Patrick Keiller’s film Robinson in Ruins, released on 19 November, is one of several outcomes of a three-year, AHRC-funded research collaboration between Keiller, Doreen Massey, Patrick Wright and Matthew Flintham.

On Saturday, 20 November at 17:20 the film will be screened. Following the screening, the co-researchers will present their shared project. Through its study of a landscape, the project challenges commonly-held assumptions about the current economic and ecological crises: about market forces, commodification, and the terms of belonging in an age supposedly characterised by mobility and displacement.

Please see link below for additional information:
http://thefutureoflandscape.wordpress.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4Sr0Y–ldI&feature=related
http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49663

Consortium alumna Dorothée Brill has just published her new book Shock and the Senseless in Dada and Fluxus (Hanover and London: University Press of New Hampshire, 2010), based on the PhD that she completed at the London Consortium in 2007.

Mark Cousins’s Friday Lecture Series begins Friday October 22nd, at 5pm in the AA Lecture Hall. It is entitled ‘Technology and the First Person Singular: Homer and the voice’. You can find more details here. The following Friday, October 29th, his talk is entitled ‘Technology and the First Person Singular: Inscription and Spacing’ – more details here. Further dates for this series will be November 12th and November 19th for which you should refer to the AA website for more information.

Histories of Hatred free film screening and wine reception7pm, Friday 22 October, Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PDIt is a problematic theme, and one that is rarely discussed: what is our responsibility when it comes to writing histories of hatred? How can we talk about hatred? Do we merely sanction and further discourses of violence by engaging with them? When does documentation become participation? Should we be chroniclers, or should we get involved?This summer the London Consortium convened a panel of academics, artists and critics to tackle these questions. Drawing on their own experiences in diverse fields and disciplines – from medieval Christian visual culture to contemporary litigation – they offered a series of compelling reflections on ethics and practice. This 30-minute documentary reviews key moments from the discussion with conference organiser Noam Leshem, and features speakers including Anthony Julius, Deborah Lipstadt, Pratap Rughani, Senam Okudzeto, Anthony Bale and Joanna Bourke.Histories of Hatred was filmed and edited by Lily Ford (PhD Humanities and Cultural Studies, London Consortium) and Jonathan Law (PhD History and Philosophy of Art, University of Kent). As part of the LCACE Inside Out Festival, there is a free screening at Birkbeck Cinema at 7pm on 22 October 2010, followed by a free wine reception.To attend, please register by following this link: http://www.insideoutfestival.org.uk/2010/details/histories-of-hatred.html

Patrick Wright will discuss his new book Passport to Peking (published by Oxford University Press 27 October) with the journalist and historian Neal Ascherson at the London Review Bookshop. The conversation will be held Thursday, 21 October at 7.00 p.m. The book, which has been described as a hodgepodge of literary styles: travelogue, cultural history, and comedy, details the story of four British delegations setting off to Beijing in 1954 at the invitation of then Chinese prime minister, Chou En-Lai. The Bookshop is located at 14 Bury Place, London, WC1A 2JL, near Holborn tube station.

The London Sound Seminar offers an opportunity for research students and faculty in London to explore issues relating to the history and theory of all forms of sound-making and auditory culture.

All meetings are in room 112, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1

Wednesday 6 October, 4.30-6.00
Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening (New York: Fordham University Press 2007), pp.1-18.

Wednesday 20 October, 4.30-6.00
Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Geneviève James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp. 2 – 8, ‘The Object of the Book’; pp. 12 – 14. ‘Noise’ and ‘Sea Noise’; pp. 19 – 22, ‘Ichnography’ and ‘The Foot’; pp. 25 – 26. ‘The Apparition of Forms’; pp. 57. – 70. ‘Dovetail’, ‘Demons’ and ‘Vortex’.

Wednesday 3 November, 4.30-6.00
Rudolf Arnheim, Radio:An Art of Sound, trans. Margaret Ludwig and Herbert Read (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), pp. 211-25
Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Film and Radio, trans. and ed. Marc Silberman (London: Metheun, 2001), pp. 41-46 Session led by James Emmott.

