Exhibition: The Part in the Story Where a Part Becomes a Part of Something Else, Witte de With | Center for Contemporary Art, 22 May - 17 August 2014, Rotterdam

Photo courtesy of Anne Schwalbe

The BiM team relish a little garnish of intertextuality with our intertextuality and thus couldn't resist flagging this quirky and fleeting morsel in Rotterdam over the next few months. "The Part Where a Part Becomes a Part of Something Else" at the Witte de With | Center for Contemporary Art, exhibiting from 22 May to 17 August of this year, promises to deliver on its title by both "spinning off" from and playing epilogue to their now closing long-term program "Moderation(s)", which teamed The Netherlands with Hong Kong to produce some stunning and considered work.

Over forty artists from around the world come together to conceive what it means to interpret, moderate and transmit. Amongst the associations, "time, duration and space", "memory and inscription", "transformation", "pleasure" and "encounters" take centre-stage, all of which themes developed organically throughout "Moderation(s)" over its two-year stint at the Witte de With.

"An epilogue is the final chapter at the end of a story. It can occur a significant period of time after the main plot has ended, and may offer scenes only tangentially related to the subject of the story. An epilogue can continue in the same narrative style and perspective as the preceding story, although occasionally the form can be drastically different from the overall story."

 Celebrating the flows and divergences from its mother-project, "The Part Where a Part Becomes a Part of Something Else" savours a messy, entangled process of conversation of works between, amongst, and becoming other works, produced by artists, curators and audiences who have had almost two years of creative dialogue to feed upon.

Read more about the exhibition and their concurrent public program on the gallery website. Also included is a fairly thorough exhibition guide and information on the previous project "Moderation(s) for those who choose to read further.

Exhibitions: Aquatopia: The Imaginary of the Ocean Deep, Tate St Ives, 12 October 2013-26 January 2014 / Sound Versus System, Kunsthall Oslo, 19 October-21 December 2013

Juergen Teller, Björk, Spaghetti Nero, Venice (2007)

BiM spotlights two fascinating European exhibitions this week: Aquatopia: The Imaginary of the Ocean Deep, a major artistic retrospective on the vagueries of the sea, held at the Tate St Ives in Cornwall until 26 January; and Sound Versus System, a series of screenings, performances, talks and accompanying exhibition at the Kunsthall Oslo ending 21 December of this year.

The ambitious subject matter of the Tate St Ive's Aquatopia allows for an expansive coverage of aesthetic history. Fresh from the Nottingham Contemporary where it has resided for the past three months, the newly installed exhibition at the Tate St Ives (perfectly overlooking Porthmeor Beach) features works spanning from Katsushika Hokusai, J. M. W. Turner and Lucien Freud to Wangechi Mutu, Simon Starling and Marvin Gaye (Spartacus) Chetwynd, with many more between. Claiming that "Ocean myths both ancient and modern have been shaped by conquest and colonialism, and more recently by the tide of gender politics", it is perhaps unsurprising to find their printed catalogue brimming with not only literary excerpts but also essays from visual culture and historical theorists, writers, entertainers and more.

Drifting further north-east of Britain, Oslo's Kunsthall has its own busy schedule of events with Sound Versus System, featuring performances, talks screenings, art pieces and anything else that might "explore the potential of impure and hybrid forms, experimental relationships between sound and image, and the artistic disruption of both aesthetic and social structures".

The nine-week series of events and exhibition include the screening of a Norwegian film The Stone Wood Witches (1976) directed by Bredo Greve, which had been previously suppressed for being anti-proprietary and anti-Christian, as well as a major presentation of the forty-year oeuvre of experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer. Besides this, expect numerous improvised concerts, films and sound pieces, and a cinematic selection by Kenneth Goldsmith gathered under the guiding principle: "Easy is the New Difficult: A Manifesto for a Non-resistant Art".

Conference: Touring Consumption 2013, 24-5 October, Karlsruhe

Karlsruhe provides the opportunity to talk critically about tourism, tourist practices and traversing spaces in October of this year at the "Touring Consumption 2013" conference hosted by Karlshochschule International University. Embracing an expansive notion of mobilities and travel, the conference aims to "confront spatial, performative and cultural interrelations between tourism and social/economic behaviour"  in order to discuss the complexities which might be involved in concepts of "touring consumption".

The call for papers for Touring Consumption 2013 have closed but registration is still available on their website. It will feature around thirty speakers, some interactive workshops and a "surprise tour", along with three keynote speakers: prolific academic in mobilities and theories of tourism John Urry, human geographer Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt and sociologist Steve Miles, all of whom closely engage with cultures and theories of consumption in their critical writings.

