Past events
2007
Professor Christopher Pinney Lessons From Hell: Karma and Governmentality in Popular Indian Imagery. 13 December 2007
Synopsis: "Karni Bharni" images embody the importation of a Jain soteriology into mainstream Hinduism in the late nineteenth century. They depict punishments in hell for moral transgressions and eventually transmute, in the mid-twentieth century, into a parallel genre known as "Ideal Body" which visualise codes of citizenship. The lecture explored the powerful "underneath" of this world of punishment and its role as a visual mode of governmentality. Christopher Pinney is Visiting Crowe Professor, Department of Art History Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA. & Professor of Anthropology & Visual Culture, University College London. Organised by the Centre for Cultural Studies in collaboration with the Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths
Spectropia by Toni Dove. 10 December 2007
Spectropia, by writer/ director and responsive media artist Toni Dove, is both a feature film and an interactive performance. Dove was present to discuss the project and perform excepts from her "scratchable" movie. This sci-fi hybrid, in development for the last six years, features time travel, telepathy, elements of film noir and the supernatural. Utilizing gaming technology and experimental theater strategies, performers can interact with the narrative, using motion sensors to control the performance oftheir on-screen avatars. The audience were able to see through the character’s eyes, hear their interi or thoughts, navigate their way through space, and even talk with the characters. Anything can happen.
Toni Dove is an artist/independent producer who works primarily with electronic media, including virtual reality, interactive video installations, performance and DVD ROMs that engage viewers in responsive and immersive narrative environments. Her work has been presented in the United States, Europe and Canada as well as in print and on radio and television. http://www.tonidove.com. Download the flyer for this event [pdf].
CCS co-sponsored INTIMACY Across Visceral and Digital Performance (7 - 9 December 2007)
Tuesday's CCS Film Night
It's 150 years since the 1857 uprisings, 60 years since Independence (for Pakistan and India) and 40 years since Naxalbari (see, dialectics!)... In a kind of angular appreciation of these anniversaries, the film slot for CCS in Autumn term 2007 was a series of great Bengali films. We started with Satyajit Ray's "The Chess Players". Then Mrinal Sen's "The Guerrilla Fighter. Followed by more Mrinal Sen, Some Ritwik Ghatak, films by Arparna Sen and one by Buddhadeb Dasgupta. Updates:
http://what-on-occasionally.blogspot.com
Wednesday 5 December 2007
A talk by Dr Nimish Biloria. Design Informatics
Download the poster for this event. [pdf]
The Weird (Saturday 1 December 2007)
The Uncanny and the Fantastic have been extensively theorised, but the Weird awaits conceptualisation. Following the success of the Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Theory symposium earlier this year, this event aimed to discover if a crisp definiton of the Weird can be produced. What makes an object Weird? What examples of the Weird can be found in fiction, film and science?
The event did not follow the format of the standard academic conference. In keeping with the format successfully adopted for the Weird Realism event, no papers were delivered. Some written materials were circulated in advance and the event was devoted to structured discussions led by participants.
Participants included:
China Miéville - acclaimed author of Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and other tales of the Weird Fantastic. Ray Brassier (Middlesex) - author of the forthcoming Nihil Unbound Benjamin Noys (Chichester) - author of The Culture of Death and Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction Graham Harman (Cairo) - author of Tool Being and Guerilla Metaphysics.
Friday 23 November 2007 - A talk by Geert Lovink, Director of the Institute for Network Cultures, Amsterdam
Zero Comments: Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse
A Critique of Citizen Journalism
The dominant citizen journalism discourse presents itself as an empowering, all-inclusive movement. However, the vast majority of bloggers neither sees
itself as a political subject ('citizen') or has the ambition to become a journalist. The 'citizen journalism' meme was produced by a small vanguard of US-American bloggers (the so-called A-list), who, through their competitive knowledge of Internet applications found a way to intervene in
the already declining legitimacy of the Western news media. Instead of a radical critique of news manufacturing and public relations, most bloggers
used citizen journalism to create a niche market: how do I fit in?