Wednesday 17 November, 4.30-6.00
Samuel Beckett, Embers.
Donald McWhinnie, The Art of Radio (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), pp. 21-28, 34-36, 77-93.

Wednesday 1st December, 4.30-6.00
Historical Soundscapes
Mark M. Smith, Bruce R. Smith and John Picker. Session led by Katherine Hunt. Texts to be notified.

To subscribe to the London Sound Seminar mailing list:

From the email address you wish to subscribe with, send the following command within the body of the message to listserv@jiscmail.ac.uk:

SUBSCRIBE LONDONSOUNDSEMINAR Firstname Lastname

We will use the list for announcements of meetings and events, and it can be used for discussion too. To send an message to the list, simply email londonsoundseminar@jiscmail.ac.uk

(RE)BRANDING FEMINISM

A conference hosted by the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies (IGRS), Stewart House, 32 Russell Square, London, WC1B 5ND.

1st-2nd March 2011.

In recent times there has been a general recognition, if not acceptance of many of feminism’s key concepts. But does this mean that it has ceased to assert itself as a unique movement? Indeed, should feminism be (re)branded in an age when all ideologies are subject to market forces? And what should this rebranding consist of?

Two years on from the stimulating ‘Where are we now? A workshop on women and heterosexuality’ hosted by the IGRS, this conference will address some of the issues raised then (see link below) to question the place of feminism in the twenty-first century. While there has always been ambivalent press and general apathy towards those issues that once encouraged women to put the political into the personal, nowadays it is women themselves who think there is nothing more to discuss. Why has there been a decline in the link between the personal and the ideological? Do we need a different kind of feminism to meet the cultural, political and academic needs of a younger generation?

Abstracts of between 200-300 words are sought that explore any aspect of (re)branding feminism. Topics might include but are not limited to:

· Are sisters doing it for themselves?
· Feminism on the frontline
· I can be a real bitch
· Family romances
· Home-makers versus career women
· God was/is a woman
· Feminism and the sex industry
· Feminist renaissance
· Feminism is bollocks
· Rebranding feminism
· Pub talk

Poster submissions are also sought on any topic related to rebranding feminism.

Please send abstracts and poster ideas both to Jean Owen (ojean27@yahoo.com) and Elisha Foust (elishafoust@googlemail.com) by 5pm 1st October 2010.

From 26th to 31 July, the London Consortium is hosting the 2010 European Summer School in Cultural Studies, on The Cultures of Food, Cooking and Eating .

Programme

Participants and Abstracts

The Thread is a unique concept in live talk radio, bringing together accomplished thinkers from academia, the arts and the professions to consider crucial questions both pressing and obscure. From the playful to the political, from theory to theology, The Thread is a free space for the intellect, bringing challenging conversation out into the public domain.

The Thread has previously hosted speakers like former London mayor Ken Livingstone, television presenter and journalist Richard Johnson and media and technology scholar Chris Brauer.

On 1 June 2010 it launches its fourth season on Resonance 104.4fm, London’s community arts station, going deeper into the big questions with the theme of ‘Inside’. Guests for this season include novelist Jake Arnott, Guardian writer Bidisha, writer and mythographer Marina Warner, art historian Ysanne Holt and historian of medicine Ruth Richardson.

Resonance 104.4fm broadcasts from central London, with a simultaneous webcast from www.resonancefm.com

The Thread is hosted, created and produced by graduate students from the London Consortium, a unique interdisciplinary collaboration between Birkbeck College, Tate, the ICA, the Architectural Association and the Science Museum.

thethreadradio.org
resonancefm.com
www.londonconsortium.com

Email: radiothread@gmail.com

The Thread
Season four schedule (subject to change)

For the Thread team, this is the first time we have attempted to produce a set of thematic conversations. The connective tissue we devised is this idea of inside. Clearly, this term easily suggests the oppositional, but is was not the contrast to the outside that initially excited us. Rather, it is the suggestion of being, and being positioned on the inside that is the fundamental fascination. We grasped that we wanted to get inside these questions, systems of knowledge, continents, rubrics, intimacies and problems because that is where a deeper engagement with our common culture can begin. We would like you to be in the room with us throughout this series. Please join us.

