Recorded Lecture: Akira Mizuta Lippit, "Like Cats and Dogs - Cinema and Catastrophe"

Ever since 'Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture' announced its open research program, it has been hard to dismiss its excellent line-up of speakers, both academics and artists. Amongst the names is that of Akira Mizuta Lippit, whose presentation "Like Cats and Dogs - Cinema and Catastrophe" at The Museum of Kyoto on 21 June 2013 was expanded into an essay published digitally in both Japanese and English.

Broaching such classic subjects as mixing metaphors, catastrophe and kitlers, Lippit performs his hallmark critical analysis with gusto on the films of D. W. Griffith, Leni Riefenstahl and Alain Resnais, quite cheekily linking catachresis, cats and filmic representation, and suggesting by the end, "Isn't every film image ultimately a cat?"

"But does a real cat (and cats are always real, it seems) have to be in every scene of catachresis? Is this the way to underscore the rhetoric as if there were some natural and thus non-catachrestic relation between the image of the cat and the trope of catachresis? Are cats the real figures of catachresis? Is a scene of catachresis without a cat incomplete, a catalexis?"

The essay can be found on the Parasophia website, available for download in ePub and pdf formats.

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.

Conference: Bodies beyond Borders. The Circulation of Anatomical Knowledge, 1750-1950, 7-9 January, Leuven

After a bit of upheaval, major relocation of the Bodies in Movement headquarters and two long, painful months of internet silence (during which time most of the BiM team curled up into a tiny, modem-less ball in the corner of an empty room and rocked back and forth, wailing in pitiful denial), we are happy to announce that the BiM blog is back online and on track for constant future updates.

And, to top off the list, we present a fascinating meld of history, medicine and humanities straight from Belgium's Leuven. Celebrating the birth of anatomist Andreas Vesalius 500 years ago, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven will play host to 'Bodies beyond Borders. The Circulation of Anatomical Knowledge, 1750-1950' on 7-9 January 2015.

The conference will fit in with two larger pursuits at KU Leuven: a research project on anatomy, scientific authority and the visualised body in medicine and culture in Belgium, 1780-1930, which investigates the history of anatomy in the country during the long nineteenth century; and an exhibition, 'Unravelling the Body. The Theatre of Anatomy', commemorating Vesalius and his influence on the anatomical tradition. However, further extending its scope, the conference seeks a wider conceptual and geographical focus:

Knowledge does not move by itself - it has to be carried. To better understand how anatomical knowledge moves from place to place, we will seek to trace the trajectories of its bearers.

The call for papers is open until 1 June 2014, with notification of acceptance distributed in early July. Organisers welcome contributions concerning the transit of anatomical knowledge in the widest interpretation of the phrase - from scientists, body parts and models to films, dissections and wall maps. Confirmed speakers include Sven Dupré, Helen Macdonald and many more. See the conference website for further details.

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.

Conference & Exhibition: London Conference in Critical Thought 2014, 27-8 June, London / Simon Fugiwara, Rebekkah (Display), 29 January - 28 March, London

It's been a bit of a hectic, crazy end of year, signalled by a disappearance of updates for over a whopping two months. Having settled down a little now, Ky is happy to report that we're back in action (hopefully) and mean to bring you more constant updates of all things to do with corporeality, movement and theory in the coming 2014 year. For our watermark first post for 2014, the Bodies in Movement crowd happily present a couple of conference and art-related treasures.

 

 

It's time again for the London Conference in Critical Thought for 2014, taking place this time at Goldsmiths, University of London. In its reliable fashion, the LCCT has aligned its stream areas to topics identified as carrying particular currency in the contemporary climate of critical theoretical engagement. The political and legal seem prominent this year, along with various strains of critical pedagogy. A full stream listing can be found on their website.

 

Stream proposals are now closed, but their call for papers stays open for submissions until 10 March 2014. Participation is completely free, which offers a nice incentive, but registration is mandatory.

