[spectre] New Thurdsay Club Season - Goldsmiths, London

Mon Jan 14 19:12:48 CET 2008

 Dear All,

Happy 2008. Please find here info re our forthcoming Thursday Club events
at Goldsmiths. I hope to see you there.

Best
Maria X

::

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

Supported by the Goldsmiths DIGITAL STUDIOS and the Goldsmiths GRADUATE
SCHOOL

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

FREE, ALL ARE WELCOME

*31 JANUARY with JOE BANKS / DISINFORMATION
:
Rorschach Audio *

Through his ground-breaking Disinformation project (active since 1995),
noise DJ and installation artist Joe Banks pioneered the use of
electromagnetic (radio) noise from sources such as live mains electricity,
lightning, industrial and IT hardware, laboratory equipment, trains,
magnetic storms and the sun as the raw material of musical and fine-art
publications, exhibits and events. Disinformation has been the subject of
ten UK solo exhibitions, experienced by over 100,000 people and described
by The Guardian as “some of the most beautiful installations around.

Banks will be demonstrating the illusions of sound discussed in his MIT
Press published research project “Rorschach Audio.” "Rorschach Audio"
argues that credulous interpretations of EVP research (which are
commonplace in contemporary art) are at best examples of wilful
self-delusion, at worst examples of outright fraud. "Rorschach Audio"
offers the primary hypothesis
that an understanding of the relevant aspects of psychoacoustics provides
a complete explanation for most EVP recordings, and a secondary hypothesis
that an informed understanding of these processes is as important to
understanding the emergent field of sound art as studies of optical
illusions have historically been to understanding visual art.

"Rorschach Audio - Ghost Voices and Perceptual Creativity" Leonardo Music
Journal, The MIT Press 2001, and "Rorschach Audio - Art and Illusion for
Sound" Strange Attractor Journal volume 1, Strange Attractor 2004.
"Rorschach Audio" is COPYRIGHT Joe Banks.

(text from Kinetika Museum and spectre mailing list)

-- 

*7 FEBRUARY with KATE PULLINGER & CHRIS JOSEPH
:
Flight Paths: a networked book*

"I have finished my weekly supermarket shop, stocking up on provisions for
my three kids, my husband, our dog and our cat.  I push the loaded trolley
across the car park, battling to keep its wonky wheels on track.  I pop
open the boot of my car and then for some reason, I have no idea why, I
look up, into the clear blue autumnal sky.  And I see him.  It takes me a
long moment to figure out what I am looking at.  He is falling from the
sky.  A dark mass, growing larger quickly.  I let go of the trolley and am
dimly aware that it is getting away from me but I can’t move, I am stuck
there in the middle of the supermarket car park, watching, as he hurtles
toward the earth.  I have no idea how long it takes – a few seconds, an
entire lifetime – but I stand there holding my breath as the city goes
about its business around me until

He crashes into the roof of my car."

The car park of Sainsbury’s supermarket in Richmond, southwest London,
lies directly beneath one of the main flight paths into Heathrow Airport.
Over the last decade, on at least five separate occasions, the bodies of
young men have fallen from the sky and landed on or near this car park.
All these men were stowaways on flights from the Indian subcontinent who
had believed that they could find a way into the cargo hold of an airplane
by climbing up into the airplane wheel shaft.  No one can survive this
journey. “Flight Paths” seeks to explore what happens when lives collide –
the airplane stowaway and the fictional suburban London housewife, quoted
above.   This project will tell their stories; it will be a work of
digital fiction, a networked book, created on and through the internet.
The project will include a web iteration that opens up the research
process to the outside world, inviting discussion of the large array of
issues the project touches on.

Questions raised by this project include: what are the possibilities for
new narrative forms? How do we “write to be seen” or “write to be heard”
when creating multimedia narratives, and can we imagine writing to be
smelled, tasted, felt? What are the effects of collective authorship
across multiple forms?

