[spectre] ** NEW THURSDAY CLUB SEASON @ GOLDSMITHS, LONDON SE14

[Maria Chatzichristodoulou [aka maria x]]

APOLOGIES FOR CROSS-POSTING


** NEW THURSDAY CLUB SEASON ** NEW THURSDAY CLUB SEASON ** NEW

Supported by the Goldsmiths GRADUATE SCHOOL and the Goldsmiths DIGITAL 
STUDIOS

6pm until 8pm, Seminar Rooms at Ben Pimlott Building (Ground Floor, 
right), Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, SE14 6NW

FREE, ALL ARE WELCOME. No booking required.



*11 OCTOBER with CHRIS BOWMAN
:
GEO Landscapes and other sites of investigation…. *

Chris Bowman (University of Technology Sydney, Australia) gives an 
overview of his recent project GEO Landscapes. This presentation is an 
introduction to Phase 01 of the GEO Landscapes project which was 
recently demonstrated at BetaSpace, an experimental exhibition venue for 
interactive artworks at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney and explores 
prototype narrative structures which simulate ‘on-site’ engagement by a 
potential visitor to a given site ( in this instance the Brickpit Ring 
walk at the Sydney Olympic Park) or multiple sites of investigation. The 
long-term aim of GEO Landscapes is how to create an augmented 
interactive audio-visual story-telling experience using interpretive 
mobile technologies and this will be defined over an iterative series of 
phased developments. The ultimate experience is designed to be accessed 
through three principle technologies; a) handheld mobile devices, b) 
interactive audio visual public display and c) and web-community.

Bowman's creative work for GEO Landscapes and other ‘sites of 
investigation’ features an exploration between corresponding video 
sequences, selected narratives and site-specific information (GPS) 
captured across two or more locations. Socially, this drawing together 
of the virtual and the augmented space is designed to enrich the 
presence of the individual in the spaces or places and thereby enhance 
the interconnectivity of the user in the associated environment that 
supports remote creative collaboration and information access.

CHRIS BOWMAN is an Australian based artist, writer, director and teacher 
who works with film, and convergent media display systems. His research 
interests include interactive narrative systems, schematic 
representations of spatio-temporal interactive artworks and related film 
theory. Chris currently lectures in the Visual Communication Program in 
The Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building at UTS. He is an active 
member of the Creativity and Cognition Studios and Co-Director of the 
Digital Design Group both at UTS.
-- 

*1 NOVEMBER with VERONIQUE CHANCE & RACHEL STEWART
:
Live Run(ner) & Thinking Blue Sky *


Veronique Chance's research project (PhD Candidate Goldsmiths) considers 
the dynamic relation between the physical presence of the body and its 
presence as a screen image, through which she examines the impact of 
visual media technologies on our conceptions and perceptions of the body 
as a physical presence. The effects of these technologies on traditional 
notions and conditions of physicality and representation mark, she 
suggests, a shift in our relationship to, and understanding of the body 
as a physical presence as we become more used to interacting and 
communicating with the body through the immediacy of screen images. This 
has led to questions regarding the body as a material presence and to 
the technologically mediated image becoming associated with notions and 
ideologies of disappearance and disembodiment. Chance understands the 
condition of the body as being very much embedded in the material world 
and approaches her project through the proposition of what she calls 
'the physicality of an image', through which she argues for a 
reconceptualisation of the materiality of the body through its physical 
presence as an image.

For the Thursday Club Chance will present Live’ Run(ner), an artwork in 
progress that will record and transmit live the Great North Run through 
her own live experience of running the event. The idea is to recreate a 
live transmission of her eye-view in real-time, as she run the course, 
(literally ‘moving image’). Viewers would experience the event through 
her eye-view as she runs, through being able to ‘pick up’ a signal on 
their home computers and at wireless hotspots in the City.

VERONIQUE CHANCE is an artist practitioner and educator working across a 
range of media. She is currently a PhD Candidate in Fine Art by Practice 
at Goldsmiths. She also works as a Mentor for Artists in Residence 
Project, Morley College, London; Associate Lecturer, Foundation Course, 
Wimbledon School of Art; and Visiting Tutor, Fine Art/ArtHistory, 
Goldsmiths.

