Past events
2008
CCS film nights: 'Imagination'
5 December 2008
Imagination (Dir: Eric Leiser 2007 USA 72 mins)
"Dr. Reineger is a child neuro-psychologist who has dealt with extreme and abnormal cases his entire life. But one particular case, that of Anna Woodruff, a candidate for Asperger's Syndrome, leaves the doctor perplexed when he learns of her identical twin sister Sarah and their intense connection. After bringing them both in for testing, the doctor is amazed at the results: the twins seem to unify in another realm, that of vision and imagination. But when these visions begin to cross over into reality, the troubled doctor must confront his own beliefs in what science can explain, and consider the unknown. The events which follow are so astonishing that they bring Dr. Reineger to a stand still: either accept the prophesy of the twins, or abandon his practice. But before he can decide, the institutionalized girls escape. The conclusion and findings are silencing: have the girls transcended reality itself?"
California native Eric Leiser is a filmmaker, animator, puppeteer, holographer, illustrator, writer, teacher, sculptor, and painter. Mr. Leiser is an alumnus of the Experimental Animation Program at the California Institute of the Arts. His body of work include several shorts subject and feature films. His two feature films 'Imagination' and 'Faustbook' along with his collection of animated 'Eclectic Shorts' have won acclaim in international film festivals and are distributed by Vanguard Cinema.
Opening and lecture on the Art of Holography- Eric Leiser
Wednesday 3 December
Exhibition, 1-5 December 2008
Eric Leiser is gaining notoriety among a new generation of fine art holographers, looking to resurrect and reinvent the science of holography. His recent work has concentrated on the Infinite in its mathematical, philosophical and spiritual form. He will be discussing in his lecture his works which will be on display in the Kingsway Corridor which will include holograms from his Wunderkammer series, his Aleph Null series which exhibited at Fringe Exhibitions LA in April 2008 and unexhibited works from a new series. Eric Leiser is also a professional animator, puppeteer, illustrator, teacher, writer and filmmaker. Mr. Leiser is an alumnus of the Experimental Animation Program at the California Institute of the Arts. He has shown and lectured recently at the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago, Fringe Exhibitions and the Holodome in Los Angeles and the Ruben H. Fleet Space Museum in San Diego. His two feature films 'Imagination' and 'Faustbook' along with his collection of animated 'Eclectic Shorts' have shown internationally in film festivals and are internationally distributed by Vanguard Cinema. He screened 'Imagination' in the Goldsmiths Cinema on 5 December.
"In my work I choose specific objects that correspond to the unique conceptual potential of holography. The holographic process corresponds to a multidimensional conceptuality: the laser light hitting every axis point allows the image to change when viewed from multiple perspectives. The capture and archiving of objects into a seemingly incorruptible format such as holographic glass at once freezes time and opens up the many dimensions of the objects in space. This I find this to be at once uncanny, sublime and beautiful, and this fascination is what drives my work. Holography offers an untapped synthesis of technology, science, theory and art that I have not found in any other media, including in my work as an animator and filmmaker. My view of the science and art of holography is a vast landscape of untapped potential as an art form and well as a vital technological advancement. My desire is to explore this vast landscape by innovating the arts of filmmaking and animation through holographic cinema. The conceptual depth of holography has allowed me to explore implied narratives in my work and new aesthetic values. I see this rare practice as an advantage and an innovate force in the art world. The art form of holography needs to liberated from its narrow technological use, into its application as an art form."
Force of Metadata
29 November 2008
A one day workshop. Keynote speakers: Bernard Stiegler (Head of the Department of Cultural Development, Centre-Georges-Pompidou, Paris) and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (Electronic Artist, working at the crossroads between architecture, sculpture and performance). This event was the annual symposium of Goldsmiths Media Research Centre, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The Centre for Cultural Studies is responsible for the project 'Metadata in the Age of Ubiquitous Media' within this programme.