 

 

Also in London, 59 Central Street Displays run by the Contemporary Art Society will feature Simon Fujiwara's Rebekkah, featuring 100 terracotta female soldiers modelled after a 16 year old girl from Hackney (predictably named Rebekkah) who was arrested for her participation in the 2011 London Riots. Rebekkah is the material product of a social experiment involving Rebekkah and Fujiwara, of which more can be read here. 

"Up to 100 figures were created in [an] assembly line technique, shifting Rebekkah to a new position: a representative of a new breed of British-born warrior and a soldier for social change."

Fujiwara will be at the Contemporary Art Society at 7pm on 30 January to talk about his piece. The event is sold out but they are accepting names to their waiting list. Further information can be found here.

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".

Article: Liz Kinnamon, "London Riots, Living Walls: Questions of Resistance in Late Capitalism"

Street Art vs. Capitalism by Escif in Grottaglie, Italy, 2011

Deleuzian-inspired e-journal Rhizomes dedicates the virtual pages of its most recent 2013 issue (no. 25) to the cultural and political potential of graffiti, where amongst its offerings (varying a little in quality and glowing exaltation of street art's potential) nestles Liz Kinnamon's incisive commentary, "London Riots, Living Walls: Questions of Resistance in Late Capitalism". Critically investigating the revolutionary potential of graffiti and rioting practices as political speech acts, Kinnamon takes two temporally proximate events in 2011 - the street art conference in Atlanta, Living Walls: The City Speaks and the riots across the ocean in the United Kingdom - to explore the loaded question: "In a neoliberal capitalist climate ... where capital is continuously, cannibalistically folding in, what becomes of attempts to find a way out?"

A lucid break-down of the consumerist atmosphere of the UK riots follows, and a surprisingly complementary reading with the officially-sanctioned graffiti happenings staged during the Living Walls conference. Kinnamon paints a sad picture of the blunted and sanitised evolution of these anti-authoritarian practices since the 1970s:

"We are fully planted in a time when resistance is co-opted, folded into capital, and rendered harmless. ... But even before someone trademarks and stamps a slogan from the latest peoples movement onto a t-shirt, many so-called rebellions bear an already-resemblance to the systems they allegedly oppose. The actors in the UK riots and Living Walls utilize and exhibit the same characteristics capitalist governmentality has conditioned in them."

Yet hope is not completely lost: Kinnamon leaves us with some space to salvage these modes of political speech (rioting, graffiti) from their integration into capital through the work of Rei Terada via Michel Foucault's concept of parrhesia. However, the forms which these speech acts adopt, it would seem, will always be precarious and ambivalent at best.

Rhizomes is an open-access journal. All the essays in the current issue are all freely downloadable from their website. Its archive is also worth a lengthy browse; it can be found here.

Project & Blog: MOUTH (Edia Connole & Scott Wilson)

 

As the academic spotlight shifts from the effects of eating - demonstrable in renewed interest in areas such as fat and anorexia studies - to the affects of eating (the posthuman, vibrant matter, sensory studies, etc.), the very tactility and phenomenal nature of such sensory activity sometimes seems in a crisis of disappearance under the weight of its own glosses. Enter, however, the collaborative project MOUTH, comprising of Edia Connole and Scott Wilson, which stubbornly refutes this fear through a challenging and unique mode of praxis. Slated as "an actionist art project in culinary divinomics", MOUTH currently performs provocative and spectacular gastro-theoretical fea(s)ts in Ireland and the United Kingdom.

 

MOUTH's most recent project of June 2013, teaming up with artist Jessie Pressley Jones and the Korean Society of Ireland under the umbrella of Dublin public art initiative The Prosperity Project, saw them co-host and co-cater the paradoxically sumptuous Scarcity Banquet. Entitled "LAND", after iconic Korean writer Pak Kyung-Ni's 25-year literary production of the same name (Toji), the culinary experiment radiated from the concepts of hunger and famine which haunt both the Irish and Korean cultural memory. LAND explicitly engaged with the Korean notion of han, which is "formed from sentiments of loss and rage at the severance of wholeness and continuity between self and history", in order to offer a radical restaging of hunger, dining, the social, the political.

