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.

Reflections on the Anglo-Chinese encounter

16-19 June 2008

Patrick Wright has written four 15 minute talks for ‘The Essay’ slot on BBC Radio 3. They will be broadcast at 23.00 on consecutive evenings, 16-19 June 2008.

1. ‘A Museum of Embryos’: The Great Exhibition and London’s Chinese Junk.

2. Limehouse Chinatown: The Opium Wars Brought Home.

3. ‘Dumb-Walking-Man’: Chiang Yee becomes The Silent Traveller.

4. ‘China Stands Up’: From Maoist Peasant to English Leveller.

A Conference on Interdisciplinarity and Research

Saturday 31st May, Birkbeck, University of London

Disciplinary boundaries can be both prisons and safety zones. We are often tempted to transgress the boundaries of our disciplines, but at what cost and with what consequences?

The Faculty of Lifelong Learning, Birkbeck, with Consortium Projects, invite you to a multifaceted conference celebrating and critiquing interdisciplinary work.

As well as interrogations of the very concept of interdisciplinarity, specific issues within the fields of art, architecture, film, education, law, and literature will be examined.

Speakers include

• Marko Daniel, Curator of Public Programmes, Tate Modern (Chair)
• Matthew Gandy, Professor of Geography, University College London, and co-ordinator of the UCL Urban Laboratory
• Dr Tim Boon, Head of Collections, Science Museum

Date
Saturday 31st May, 9.30am-5pm

Venue
Room B35, Birkbeck, Malet Street, University of London. See http://www.bbk.ac.uk/maps for directions

How to register
Attendance is free, but places must be booked by emailing boundariesconference@yahoo.co.uk by 5pm on Friday 23rd May 2008

Conference organisers
Ben Cranfield and Richard Martin

The Faculty of Lifelong Learning, Birkbeck offers over 900 modules across academic disciplines, attracting over 13,000 adult learners to venues across London.

Consortium Projects is a research, development and production agency comprised of current students and alumni from the London Consortium (Architectural Association, Birkbeck, ICA, Tate, Science Museum).

Tate Modern

Friday 27 June, 18.30 – 20.00
Saturday 28 June, 10.30 – 17.45; 19.00 – 21.00

Friedrich Kittler has been hailed as the ‘Derrida of the digital age’ and his work is indispensable to anyone thinking about ‘technoculture’. This landmark event brings one of today’s foremost philosophers of media to Tate Modern for an unmissable opportunity to examine the relationship between culture and technology with a range of leading thinkers and practitioners. For anyone interested in our complex interactions with the technologies that surround us this event is essential, while for those unfamiliar with Kittler it presents an opportunity to discover the work of the leading figure in the flourishing area of German media theory. Media Matters is a two-day series of events that comprises:

• Keynote lecture and performance: ‘Preparing the Arrival of the Gods’ - Friedrich Kittler with Joulia Strauss and Martin Carlé
• A symposium featuring leading thinkers in the fields of cultural theory, film and the arts. Plus a Q+A with Friedrich Kittler
• ‘Gramophones, Films, Typewriters’: audio, video and text works curated by Seth Kim-Cohen

A ticket can be purchased for all three Media Matters events priced £32 (£24 concessions). Alternatively, tickets are available for each event separately. Book tickets

This series of events is organised in association with the London Consortium, Birkbeck, Goethe Institute and iRes, University College Falmouth. See below for full programme details.

Friday 27 June, 18.30 – 20.00
Keynote lecture and performance: ‘Preparing the Arrival of the Gods’ - Friedrich Kittler with Joulia Strauss and Martin Carlé
– Starr Auditorium, Tate Modern
Tickets £8 (£6 Concessions)

Friedrich Kittler is Professor of Aesthetics and History of Media at the Humboldt-University, Berlin. In the course of a long and distinguished career, he has held visiting professorships at Columbia University, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley and others. His translated works include Discourse Networks 1800/1900 and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, texts which reflect on the nature, impact and history of technologies and which have been influential not only in the fields of literary and cultural studies but also film studies, social theory, digital art and the ‘open source’ movement. His most recent work on music and mathematics traces the historical development of notation systems from Ancient Greece to today. This lecture represents a rare opportunity to hear Friedrich Kittler speak outside his native Germany.