Public Lecture: DONT RHINE of Ultra-Red
13 November
Annual Report
Since 2004, Ultra-red have conducted simultaneous projects including "We Come From Your Future" held at the Tate Britain in June. Concurrent investigations have made apparent a number of themes inherent to Ultra-red's combination of sound art, political organizing, and radical pedagogy. In an annual report of the collective's activities, Rhine presents some of those themes for discussion.
DONT RHINE: Co-founder of the sound art collective Ultra-red in 1994. Recent performances and exhibitions: Fowler Museum (Los Angeles), Tate Britain, and the KwaZulu-Natal Society of Arts Gallery (Durban). Curates the online fair-use record label, Public Record. In Los Angeles, collaborates with the Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project. Received a 2007 California Community Foundation award for visual artists.
A Visual Cultures Guest Lecture Series in conjunction with the Centre for Cultural Studies
Sonic Diaspora
3 to 8 November 2008
A week of events as part of the Beyond Text Beyond Borders workshops in London, Berlin and Copenhagen. Organized by John Hutnyk. Find out more
Googling the City. A talk by Scott McQuire
21 October 2008
In May 2007, global media giant Google launched 'Street Views', an application enabling users to access a digital archive of street level photographs taken across five cities in the United States. By mid-2008, the service covered over 50 US cities, and was also launched in Australia and Japan, with more countries in the pipeline. In this paper, Scott McQuire wants to locate 'Street View' within a history of urban representation and metropolitan discourse. Beginning from the invention of photography which initiated new systems of 'mapping' urban space in the 19th century, he will trace the ways that the convergence of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with distributed networks and mobile media initiates new struggles over public space.
Scott McQuire is Associate Professor in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. His most recent book The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space was published in the Theory, Culture and Society series by Sage in 2008.
Francois Jullien, "The Universal"
27 October 2008
Francois Jullien, Professor at the Université Paris VII-Denis Diderot and Director at the Institut de la Pensée Contemporaine, presented a talk on "The Universal" (full title to be confirmed) at Goldsmiths on Mon 27th October.
The talk was followed by responses and discussion led by Michael Dutton and Chantal Mouffe.
Francois Jullien is the author of a number of books on Chinese and western thought, including Vital Nourishment: Departing from Happiness (2007), In Praise of Blandness (2004) and The Propensity of Things: Towards a History of Efficacy in China (1995).
Lagos/London 2008 - Andrew Esiebo and Nilu Izadi
Wednesday, 8 October
Photographers Andrew Esiebo and Nilu Izadi talk about their recent work.
The Remaking of Sensorial Experience and the Politics of Speculative Constructivism
A public lecture by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa
Friday, 3 October 2008
Feminist knowledge politics in science and technology studies have engaged with an epistemological reclaiming of the worlds of emotions, affects and the sentient body as intrinsic to the world of fact production. The affirmation of the sensorial is one of the ways through which constructivist involvement with science and technology invokes the materiality and embodiment of experience. In this context, a move to touch appears as a speculative vision of feminist technology. This paper argues that reclaiming the possibility of touch requires attention to the politics of the expanding market of haptic technologies, which also speculates with the remaking of our sensorial experience.
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa is a Research Associate at the Research Group on Constructivist Studies, Philosophy Department, Université Libre de Bruxelle. Her lecture is co-sponsored by Goldsmiths' Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process (CSISP).
Pantomime Terror: the Paranoid Commuter and the Danger of Music
Inaugural Lecture from Professor John Hutnyk
Tuesday, 30 September 2008
Release!
Tuesday 2 September 2008, Graduate Student Conference
Release! was the title of the 2008 Centre for Cultural Studies' Annual MA Student Conference. Release!: a moment of friendly and relaxing activity, an opportunity to participate and discuss the latest oucomes of cultural research at Goldsmiths.
To release refers in this case to the act of unbinding or undoing not as a denial of the path followed over the course of the degree, but as a turning point. The momentum of the flow of the activity is no longer inwards, but becomes released outwards; the solitude of reading, researching and writing is replaced by the joy of sharing and questioning.
Being Released! can be a physical activity of liberation from confinement, obligation or even pain. It can also be a device put into place to unfasten a mechanism.