&

Rachel Stewart's research (PhD Candidate Goldsmiths) is based around an 
engagement with the psycho-geography of the everyday sky and its 
representation with contemporary visual culture. Stewart is interested 
in how experiences of freedom, imagination, spirituality, orientation 
and weight are contextualised within manifestations of the skies of the 
post-human landscapes of C21st.
Her research addresses the literary and visual trope of the sky, 
specifically the blue sky. The specific material she will discuss is an 
index of sky photographs that she has been collecting for a number of 
years. The photographs all detail a sky at the occurrence of ‘a sky 
event’ i.e. the sky above the screening of James Benning’s Ten Skies, or 
the Whitechapel exhibition of Gerhard Richter’s Atlas, or the sky above 
Manuel de Landa talking of the sky as a painting of intensive different 
at the Creative Evolutions Conference in 2005. The photographs detail 
only the particular sky and contain no other visual information. They 
could be construed as ‘eventless’. However, seen together these images 
create a visual subject, a subject that works in a familiar way but also 
starts to describe a new set of relations with this space.

RACHEL STEWART is a contemporary art curator and PhD candidate at 
Goldsmiths Visual Cultures. As a curator she has worked both in 
partnership with Helen Hayward and on behalf of other organisations on 
commissions that include working with Mark Wallinger, Amy Plant, Lothar 
Goetz, Daziell+ Scullion, James Ireland, Simon Periton, Mark Titchner, 
Florain Balze and Rose Finn-Kelcey. From 1994-1998 Stewart set up, 
edited, published and distributed independent arts magazine ENGAGED.
-- 

*22 NOVEMBER with JOSEPH TABBI
:
Toward a Semantic Literary Web: Three Case Histories

*Supported by Goldsmiths Department of English and Comparative Literature*
*

In this talk, Joseph Tabbi introduces a new literary and arts 
collective, Electronic Text + Textiles, whose members are exploring the 
convergence of written and material practices. While some associates 
create actual electronic textiles, Tabbi has explored the text/textile 
connection as it manifests itself in writing produced within electronic 
environments. His online laboratory consists of two literary web sites, 
EBR (www.electronicbookreview.com), a literary journal in continuous 
production since 1995, and the
Electronic Literature Directory (www.eliterature.org), a project that 
seeks not just to list works but to define an emerging field. Rather 
than regard these sites as independent or free-standing projects, Tabbi 
presents their development in combination with the current (and 
similarly halting) development of semantically driven content on the 
Internet (e.g., The Semantic Web, or Internet 2.0).

His purpose is to determine to what extent *concepts* can flow through 
electronic networks, as distinct from the predominant flow of 
*information*. The latter, in which documents are brought together by
metatags, keywords, and hot links, is arguably destructive of literary 
value. Where tagging and linking depend on direct, imposed conectivity 
at the level of the signifier, the creation of literary value depends
on suggestiveness, associative thought, ambiguity in expression and 
intent, fuzzy logic, and verbal resonance. At a time when powerful and 
enforced combinations of image and text threaten to obscure the 
differential basis of meaning as well as the potential for bringing 
together, rather than separating, rhetorical modes, Electronic Text + 
Textiles seeks to recognize and encourage the production of nuanced, 
textured languages within electronic environments.

JOSEPH TABBI is the author of two books of literary criticism, Cognitive 
Fictions (Minnesota, 2002) and Postmodern Sublime (Cornell, 1995). He 
edits ebr (www.electronicbookreveiw.com) and hosted the 2005 Chicago 
meeting of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. He is 
Professor of Literature at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
-- 

*13 DECEMBER with ALEX GILLESPIE, BRIAN O'NEILL & ROBB MITCHELL
:
Cyranoids...*


How can “speaking the thoughts of others” enhance and subvert social 
interaction both face-to-face and remotely ?