Saturday 28 June, 10.30 – 17.45
Symposium: Media Matters, Friedrich Kittler and Technoculture –Starr Auditorium, Tate Modern
Tickets £24 (£18 Concessions)

The symposium is organised around three themes, following the structure of Kittler’s book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Each session invites a pair of speakers to engage with the notion of sound, visual and writing technologies respectively. Friedrich Kittler will then have the opportunity to respond and reflect on the day’s events in a closing dialogue.

10.00 Registration
10.30 Welcome
10.35 Introduction
10.45 ‘Gramophone’ – Steven Connor and John Durham Peters

Steven Connor is Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck, University of London, as well as Academic Director of the London Consortium. He has published prolifically and on diverse subjects, including air, flies and skin, but sound is one of his key areas of interest. His book, Dumbstruck (2000) is a cultural history of ventriloquism, and he has also broadcast a series of BBC programmes entitled Noise.

John Durham Peters is F. Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor of Media History and Social Theory, University of Iowa, where he researches and publishes on the history and theory of media. In particular he has focused on the voice and communication, publishing Speaking to the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication in 1999.

12.15 Lunch
13.30 ‘Film’ - Caroline Bassett and Alex Galloway

Caroline Bassett is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media and Film at the University of Sussex and is Director of the Centre for Material Digital Culture. Her research is focused on new media and she has published widely on gender and ICTs, narrative and new media, media innovation and the transformation of everyday life, with an emphasis on mobile and intimate media and globalization. Her forthcoming book is entitled The Arc and the Machine: Narrative and New Media.

Alexander R. Galloway is an author and programmer. He is a founding member of the software collective RSG and creator of the Carnivore and Kriegspiel projects. The New York Times recently described his work as “conceptually sharp, visually compelling and completely attuned to the political moment.” Galloway is the author of Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (MIT, 2004), Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minnesota, 2006), and a new book coauthored with Eugene Thacker called The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minnesota, 2007). He teaches at New York University.

15.00 Refreshments
15.30 ‘Typewriter’ – Mark Hansen and Pam Thurschwell

Mark Hansen is Professor of English and Cinema/Media Studies at the University of Chicago. His research ranges across a host of disciplines, including literary studies, film and media, philosophy, science studies, and cognitive neuroscience. Recent published works (New Philosophy for New Media and Bodies in Code) have focused on the way computers may be fundamentally altering the infrastructure of our lifeworld, and even changing what it means to be human.

Pam Thurschwell is Senior Lecturer in English at University of Sussex. She has worked on the intersection of psychoanalysis, the supernatural and new technologies at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. She is author of Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920. Another focus of research is writing and the figure of the secretary, and she has edited the collection Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture (2005).

17.00 Kittler in conversation with Anthony Moore.

Anthony Moore is a composer and Professor at the Academy of Arts and the Media, Cologne working on the theory and history of sound. Since 1969 he has composed a number of soundtracks for European experimental movies and from 1973 he worked in different European locations as a freelance composer, writing songs, film scores, and experimenting with sound. He has collaborated together with Pink Floyd and other musicians. Besides teaching, he continues to make music and sonic installations. Recent Publications include ‘Homage to Pink Floyd’ in a 2002 collection of essays edited by Kittler.

Saturday 28 June, 19.00 – 21.00
Gramophones, Films, Typewriters: audio, video and text works – East Room, Tate Modern
Tickets £8 (£6 Concessions)

Sounds, images, texts curated by Seth Kim-Cohen.

“Media determine our situation.” So begins Friedrich Kittler’s highly influential Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Today, twenty-two years later, such determination is even more acute. Media are everywhere. Control of sound, image, language and their dissemination is no longer the purview of the connected, moneyed, haut monde.

All this media determine the artist’s situation too. Those who work with technological media, suddenly find their world overpopulated. Those who work with traditional media (painting, sculpture, and by now we can surely include photography), must wonder if the jet pack has left the station.

The artists we present tonight hail from Germany, Ireland, Canada, the U.S and the U.K. Five of them have at one time or another called London home. Their works engage the exigencies and allowances of media: flirting with the inchoate, challenging the virtue at the root of both the virtual and the virtuoso, exploiting the transportability of the message while acknowledging its recalcitrance. We collect this multiform work under the collective title Gramophones, Films, Typewriters, but it could just as easily have been Media, Determinations, Situations.