Release! provided the opportunity to celebrate an activity that has reached its end in order to be replaced by other activity.
What is a World? World Literature in a Postcolonial Frame
A talk by Pheng Cheah (UC Berkeley)
12 June 2008
-RW [Rewritable] - end of year show
Thursday 3 - 5 July 2008
From Thursday 3 July to Saturday 5 July, 2008, the Centre for Cultural Studies presented "-RW [Rewritable]" an event by MA Interactive Media under the guidance of Harwood (Mongrel, Mediashed) and Dr Luciana Parisi.
CCS US/Mexico Border Film Festival
Cinema Division: We Are All Illegals. All screenings on Tuesdays in Goldsmiths Cinema.
Marx and Philosophy, 2 June 2008.
A one day workshop reflecting on issues relating to globalisation, resistance, value and the Interpretation of Capital.
The day involved discussion, and was organised around presentations dealing with the following topics: global community; civil disobedience and its tactical evaluation; the political implications of value theory; the content and implications of Marx's work, and his relation to philosophy.
Speakers :
Jonathan Brookes: "Marx and Global Community" Sam Meaden: "A Critical Appraisal of the 'Reclaim the Streets' Movement"
Sean McKeown: "Value Between Economics and Politics" Nick Gray and Rob Lucas: "Formal and Real Subsumption Logical or Historical Categories?"
Nicole Pepperell: "How to Walk with Hegel On the the 'Peculiar Social Character' of Commodity Production" Alberto Toscano: response.
The Crisis of the Humanities, and What We Can Do About It: A seminar with Stanley Aronowitz
Thurday, 22 May
Stanley Aronowitz is a Distinguished Professor in Cultural Studies, Film Studies, Sociology, and Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. He is one of the founding editors of the journal Social Text and the author of many books dealing with, amongst other things, marxism, education, labor, and imperialism. An active trade unionist, he has also run for Governor of New York with the Green Party in 2002. For more info see his website: http://stanleyaronowitz.org
This seminar was co-sponsored by the Centre of Cultural Studies and Sociology at Goldsmiths.
A symposium on Walter Benjamin's 'Critique of Violence'. 19 May 2008
Four great speakers:
Elina Staikou "Force of Name: The Critique of Violence".
Andrew Benjamin "On their Difference - Mythic and Divine Violence".
Jennifer Bajorek "Of Dogma and Decay: The 'Case' of Language in the Critique".Howard Caygill "The Worst: Benjamin, Weber and the critique of violence".
The Society of Molecules: Massumi and Manning on Guattari. 21 April 2008.
Event/workshop on Felix Guattari led by Prof. Brian Massumi and Dr Erin Manning, chaired by Dr Luciana Parisi. See the Guattari Reader [Word file]
The Society of Molecules
'I believe there exists a multiple people, a mutant people, a people of potential that appears and disappears, embodied in social events, literary events, musical events. I can see it, perhaps I'm delirious, but I think we're in a period of absolutely fantastic production, creation, and revolution with regard to the emergence of a people. This is what I mean by molecular revolution: it's not a slogan, it's not a program, it's something I feel, something I live through in encounters, in institutions, in affect, and as well as in certain reflections.'
This is how Félix Guattari, speaking in 1982, described his experience of Brazil, a country he saw as a laboratory for what he believed the future held generally in store with the rise of what he was calling at the time Worldwide Integrated Capitalism or what two decades later would burst on the scene under the moniker globalisation. What emergences can we feel today (are we delirious yet)? We propose a discussion around Guattari's concepts of molecular politics, group subjectivity and institutional analysis, starting from the same ground he signposted lived relation and the politics of affect, along with modes of reflection adapted to them. We propose to reapproach the question of micopolitics drawing on certain concepts of A.N Whitehead, while extending it to the problem of preemption, arguably a macro-regime of globalised power capable of appropriating molecular becomings at their point of emergence. What 'elbow room' (Whitehead) remains for 'a people of potential'?
