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.

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.

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).

ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION

Artist’s Series (supported by the London Consortium)

Organised by Parveen Adams

Friday 27th February

Jane and Louise Wilson

have worked together for the last twenty years. Their multi-part video installations are notable for their handling of the viewer’s relation to the spaces as the artists have experienced them - Stasi City (1997), Gamma (1999), Erehwon (2000) among many others. Their most recent work, Unfolding the Aryan Papers (2009) is currently at the British Film Institute’s Southbank Gallery. It is based on unmade Kubrick film concerning a wartime story of a Jewish woman. The actress who was to have played the lead herself figures large in the Wilsons’ film which also includes Kubrick’s wardrobe stills and wartime newsreel images - a complex and stunning work.

Friday 6th March

Melik Ohanian

is a French-Armenian artist working in Paris. In 2006 he showed in South London Gallery - Invisible Film (2005) along with Seven Minutes Before. The latter is an experiment with narrative structure which involves seven screens with seven films taken across two kilometres of a French valley floor which culminate in a single dramatic explosion. In the same year the Institut d’Art Contemporain put their entire space at his disposal. His work has been described as ‘among the most intriguing forms of creative work to be seen at the present day’ (J-L Maubant). Among many projects this year is a group show entitled The Times of a Place in Spain.

Friday 13th March

Matt Collishaw

Haunch of Venison show (2008) - a marvel - Böcklin’s Island of the Dead animated by light changes during the course of a day and projected onto a two-way mirror with complex effects - the viewer held as much by the sheer beauty of the piece as the need to work out how it worked. Shooting Stars projected images of children (from old and new photographs) onto the walls of a huge room in a series of fleeting flashes that might appear anywhere. What were we seeing and why were we seeing it this way? Throbbing Gristle, a large mesmerising sculpture with human and mythological figures, animals and birds constructed like a merry-go-round that rotated with accompanying strobe lighting which conjured up a fearful yet compulsive scene of Chapmanesque excess.

Friday 20th March

Mary Kelly

has shown her work round the world and it is included in major collections. Working in London in the 1970s she incorporated her feminist concerns in the landmark five-part Post-Partum Document. This was followed by a complete showing of the four-part Interim at the New Museum in New York in 1990. She then developed a powerful technique utilising the lint screen of a clothes-dryer by which she produced curved grey mini pads of lint. She has used these to great effect in a series of works in the nineties. She will speak about her recent work including her part in Documenta 2007.

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

Mark Cousins 5.00 lectures Distructure of Cities - on the above dates 

Fortnightly research seminars series presented by David Bennett:

Thursdays, 12.00-2.00 p.m., on 30 Oct., 13 Nov., 27 Nov. and 11 Dec., 2008.

Location: Tillotson Room, 30 Russell Square

What is ‘libidinal economy’ and how has it informed ideas about subjectivity, desire, commerce and subversion since the rise of consumer culture in the eighteenth century? These four research seminars will investigate a tradition of thinking sexuality through the trope of economy which figures desire or libido as something quantifiable that may be spent, saved, squandered or profitably invested. Since ‘to spend’ became the standard vernacular term for orgasm in the late seventeenth century, the metaphoric commerce/intercourse between the languages of money and sex has been richly promiscuous, producing such influential bodies of theory as Freudianism’s economic model of the psyche. These seminars will examine how libidinal economy has operated in discourses as disparate as Victorian pornography and self-help manuals, psychoanalysis, radical political philosophy, market research and advertising. They will consider how the ‘homo oeconomicus’ model of the citizen-subject-on which both classical political economy and neo-classical economics are predicated-has shaped explanations of sexual desire, deviancy and pleasure, and how changing accounts of the costs and benefits of expending libido have interacted with the producer and consumer ethics in the transition from liberal capitalism to late consumer culture.Each seminar (talk + discussion) will focus on a different aspect of the sex-money nexus that libidinal economists have undertaken to interpret, regulate or exploit.

Click here for full information: Libidinal Economy.

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.

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.

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.

Tuesday 9th October, 7.15pm

A series exploring the continued relevance of phenomenology, a philosophy aimed at making explicit 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 fourth event in the series focuses on meat. In Old English, the term was used to designate all food. Now it refers mostly to animal flesh meant for human consumption. Some people choose to shun it and others consume it everyday. Some say it’s bad for our health and others think we can’t live a healthy life without it. Whether it’s a source of nourishment or a cause for concern, meat is present in our lives. There will also be a demonstration of butchery.

Speakers: Jan Fabre, artist; Surinder Phull, nutritionist; Philip Hughes, managing director of Rhug Estate Organic Farm; and Ginger Pig butchers.

The series is organised by Consortium PhD student Martine Rouleau.

Presented in association with the ICA.
Tickets £10 / £9 Concessions / £8 ICA Members
Book online at the ICA website.

See details of previous talks in the series here.

An annual series of Artists’ Talks held at the Architectural Association, organised in collaboration with the London Consortium. Artists and speakers featured in this series included Bernd Behr, Ryan Gander, Jan Mancuska and Ralph Rugoff.

All talks were open to the public and took place at the Architectural Association, 34-36 Bedford Square, WC1.

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strong>Wednesday 28th February, 7pm
In association with the ICA

The third in an on-going series celebrating the continued relevance of phenomenology, a philosophy aimed at making explicit structures of lived experience and modes of human existence: those things that are encountered every day without thought.

The third event in the series focuses on walls.

They keep us in or keep us out; whether they literally mark borders or figuratively establish limitations, walls delimit the environment that surrounds us and dictate the paths we take to move through it. Speakers include Shumon Basar, architect, editor at sexymachinery and Tank magazines; Conor Harrington, painter and graffiti artist; artist Alex Hartley; and Louise Hojer, art theorist and curator.

Tickets are available from the ICA. £10 / £9 Concessions / £8 ICA Members.