Book: Luke Bennett and Katja Hock, Scree

 

 

In the tail end of 2013, Luke Bennett and Katja Hock released their collaborative effort Scree, currently available for download from Bennett's blog. Launching from an enquiry into an ordinary house brick sheltered in his garage, the pursuit to take it "back to the place of its birth" carry Bennett to peculiar wasteland places layered together in an accumulating escarpment: landfill, abandoned skiers' dry slope, forgotten gas works, ghost town and more.

"When I started out on this project I thought I'd be writing about the absence of the excavated matter, but the more I have searched for and peered into these 'holes' the more I have realised that what has happened here is the moving around of matter - across local space, across form and through time. Nothing has disappeared, it has just changed state or location."

Written in a self-identified psychogeographic style, Bennet and Hock's piece reads like a memoir replete with haunting images of space and memory. It includes, in the last handful of pages, a back-and-forth Q&A-style dialogue between Bennett and Hock ruminating on their different styles of approach to the project. The "'coffee-table' art book" can be downloaded as a pdf from here.

Exhibition & Events: The Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret, London

Tucked away up the stairs of a little English Baroque church in Southwark, London lies the historic Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret, the oldest operating theatre in Europe. Built into the herb garret of St Thomas's Hospital over 180 years ago and rediscovered in 1956, this little handful of rooms crammed full of Victorian medical oddities is a modest but fascinating counterpart to the Surgeons' Hall Museum in Edinburgh.

Like that museum, the Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret also hosts a packed schedule of lectures and events on a variety of medicine-related topics, including the history of pathology, after-death photography and the operated body in film and literature. A detailed list of their events for the next two months can be found on the museum website, along with detailed histories of St Thomas's, Guy's and Evelina Children's Hospitals in London, resources for the history of medicine, a digital catalogue of the objects on display at the museum, and more.

Thanks go to the blog post on Penny Dreadful Delights for giving us the opportunity to know about this obscure but special space.

Conference: A Feeling for Things - Jane Bennett, 4-5 October, London



Birkbeck (University of London) offers
another fantastic two-day event in early October, "A Feeling for Things: A Conversation around the work of Jane Bennett". The evening of 4 October will feature a public lecture by Jane Bennett, some of whose work we have already featured on this blog here and here. This will be followed by a full-day workshop on 5 October. Drawing upon academics from a variety of backgrounds - Eileen Joy, João Florêncio, Jussi Parikka, Nigel Clark, Milla Tiainen, Lisa Baraitser and Michael O’Rourke - the event promises to be both a fascinating conversation between politics and philosophy, and a likely crowd-puller.

The public lecture will offer insight into Bennett's current research. The workshop on 5 October seeks to investigate the possible resonances and feedback between the politics of Bennett's work and a variety of other disciplines:

"This two day event makes the writing of Jane Bennett a vibrant matter for discussion across the fields of philosophy, psychosocial studies, political theory, cultural studies, literary theory, visual theory and performance studies among others. In particular, the focus will be on how Bennett’s explorations of vitalism, anthropocentrism, agency, biopolitics and new materialisms contribute to the emerging and fraught conversations between feminist and queer theory, Object Oriented Ontology and Speculative Realism."

Registration to the workshop on 5 October costs £20 for students and Birkbeck staff, £40 for all other attendees, with attendance at the public lecture mandatory for all workshop participants. Links to registration are provided on the event webpage. The public lecture on 4 October is free but booking is required - registration to this is handled through Eventbrite.

Performance & Exhibition: Ruth Clinton, Niamh Moriarty, Michael O'Rourke & Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Rotator

Pallas Projects in Dublin city currently contains the collaborative exhibition by artists Ruth Clinton & Niamh Moriarty. The show, aptly coined with the palindrome Rotator, loops around secrets, crypts, water and topographies in a variety of media forms; it explores the lesser-known currents of one of the city's more familiar waterways (the River Poddle), records endless passageways of/in brick, and commemorates the hidden stories of the underground.

 

The rich textures of Clinton and Moriarty's exhibition - dizzingly wet, mossy and stony - are sensationally enlivened in a recorded "tour" of the exhibition performed by the artists themselves, Michael O'Rourke and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (read by fellow artist John Ryan) on a wintery March evening. Beginning with an introduction by O'Rourke, the tour takes the form of a question-and-answer conversation between the participants inflected by the exhibition works. "Hydrocryptographic", O'Rourke describes Rotator, and the four performers draw upon Serres, Cixous, Derrida, myths of the giant Balor, Blake, T.S. Eliot and a particuarly savvy twenty-questions AI algorithm to trace the damp crevasses of the show within this 45 minute audio recording.