KATE PULLINGER works both in print and new media.  Her most recent novels
include A Little Stranger (2006) and Weird Sister (1999).  Her current
digital fiction projects include her collaboration with Chris Joseph
(babel) on 'Inanimate Alice', a multimedia episodic digital fiction and
'Venus Redemption', a game for female casual gamers.  Pullinger is Reader
in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University.

CHRIS JOSEPH is a digital writer and artist who has created solo and
collaborative work as babel. His past projects include 'Inanimate Alice'
(with Kate Pullinger), an award-winning series of multimedia stories; 'The
Breathing Wall' (with Kate Pullinger and Stefan Schemat), a digital novel;
and 'Animalamina', a collection of interactive multimedia poetry for
children. He is editor of the post-dada magazine and network 391.org, and
a founding member of The 404, a network of artists. He is currently
Digital Writer in Residence at De Montfort University, Leicester.

--

*28 FEBRUARY with ELENA COLOGNI
:
The Film As Document In (Of) Real Time*

A meta-linguistic performative experiment.

Key questions:
1. In my video live installations I investigate the perception of time
(psychological time ), non simultaneous artist and audience interchange in
liveness, and the production of the video document. Live recording,
pre-recording and their transmission, as overlapping layers of
representation of time, unfold in duration.
2. I am now starting to contextualising the recent work, which I believe
challenges the early Bergsonian differentiation between memory and
perception based on the assumption that the former is linked to the past
(representation) and the latter to the present (action) (as in latest
Deleuzean scholar Guerlac ’s book).
3. I also contribute to the debate on performance documentation in
parallel to recent Auslander’s publication : embedding the document (eg.:
video recording) in the event allows audience to witness its very
production, thus emphasising the document’s ‘performativity’ aspect.

ELENA COLOGNI is an art practitioner. Currently Research Fellow at York St
John University, her PhD ‘The Artist’s Performative Practice Within The
Anti-Oculatcentric Discourse’ is from Central Saint Martins College of Art
and Design (CSM), London. After the post-doc AHRC and CSM awarded project
'Present Memory and Liveness in delivery and reception of video
documentation during performance art events', she was at Glasgow Centre
for Contemporary Arts for a Creative Lab residency focusing on questions
of migrations, remoteness and transmission of information over time and
space. She is active in the debate on practice as research methodologies,
as well as the relationship between performance and new media. Her artwork
has been presented internationally.

-- 

*13 MARCH with ANNA HOWITT
:
The Empty Space Gallery*

The Empty Space Gallery exists to foster creativity, and encourage debate
about what ‘art’ is and what ‘artists’ are. It’s a novel way of
encouraging people to engage with this thing we call ‘art’ and what it
might be. Ultimately it is an experiment in ‘art’, ‘artists’, those that
believe in them and those that think they are. The Empty Space Gallery can
also be considered an anonymous art fair, where more established and
well-known artists share the same space and audience as unknown doodlers.

How does The Empty Space Gallery work?

Individuals, whether ‘artists’ or not, are invited to submit anything they
deem to be ‘art’, in any medium whatsoever. The purpose of the experiment
is to gain some insight into, not so much how work is created, but how it
is received, consumed, and engaged with. The aim is to uncover some of the
processes we employ in order to decide whether something is ‘art’ or not.

Once the ‘works’ are received they are catalogued and sealed in plain
white A4 envelopes. Only these envelopes are placed on display; no details
of the ‘artist’ are available at this time. Visitors to the gallery are
invited to pick, at random, any envelope they choose and own whatever they
find inside.
In addition, visitors are also invited to create an ‘artwork’ there and
then, for inclusion in the gallery, which is then passed on again to
another visitor.

ANNA HOWITT is artistic director of The Forward Company, an
interdisciplinary arts company based in Berkshire.  She also is an arts
and literary reviewer.  She finished her MA in Contemporary Arts at the
Manchester Metropolitan University in 2001 and has since had a residency
at the South Street Arts Centre in Reading (2003-4).

-- 

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 & Computational Technologies
15 Rodmell
Regent Square
London
WC1H 8HX