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.

Thursday 15th May, 7pm, ICA (Nash Room)

A 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 sixth event in the series focuses on the act of collecting: seeking, locating, acquiring, organising, cataloguing, displaying, storing, and maintaining whatever items are of interest to the individual. Why do certain people collect? What do they collect? How do they go about amassing a number of items around a specific interest? Is the search for specific items more rewarding than actual possession? Can a collection ever be complete? Why make a collection publicly accessible - or why keep it private?

Speakers: Anita Zabludowicz, art collector and founder of Project Space 176; John Sellars, senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of the West of England and a fellow of The London Consortium; Mike Presdee, Senior Lecturer in Criminology, University of Kent. Chair: Martine Rouleau, The London Consortium.

The talk will begin with a slideshow of personal collections. If you are attending the talk and would like your collection to be included (anonymously), please email a photograph or image of the collection to jennifert@ica.org.uk.

In association with the London Consortium.

£10 / £9 Concessions / £8 ICA Members.

Full details and booking information are available on the ICA website

ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION
Artist’s Series (supported by the London Consortium)

Organised by Parveen Adams

Friday 8th February JUDITH BARRY

Judith Barry’s work is interdisciplinary and she won the Friedrich Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts in 2000. She was awarded best pavilion at the 8th annual Cairo Biennial and has been exhibited internationally at biennials in Venice, São Paulo, Nagoya, Cairo, Australia, and U.S., among others.

Friday 15th February STAN DOUGLAS

Stan Douglas ranks among the most important of contemporary artists. He has participated in Documenta and in the Venice Biennale many times. His recent exhibition in Stuttgart showed the principal works of the last twenty years. He is concerned with the history of places - Potsdam, Vancouver, Cuba, Detroit - which are reflected along various literary, filmic or musical references. His recent work has engaged with the work of Samuel Beckett.

Friday 29th February WALID RAAD (Atlas Group)

Walid Raad works with film. video, photography and literary essays to investigate the contemporary history of war in his native Lebanon. He is widely known for The Atlas Group project. Raad uses film, video, and photography as documents of physical and psychological violence. He teaches at Cooper Union in New York.

Friday 7th March MICHAEL LANDY

Michael Landy is the man who destroyed everything he possessed in what a critic described as ‘an act of self-abrogation worthy of the great hermit of Cordoba’. He is also the man who built a life-size replica of his parents’ house - a pebble-dashed suburban semi-detached in Essex – and placed it in the Duveen gallery. He is currently working on a project around Jean Tinguely’s machine, destined for auto-destruction.

All sessions are 6.30-8.00 at the AA, 34-36 Bedford Square, WC1

Mark Cousins’ 5.00 lectures on Nothing – 1st February and on the above dates

The Wheatsheaf lecture series ‘Organics’, organised by Matthew Wraith and Ben Dawson will be continuing this term. The lectures in their various ways investigate contemporary conceptions within the biological sciences of what an organism is, does, and can become and how these have inflected the ancient use of the notion of the organic as a structuing metaphor or aspirational model for society, culture and the built environment as a whole. These will both be in the Wheatsheaf pub 25 Rathbone place W1T 1DG:

Wednesday 23rd January, 7pm
Neil Leach - The Organic in Contemporary Architectural Design

Neil Leach is an architect and theorist. He is teaching now at Brighton University and has been closely involved with both the AA and the London Consortium in the past. His books include The anaesthetics of Architecture, Camouflage and most recently Forget Heidegger. His talk at the Wheatsheaf will be on how concepts central to biology like ‘morphogenesis’ and ‘emergence’, together with the biologically informed writings of theorists like Gilles Deleuze and Manuel DeLanda have colonised architectural theory and prized the idea of the organic away from its traditional assocations with the Organic Movement in Twentieth Century Architecture.

Tuesday 19th February, 7pm
John Marks - Symbiosis and virtulisation - The Mind of Society

John Marks is Associate Professor of French Studies at the University of Nottingham and a member of the Science, Technology and Cultures research group. His work focuses on the possible ways in which the human body and brain might be transformed, mediated theoretically through a reading of French thinkers such as Foucault and Deleuze, along with a more recent interest in the cultural and intellectual impact of molecular biology as a discipline.