Erin Manning is assistant professor in studio art and film studies at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) as well as director of The Sense Lab, a laboratory that explores the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement. In her art practice she works between painting, fabric and sculpture. Her current project entitled Folds to Infinity is an experimental fabric collection composed of cuts that connect in an infinity of ways, folding into clothing and out into environmental architectures. Her dance background includes classical ballet, contemporary dance and Argentine tango. She has also developed and written about a movement practice called Relational Movement. Publications include Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2006) and Ephemeral Territories: Representing Nation, Home and Identity in Canada (Minnesota University Press, 2003). Her current book-project is called Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (in press, MIT) and deals with movement, art and techniques of relation.
Brian Massumi specializes in philosophy of embodied experience, media theory, and political philosophy. His current research is two-fold the experience of movement and the interrelations between the senses, in particular in the context of new media art and technology; and emergent modes of power associated with the globalization of capitalism and the rise of preemptive politics. He is currently preparing two book projects. Architectures of the Unforeseen: Arts of Relation which addresses these issues through detailied analyses of the work of selected architects and artists (forthcoming MIT Press). Empire of Emotion studies affective politics, in the Bush administration and beyond. His earlier works include Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Duke University Press, 2002), A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (MIT Press, 1992), and First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot (with Kenneth Dean; Autonomedia, 1993). He is editor of The Politics of Everyday Fear (University of Minnesota Press, 1993) and A Shock to Thought: Expression After Deleuze and Guattari (Routledge, 2002). His translations from the French include Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari"s A Thousand Plateaus. He teaches in the Communication Department of the Université de Montréal, where he directs the Workshop in Radical Empiricism. Website: www.brianmassumi.com.
"A Nuclear Dawn in South India: Cultures of Anti-Nuclear Resistance in Kanyakumari District"
Dr Raminder Kaur (University of Sussex)
12 March 2008
Architecture of Abstraction seminar series presents Usman Haque, 12 March 2008
Architecture has traditionally been thought of as solid, static and permanent. Here we consider, instead, a soft, dynamic and fluid architecture created with smells, sounds, electromagnetic fields, floatables, and thousands of toys...
Usman Haque (Director, Haque Design & Research) is an architect who specialises in responsive environments, interactive installations, digital interface devices and mass-participation performances. His skills include the design of both physical spaces and the software and systems that bring them to life. As well as directing the work of Haque Design + Research he was until 2005 a teacher in the Interactive Architecture Workshop at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London.
Uncertainty, Innovation and Value Ian Gulland Lecture
6 March 2008
In "Uncertainty, Innovation and Value" processes of value creation in contemporary capitalism will be discussed. In particular, this seminar will be focused on the increasingly relevant role played by the management of uncertain orders of worth in producing innovation; and the way "value spheres" -such as music scenes, markets for financial titles and environmental campaigns- are currently produced. The event brought together world leading experts coming from different disciplines and theoretical perspectives and composed by two main sessions.
Michael Hutter (Social Science Centre Berlin and Technical University Berlin, Institute of Sociology): "Applause, protest and exchange values: A theoretical appraisal of valuation systems" Respondent: David Graeber (Anthropology, Goldsmiths) Chair: Scott Lash (Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths University of London)
David Stark (Centre on Organization Innovation, Columbia University): "Exploiting Uncertainty in the Search for What's Valuable" Respondent: Jakob Arnoldi (Aarhus School of Business, University of Aarhus) Chair: Michael Keith (Sociology, Goldsmiths)
Participants Jakob Arnoldi is Vice Dean, Director of Research, Aarhus School of Business, University of Aarhus Denmark, author of the forthcoming book Risk, an introduction (Polity Press), and co-editor of the special section on economy and finance in Theory, Culture & Society Annual Review 2007.
David Graeber is Lecturer, Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths University of London, author of Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar (University of Indiana Press 2007) and Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (Palgrave 2001).
Michael Hutter is Professor, Social Science Centre Berlin and Technical University Berlin, Institute of Sociology, has recently co-edited Beyond Price. Value in Culture, Economics, and The Arts (Cambridge University Press 2008); and is the author of Neue Medienökonomik (Wilhelm Fink Verlag 2006).
