To mark the launch of The Street, a year-long programme of new artist commissions on Wentworth Street exploring the limits and possibilities of art in social context.

Speakers include the artist and curator collective - Canal, participating artists, Minerva Cuevas, Jens Haaning, Henry VIII’s Wives, Bernd Krauss, Shimabuku and Nedko Solokov. And participating writers Lars Bang Larsen and General Public Agency.

Booking essential. £5 entry includes lunch.

With biennials and art fairs in every continent, the contemporary art world is now truly global. So is the art world now a utopian space, where cultural differences are successfully negotiated, borders are open, and racism has no place? Or are artists encouraged to fetishise ethnic and national identities to protect their ‘brand’? Or is art becoming too homogeneous, too Western?

Speakers: artist Wolfgang Tillmans; artist Jorge Pardo; art critic and historian Marcus Verhagen; artist Jananne Al-Ani. Chair: Iwona Blazwick, director of Whitechapel art gallery.

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

Continuing on from Supernatural’s previous lectures exploring the development of visual effects and computer animation, this next installment introduces lecturers from a broader spectrum of disciplines within digital creativity to include not only visual effects in film, television and advertising but also the computer games industry and product design. They will be accompanied by representatives from the software and hardware industries whose vision and understanding of the creative process are so vital in pushing the realms of possibility within digital expression.

£8 (£6 concessions), booking recommended

A discussion of new models of narrativity, the changing nature of storytelling, and new ways of thinking about images, with two great writers and directors. Peter Greenaway is director of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and The Draughtsman’s Contract and author of The Rise & Fall of Gesture Drama. Raoul Ruiz is director of Treasure Island and City of Pirates, and the author of the Poetics of Cinema series.

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

Cybernetic Serendipity (ICA 1968) was one of the most important exhibitions of the 60s - kept open longer due to popular demand. That year, Jack Burnham’s book Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century, proposed a bold teleology of sculpture leading towards the cybernetic. So what happened to the robotic exhibition and computer generated art work? As proficiency with technology grew and computers became commonplace, the technological art exhibition seemed to become an anachronism. The only acceptable cyborg was the homemade kind produced by artists such as Bruce Lacey. Contemporary use of technology in art has become located in its own sphere of artistic practice, with galleries and groups dedicated to new media and new technologies with a special emphasis on the ‘hope’ of a super connected New Babylon. Why is there such a divisive split between art exhibitions and media art exhibitions? Should curators be more embracing of technologies? Is there good reason to be mistrustful of the use of technology in art and exhibition making?

Speakers: Jasia Reichardt, writer and curator of Cybernetic Serendipity; Richard Grayson, artist, writer, curator of 2002 Sydney Biennale; Dianne Harris, art director, Kinetica Museum; Paul Granjon, artist interested in the co-evolution of humans and robots. Chair: Dr Charlie Gere, reader in new media research and director of the Institute for Cultural Research at Lancaster University.

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

Alfredo Jaar is an artist, architect and filmmaker based in New York. He presents his work in the context of his current exhibition at the South London Gallery, which focuses on his long-standing engagement with the socio-political realities of African countries.

£8 (£6 concessions), booking required

Familiar spirits were a particularly British aspect of Witchcraft. Perhaps none was so famous as ‘Boye’: the enormous white dog who accompanied Prince Rupert on his campaigns from 1642-44. Seen as a talisman, mascot, & victory bringer by the Royalists; and as an agent of the Devil, a shape-changing, Lappish witch by their Parliamentary foes: ‘Boye’ was equally celebrated and derided in print, painting, & pamphlet over the course of his short life.
This talk will look at the rise and fall of the ‘Witch Dog’ and the manner in which he continues to capture the imagination and interest of modern day authors and playwrights.

£2.50 / £1.50 concessions.

Torn between a revival of the discourse of aesthetics and the persistence of conceptualism, critical writing about contemporary art has once again come to focus on differing views of its aesthetic dimension. The context and character of these debates has, however, shifted markedly from the 1960s, with changes in art practices, institutions, political contexts, and theoretical paradigms – and in particular, with the global extension of the Western artworld since 1989.

This panel discussion will focus on art as a “didactics of liberation”. How, in light of the recuperation of artistic critique since the 1960s, might a directly political art be conceived and communicated today?

Speakers include artist and writer Luis Camnitzer, author of Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation; and Professor Emeritus of Art at SUNY Old Westbury; Gertrud Koch, Professor of Film Studies, Free University, Berlin, and author of books on Herbert Marcuse and Siegfried Kracauer; Professor Peter Osborne, Director, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, and editor of the Phaidon Themes and Movements volume Conceptual Art.

£5, £3 concessions.

Lecture 1 in a series entitled “Reflections Beneath a Dark Sun: Myth, History, Politics and Paganism”.

This opening lecture introduces the theme of the series: the politics of fascism and where they may intersect with paganism, mysticism and occultism. Dr. Alexander looks at the philosophical questions in their peculiarly German cultural and historical context, arguing that many of the forces at work in late 19th and early 20th century Germany are also at work now, globally. He suggests that we must address the fact that new forms of racial and religious mania are being given fatal political expression.

Philosopher of the taboo Stephen Alexander does an annual lecture-seminar at Treadwell’s. This year’s series looks at the darkly romantic temptation to seek out ways to tear apart the material reality of modern life, to make manifest “unbound powers of being”. His aim is to identify the nihilism in us all: not to say things because we think them, but so that we will not have to think them anymore; to rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and pleasures, of fascism. Dr. Stephen Alexander did his Ph.D. at Warwick University on D.H. Lawrence and continental philosophy. His work focuses on transgression, shock and forbidden subjects.

£5 entry.

Language is the main channel in which human beings share the contents of their consciousness. It thereby offers a window into human nature, revealing the hidden workings of our thoughts, our emotions, and our social relationships. Steven Pinker will explore an example of each: everyday metaphor as a window into human cognition; swearing and taboo words as a window into human emotion; and indirect speech, veiled threats and bribes, polite requests, and sexual come-ons as a window into human relationships.

Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has also received four honorary doctorates, several teaching awards, and numerous prizes for his books The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate. He has been named Humanist of the Year, and is listed in Foreign Policy and Prospect magazine’s The World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals and in Time magazine’s The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today. His latest book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature which was published by Penguin books in September 2007.

Tickets are £12.