SEMINAR: THE TIME IT TAKES TO
TRUE - BOOK
10:00-14:00 Goldsmiths Ben Pimlott, Seminar Rooms
Leader: MINE KAYLAN, Goldsmiths/University of Sussex
"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 - BOOK
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?
SATURDAY
8th December
SEMINAR:
PERFORMANCE AND PORNOGRAPHY - BOOK
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 - BOOK
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.