 

Audio of the tour can be found here. The exhibition catalogue is downloadable here. Further pictures and descriptions of the exhibition can be found in the artists' blog posts, Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty as well as the Pallas Projects website, where may also be downloaded an information sheet related to Rotator and a podcast interview with the artists recorded by RTE Lyric FM.

"Rotator is more attuned to the inclinations and glossolalic streaming together of matter. The exhibition is an exercise in diverculvertation as we drift from territories of the infinitesimally small - our selves and bodily matter composed mostly of water - to the infinitely vast - rivers, seas, oceans, the sky, moon and stars."

Conference: Body Projects Conference, 9 March 2013, York

 

The often contestatory themes of body modification and feminism meet for a day of discussion at the University of York on 9 March 2013. The "Body Projects Conference" adopts a wide definition of body modification - "from shaved legs to buttock implants; from the honed 'fit' body to 'fat-reducing' surgery; from self-tanning to pro-ana; from piercings to gender reassignment, and much more" within an interdisciplinary academic environment.

 

Organisers are currently seeking proposals for twenty-minute presentations and ideas for performances and/or artwork, to be submitted by 10 December 2012. The call for papers can be found here. The program and guest speakers have yet to be announced, but further details will soon be posted on their website.

"It has been claimed that the unaltered female body is an unacceptable entity in the contemporary west and that the female body physically bears the marks of contemporary culture through the modification enacted upon it. The body is part of the embodied experience of an individual, but also, and increasingly, an object for critique."

 

Recorded Lecture: Jane Bennett, "Powers of the Hoard: Notes on Material Agency"

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

In 2010, Jane Bennett published Vibrant Matter (read the blog post here), a fascinating foray into the agency of things which challenged readers to think beyond the confines of an unquestioned anthropocentric perspective.

If Vibrant Matter proffered the rough layout or skeleton of such a concept, Bennett's talk, "Powers of the Hoard: Notes on Material Agency", begins a process of enfleshment, building some theoretical muscle on top of that bone. Continuing her project of "thing-power" through a distinctly vital materialist lens, her discussion in this presentation at the Imperial War Museum in London on 3 December 2010 asks the crucial question of what kind of lexicon is available to us to acknowledge and explore the active power of things when language itself tends towards anthropocentrism and instrumentalist positionings.

Propensity, action, trajectory, vital impetus, assemblage - Bennett cycles through a host of possible vocabularies before fixing on the concept of the hoarder. The various attitudes towards objects demonstrated by "extreme" hoarders on the A&E reality television show Hoarders, she argues, gesture towards the intercorporeality of things and humans within the amasser's environment. In such a perception, the self is both porous and aggregate, itself a collection of a vast number of attendant things.

"A vibrant materialist would say that hoarders have exceptionally acute awareness to the extent to which all bodies are intertwined with those in its vicinity. They sense that a variety of 'its' make up a self and that the 'its' possess a vibrancy formerly thought to be unique to organic bodies." 

Bennett's talk in London has been archived on the Backdoor Broadcasting Company website and can be streamed or downloaded from here, along with slideshows from her presentation. You can also track the evolution of this project of lexical accretion by listening to or viewing her other talks on the topic at ICI Berlin in May 2011 and at The New School on 13 September 2011.

Exhibition: "Invisible: Art about the Unseen, 1957-2012", 12 June - 5 August, London

The Haward Gallery at the Southbank Centre in London has now launched its new exhibition, Invisible: Art about the Unseen, 1957-2012. Collecting together samples of art exploring ideas related to the invisible and the hidden, from productions by well-known twentieth-century artists to contemporary works.

The contributions of these 26 artists, including Yves Klein (pictured here in his The Void Room), Teresa Margolles and Yoko Ono as a few of the more recognisable names, prod at the limits of visibility, presence, the public and perception, among other themes.

Tonight at the Hayward, artistic contributor to the exhibition Jeppe Hein talks about invisibility and smell in relation to his installation; and on 20 June, contributor Tehching Hsieh, performer of incredible durational pieces, discusses his work. Special exhibition tours are also being conducted on 28 June, 29 June and 12 July. Entry fee is set at a reasonable £8 for adults, with discounts for students, youths and seniors. See here for further details.

