Cinema Typhoon 2009, Mondays at 6pm
Every Monday during Autumn term 2009, ASA (Alternative Studies for Asias) presented films from different regions in Asia with music as a theme. Supported by The Centre for Cultural Studies.
Cinema Typhoon screening session:
- October 05 - Burmese Harp (1956 133min.)
- October 12 - Together (2002, 177 min.)
- October 19 - All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001, 146 min)
- October 26 - Sleepwalking Through The Mekong (2007, 68 min)
- November 02 - Waikiki Brothers (2001, 110 min) (VENUE TBC)
- November 09 - Platform (2000, 180 min)
- November 16 - Understanding Trafficking (2009, 87 min) + Q&A with Ananya Chatterjee
- November 23 - End of series discussion
- November 30 - To Gaza with Love
The true story a rag-tag team of international peace activists aboard two fishing boats, who decided to take on the might of the Israeli military and break the siege of Gaza. Refusing to be intimidated, only one thing could stop them; and that was themselves.
Trailer: http://www.imdb.com/video/wab/vi2755068441/
http://www.imdb.com/rg/VIDEO_PLAY/LINK//video/wab/vi2755068441/ All Welcome
Download the Cinema Typhoon Flyer in PDF format.
Militant Dysphoria - "What are the politics of disaffection?"
30 September 2009
We have been told by the living that the idea of a vital world is that of comfort and warmth. Dominic Fox assured us that this is not the case. With an unparalleled militant efficiency, Cold World blackens the lines between poetics and politics, music and negative resistance. It is a haunting sermon from the world of the dead exhorting the living to revolt in the name of a life whose vitality has been disenchanted by coldness and whose sacredness has been profaned by nigredo. - Reza Negarestani, Author of Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials.
Dominic Fox's timely and important Cold World pinpoints the fundamental issue underlying contemporary debate about the possibility of revolutionary politics in a culture suffused by paralysing despondency. Drawing on a remarkable array of sources from Coleridge and Gerard Manley Hopkins to Xasthur and Ulrike Meinhof, Fox explores the necessary yet apparently contradictory link between refusal and revolution. While refusal without revolution perpetuates the very condition it would negate, revolution without refusal quickly lapses into phantasmatic utopianism. The quandaries of this particular dialectic have never been as lucidly charted as they are here. - Ray Brassier, Author of Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction.
Featuring:
Dominic Fox
Nathan Brown
Mark Fisher
Nick Srnicek
James Trafford
Alex Williams
An event which discussed some of the issues raised by Dominic Fox's Cold World: The aesthetics of dejection and the politics of militant dysphoria, due to be published by zer0 at the end of September. What is meant by 'militant dysphoria', and in what ways can the concept help us move beyond the impasses of contemporary politics? How might disaffection be converted into militancy? What political potentials are there in dysphoric music such as Black Metal? The event will also explore the relationship between politics and Speculative Realism.
This was not a formal academic conference. Instead, it folowed the pattern set by the Weird events at Goldsmiths and the recent UEL symposium on the hardcore continuum. There was short semi-formal presentations by speakers, but the emphasis was on discussion of concepts rather than on presenting of papers etc.
Bombing of Poems over Warsaw
A performance organized by CCS PhD Student Cristobal Bianchi, 8 August 2009
One hundred thousand poems, printed in bookmarks, were dropped from a helicopter at night over the Old Town and Castle Square of the city. The poems were by Chilean and Polish contemporary poets. Watch at www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VJ03FBhoy0
Warsaw was the 4th city chosen to host a Bombing of Poems. For more about this project, see:
casagrande.bligoo.com
Join in:
- Twitter English (@poemswarsaw)
- Twitter Spanish (@casagrande09)
- Facebook (Deszcz Wierszy nad Warszawą - Bombing of Poems Over Warsaw)
Expo ‘09: MA Interactive Media
Opening: Thursday 2 July 2009. Fri 3 - Sat 4 July
Loosely modeled on the idea of a Tech Fair, Expo’09 was an informal event showing the work of MA students and seeking to spark discussion and critical engagement. It highlighted tensions rather than reveal truths, thereby inviting to investigate culture through machinic thought and software visions.Expo’09 developed a new direction in the study of interactive media. Dissatisfied with the particularities of bounded disciplines, it works at the intersection of philosophy, science & technology and the arts where theoretical investigation and practical experimentation fold onto one another.
Attracting a wide range of participants, Expo’09 tackled issues as varied as the difference between the analog and the digital, language and physicality, machinic processes, algorithms and databases in control societies, the aesthetics of political and cultural action through viral entities. These were showcased through a mix of objects, installations, software and performance.
Celeste Olalquiaga at Goldsmiths
12 May, 2009
"Look but Don't Touch: The Role of Tactility in an Era of Visual Excess" a talk by the noted author of "The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience".
Co-sponsored by the Centre for Cultural Studies and the Centre for Postcoloniial Studies.
All welcome.