For further details on the conference outlines, refer to the website. Co-organiser of the conference Desmond Wee has also been interviewed by Patrick Breitenbach on a Karlsdialoge podcast (found here), in which he talks about his approach to tourism analysis generally, suntan lotion, fake beaches, couch-surfing and AirBnB, as well as the conference aims and a handful of other related subjects.

"... one of the things this conference tries to do is to look at the notion of practice: how tourism is practiced; how it moves; how we look at flows of information; flows of people. ... It's about representations also, but it's how representations evolved ... How ideas are co-produced and reproduced; how new meanings emerge. This conference tries to put that in perspective, and [investigate] how different spaces are being consumed."

Conference: Ordinary/Everyday/Quotidian, 26-7 September, York

Organisers for the two-day, interdisciplinary conference   "Ordinary/Everyday/Quotidian" at the University of York are currently calling for abstracts. The conference seeks to bring the quotidian onto the stage of academic debate and, by doing so, asks that we focus the rigors of critique upon the usually unnoticed or undetectable. Participants are encouraged

"to ponder, celebrate, and critique the quotidian, ranging from the furtive pleasures of pop to the dubious delights of junk: “Does it glow at the core with personal heat, with signs of one’s deepest nature, clues to secret yearnings, humiliating flaws? What habits, fetishes, addictions, inclinations? What solitary acts, behavioral ruts?”

The event has three confirmed keynotes - John Roberts (History of Art), Jennifer Baird (Classics and Archaeology) and Bryony Randall (English) - and will finish with a colloquium peopled by a further five academics from various humanities-based areas of study. With a keen interdisciplinary slant and compelling subject matter, the conference promises to provide a platform for some fascinating inquiry and dialogue.

Abstracts are due by 16 August and are welcome from any and/or multiple discipline(s). More information can be found on the website.

Conference & Exhibition: On Walking, 28-29 June 2013, Sunderland

At the end of June of this year, the University of Sunderland's Walking, Art, Landskip and Knowledge (W.A.L.K.) research group and the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art (Sunderland) feature the multidisciplinary conference "On Walking". Following the momentum of a surge of academic and artistic interest in walking as a practice within the last decade, the two-day conference "seeks to examine and interrogate the practice and process of walking in all its cultural, ethnographic, poetic, and geographical ramifications." Timothy Ingold will bring his work on walking, ecology and perception to the floor as featured kenote at the conference, and a joint exhibition will take place at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, entitled "Walk On: From Richard Long to Janet Cardiff, 40 Years of Art Walking". The call for papers is unfortunately closed for this conference; registration details for all attendees will be posted to the conference blog shortly.

 

The exhibition, which presents works that "start with an artist taking a journey on foot, staking out new artistic territory – whether using the street as their studio, or the landscape as a place to inhabit and change through their presence, rather than merely represent at a distance", opens in June, coinciding with the Festival of the North East. It displays the works of artists such as Marina Abramovic, Chris Drury, James Hugonin, Ingrid Pollard and others, and will also feature curator and artists talks/walks throughout the exhibition period.

Radio Segment: This American Life, "Mapping", 4 September 1998



David Wood, map of the neighborhood’s phone, cable, and power lines

 Back in 1998, Radio program This American Life produced an hour-long segment entitled "Mapping", tracing five different techniques of mapping following the senses. The first twenty-four minutes are particularly interesting, involving interviews conducted with cartographer Denis Wood on his practices of mapping a myriad of different elements in his neighbourhood (from traffic signs to Halloween pumpkins - see a few examples here), and Toby Lester on his charting of ambient noises and drones produced by everyday machinery, both of which in some way seek to reinterpret one's expectations of cartographical practices.

These are followed by three stories, spanning the final thirty-four minutes of the bracket, which offer slightly flatter stories on the electronic nose developed by Cyrano Sciences (interesting when taken in context of the technology's further development over the past decade in various industrial sectors), on one woman's compulsive and hypochondriacal self-examinations of her body by touch, and on a food writer's mission in the 1980s to map all the eateries of Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles.

The stories can be streamed through the This American Life website as separate recordings or read in transcript form. 

"I'm looking at a map now that's got all of the overhead lines mapped on it, and it is a crazy star field. It's the power lines, the telephone lines, and the cable lines. And there's a hierarchy, of course. They flow into the neighborhood from outside the neighborhood. And as they move into individual homes, they break down. They shatter, so that the homes are all like the ends of little, teeny capillaries. ... It is a living organism."