His talk will be on the French biologist, geologist, and jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of the noosphere, focusing on some of the ways in which this idea has re-appeared in recent French writing on the Internet, cyberspace, cybernetics and biology.

Paul Sheehan ‘Animals on Film: Godard, Bresson, Herzog and the “Politics of ‘Pure Seeing” ‘

ICA Cinema 2

Friday 18 January 2.00 pm

Animals are ‘anti-cinema’, given the irreducible, unmediated alterity they bring to the image. In posing a permanent challenge to the formal and financial controls exerted by the medium, animals reveal the otherness of the non-manipulable. In this paper, I explore some early episodes of animals on film, to outline the link between the two (animals and film), and how deep it runs. Then I examine the metaphysics of identity as the implicit screen logic that separates human actors from animal ‘performers’, and consider attempts to disrupt or bypass that logic in Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Bresson. And thirdly, I outline Werner Herzog’s daring and extraordinarily varied use of animals, and show how it might be seen to exemplify a politics of animal being, one that both reveals and puts into question the cardinal tenets of a medium founded on the metaphysical privileging of human beings over animals.

Paul Sheehan is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Modernism, Narrative and Humanism (2002) and the editor of Becoming Human: New Perspectives on the Inhuman Condition. Most recently, he has contributed chapters to The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, The Matrix Trilogy: Cyberpunk Reloaded, and Beckett after Beckett. His current project is a historical poetics of transgression in literature and film, entitled Violence and Aesthetics: From Dorian Gray to Hannibal Lecter.

To mark the ICA’s 60th anniversary, a series of talks will look back at the dominant curatorial approaches of the ICA’s history, questioning their continued relevance today and looking at the possibility of their revival. The series takes key exhibitions and themes from the ICA’s past as the starting point for discussion at each talk, which will take place over the coming months. Transcripts from the talks will form the basis of a publication to be released at the end of the series.

The first two talks have now been annouced:

Political manifesto as curatorial project
Tuesday 27th November, 7pm, ICA

The ICA played host to the politically controversial Unknown Political Prisoner exhibition in 1953, offered solidarity in the early 60s to LA artists protesting against Vietnam, and most recently invited artists’ proposals for a Memorial to the Iraq War (2007). In a time which is often described as apathetic, but which has also seen some of the biggest anti-war demonstrations ever, should contemporary politics be the domain of the curator?

Speakers include: artist Liam Gillick, contributor to Memorial to the Iraq War; Mark Nash, head of curating contemporary art, Royal College of Art, and co-curator Documenta 11 (2002); Sophie Hope, co-founder B+B, co-curator, Real Estate for London in Six Easy Steps (2005); Will Bradley, co-curator, Forms of Resistance: Artists and the desire for social change from 1871 to the present, Van Abbemuseum; Polish-born, London-based artist Marysia Lewandowska, who has collaborated with Neil Cummings since 1995, and whose recent Enthusiasm project explored, through amateur films made by Polish factory workers under socialism, the potential of working outside ‘official’ culture. The discussion will be chaired by Andrew Brighton, writer, contributing editor to Critical Quarterly and painter.

The Artist-curator: curators as artists and artists as curators
Tuesday 11th December, 7pm, ICA

The postwar era fundamentally altered the way in which the public interacted with art. One of the most visible changes was the emergence of the artist from studio to exhibition space. Key exhibitions of the late 50s, such as This is Tomorrow (Whitechapel, 1956) and Parallel of Life and Art (ICA, 1953) saw artists and architects collaborating on exhibition stands and curatorial models. This fluid positioning has resulted in some of the most interesting exhibitions in the contemporary British art scene, and recently, due to pressures both creative and economic, the rise in the artist-run space. Many questions remain unanswered: is there a fundamental difference of position between artist and curator? Do we need curators at all? Should the curator be considered an artist?

Speakers include: Mark Sladen, ICA director of exhibitions; Jeremy Millar, artist and AHRC Research Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford, and curator of The Institute of Cultural Anxiety - Works from the Collection’ at the ICA in 1994; Gavin Wade, Director of Eastside Projects, Birmingham; Siobhan Wootton, co-director and curator of Alma Enterprises, an artist/curator run space on Vyner Street; Dr. Cameron Cartiere, Director of Doctoral Research for the Faculty of Lifelong Learning at Birkbeck College, and MA course director for the department of Arts Policy & Management.