The artists and their works:
Julian Rosefeldt – Lonely Planet (2006)
Dexter Sinister – Blazon for Moholy (2008)
Janice Kerbel – Untitled (2008), typewriter
Seth Kim-Cohen – Mise En Abyme (2008)
Lytle Shaw – Untitled (2008)
Jarrod Fowler – -ion as Rhythm (2008)
John Lely – Precision Sonics (2005)
Petrova Giberson – She Loves Everything (2008)
Richard Mosse – Untitled (Ireland) (2007)
Aliza Shvarts – Untitled (2008)

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

Stephen Johnstone, Lecturer in Fine Art, Goldsmiths and Editor of ‘The Everyday’, the latest edition in the Whitechapel’s Documents of Contemporary Art series, considers the range of contemporary art engaged with the everyday, as well as its antecedents in Dada and Surrealism, Pop, Situationism and Fluxus.

Art’s turn to the ordinary is symptomatic of a desire to address things in the world, rather than the history and institutions of art, showing a recognition of ordinary dignity or the accidentally miraculous; an engagement with a new kind of anthropology; an immersion in the pleasures of popular culture; or a meditation on what happens, when nothing happens. The celebration of the everyday has oppositional and dissident overtones, offering a voice to the silenced and proposing possibilities for change.

Free. Booking essential

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS NOW OPEN

DEADLINE: 1 September 2008

Simultaneous Screenings in November 2008 in Athens, Barcelona, Istanbul, London, Maribor, Munich, Novi Sad, Paris, Poznan and several other cities in Europe and beyond

Awards: Special European Jury Prize
Various Local Jury Prizes

The Theme: Money Money Money
“Don’t try to keep up with the Joneses. They have more money than we.” (Dizzy Gillespie)

We would like to invite filmmakers from around the world to submit short films (animation, music video, artist films, narrative, documentary etc.) up to 10 minutes on the theme “Money Money Money”. Think about the poor and the stinking rich, the stingy and the philanthropists. Think about what you could do with a million, but don’t forget what some people can do without a penny. You could explore capitalism, communism or globalisation. If you feel like it check out the price for a barrel of oil. If you think money can buy you love, then make a film about that. And what about haggling, gambling and shopping therapy? Don’t try to keep up with the Joneses but do better than them and send us the best film you can make!

What makes this contest different from any other short film contest is that the audience will be able to bet on which film will be the winner – however, bets must be placed before the screening. Trailers of the films chosen for BoSs 2008 will be streamed on our website and in the participating venues a week before the screening. In addition all contestants will be 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 will be available to the audience ca. 2 hours before the screening, when they will also be asked to place their bets.

Entry Procedure: The entry form with all required information accompanied by a DVD-preview copy should reach us by 1 September 2008. For preview only DVD copies will be accepted. If the original language of the film is not English, the preview copy should be subtitled. Please note that we can only accept one film per director.

Selection and Notification: As we expect to receive several hundred submissions we regret that we can only write to the selected filmmakers. If you have not heard from us by end of September 2008 please assume that you have not been successful this time.
Dispatch Costs: The applicant is responsible for the costs of sending the preview copy and, should the film be selected, also the screening copy. Preview copies can only be returned if the applicant provides a self-addressed and stamped envelope.

Please send your preview copy to:
“Betting on Shorts”
London Consortium – Institute of Contemporary Arts
12 Carlton House Terrace
London SW1Y 5AH
U.K.

Entry forms must be submitted electronically at www.bettingonshorts.com/form.html and must also be printed out and sent with the preview copy. For further information please do not hesitate to contact us at the above address or at:
Tel.: ++44 (0)20 7893 8669 ® Fax: ++44 (0)20 7930 9896
Email: submissions@bettingonshorts.com

A New Book on the Russian Filmmaker

Nathan Dunne is a London-based writer on art and cinema. He recently organised the forthcoming international symposium The Art of Andrei Tarkovsky at Tate Modern and is also a member of the London Consortium. The book was recently featured in the Independent as one of the Ten Best Film Books.

Synopsis: Andrei Tarkovsky is the most important Soviet filmmaker of the post-war era and one of the world’s most renowned cinematic geniuses. The beautiful and existential films he produced have been repeatedly hailed as masterpieces of world cinema. Their rich symbolism and spirituality is infused with recurrent themes of memory, dreams, childhood and Christianity. Tarkovsky is the definitive text on this great director’s singularly complex body of work.