1 June 2010, 18.30 – 19.30 BST – Inside Code. Encoding and decoding appear in contemporary context as a fundamental feature of technology, in our use of language and in our social interactions, from html to language coding and literary symbolism. How, and through what means, do people encode and decode?

8 June 2010, 18.30 – 19.30 BST – Inside Africa. From Live 8 to a glut of Hollywood films like Blood Diamond, images of Africa in the west are largely limited to war, poverty, crime, disease and disaster. Here we discuss the view from inside Africa, emphasising the recognition of an authentically African voice that might speak for itself.

15 June 2010 18.30 – 19.30 BST – Inside Job. Crime film and fiction both evince a consistent fascination with the inside job, criminal activity carried out with insider help or perpetuated by someone on the inside. This show considers the social causes and philosophical implications of performing crime from a privileged position.

22 June 2010 18.30 – 19.30 BST – Inside the Body. Historically the only way to look inside the human body during an autopsy. Since the late 70s, technologies such as MRI (Magenetic Resonance Imaging) allow for non-invasive imaging and even researching the workings of the living brain. How do changing ways of viewing our anatomies affect scientific research and understandings of humanity?

6 July 2010 18.30 – 19.30 BST – Outside the City. How do metropolitan centres construct the rural, and what effects does this have on the people living in non-metropolitan regions? How does the rural speak back? The history of art provides a way of thinking through these questions, from tourism to changing attitudes towards landscape and the pastoral.

13 July 2010 18.30 – 19.30 BST – Inside the Bedroom. How have both male and female sexualities and identities have been impacted by the increasing ‘pornification’ of mass culture? How has this violent entry of a specific type of sexuality into public discourse impacted on real sex?

20 July 18.30 – 19.30 BST – Borders. Popular discourse is filled with references to the borders that we live in or around: identity borders, national borders, contact zones and scientific frontiers. How do borders fundamentally structure the world, and are they the only way in which we can know how to locate ourselves?

27 July 18.30 – 19.30 BST – Inside Fear. Fear is a fundamental feature of the contemporary landscape. We live in terror of things getting inside: the enemy within, terrorists within our borders, even contagions and pathogens. How does the interiority of fear affect our relations with the world?

Starr Auditorium, Tate Modern

Saturdays 5 June – 10 July 2010

Led by Lucy Scholes and Richard Martin

Combining film, literary and psychoanalytic theory, this six-week course explores the fascinating theoretical connections within the work of Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler and Stanley Kubrick. Honing in on Kubrick’s controversial last film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999) – adapted from Schnitzler’s novella Dream Story (1926), which in turn can be traced back to Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) – we will consider how successfully cinema has depicted the dynamics of desire, dreams and fantasy.

Classes will begin with a short introductory lecture on the main themes of the week, with class discussion – in small break-out groups and as a whole – forming the majority of each session. Eyes Wide Shut will be screened as part of an extended first session, and the course will also include a session led by the film’s executive producer, Jan Harlan, as well as visits to Tate Modern’s Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera exhibition and to the Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts London.

Booking details, and a full course outline, are available here.

Transplant, a film by Consortium students Paul Craddock and Walter Stabb, is now online at static.tv.org, the London Consortium’s TV channel. The film explores and reflects on the collaboration of sound artist John Wynne and photographer Tim Wainwright in their Transplant project.

Other recent additions to the channel include Anish Kapoor in conversation with Sir Nicholas Serota at the Royal Academy, a report by Jessica Lee and Jon Law on the Bust Craftacular in New York and Leandro Cardoso and James Wilkes’s filmed interview with artist Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre about her exhibition Do You Remember Olive Morris?