"Invisible ultimately reveals that there is no limit to the possible meanings of invisibility in art. Works that share a similar blankness can convey remarkably varied content. An empty room or unoccupied plinth may function as a sign of mystical sensibility, a haunting past, or a cursed presence. ... And almost inevitably most of these works highlight the fact that our interpretation and experience of art is often contingent on information that exists apart from an object itself."

Article: Julia Reinhard Lupton, "Thinking with Things: Hannah Woolley to Hannah Arendt"

Just for this month, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies is offering the the whole content of their newest issue of Spring 2012 - entitled "Becoming Media", edited by Jen Boyle and Martin Foys" - for free download. Contributions include Eugene Thacker's "Wayless Abyss: Mysticism, Mediation and Divine Nothingness" and a fascinating cross-media experiment by Whitney Anne Trettien, "Plant Animal Book: Magnifying a Microhistory of Media Circuits", which is accompanied by an additional digital essay-cum-gloss to be read relationally with the postmedieval text.

Julia Reinhard Lupton's quirky and reflective article "Thinking with Things: Hannah Woolley to Hannah Arendt" is another postmedieval offering in this issue available online throughout March. Lupton spices up seventeenth-century Hannah Woolley's cookbook The Queen-like Closet (first published in 1670) through a peculiar comparative proximity with Hannah Arendt's concept of "judgment", carefully filtered through the register of actor-network theory and object oriented ontology. Through such a perview, Lupton encourages not only a wider reading of Arendt's philosophy but also (and perhaps more primarily) a subtle re-evaluation of the generally quotidian task of cooking and the tactile engagements which form the basis for judgment in the course of preparing food for a table. 

"Bringing the two Hannahs to the same table helps me unfold the preparation of meals as engaging at once a worldly environment and social scripts, setting the scenes in which action, work and labor enter into the most intimate proximity, without, however, losing their distinctions altogether."

 

Conference: London Conference in Critical Thought 2012, London, 29-30 June 2012

The London Conference in Critical Thought host their inaugural conference on 29-30 June of this year, supported by the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. Engaging with the "critical" tradition, the LCCT is especially seeking out those who fall within the fringes and margins of their academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to share their work within a collaborative, interdisciplinary setting.

The conference is divided into sixteen streams (and one catchall, "general" stream), which focus on, inter alia, law and culture, objects and time, Deleuze, animality, cosmopolitics, critiquing critical theory and the ethics of radical politics. Further stream descriptions can be found on their website.

"The LCCT aims to provide an opportunity for those who frequently find themselves at the margins of their department or discipline to engage with other scholars who share theoretical approaches and interests. Interdisciplinary and inter-institutional, the conference hopes to foster emergent critical thought and provide new avenues for critically orientated scholarship and collaboration."

Held at Birkbeck College (University of London), the conference is free to all participants. Their call for papers and panels ends on 19 February, so those interested should send in their proposals very soon.

Recorded Lecture: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, "Feeling Stone"

"Stone hurts," Jeffrey Jerome Cohen begins his opening address entitled "Feeling Stone" for the Hearts and Stones collaboratory hosted by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions at the University of Melbourne, Australia in July 2011. His keynote ruminates with anecdotal openness on the possibilities of the radical readjustment to our entrenched anthropomorphicism which may occur in the encounter between stone and flesh.

Cohen describes the relation he seeks as a collaboratory of "experimenting, working and living together" between the agency of stone and the excitation of humans, in which the meeting with rock can destabilise a human-centric narrative of existence and give way to different, creative rethinking of ecologies, landscapes, texts and art. In the process of this reconceptualisation, he subtly weaves together the actor network theory of Bruno Latour with Graham Harman and Tim Morton's work on object oriented ontology and echoes of Jane Bennett's vibrant materialism (the last of which he engages with directly in the final section of his lecture) along with a liberal dose of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

The recording of his lecture is available online, along with an image capture file of Cohen's accompanying slideshow.

"Stone as monument is stone in movement, and by 'movement', I mean 'motion' that brings about connection that is desire, affect. But the question arises, where does that motion originate – from the human hands that perhaps fashion the monument, or from the stone itself?"