Michael Keith is Professor and Head of Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths University of London, author of After The Cosmopolitan?: Multicultural Cities and the Future of Racism (Routledge 2005).
Scott Lash is Professor and Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, and has recently authored (with Celia Lury) Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things (Polity Press 2007) and "Capitalism and Metaphysics" Theory, Culture and Society (2007).
David Stark is Arthur Lehman Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Columbia University where he directs the Center on Organizational Innovation. Stark's recent publications include: "Sociotechnologies of Assembly" (with Monique Girard) in Governance and Information: The Rewiring of Governing and Deliberation in the 21st Century (2007); and "Social Times of Network Spaces: Network Sequences and Foreign Investment in Hungary," (with Balazs Vedres) American Journal of Sociology (2006).
Jeremy Valentine, Queen Margaret University Edinburgh
"Everyone's at it: The Rentier Economy and the Morality of the Cultural Industries". 4 March 2008.
This paper is written in the spirit, but not the style, of Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees (1705). It begins with a critical analysis of theoretical claims that reduce culture to economy by virtue of the meaningful and embedded nature of the latter. There are two aspects of this critique. Firstly, an internal one directed at the assumption of a telos of homogeneity in cultural economy approaches. Even though the notion of economy is broadened everything is located within an equilibrium. Secondly, an external one which draws attention to the coincidence between cultural economy approaches and contemporary political rhetorics of 'creative economy'. Both aspects naturalise historically specific relations of production through the category of culture and both privilege and generalise cultural industries as the leading edge of wealth production. The paper argues that both approaches are organised by a disavowal of the political dominance of the economic category of rent and the regimes of rights and fees on which it depends. Following a discussion of the problem of rent for capitalism, from Smith via Marx and Keynes to Buchanan, the paper outlines the role of rent in contemporary neo-liberal capitalism and its links to practices of 'value capture'. The paper concludes with a discussion of the possible reasons for the valorisation of culture in contemporary neo-liberalism and in particular the example of the cultural industries in the formation of moral subjectivity.
AHRC Workshop for CCS Research Students
Things, flows, assemblages, networks: analysing the object in material culture
Speakers:
Neil Cummings (University of the Arts- Chelsea, London)
Current research includes collaborative creative practice; the re-animation of the public domain and the creative commons through 'copyleft' viral licensing. He has written on the issue of use-value and his work in this area finds form in www.chanceprojects.com. Neil showed some of the short films made as part of his current work on the 'Enthusiasm Project' and talked about their role as things embedded in networks.
Tim Dant (Lancaster University)
Has been engaged with the study of things and how objects are embedded with the ideas and values of society since the mid-90's. Publications include 'Playing with Things: Objects and Subjects in Windsurfing' (Journal of Material Culture, 1998, Vol. 3 (1): 77-95) and Material Culture in The Social World, (1999, Open University Press). Tim talked on 'getting to know the thing' and discuss the structure of material interaction with things and how it involves an exchange of meaning between person and thing.
Amy de la Haye (University of the Arts, London College of Fashion)
Amy is curator of an exhibition about the Women's Land Army (WLA) which will open at Brighton Museum in Autumn 2009. It is a clothing focused exhibition which will serve as a case study in material culture analysis. Amy's talk was entitled 'Exploding an object: interpreting and exhibiting the uniform worn by the Women's Land Army'. Suggested reading:Taylor, Lou 'Doing the Laundry? A Reassessment of Object-based Dress History' Fashion Theory Volume 2, issue 4 pp337-358.
Ian Cook (Exeter University)
Ian is a material geographer whose current interests are in material culture and in particular 'following the thing' methodology. This is best witnessed in his work on tracing the origins and pathways of the Papaya and the Red Hot Chilli. He spoke on 'Hydrocortisone relatedness'.
From Body without Organs to Body Area Networks, a talk by Sally Jane Norman, 21 February 2008.