 

In the pointed absence of famine, a lush dining hall in Dublin's centre bore witness to dish upon dish of things-we-do-not-eat (grass, acorns, ox heart) and things-we-dare-not-eat (worms, rat) served with artistry appealing to the contemporary gourmand and defiantly celebrated across long, festive tables. And to intensify the experience/ordeal and capitalising upon the multi-sensory nature of the event, Wojtek Doroszuk’s short film Festin - featuring the gradual, seemingly inexorable consumption of a heavily-laden, seventeenth-century banquet by a host of non-human actors - looped endlessly against a back wall in a warped reflection of the night's consumption.

"Hunger changes the world, transgresses the taboos that structure social identities and hierarchies, radically changing perspectives on what should and should not be eaten, and with whom one can and cannot eat. ... Moving from han to MOUTH, then, in the wake of the dead and insurgency of the land, this the latest installment of The Prosperity Project marks the desire for a banquet in which living and eating well is the best tribute and revenge."

Further information on LAND can be found at The Prosperity Project website. More on MOUTH and upcoming projects can be found via their MOUTH blog, which also accommodates records of past events, including some texts from the P.E.S.T. symposium of 2012 (which we blogged about here), and a talk given by Michael O'Rourke at the LAND event (forthcoming). Previous banquets include: "En Soiree Culinaire par Georges Bataille, pour RLII", exploring the ecstasy on the cusp of horror (and vice-versa) of Georges Bataille; a sacrilegious "Blackened Mass for Quentin Meillassoux" in which the mouth plays divinity; an irreverent "test of faith" in the ascetic tradition; and others.

 

Exhibition & Seminar: The Second Sex - A Visual Footnote, 25 May - 13 July, Noisy-le-Sec

Marianne Wex, LET’S TAKE BACK OUR SPACE.



Le Gallerie (Contemporary Art Centre, Noisy-le-Sec in the Eastern suburbs of Paris) exhibits The Second Sex - A Visual Footnote from 25 May to 13 July of this year. For those fortunate enough to be in the neighbourhood, this "visual essay" inspired by Simone de Beauvoir's book offers installations from established international (and notably, non-French) artists Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven, Marianne Wex and Ilene Segalove. Also in the mix are: throughout the exhibition duration, screenings of activist videos, documentaries, video art and experimental films plumbed from the archive at the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir; as a closing bonus on 15 June, a roundtable discussion with Nicole Fernández Ferrer from the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir, art critic and curator Elisabeth Lebovici and art historian Giovanna Zapperi; and later that day, a seminar in collaboration with Travelling Féministe.

 

 

More information concerning the exhibition can be found here (in French), including an information flyer and a longer release containing a "visual note" by Tobi Maier (in French and English).

 

 

 

Article: Bojana Cvejić, Marta Popivoda, Ana Vujanović and Bruno Latour, "A Conversation with Bruno Latour"

Making Things Public exhibition. Photo by Franz Wamhof.

Interviewers Bojana Cvejić, Marta Popivoda and Ana Vujanović delve into performance theory, politics and the public in this short interview with Bruno Latour, conducted at the end of 2011 and published in the most recent number of open-access TkH Journal for Performing Arts Theory (No. 20, 2012), devoted to the theme of Art and the Public Good.

Springboarding off the theoretical conceptions of the public posited by Walter Lippmann and John Dewey, Latour, Cvejić, Popivoda and Vujanović explore the difficulties of performing (in) a political moment, the disappearance of politics and fumbling in the dark, with a fleeting touch upon Latour's co-curated exhibition Making Things Public from 2005 (in the catalogue for which he produced the call-to-arms for an object-oriented democracy, "From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik"). Departing from a public/private divide in favour of recognising politics as located at that place of exception "where experts fail, where ... there is no procedure in place", Latour examines the sensitivities implicit in public and political actions.

"I can name the exact moment when it happened, when I started doing this ephemeral work of building a strange circle whereby you obtain something that is absolutely imposible: to speak in the name of several different people who say different things. And no habit can accomplish that. That's exceptional and if the principle of exception has an ephemeral quality to it, that's also what makes political activities hard."