Recorded Lecture: William E. Connolly, "Two Images of Becoming: Whitehead, Nietzsche, and Cosmopolitics"

At the end of May of this year, the University of London and the University of Exeter hosted the conference event Time, Politics and Becoming devoted to William E. Connolly's text A World of Becoming, published by Duke University Press last year. Connolly's closing address and the ensuing discussion are now available for both streaming and download on the Backdoor Broadcasting Company website.

Connolly's lecture launches with a consideration of the speculative theophilosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, inflected by a comparative analysis with Friedrich Nietzsche's philology. Outlining Whitehead's exploration of the potential for creative change within entities through pluripotential entanglements and interinvolvement with other entities, Connolly advocates our own social, biological and, indeed, existential capacities to "extend our sensitivities" (and, in particular, to problematise the fragility of late capitalism and received experiences of time) which might result as a response to these human and non-human creative processes of change.

"In a fragile world of multiple attractions and repulsions that exceed our everyday practices of action-oriented perception (the Bergsonian distinction), we need to work upon ourselves to become more responsive: to the artistry of whales who compose music as they travel, to the complexity of bird powers of sonar navigation and migration .. to yeast as the vibrations it emits express unconscious feelings of pain when alcohol is poured on it."

Listen to the questions after the talk (the second file within the archive) for further extrapolation on the relationship between Whitehead and Deleuze, and a longer discusssion of Connolly's concept of late capitalism and its ensconced fragility.

The three panel talks from the conference - divided into the themes "Agency and Master", "The Ethical Sensibility of William E. Connolly" and "Immanence, Transcendence, Becoming" - are also available for online streaming and download.

Web: Biothing: Repository of Computational Design

Effervescent, undulating and curiously sonorous, the visuals created and displayed on biothing.org, primarily led by Alisa Andrasek ("experimental practitioner and research based educator of architecture and computational processes in design"), seem to span multiple gaps in the aesthetics of structure - abstract and concrete, biological and machinated, randomness and repetition, stasis and movement. Offering poetically proliferating architectures to experience and inhabit, Biothing/CONTINUUM research explores the question of where genetic growth, patterning and curvature intersects with the linearity of diagrammatics and computational replication in order to affect the ways in which forms and space are experienced.

The Biothing research archived online exhibits a rare combination of programming, textuality and visual expression based (importantly) in lived environments. As such, the functional and often in-situ element of each project provides fascinating interpretations of theory-meets-practice. Biothing projects include a critical rethinking of the rigid organisation of city-centre buildings, expanding the possibilities of sound composition software by introducing algorithmically based processes and producing new lightscapes to stimulate novel fields of perception of aquatic spaces.

"biothing/CONTINUUM research is exploring the shift from the technique-based approach that dominated generative practices within architecture in the recent past towards the more explicit computational approach by engaging with scripting directly in an open source manner - addressing a growing culture of collective computational knowledge emerging within a discipline. At the core of the work is an accumulative library of scripts and methods for their transcoding, applicable to the constraints of materials, structure, fabrication and assembly. Evolving algorithmic infrastructure allows a designer to work at the scale of information linked to various forms of materialization. Computational patterns are understood as deep in terms of their potential to produce expressions at various scales."

Book: Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter

This relatively new 2010 publication (Duke University Press) sees Jane Bennett critically extend the work of her earlier book, The Enchantments of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, Ethics (2001) into the interrogation of “thing-power” through the formation of a vital materialist perspective.

Bennett's anecdotal style finds a fitting model to poetically introduce the strange intimacy of her subject matter while simultaneously understating the ambitious trajectory of her text, which seeks to displace so many entrenched discourses surrounding issues such as the ontology of objects and matter, consumption, environmental politics and democracy.

Following, as Bennett herself identifies, “in the tradition of Democritus-Epicurus-Spinoza-Diderot-Deleuze” (xiii) (most especially Deleuze), Vibrant Matter segues from a meditation on the vitality of an ordinary gathering of items by a storm-drain grate - a work glove, oak pollen, a dead rat, a plastic bottle cap, a stick - to an ultimate consideration of the possibilities of forming a different kind of ethics premised on assemblages comprising of both human and non-human affective relations, and a different kind of agency which takes into account the powerful actant capabilities of "inanimate" matter.

"The aim is to articulate the elusive idea of a materiality that is itself heterogeneous, itself a differential of intensities, itself a life. In this strange, vital materialism, there is no point of pure stillness, no indivisible atom that is not itself aquiver with virtual force." (57)