene of the crime, Lorens Holm
• Richard Rorty: an interview, Fabrizio Trifiro
• In a black night, fires as bursts of laughter: notes on Jazz and protest, Pierandrea Gebbia
• ‘It’s all crap’ : scatalogical elements in Schwitters’ Merzbau, Bernard Vere
• They sent their guides to a Disney school for instruction: prognostication for a new order, Toby Newton
• Bow ties and branding: Dan Graham on contemporary museum architecture, Kathy Battista with Mark Morris
• A Louvre of suburbia: re-constructing the Ashdod Museum of Art, Segal, Weizman & Herz Architects
• Out in the cold: fantasies of revival, John Tercier

“Don’t be too hasty in trying to find a definition of the town,” wrote the novelist George Perec, “it’s far too big and there’s every chance of getting it wrong.” This collection of critical essays from the London Consortium, including interviews with film-maker Patrick Keiller and painter Jock McFadyen, does not attempt to define or exhaust London. Instead Eyeing London includes a highly diverse set of considerations, encompassing Tube advertising, Westway, the Freud Museum, art in the Milennium, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, tourist trinkets, wobbly bridges and a vision of ruined London, to form a group that stages a possible itinerary and suggests countless more.