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, 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

The Thread has now secured a time slot on Wednesday night and should commence in January

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 ResearchSaturday 31st May, Birkbeck, University of LondonDisciplinary 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 ModernFriday 27 June, 18.30 – 20.00
Saturday 28 June, 10.30 – 17.45; 19.00 – 21.00Friedrich 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

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.

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.