The great artistic movements of the Avant Garde – Futurism. Surrealism, Dada were characterised by remarkable statements of intent, designed to stir, and often shock society and radicalise creative expression often into a semi-political force. The Manifesto phenomenon has continued in rude health ever since.

This panel discussion will unpick the motives behind the creation of manifestos, how they are both similar and dramatically different, and explore what impact they have had.

Participating will be Gustav Metzger, artist and political activist best known for his extreme Auto Destructive Art actions and manifestos from 1961 onwards; Lee Scrivner, author of How To Write An Avant Garde Manifesto ; broadcaster, comedian and creator of Arturart Arthur Smith and Stephen Bury, Curator of the British Library exhibition Breaking The Rules: The Printed Face Of The European Avant Garde 1900-1937 and Head of European and American Collections at the British Library.

The discussion will be chaired by Esther Leslie, Professor of Political Aesthetics in the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London.

£7.50, £5 concessions.

Known for his satirical, grotesque and fantastic novels and short stories, Will Self talks about his new book, Psychogeography, with fellow author Iain Sinclair. Together they discuss the meaning of the term and the new genre of writing.

£7.50, concessions available.

The move from a line that represents to a line that is generative marks the advent of the diagram within architecture. The diagrammatic is abstract. The question to be addressed however is how is abstraction to be understood. The aim of this lecture is to look at emergence of abstraction in the work on Mondrian as a way of beginning to answer this question.

Speaker: Andrew Benjamin is Professor of Critical Theory and Philosophical Aesthetics at Monash University. His publications include Architectural Philosophy (Continuum, 2001), Disclosing Spaces. On Painting (Clinamen Press, 2004) and Style and Time: Essays on the Politics of Appearance (North Western University Press, 2006).

Free entry.

Biologist, engineer, author, broadcaster and columnist Lewis Wolpert, Professor of Biology as Applied to Medicine at UCL, and Alumnus of Imperial College, investigates the nature of belief and its causes. He looks at its psychological basis and its possible evolutionary origins in physical cause and effect. How did tool-making drive human evolution? What is the evolutionary advantage that belief provides?

£6 - £15.

Being unable to sleep can be frustrating, exhausting, liberating, inspiring and inexplicable. It is something that most of us have experienced; but scientists, sociologists, historians and artists are only now beginning to unravel its mysteries.

The event will begin on Friday evening with a special performance by innovative classical music group Manning Camerata of pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach and Domenico Scarlatti. The pieces selected for performance were written to cure the sleep disorders of the musicians’ patrons.

This symposium brings together a panel of international speakers to explore sleeplessness in all its guises. On Saturday join our invited guests from across the world to explore how we understood insomnia in the past, and how that could alter our understanding of sleep today; how insomnia inspires creativity in some artists; why not being able to sleep is bad for your mind and other questions. Just don’t expect them to solve your sleep problems.

Visit the Wellcome Collection website for booking details

How has the presence of Muslim Europeans, especially after September 11 exacerbated the deep-seated Orientalist anxieties in Europe? This Orientalist unease with Islam goes hand in hand with the interest in bringing to fore the so-called distinctive European characteristics and thereby distinguishing the Europeanness of Europe. I trace how orientalism refigures in the discourse of European cultural identity by way of the expulsion of Islam from what is deemed to be the proper identity of Europe. I examine the role of the discourse of “cultural difference” in this exclusion, which is in fact a secularized version of a religious discourse that now is fundamental in the refashioning of European identity.

Free entry.

What is ideology? When we are dealing with a problem which is undoubtedly a real one, its ideological designation-perception introduces an invisible mystification. Say, tolerance designates a real problem – how can one be for intolerance towards foreigners, for antifeminism, for homophobia? But what should be against is the (today’s automatic) perception of racism as a problem of tolerance: why are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance, rather than as problems of inequality, exploitation, or injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, rather than emancipation, political struggle, even armed struggle? Such mystification is not a matter of sophisticated argumentation: it is part of our spontaneous everyday understanding of ideology – like the journalists who report embedded with the US forces in Iraq, we are all embedded in ideology. Since one of the privileged mechanisms which (re)produce this everyday ideology is cinema, the course will focus on the analysis of today’s cinema – not only Hollywood and not only popular cinema: from 300 to The Hero, from Da Vinci Code to Perfume, from The Fall of Berlin to Sacrifice, from United 93 to World Trade Center, from Taxi Driver to The Fugitive – The class will have 5 sessions: four lectures and a general debate.

1. The basic Hollywood matrix: creating a couple
2. Violence as ideology
3. Subtraction in cinema
4. An excursion into opera: Wagner and ideology

Literature:
Slavoj Zizek: IN DEFENSE OF THE LOST CAUSES, Verso Books 2008
Jacques Lacan: THE OTHER SIDE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS (SEMINAR XVIII), Norton 2006

Free entry.

Jackie Orr is Associate Professor of Sociology at Syracuse University. She teaches and writes in the fields of cultural politics, contemporary theory, and feminist studies of technoscience and psychiatry. Her recent book, Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder (Duke University Press, 2005), chronicles the entanglements of bodies, pills, computers, power, capital, war, and (social) scientific discourses that have shaped and re-shaped ‘panic’ in 20th century United States. She is also a performance theorist, using visual media and performative writing to promote collective political dis-ease.

Free entry.