In my theory of blogging, which recently came out as part of the book, Zero Comments (Routledge NY, 2007) I emphasize the massive, inward-looking, reflective aspect of diary keeping rather than the media related categories such as 'truth', 'news' or even 'reporting'. Blogging in the post-9/11 period closed the gap between Internet and society. Whereas dot-com suits dreamt of mobs of customers flooding their e-commerce portals, blogs were actual catalysts that realized worldwide democratization of the Net. As much as democratization means 'engaged citizens', it also implies normalization (as in setting of norms) and banalization. We can't separate these elements and only enjoy the interesting bits.
Each new blog adds to the fall of the media system that once dominated the twentieth century. What's declining is the Belief in the Message; that's the nihilist (nihil = zero) moment and blogs facilitate this culture like no platform has done before. Each new blog entry adds to the slow implosion of our centralized meaning structures. Blog software assists users in their crossing from Truth to Nothingness. The printed and broadcast message has lost its aura. News is consumed as a commodity with entertainment value. Instead of presenting blog entries as mere self promotion, we should interpret them as decadent artifacts that remotely dismantle the broadcast model without offering an alternative model, let alone subversive content.
Apart from my 'nihilism' thesis, as exemplified through the 'shocklogs' genre, I am working on a general theory of blogging together with the US-American scholar Jodi Dean. In this collaborative research we look into the subjectivity formation of blogging and how the software architecture, combined with the general post 9-11 climate, produces a certain kind of blog behaviour.
Geert Lovink is Director of the Institute for Network Cultures, Amsterdam. He is the author of, 'Dark Fiber' (2002), 'Uncanny Networks' (2002), 'My First Recession' (2003) and 'Zero Comments' (Routledge New York, 2007)
AHRC Training Workshop for CCS PhD Students: Jonathan Beller on The Cinematic Mode of Production, Goldsmiths Great Hall, Monday 12 November 2007
Around 500 people attended a free public lecture entitled:
'Revisiting Postcolonialism' with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Thursday 8 November 2007
We also hosted the launch of her new book.
Professor Spivak's visit is hosted by the Centre for Cultural Studies, MA Postcolonialism, with generous support from the Department of Media and Communications, Department of Politics and the Graduate School.
Download the poster for this event. [pdf]
Lev Manovich: 'After Effects, or Deep Remixability'
15 October 2007
This lecture presented an analysis of the new hybrid visual language of moving images that emerged during the period of 1993-1998 and which today dominates our visual culture. The lecture suggested that this new language can be understood with the help of the concept of remixabiity - if we use this concept in a new way. We can call the result deep remixability - for what gets remixed is not only of the content of different media, but their fundamental techniques, working methods, and modes of representation and expression. Lev Manovich analyzed how the new software-based methods of production adopted in the 1990s - specifically software such as After Effects - made this language possible.
Lev Manovich is an artist and writer. He is the author of 'The Language of New Media' and Professor at University of California San Diego and from 2007 on, Visiting Professor, Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths. A selection of his texts and projects may be found at www.manovich.net
CCS special seminar: Tim Mangin. Tuesday 9 October 2007
Cosmopolitanism in Senegal: Jazz and Rap
This explored how Senegalese local popular culture thrives not in spite of transnational influences and processes, but as a result of them. Popular music scholars and social scientists have increasingly begun to study the impact of popular African diasporic musics in Africa such as jazz and Latin musics in West, South, and Central Africa. However, the meaning and role of black U.S. pop musics in identity formations in Francophone West Africa has received less attention. This paper addresses this problem by examining how Senegalese have used diasporic musics since the 1940s as one way to assert their modern cosmopolitan identities. Based on fieldwork conducted in Saint Louis and Dakar, Senegal, I explore how jazz and rap have become vitally cultural expressive practices for negotiating national and black identities.
Tim Mangin, a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at Columbia University, studies transnationalism and cosmopolitanism in African diasporic popular musics and culture. His masters thesis explores collaborations between DJs, rappers, visual artists, dancers, and jazz musicians in underground hip hop clubs in New York City and his dissertation is an ethnography of *mbalax*, the popular music of Senegal.