For further details about both of these talks, and to book tickets, go to the ICA’s website.

The talks have been developed by London Consortium student Ben Cranfield and the ICA’s Talks Department, and are organised in association with the London Consortium.

The Wheatsheaf Talks are an annual series, and take place in the upstairs room of the Wheatsheaf pub - a favourite of 1930s writers such as George Orwell and Dylan Thomas - at 25 Rathbone Place, W1T 1DG. Talks are open to all Consortium students.

This year’s series of talks is being organised by Consortium students Ben Dawson and Matt Wraith, and consider the fate of ‘the organism’ in recent social theory.

Organics: Between Biology and Politics in Contemporary Social Theory

The second in the series of talks will take place on Tuesday 20 November 2007 at 7pm:

Michael King (Professor of Law, Reading)
Professor King is a leading expert on the increasingly influential work Niklas Luhmann. His paper, ‘The Autopoiesis of Social Systems’ will focus on Luhmann’s uses of biology in his theorisations of autopoietic systems.

The Wheatsheaf Talks are an annual series, and take place in the upstairs room of the Wheatsheaf pub - a favourite of 1930s writers such as George Orwell and Dylan Thomas - at 25 Rathbone Place, W1T 1DG. Talks are open to all Consortium students.

This year’s series of talks is being organised by Consortium students Ben Dawson and Matt Wraith, and consider the fate of ‘the organism’ in recent social theory.

Organics: Between Biology and Politics in Contemporary Social Theory

The conception of society as a single living organism is ancient and found in a variety of cultures. From the early Stoics’ connections of pneuma (life force) and oikeiosis (belonging/sociality) to the mechanists and vitalists whose science framed the political debates of the Glorious Revolution, theories of organic life have implicitly and often explicitly carried morally and politically normative associations. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ‘organic relations’ came to be seen as an antidote to the ills of industrialisation and the call for an ‘organic society’ was made by an extraordinarily diverse range of thinkers. In recent years, organic and biological concepts have crept back into cultural theory and begun breeding there exponentially. Insights, discoveries, and models drawn from the life sciences have inflected political, social and cultural thought and have variously been used as means of conceiving, exemplifying, analogising, grounding, expanding, regenerating and metamorphosing cultural and political processes. But these new theories differ from the organic social models of the past in many important ways.

Contemporary revitalisations of the relation between biological and social processes resist reductive or essentialist biologism. These theories focus not so much on the human organism and other drearily hierarchical central nervous systems, but draw instead on the rhizomatic structure of certain grasses, on viruses, or single cells.

Older theories arguing for an ‘Organic Society’ tended to be anti-modern, anti-industrial, anti-urban. Today, it is the modern, industrial or post-industrial, technologically connected urban collective that most adequately approaches the complexity of the organism. The organic was once valued for its simplicity, now it is seen as a paradigm of complexity.

The aim of this lecture series, and of the discussions we hope will emerge from and grow around it, is to consider the fate of the organism in recent social theory and tap the wide stream of thought that flows from the meeting of these two tributaries.

Wednesday 17 October 2007, 7pm
John Dupré (Professor of Philosophy of Science, Exeter)
Professor Dupré specialises in the relationships between of science, metaphysics, and social theory, and on the limitations of socio-biology. He will be speaking on the statement ‘There is no such thing as society’.

Tuesday 20 November 2007, 7pm:
Michael King (Professor of Law, Reading)
Professor King is a leading expert on the increasingly influential work Niklas Luhmann. His paper, ‘The Autopoiesis of Social Systems’ will focus on Luhmann’s uses of biology in his theorisations of autopoietic systems.

Spring Term (Date TBC)
John Marks (Associate Professor of Philosophy, Nottingham)
John Marks has written extensively on the work of Gilles Deleuze. He is a member of the Science, Technology, and Culture Research Group at Nottingham, and will be speaking on biology, twentieth-century French thought and cybernetics.