AURA SATZ
TURNTABLE TABLEAU, a film performance, Sun 9 May, 5pm
ICA – Live Weekend 1 – Performance etc (produced by David Gryn)

Consortium teaching fellow Aura Satz presents a talking book ventriloquist act, followed by a live soundtrack to her recent film ‘Sound Seam’, performed Alex Baker, Frances Scott and and Consortium students Lina Hakim, Roger Orwell.

‘Sound Seam’ is a film featuring abstract imagery of close-ups of gramophone grooves, giving voice to the idea that every surface, in particular parts of our anatomy, is potentially inscribed with an unheard sound or echoes of voices from the past. The hypnotic film uses microscopic close-ups of gramophone grooves, wax and acetate shavings, phonograph cylinder recording and erasing technology, as well as footage of the anatomy of the ear, where inner ear hair cells have been animated to look like a sound groove, and a gold-plated cochlea spirals like a shellac disc. Presented at the ICA as a silent film, accompanied only by the surface noise of crackle, the performers enact a live sculptural sound-track, a spiraling multivocal counterpart, a cornocupia of voices recounting a tale of mourning and technology, a forensic love-story of sorts in which the voices overlap, echo and pre-empt each other. The layers of voice-overs narrate a tale which draws on Rainer Maria Rilke’s text ‘Primal Sound’, where he reflects on the possibility of playing the coronal suture of a skull with a phonograph needle. The cinematic stage is animated by a voice-over carousel, a spinning tableau vivant, a canon of voices amplified by horns set on a rotating stage.

‘Sound Seam’ premiered at the AV festival in Newcastle in March 2010 as a complex filmic multi-channel sound installation in collaboration with Aleks Kolkowski, featuring 20 original phonograph and gramophone horns, a number of hearing trumpets, and an 8ft auxetophone horn on loan from the Discovery museum in Newcastle. The installation will tour to the Wellcome Collection in London in December 2010. The film was funded by the Wellcome Trust, and was produced during an artist residency at the Ear Institute, UCL.

Facebook invite: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=109832822380753&ref=ts#!/event.php?eid=118623424831585&ref=ts

Sunday, 16 May 2010

11:30-18:00

A London Consortium public event

What are the historical records of hatred? Where in the archive should we look to discover the roots of contempt? Who are the protagonists of this, the haters or the hated?

Marking the publication of Anthony Julius’s major new book, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford University Press), this one day event brings together historians, artists and cultural critics to shed light on the challenges of documenting and accounting for histories of hatred. Speakers will explore the problems of documenting and representing histories of racism, anti-Semitism and periods of extreme cultural and political oppression and conflict.

Speakers include Anthony Julius, Anthony Bale (Medieval Studies, Birkbeck), Joanna Bourke (History, Birkbeck), Steve Connor (The London Consortium), Deborah Lipstadt (Jewish Studies, Emory University and Pratap Rughani (Media Studies, University of the Arts).

The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA)
The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH

Booking:
Tickets £10 / £7 (student concessions)

For bookings and general enquiries, please contact Dr. Noam Leshem: lnoam@hotmail.com
Tel: 0778 3233591

Space is limited and early registration is recommended

2 July 2010 – 4 July 2010

A Multidisciplinary International Conference

A three day conference convened by David Bennett (University of Melbourne) and Ivan Ward (Freud Museum) supported by Birkbeck College and the Australian Research Council.

This conference, and the volume of essays that will result from it, aims to explore all aspects of the nexus between psychoanalysis, money and the economy.

The conference will feature a number of eminent keynote speakers. The pre-conference programme will include a workshop convened by Andrew Samuels on the theme: “What kind of economic system do we want? – an exploration with psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in mind”. Pre-conference events will be held at the Freud Museum, Hampstead, and the conference venue will be Birkbeck College, Bloomsbury.

Registration: £145 / £105 (Full conference). Day tickets also available.

For further information please click here or email: info@freud.org.uk

Further details are online here and any enquiries may be directed to admissions tutor Dr. Matt Taunton on matt@londonconsortium.com

Consortium student Burhanuddin Baki will lead a five-week seminar series for London Consortium students on Mathematics for the Humanities and Cultural Studies.