Migrating University, 14-15 September 2007
In order to feed Goldsmiths people and enthusiasm into the No Borders Camp at Gatwick (19-24 Sept), we wanted to organise a workshop at Goldsmiths the weekend before, called Migrating University. It included a walk along the route of the Battle of Lewisham 1977 30th anniversary of the NF march in our area, and also other topics, debates, themes of relevance... The No Borders Camp at Gatwick was an ideal opportunity for Goldsmiths to rouse itself from sleepy London and show its solidarity with Britain's new settlers, condemn the Governments asylum and detention practices, and expose the hypocrisy of having unregulated capital flow alongside racist fortress restrictions on people.
Graduate Student Conference: Theoretical Gymnastics
31 July 2007
This student conference was intended as an opportunity for Masters students in the fields broadly related to the study of 'culture' to have an occasion to share our own exciting research and writing, to hear other people's research directions, and to give creative feedback and input.
Being in practice, keeping in shape but also being creative, looking good, hitting certain positions with flair, performing with grace and style - these are all things that make contemporary cultural scholarship a gymnastic enterprise.
The finest gymnast/researcher uses polymorphous sources without falling entirely apart; they oscillate between eclecticism and rigour. The acrobatics of the cultures we are all dedicated to pervade our own academic performances. Style then becomes not just a question of attitude but an integral part of our scholarly exercises. With this conference we probed notions such as creativity, interdisciplinarity and culture/creative industry by questioning towards ontological depth in these methods.
We invited postgraduate students from the fields of Cultural Studies, Media & Communication, Anthropology, Sociology to participate in a day of energetic academic athleticism. We oprganised multiple panels of three people, put together based on areas of similarity. Term papers are welcome, as are 'chapters' of dissertations - whatever work you have that you would like to share and get comment on. This was a good opportunity to cut our teeth, and learn the thrill of public speaking, among our fellow best-and-brightest here at Goldsmiths. Everyone was invited to attend, participate and discuss about the latest outcomes of cultural research at Goldsmiths.
Download the conference poster [Word doc]
MA in Interactive Media Degree Show
6 July - 8 July 2007, Goldsmiths
With open technology and interaction all the rage these days, what is virtual and what real? What do we make of our shrinking globe and its quickening pace? What of our interactions with each other, media, and art today? Addressing these questions and more was the degree show of Goldsmiths' Interactive Media Masters students. Futuresque exhibits that spanned everything from sonic chambers to life-sized political video games, surveillance experiences to body magnets.
AHRC PhD Training Day
Urban Audiologies. 2 July, 2007
Julian Henriques from Goldsmiths College spoke about sonics and movement. He is author of 'Sonic Dominance and Reggae Sound System Sessions', in M. Bull and L. Back (eds.), Auditory Culture, as well as various other essays and articles and has also made numerous TV and film documentaries, including Babymother for Film Four.
Michael Bull from Sussex University is the author of Sounding out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life, The Auditory Culture Reader and most recently Mobilizing the Social: Sound Technology in Urban Experience. He has studied the mobile music revolution since the arrival of the Sony Walkman in the late 1970s and will be speaking about his latest research into ipod culture and the fashioning of sound.
Vivek Bald is a New York based filmmaker and music producer. His documentary Taxi-Vala chronicled the lives, experiences and political activism of South Asian immigrant taxi drivers in New York City. He also produces and performs music under the name Siraiki and is co-founder of the groundbreaking Mutiny club night. He showed his latest film Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music followed by a Q and A session, as well as talking about his forthcoming audio/visual projects.
Steve 'Kode 9' Goodman is Lecturer in Media Production at the University of East London and member of the autonomous research collective, the Ccru (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit). He also dj's on London pirate radio and internationally under a number of guises. His research interests include Cybernetic Culture, Sonic Culture, Diasporic futurisms, and he presented from his new book Sonic Warfare.
2007 AHRC PhD Training Day. Wednesday. Biopower and the Genealogy of Modern Architecture. Wednesday, 27 June 2007
Sven-Olov Wallenstein is a Swedish philosopher who has written several books on philosophy, aesthetics and architecture and is the translator of Deleuze, Derrida, Agamben, Hegel, Kant, Ranciere and others. He is a professor at Södertörns University and a researcher at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, as well as the head editor of Site Magazine. A collection of his writings, essays and lectures has just been published by Axl Books.
