Event overview
The Department of Art Public Talks Programme Autumn 2017 welcomes artist Benedict Seymour.
Benedict Seymour is an artist, writer and film maker, in the last 5 years his practice has been focused on developing forms of theoretical fiction to explore the systemic crisis of social reproduction post-1970 – specifically as it has accelerated since the 2008 ‘credit crunch’. Using video, music and speculative fiction, his work has traced the feedback between cultural, financial, social and infrastructural relations. His new feature length film ‘Dead the Ends’ (2017) uses the suspect sci-fi device of the time machine to dramatise a self-reflexive, self-cannibalising system. Reworking existing remakes and derivatives of Chris Marker’s ‘La Jetée’ (1962) into a montage of animated gifs, ‘Dead the Ends’, plunders fifty years of cinema and 5 years of social media to assess the history of social antagonism in a phase of escalating ‘austerity’. Asking how did we get here, and where do we go next, the work aims to reintroduce content, humour, and social urgency to artistic and critical practice in the midst of secular crisis.
Benedict Seymour’s practice is varied, as well as writing and editing for Mute Magazine since 2003 his work has included films: ‘Dead the Ends’ (director, 2017); ‘Can Dialectics Break Gravity?’ (with Matthew Noel-Tod, 2014); ‘Bang!’ (Script; Dir: Matthew Noel-Tod, 2012) and ‘The London Particular ‘(2004, with David Panos). His essays and fictions include ‘Primer’, October 2017; ‘Short Circuits: Finance, Feedback and Culture’; ‘Creativity’s Rainbow’, 2009; ‘Blurred Boundaries: Sport, Art and Activity’, 2008 – published in Mute Magazine and elsewhere). He has produced soundtracks for Melanie Gilligan's ‘The Common Sens’e (2015) and ‘Crisis in the Credit System’ (2008); Maija Timonen’s ‘The Debtors’ (2008), as well as contributing music to Anja Kirschner’s ‘Moderation’ (2016). Musical projects include albums with Petit Mal (2008) and Antifamily (2006), and (forthcoming) a video-opera transposing Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus to the era of ‘neoliberalism’ and cybernetics. Benedict is a member of the Boycott Divest Zabludowicz group and a Lecturer in Critical Studies on the MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths.
Image: ‘Dead the Ends’ video still, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.
‘Dead the Ends’ (2017) trailer: https://vimeo.com/222562958
This event is free. No booking is required. All welcome.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 29 Nov 2017 | 5:30pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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