Old Women
A lecture by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Monday, 11 May 2009
Sponsored by Goldsmiths' Centre for Postcolonial Studies, Centre for Cultural Studies, Dept Media and Comms and the Graduate School.
More information at http://hutnyk.wordpress.com/what-is-to-be-done
Second Skins: Cloth and Difference
Thursday 30 April
Speakers and Artists included: Sokari Douglas Camp CBE, Margareta Kern,Sarat Maharaj, Grace Ndiritu, Sarah Quinton, and Rosanna Raymond. Second Skins was instigated by Christine Checinska and is organised in partnership with Iniva with support from Goldsmiths and A Foundation. For more information, download the flyer [image file] or visit www.iniva.org/events/what_s_on/second_skins
Epistemic
Thursday 5 March
Walter Mignolo is a leading figure in Latin American Studies and Postcolonial Studies. He is the William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and Romance Studies and Director of the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities, at Duke University. Mignolo's earlier work, published in Spanish, focuses on semiotics, discourse analysis and literary theory. Since the 1980s he has written extensively in English and Spanish on the invention of the Americas, the coloniality of knowledge, and the political, ethical and epistemological imperative to decolonise knowledge and knowledge production. His work, which has been translated to Portuguese, French and Russian, includes The Darker Side of the Renaissance (1994 and 2003, awarded the Katherine Kovacs Singer Prize from the MLA), Local Histories/Global Designs (2000) and The Idea of Latin America (2005, awarded the Frantz Fanon Prize from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.)
This event was hosted by the Centre for Postcolonial Studies and the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths. For further information email: Sanjay Seth: s.seth@gold.ac.uk Francisco Carballo: cup01fc@gold.ac.uk.
Politics, Time and Theology
A Workshop on Giorgio Agamben's 'The Time That Remains'
Wednesday, 25 February 2009
Politics necessitates a thinking of the event; the event as a form of interruption that opens the space for another possibility. Equally politics brings with it questions of agency and subjectivity. The interconnection between the event and the subject continues to be expressed in terms of the relationship between universality and particularity. Contemporary philosophy continues to find resources that allow the issues raised by this complex of relations to be taken up in the theological writings of Paul.
Badiou, Derrida, Zizek, Taubes, Agamben amongst others have turned to Paul to continue to think through what might more generally be called a politics of time. The aim of this workshop was to look in detail at one of these contemporary works, namely, Giorgio Agamben's 'The Time That Remains' Stanford University Press (2005)
Professors Andrew Benjamin and Scott Lash in discussion.
The Knowledge Economy and the Future of Capitalism
Tuesday, 24 February 2009
Speakers include: Yann Moulier Boutang : a philosopher and economist, and director of the journal Multitudes. Bernard Stiegler: widely regarded as one of France's most eminent philosophers and a Director at the Centre Georges Pompidou.
Creating the Global Image Archive
Monday, 16 February 2009
A workshop on images and their archives in cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary contexts
Our experiences and practices of the image are characterized by an ever-expanding circulation across proliferating and ever more diverse circuits. Scholars, artists, curators, and other practitioners have frequently sought to understand these changes in the name of globalization. Some have focused on technological transformation (new media and network or digital culture). Others have emphasized shifting zones of cultural contact (migration, transnationalism, postcoloniality). Curator Okwui Enwezor thus speaks of a “global image ecology.” Interactive media artist Graham Harwood speaks of the “networked image.” Thanks to these projects, we are working with and thinking about images in new ways, and with a focus on movement, transformation, and rhythms of access.
But images are also lost, forgotten, deleted. Structures of archivization are shifting. With the death of old technologies—and geopolitical inequalities in the distribution of new ones—we find ourselves handling images whose futures are uncertain. There are furthermore whole classes of images whose original contexts are marked by forms of sacredness, consecration, and propriety. These haunt the discourses of global circulation and expose the fantasied openness and access otherwise. The archive is troubled by two ethical and practical imperatives: to maintain and preserve the past while at the same time respecting its own modes of exclusion and memorialization, which may well be at odds with other contemporary drives.
Guests were to reflect on the image archive in transformation. We left the field open, but we are particularly interested in work that is concerned with, or takes place in, non-Western or non-European space. This project began as an enquiry into an inter-disciplinary distinction between contextualizing practices (associated with sociology and ethnography) and more formalist approaches paying attention to the genesis and problematics of specific images and works. The aim of this workshop is to explore specific tensions between the archive’s singularities and the global contexts of circulation, and, in so doing, to create new frameworks and methods for critical practice in relation to archived bodies of work.
Dr. Jennifer Bajorek, Goldsmiths, University of London
Professor Claire Colebrook, University of Edinburgh
Invited participants:
Everlyn Nicodemus, Independent artist and writer
Robert Nelson, Art and Design, Monash University, Australia
Nick Higgins, Cultural Studies, University of Edinburgh and independent documentary filmmaker
Clare Harris, Oxford Pitt Rivers Musem / Anthropology, Oxford University
Erin Haney, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution and independent curator