Eyal Weizman is the head of Research Architecture at Goldsmiths. His current research is into the relationship between war and architecture in Palestine/Israel and his latest book, Hollow Land, will be published by Verso in June.
This was a Centre for Cultural Studies' AHRC funded training day for CCS PhD students.
CCS Summer Party. 27 June 2007
CCS students, staff and colleagues met at Blackfriars Wine Bar, Blackfriars Road, London SE1. See photos from the party.
Discussion of "Anti-Semitism and the Civil Sphere" with Professor Jeffrey Alexander (Yale) and Professor Scott Lash (Centre for Cultural Studies' Director). 25 June 2007
The discussion was based on sections from Jeffrey Alexander's book: The Civil Sphere (2003).
Method Matters: The New Organicism/The New Empiricism. 7 June 2007
Workshop-Seminar with Patricia Clough
Patricia Ticineto Clough is Professor of Sociology and Women Studies at Queens College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her most recent publications are Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology Minnesota University Press 2000 and an edited collection titled The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social forthcoming from Duke University Press 2007.
Violence and Legitimacy. 9 May 2007.
Professor Andrew Benjamin
Professor Benjamin presented from work-in-progress on Violence and Legitimacy. His paper considers the fascination of violence and the manner in which it exerts a hold and commands notice despite its apparent warrant of revulsion. This fascination operates aesthetically across a range of media such that any easily formed distinction between art practices and journalism soon vanishes. Once removed from mere presentation violence oscillates between judgment and legitimation. The word's ease of use does not belie the problem of definition. And yet, its definition is all too easily assumed. If assumptions, rather than being given centrality are deferred, then it may be possible to approach the violent by beginning with the complex interplay between fascination, judgment and legitimation.
Andrew Benjamin is Visiting Professor at Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths. He is currently Associate Dean of Research in the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Built Environment at the University of Technology Sydney and Professor of Critical Theory at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Previously he has taught at Warwick University's Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature.
Contemporary Marxist Thought. 30 April 2007.
Professor Geoff Gilbert: “The Meaning of Contemporary Realism: The Amortissement of Idiom in Daewoo,”
Felton Shortall, author of The Incomplete Marx, on “The Structure of Marx’s Capital.”
Professor Gilbert will be addressing Georg Lukács’ work on literature, and will be considering it as “the last sustained attempt to energise the category of literary realism’ as both concept and project.” Through a critical appraisal of Lukács’ concern with the inauthenticity of reification and its possible supersession via a ‘realist’ critique, Professor Gilbert will be looking at a contemporary social realist novel (François Bon's Daewoo, 2004), and will be considering the resources that modern literature presents to us as a means for conducting a critique of contemporary capitalism.
Felton Shortall’s The Incomplete Marx (1994) charted the development of Marx’s thought through a close consideration of his writings in order to illuminate his unfinished final work, Capital. Claiming that Marx provisionally closed off a full discussion of class struggle in Capital in order to describe the capitalist economy as a stable whole, Shortall argued that an account of the disruptive effects of this struggle upon value should be interpolated into the texts. His talk on the structure of Marx's most famous and influential work will reprise these claims in the light of his subsequent research, and will indicate the extent to which Capital points beyond itself to a conclusion that its author did not live to complete.
Undercover Softness: Politics and Architecture of Decay. 9 May 2007.
Undercover Softness event poster [pdf 130K]
An intensive seminar with philosopher and freelance writer Reza Negarestani (Iran) 2-5pm, Room DTH109
This is the first in a new seminar series - Architectures of Abstraction - at the Centre for Cultural Studies, convened by Dr Luciana Parisi, Susan Schuppli (PhD candidate) Jeol McKim (PhD candidate). This will be an intensive seminar with limited attendance.
Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Theory. 26 April 2007.