Denis Wood

Recorded Lecture: François Laruelle, "Pour une philosophie dite ‘contemporaine’ (Towards a Philosophy Deemed ‘Contemporary’)"

Hiroshi Sugimoto Lightning Fields 168, 2009, © Hiroshi Sugimoto, Courtesy The Pace Gallery

Courtesy of the London Graduate School and the Backdoor Broadcasting Company, we can now enjoy the ambitious and compelling project canvassed by François Laruelle in his talk on 9 May of this year, entitled "Pour une philosophophie dite 'contemporaine'". Designed as a preface to a lecture he delivered at Goldsmiths the next day ("Non-photographie, vers une interprétation quantique"), Laruelle here carefully anatomises the arguments underpinning his call for a form of contemporary philosophy which rebalances the relationship between philosophy and mathematics, and predicates itself on the vectorial and the quantic rather than the object.

His talk, a most useful foreward to his other dense works (some of which have recently or will soon be published in English translation), is equally a series of departures as it is actively propositional. Concerning the arc of his project at large, he notes: "I had to limit philosophy to give way to mathematics; and I had to limit topology to give way to algebra". Indeed, Laruelle underscores decisive points of divergence away from theorists such as Deleuze, Derrida and Meillassoux alongside his deviation from the mascroscopy of the "modern" (i.e, Plato, Decartes, Spinoza, Badiou) in preference of a "contemporary" philosophy which is worked through a relation with the physical by means of "vectoriality". He enquires:

"[W]hat can be invented with history's heritage, what do we do with it? Do we reproduce, remember, smooth, clean the glass or the mirror of language, leaving as always philosophy to be reflected in itself and to auto-model itself? Or do we incline it, 'encline' it (being 'enclined towards', the inclination as Leibnizian concept) and so free up its inventive forces rather than those forces of repression? I put myself in the position of a scientist or an artist for whom philosophy is at once object and materials ... Generic humanity is not a tradition, but an orientation that comes or under-comes"

The lecture can be found archived at the Backdoor Broadcasting Company, where a pdf of the English translation (also distributed to his listeners on the day) can also be downloaded. Laruelle adds, digresses and extrapolates in the talk itself, thus it is worthwhile to both read and listen.

Lecture: Stuart Elden, "Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power", Edinburgh, 5 July

Stuart Elden will be staying in Edinburgh for the Royal Geography Society Annual International Conference 2012, currently ongoing within the George Square area of the University of Edinburgh. His lecture, "Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power", will take place from 5:20-7:00pm on 5 July in the Appleton Tower, Lecture Theatre 4. Elden's talk will traverse the literatures of vertical geopolitics and the work of Peter Sloterdijk in order to rethink the geopolitical implications of the third dimension.

"As Foucault suggests, 'the vertical is not one of the dimensions of space, it is the dimension of power'. The world does not just exist as a surface; security goes up and down; space is volumetric."

For further information concerning Elden's lecture can be found here. Further information concerning the conference can be found here.

Exhibition: Report (Not Announcement) (Online)

After some minor techincal difficulties, Ky is back once again on the BIM blog to showcase Report (Not Announcement), the 2006 project curated by Binna Choi, the current CASCO Office of Art, Design and Theory, and provided by the electronic flux corporation (e-flux) and basis voor actuele kunst (BAK).

Comprised of a series of thirty-nine pdfs, the reports gather together photographs, diagrams and various forms of text created by forty-eight "cultural producers" in continuous states of travel and fluid displacement. Disjointed ruminations share space with short anecdotes, amusing images rub shoulders with more or less self-indulgent fragments of recorded thoughts, and slightly confused narratives accompany obscure textual non sequiturs. 

Setting these downloadable reports one after another like a line of alphabetically-branded train carriages on a scrolling frame, In both form and content, Report (Not Announced) is unanchored. It hoards ambiguous positions, seeking subjects in non-specific localities, collecting the productions of such people while they move between their own creative productions, and quietly commenting on the illogical excesses and intensities of travelling somehow between the places they want to/need to/should be.

"... It is no longer a marketing faux pas to show death and dismemberment while you are belted in to your seat, staring, because as you may have realized, YOU ARE NOT REALLY HERE, NOT REALLY YOU."

Martha Rosler, "Addendum"

From: the air to or from Europe 

Find this project where it is hosted on the BAK website, where readers are encouraged to download, print and share the contributions.