These will take place 2pm – 4pm on the following dates:

• Tuesday 23rd February: Set Theory
• Tuesday 2nd March: Mathematical Proof
• Thursday 11th March: The Mathematics of Networks
• Tuesday 16th March: Number Theory
• Tuesday 23rd March: Combinations, Counting and Probability Theory

The series will focus on the emergence of what appears to be the beginning of a new ‘mathematical turn’ in critical philosophy and cultural studies. In this burgeoning trend, more advanced concepts and contemporary results from pure mathematics are introduced in order to help think through various issues and problems in the humanities today. This turn is evident in, among others, Alain Badiou’s philosophical expliques of set theory and algebraic geometry; the recent interpretations of Gilles Deleuze’s work by Manuel de Landa and Brian Massumi; and the various contemporary investigations into the more algorithmic, computational and topological aspects of internet culture and the new media. In order to partake more meaningfully in this new turn, some acquaintance with advanced mathematical concepts might be useful, and some active discussions aimed at trying to provide a critical and cultural investigation of these concepts should be conducted – which is what this seminar will attempt to offer.

When radio began at the beginning of the twentieth century it was necessarily a communication rather than a broadcast medium (the only thing to listen to were transmissions from other radio users). Now, after more than a century of mass broadcasting, radio – the transmission of live and recorded sound – is moving from being a broadcast medium to being once again a medium of communication. Under these conditions, how might the production and broadcasting of sound come to form part of academic discourse? Theorists and historians of sound have devoted much time to thinking about radio. Might it now be possible to begin thinking in it?

As part of Static, the London Consortium’s audio-visual development project, Thinking Radio is a series of workshops led by notable practitioners of radio, who will reflect on what radio has done and what it may be able to do in the future. The workshops will be practical as well as critical, and will encourage those attending it to explore practical possibilities for the production of radio work in conjunction with their academic research, and as part of the cultural programme of the London Consortium. Numbers are limited, and those who wish to attend should contact Steve Connor in advance.

Wednesday 24 February 2.00-4.00
308, 30 Russell Square, London WC1E
Tim Dee, author of The Running Sky (2009), will reflect on his experience as a BBC radio producer for 30 years.

Wednesday 10 March 2.00-4.00
308, 30 Russell Square, London WC1E
Steven Connor, ‘Thinking Out Loud’.

The London Consortium Presents:

Graduate Conference – University of London, Birkbeck: April 29 -30, 2010

Abstracts are invited for papers exploring the following issues from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives.

This conference explores the interplay between film, identity and history in the context of crisis and catastrophe. We approach the topic through analysis of particular films as well as through a theoretical consideration of the work of film as medium. It is not so much the crisis or the catastrophe itself, but the cultural function of its filmic representation in engaging collective memory, history and identity that draws our attention. Crisis and catastrophes serve as a narrative strategy and mode of representation in order to make history accessible. As films reconstruct the past according to present readings of historic events, the reworking of catastrophes and crisis in audiovisual media oftentimes serves to legitimate current collectives. This generates questions about the exclusion of certain visions of the past and about the possibility to interrogate dominating historical narratives through audiovisual media, and particularly through film. Indeed, interrogating the filmic affinity for catastrophes and crisis requires attention to the audiovisual media as such, articulating the correlation between the logic of collective identity building and the inherent logic of media and genre, the relation between transnational media distribution and local reception, and the possibilities of medial resistance.

Papers are invited to consider these issues, but also other possible approaches, encouraging submissions from a range of disciplines in the fine arts, humanities, and social sciences. Speakers should be prepared for a 20-minute presentation followed by 10 minutes of questions.

Deadline for submissions: February 15, 2010
Please send a 250-word abstract, as well as a brief biography (100 words) to relivingdisaster@googlemail.com. Proposals should list paper title, name, contact details, institutional affiliation and any necessary audiovisual requirements.

Successful applicants will be notified by March 1, 2010.