What is a cyranoid ? Cyranoids are people whose speech is being 
controlled by another person. The term comes from the character Cyrano 
de Bergerac in Edmond Rostand’s 19th Century play. Cyrano, who is ugly 
but articulate, helps his handsome but inarticulate friend win the heart 
of Roxane by providing eloquent and witty prompts from the sidelines. 
The outcome is that Roxane falls in love with Cyrano’s mind through 
interacting with the body of his friend. Stanley Milgram, a social 
psychologist, in the 1970s coined the term cyranoid to describe a person 
whose utterances were being controlled by a second person, the source, 
via radio transmission. The cyranoid wears a headset which receives 
input from a microphone in a different location. The source then speaks 
into the microphone, and the cyranoid just has to repeat what they hear 
in their ear. So that the source knows what is going on, the cyranoid 
also wears a microphone which transmits everything it hears back to the 
source. In this way one person can control the utterances of another 
unbeknownst to other people. While the headsets used by Milgram were 
conspicuous and limited to transmitting verbal data, now, it is possible 
to use incredibly inconspicuous equipment to transmit both verbal 
instruction and for the source to receive a video stream of what the 
cyranoid is seeing. The internet means that the cyranoid and the source 
can be separated by huge distances, with sources simply ‘logging in’ via 
the web to a given cyranoid, being able to see and hear what the 
cyranoid hears and sees, and then being able to transmit thoughts to the 
cyranoid or living, breathing avatar.

The audiences are invited to participate in a social event cum 
performance seminar and experience being cyranoids, synchronoids or 
sources...

ALEX GILLESPIE holds a PhD in Social Psychology from the University of 
Cambridge. His research concerns the Self and self-reflection and 
explores the social interactional and cultural basis of the self. He is 
a Lecturer at Stirling University and, currently, Co-chair of the 
Organising Committee for the Fifth International Conference on the 
Dialogical Self.

BRIAN O'NEILL is a clinical psychologist at Southern General Hospital, 
Glasgow. He is interested in cognitive impairments, the disability they 
cause and how assistive technology for cognition might provide useful 
treatments. He also is founding member of Thunder Bug sound system.

ROBB MITCHELL is an artist, curator and events organiser who has 
exhibited and lectured widely in the UK and abroad, among other venues 
in: Market Gallery (Glasgow), Edinburgh College of Art, Intermedia 
Gallery (Glasgow), Galerie Bortiers (Brussels), Artspace (Sydney), FACT 
(Liverpool), Mediabath (Helsinki), ICA (London), CCA (Glasgow), National 
Museum of Scotland (Edinburgh), Ars Electronica (Linz) and Eyebeam (NYC).



-- 

THE THURSDAY CLUB is an open forum discussion group for anyone 
interested in the theories and practices of cross-disciplinarity, 
interactivity, technologies and philosophies of the state-of-the-art in 
today’s (and tomorrow’s) cultural landscape(s).


THURSDAY CLUB BOARD

MIGUEL ANDRES-CLAVERA
PhD Candidate Goldsmiths Digital Studios; Member of Social Technology 
and Cultural Interfaces Research Group.

MARIA CHATZICHRISTODOULOU [aka MARIA X], Thursday Club Programme Manager
PhD Candidate Goldsmiths Digital Studios; Sessional Lecturer Birkbeck 
FCE; Curator; Producer.

BRONAC FERRAN
Director of boundaryobject.org; Member of DCMS Research and KT 
taskgroup; Director of Interdisciplinary Arts at Arts Council England 
until March 2007.

JANIS JEFFERIES, Thursday Club Convener
Professor of Visual Arts, Department of Computing, Goldsmiths; 
Co-director Goldsmiths Digital Studios; Director Constance Howard 
Resource and Research Centre in Textiles; Curator; Artist.

SARAH KEMBER
Dr.; Reader in New Technologies of Communication, Department of Media 
and Communications, Goldsmiths College; Writer.

MICHELA MAGAS
PhD Candidate Goldsmiths Digital Studios; Co-director Stromatolite 
Design Studio.

CARRIE PAECHTER
Professor of Educational Studies, Goldsmiths College; Dean of the 
Goldsmiths Graduate School.

ROBERT ZIMMER
Professor of Computing, Goldsmiths College; Co-director Goldsmiths 
Digital Studios.


For more information check http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/gds/events.php or 
email Maria X at drp01mc at gold.ac.uk

To find Goldsmiths check http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/find-us/

-- 
Maria Chatzichristodoulou [aka maria x] PhD Art and Computational Technologies  Goldsmiths Digital Studios skype: mariax_gr www.cybertheater.org