Antonin Artaud's To Have Done with the Judgement of God, infamously not broadcast sixty years ago, rails against the tyranny of our automatic reactions at all levels, from the biological to the social and political. Artaud berates our subservience to standing order and pleas instead for the freely moving body without organs which, in the delirium of dance halls, can learn to dance "Ã l'envers" (dizzyingly translatable as the wrong way round, upside down, inside out, back to front, etc). This violently de-organised body offers a fittingly skewed vantage point which I shall adopt to discuss the re-organised bodies inhabiting today's "technozoosemiotic systems" (Louis Bec), with their constantly reshaped networks of vital parameters.
Sally Jane Norman is a theorist and practitioner working on relations between the performing arts and technology. She is founding director of Culture Lab, an interdisciplinary creative digital research platform at Newcastle University. See more information on her work and projects.
Being Just to Animals: Hegel, Walter Benjamin and Deuteronomy.
7 February 2008
In association with Howard Caygill's Contemporary Thought course on 'Justice', Andrew Benjamin gave a talk entitled 'Being Just to Animals: Hegel, Walter Benjamin and Deuteronomy'.
Those attending were encouraged to read the following paper [pdfs]:
Particularity and Exceptions: On Jews and Animals
What if the Other were an Animal? Hegel on Jews, Animals and Disease
Andrew Benjamin is an Australian philosopher and Professor of Critical Theory at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Andrew Benjamin's career began as a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK, where he was later Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature at the same university. Andrew Benjamin has been Visiting Professor of Architectural Theory at Columbia University, New York, USA, and Visiting Critic at the Architectural Association in London, UK, and Professor of Critical Theory in the Centre and at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. Currently Visiting Professor at Goldsmiths' Centre for Cultural Studies, Andrew Benjamin's most recent book is 'Style and Time. Essays on the Politics of Appearance' (Northwestern University Press 2007).
Double Header: Michael Taussig on art and vision (fieldwork), Andrew Benjamin on Art and Abstraction (Mondrian). 6 February 2008
This seminar was exclusively for students and staff at the Centre for Cultural Studies.
Pierre Levy in conversation with Scott Lash and Robert Zimmer. 29 January 2008
Organised by the Graduate School, Goldsmiths.
Pierre Lévy is Professor in the Department of Communications at the University of Ottawa. He will be in conversation with Scott Lash, Professor of Cultural Studies, and Robert Zimmer, Professor of Computing. The evening will be an exciting and wide-ranging exploration of Professor Lévy's ideas and their application across a range of fields.
Pierre Lévy is a philosopher who has devoted his professional life to the understanding of the cultural and cognitive impacts of the digital technologies and to promote their best social uses. His work is focused around the concept of collective intelligence and knowledge-based societies, and he is a world-leading thinker on "cyberculture". His recent works focus on the development of an Information Economy Meta Language (IEML) based on semiotic concepts. IEML is designed to provide a semantic coordinate system for the addressing of concepts on the Internet.
Lévy is one of the major philosophers working on the implications of cyberspace and digital communications. As early as 1990 he published a book about the merge of digital networks and hypertextual communication. Lévy's 1995 book, Qu'est-ce que le virtuel? (translated as Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age) develops philosopher Gilles Deleuze's conception of "the virtual" as a dimension of reality that subsists with the actual but is irreducible to it.
Scott Lash is author of Sociology of Postmodernism, Another Modernity, A Different Rationality and Critique of Information. He is co-author of Global Culture Industry: the Mediation of Things, The End of Organized Capitalism, Economies of Signs and Spaces and Reflexive Modernization. His books have been translated into eleven languages. Lash is currently principal investigator for Risk Cultures in China: An Economic Sociology. He is currently working on a book on intensive culture and has been involved with Theory, Culture and Society for the past fifteen years.
Robert Zimmer has carried out research related to computing in relation to art and design. This involves: a return to thoughts of abstraction, connecting painting and computing; systems for reasoning about archiving contemporary art with Tate Modern; large-scale public artworks; a web-based artwork centred on brain function and development; systems for making interactive digital films with BT, Cambridge University, the BBC and others; and digital access to art and artefacts. He is currently writing a book on the Machine and Human Haptics for MIT Press.