Seminars

FRIDAY 7 December

SEMINAR: THE TIME IT TAKES TO TRUE
10:00-14:00 Goldsmiths Ben Pimlott, Seminar Rooms
Leader: MINE KAYLAN, Goldsmiths/University of Brighton

"The seminar will investigate a poetics of live interaction with particular attention to time as a significant vector in 'meaningful' exchange. Within the context of proximal and of telematic /virtual environments, how does the play of time work in what we might identify as poetic exchange, which we yearn for, recognize as precious, pay good money to experience? What is 'intimacy' within these terms? What can we learn from cinema makers about structures of time and visual rhythm in interactions through telemotion? These are some questions I am sucking on, still."

SEMINAR: AT RISK
14:00-18:00 Goldsmiths Graduate School, Seminar Room
Leader: TRACEY WARR

Body Art puts another human body in your lap in live performance, photographic document or on screen image. It has often struggled to find an audience. It asks what it is to be human and what is it to be humane. In this workshop we will examine our own responses, responsibilities and complicities in relation to a range of historical and contemporary artists' work, including Chris Burden, Gina Pane, Bruce Gilchrist, Marcus Coates, He Yun Chang and Mark Raidpere. We will consider our responses in relation to differing modes of proximity as viewers of live performances, photographic documents and on screen images.

We will examine a range of theoretical positions on the issues of empathy and responsibility. In the 1930s psychologist Paul Schilder argued for a shared ontology between bodies, claiming that ‘the laws of identification and of communication between images of the body make one’s suffering and pain everybody’s affair’. Does Rosalind Krauss’ contention of an aesthetics of narcissism which she applied to video in the 1970s apply to the digital now? Kathy O’Dell’s critical work explores the notion of a contract of complicity between artist and audience. For Nelly Richard the body is ‘the meeting place between the individual and the collective … the boundary between biology and society, between drives and discourses’. Philosopher Elaine Scarry has demonstrated how the body has the status of being our most definite material reference point and is therefore used to give substance to ideologies or to take it away. The body has been the site of both ideological control and resistance.

Digital technologies have been a key influence in bringing the embodied consciousness and a metaphysics of the body back into focus. What qualities of human interaction are enabled or disabled by digital technologies? If our contemporary co-existence in both real and digital habitats is increasingly removing the distinction between real and fictional or simulated, fantasy and fact, how is that affecting our values? The computer or TV screen turns the live human into a digital object, an avatar. The digital tends to the specular, the solitary, the pornographic, the onanistic, the commodity. Can we play responsibly with each other in the digital domain?

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SATURDAY 8 December

SEMINAR: PERFORMANCE AND PORNOGRAPHY
10:00-14:00 Goldsmiths Graduate School, Seminar Room
Leader: DR. DOMINIC JOHNSON, Queen Mary University of London

This seminar will address representations of erotic and sexual intimacy in performance. Performance will be explored as a staging of forbidden or otherwise troubled intimacies, thinking through works that
figure intimacy between queers, intimacy with animals, and intimacy with children. Works for discussion may include Ron Athey and Lee Adam's Revisions of Excess event, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Porcile and Salo, Kira O'Reilly's Inthewrongplaceness, Tennessee Williams' Suddenly, Last Summer, and the photography of Slava Mogutin, Robert Mapplethorpe and Richard Kern.

In approaching these diverse performances of difficult intimacies, critical frameworks will be set up, deploying Emmanuel Levinas's idea of the infinite intimacy that is the epiphany of the face-to-face encounter; William Haver's imagining of "the pornographic life" lived within the proximate horror of intimate risk; and Georges Bataille's writings on the threat of intimate interiors as a "scandalous eruption". In exploring these varied cultural practitioners, odd contiguities, favourable mutations and unfamiliar critical intimacies may hopefully arise.

SEMINAR: (DIS)EMBODIMENT
14:30-18:30 Goldsmiths Graduate School, Seminar Room
Leader: PROF. PAUL SERMON, University of Salford

This seminar will identify and question the notions of embodiment and disembodiment in relation to the interacting performer in telematic and telepresent art installations.

At what point is performer embodying the virtual performer in front of them? And have they therefore become disembodied by doing so? A number of interactive telematic artworks will be looked at in detail during the seminar, establishing case-study examples to answer these questions. Stemming from Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz seminal work Hole-in-Space to Paul Sermon's telepresent experiments with Telematic Dreaming and to the current immerging creative/critical discourse in 'Second Life' that polarizes fundamental existential questions concerning identity, the self, the ego and the (dis)embodied avatar.

Photography credit: Microdances. Photography, 2005. Copyright: Jaime del Val_REVERSO