The Centre for Cultural Studies hosted a unique one-day symposium dedicated to exploring H. P. Lovecraft’s relationship to Theory. The event did not follow the ordinary format of the academic conference. Some written materials were circulated beforehand, but there were no papers delivered on the day. Instead, there was structured discussions based on five of Lovecraft’s stories: 'Call of Cthulhu', 'The Shadow over Innsmouth', 'The Dunwich Horror', 'The Shadow out of Time', 'Through the Gates of the Silver Key'.
Participants included: Benjamin Noys (Chichester) - author of The Culture of Death and Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction; Graham Harman (Cairo) - author of Tool-Being and Guerilla Metaphysics. (Graham says that a philosophy should be judged on what it can tell us about Lovecraft); China Miéville - acclaimed author of Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and other tales of the Fantastic.; Luciana Parisi (Goldsmiths) - author of Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire; Steve ‘Kode9’ Goodman (UEA) - author of the forthcoming Sonic Warfare; Justin Woodman (Goldsmiths) - expert on the Chaos Magick appropriation of Lovecraft’s mythos; James Kneale (UCL) - author of ‘From Beyond: H. P. Lovecraft and the Place of Horror’; Mark Fisher (Goldsmiths) - k-punk weblog; Dominic Fox - Poetix weblog.
McKenzie Wark on Gamer Theory. 20 March 2007.
McKenzie Wark, of Eugene Lang College and New School for Social Research, New York, and author of 'A Hacker Manifesto', (Harvard University Press, 2005) presented ongoing work form his forthcoming book, 'Gamer Theory'. A novel set of proposals for a critical theory of games, and an exploration of games as allegories for the world, Gamer Theory is also a new way of thinking the relationship between printed text and the word on the web.
Cities Out Of Control? 13 March 2007.
"Cities out of Control?" brought together two leading world thinkers on contemporary highly complex cities: Wang Xiaoming (Professor of Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Shanghai University): "From Architecture to Advertising: The new Urban Space of Shanghai"; and, John Urry (Professor of Sociology and Director of Centre for Mobilities Research, Lancaster University): "Cars, Cities, Climate and Complex Futures". Tuesday
Comrade Gaurav: Nepalese Revolutionary Leader. 12 March 2007
Chandra Prakash Gajurel (Comrade Gaurav), a senior Politburo Member of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), and Head of the CPN (M)'s 'International Command', recently released from an Indian prison after three years without trial, spoke at Goldsmiths. This event added to our growing interest in issues relevant to the history and development of struggles against imperialism.
Market, Economics, Culture and Performativity, 6 March 2007.
This one-day conference continued themes discussed at a 2005 Goldsmiths event, Markets, Art & Money, featuring Professors Harrison White and Donald MacKenzie.
Professor Marshall Berman
The author of All that's Solid melts into Air' and 'On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square' spoke at the CCS on 1 March 2007
Animality and Subjectivity.
Seminar with Andrew Benjamin, Visiting Professor at the Centre for Cultural Studies. Professor Benjamin will discuss a paper titled 'And if the Other Were an Animal? Hegel on Jews, Animals and Disease', 26 January 2007, Goldsmiths.
Spatial Dramaturgies, Johann Wolfgang, Goethe University in Frankfurt,
12-14 February 2007
A collaborative event bringing together researchers from Centre from Cultural Studies (Goldsmiths) and the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnography (Goethe University)
Particularity and Exception: On Jews and Animals.
A talk by Andrew Benjamin, Visiting Professor at the Centre for Cultural Studies Thursday, 25 January 2007, Goldsmiths.
Professor Benjamin's paper explored differing economies of animality relative to conceptions of the human and engages with Giorgio Agamben's recent consideration of "anthropological machines" and "bare life" in The Open: Man and Animal, seeking beyond utopian responses to the production of the non-human in the human and the suspension of law authorized in its name, an understanding of alterity liked to the porous and continuously renegotiated relations between the animal and human animality.
Professor Benjamin currently teaches at the University of Technology Sydney and Monash University, Melbourne and previously at Warwick University's Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature.
The Liturgy of Things: New Rituals for a Participatory Culture
A talk by Charlie Gere (Reader in New Media Research, University of Lancaster). Thursday, 18 January 2007, Goldsmiths.