Please note there is a conference registration fee of £30.00, which will be due by March 15 2010. We regret that travel funding for conference participants is not available at this time.

For more information:
Website: http://www.relivingdisaster.wordpress.com
Email: relivingdisaster@googlemail.com

The London Sound Seminar offers an opportunity for research students and faculty in London to explore issues relating to the history and theory of all forms of sound-making and auditory culture.

All meetings are in room 308, Department of English and Humanities Building, 30 Russell Square, London WC1

Animals and Sound

Monday 15th February, 4.00-6.00
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘Of the Refrain’, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988), pp. 310-50.

Monday 8 March, 4.00-6.00
Donald R. Griffin, Listening in the Dark: The Acoustic Orientation of Bats and Men (New York: Dover; London: Constable, 1974). Extracts to be supplied.

Monday 22 March, 4.30-6.30
Oliver Messiaen, Oiseaux exotiques, (1955–56), Catalogue d’oiseaux (1956–58)
Emily Doolittle, ‘Animals in the Concert Hall: A History of Animals in Western Music’, Revista Transcultural de Música/Transcultural Music Review, 12 (2008)
If you would like to join the London Sound Seminar or help develop its activities, please contact Steven Connor

Artist’s Series (supported by the London Consortium)

Organised by Parveen Adams

Architectural Association: 36 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3ES

Friday 12th February              ALFREDO JAAR                  6.30-8.00

Jaar explores the public’s desensitization to images and the difficulties art has in representing genocides, epidemics, and famines. He is concerned with different strategies of communication to make images visible. For the installation of Let there be light : the Rwanda project 1994-1998 (1998) Jaar placed each photo in a black box with a description of what couldn’t be seen, “as if I were describing the piture to someone who was blind.” Jaar has shown at over half a dozen Biennales and at Documenta in 1987 and in 2002. Fundación Telefonica Chile, Santiago (2006) was his first in his native country in twenty-five years. The Politics of the Image showed at South London Gallery in 2008. He has been a Guggenhein Fellow (1985) and a MacArthur Fellow (2000) and he won Spain’s Premio Extremadura la Creación.

Friday 5th March                    EYAL SIVAN                                   6.30-8.00

In an investigation of the way in which memory is used for political purposes Sivan works with the idea of an archive common to victims and perpetrators – in this case Palestinians and Israelis.  His films include Slaves of Memory (1991); The Specialist (1999) using footage from the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem; Route 181 – fragments of a journey in Palestine-Israel (2003); Jaffa, the Orange’s Clockwork (2009). His powerful work has drawn accusations of all kinds and even a court hearing. “In the Israeli case…What is surprising is to notice to what extent the analogy with the Nazi genocide existed already during the 1948 event—it was only three years after the end of the Second World War. It throws a completely new light on the myth … that memory can be a vaccine against future crimes.” He is a film-maker, a writer and a Research Professor at the University of East London.

Monday 8th March                 MARCEL ODENBACH       6.00-8.00

Odenbach is one of Germany’s leading video artists. He has produced a large body of work since the seventies. He will be speaking about and showing two works in their entirety, something necessitated by the way the work is conceived and structured in time. In Still Waters Crocodiles Lurk is a work on the Rwandan genocide of 1994 completed in 2004. The second Turning Circles is a newly completed work concerned with the relation of architecture and memory. It is a study of the Majdanek Mausoleum which was built on the site of the Lublin concentration camp in 1969. Odenbach has lived and worked in New York and Ghana and is now in Cologne.

Friday 12th March                  TOM McCARTHY                            6.30-8.00

McCarthy is a writer and artist. He won the 2008 Believer Book award for his novel Remainder. He has also published Men in Space and his third novel C will appear later this year. His International Necronautical Society is an on-going art project which surfaces in a number of forms. The discussion will focus on the relation between literature and film. Remainder is being made in to a film; McCarthy has written some script for Johan Grimonperz’ Double-Take; and C contains a big film-strand. Tom McCarthy lives and works in London.