No. 20 of ThK also includes a piece by Nina Power, which explores the London riots, the "public" and the legal status of art (this works through themes brought up in her public lecture of May 2012 blogged here) and a biting inquisition by Mario Kikaš into the failures of the critical theory sanctioned by the university, along with other short pieces exploring the various intricacies of performance theory, politics and the public. The next issue should be published soon this year.

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."

Project: The Anthropocene Project, 10 January 2013 - 31 December 2014, Berlin (Part II)

To mark the initiation of the Anthropocene Project (see the previous post on this blog), the the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin staged a four-day symposium for lectures and dialogues between key thinkers in a variety of fields including philosophy, anthropology, sociology, architecture along with many others. Clustering around five thematic "islands" - "Perspectives", "Times", "Gardens", "Oikos" and "Techné" - the transdisciplinary dialogues and lectures staged (some of which have have been audio or video recorded for posterity) interrogate the concept of the anthropocene.

 

A preoccupation with identifying the anthropocene (is the anthropocene legal?, beautiful?, a necessity?, etc.) tends to muffle more open-ended discussion in some of these conversations. Nonetheless, the meeting of minds offered by Claire Colebrook and Cary Wolfe on the subject of "Is the Anthropocene...A Doomsday Device?" manages to navigate its potential nihilism with both playfulness and consideration. The keynotes of Elizabeth Povinelli ("Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism") and John Tresch ("Cosmograms, or How to Do Things with Words") offer sometimes beautiful narratives and ruminations.

 

Dipesh Chakrabarty's bold critique of the anthropocene itself pits the question of and about the anthropocene in challenging detail. Launching his keynote, "History on an Expanded Canvas: The Anthropocene's Invitation", with the delaration that he must "decline the invitation of anthropocene", Chakrabarty underscores the gratuitous magnitude of anthropocene as a conceptual term, while still taking up the narrower (and more graspable) hypotheses of climate change and anthropocenic global warming.

"It has to be one of the profoundest ironies of our modern history that increasing use of such energy should have now transformed our collective image in our own eyes from that of an autonomous, if not sovereign, purposeful agency - from the level of the individual to the level of groups - to that of a force which is defined as the sheer capacity to produce pull or push on an object by interacting [with] it merely as another object."

Dipesh Chakrabaty

Project: The Anthropocene Project, 10 January 2013 - 31 December 2014, Berlin (Part I)

In January of this year, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin opened a fascinating and ambitious new two-year initiative entitled The Anthropocene Project, which seeks to interrogate the effects stemming from the increasing destabilisation of the definition between man and nature.

 

Chasing a paradigm shift throughout the the twentieth and into the twenty-first century in the natural sciences, the project situates Paul Jozef Crutzen's coined geological epoch - the "anthropocene", an "age of mankind" - at its centre in order to explore the mutual enfolding of the "human" and "natural" relations.

 

The opening consisted of a four-day symposium of thinkers, artists, film-makers, scientists and scholars to in conversation over this theme. Recordings of these speakers, which included keynotes by Will Steffen, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, John Tresch and Dipesh Chakrabarty, as well as a host of other dialogues, are available online at their website (some of which will be explored in more depth in Part II, posted next week).

 

Upcoming events include: the Unmenschliche Musk Festival: Compositions by Machines, by Animals and by Accident feom 21-24 February, which brings music production under critical inspection; a film series Anthropocene TV which begins on 22 May and continues until the project ends; "The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside" Conference with accompanying exhibition, from 21-22 June; along with many other events. Further information and multimedia are listed on the HKW website.

"Nature as we know it is a concept that belongs to the past. No longer a force separate from and ambivalent to human activity, nature is not an obstacle nor a harmonious other. Humanity forms nature. Humanity and nature are one, embedded within the recent geological record."

Exhibition: "BUSY. Exhausted Self / Unlimited Ability", 20 September 2012 - 13 January 2013, Vienna

Cosima von Bonin, "The Bonin / Oswald Empire's Nothing #04" (2010)

21er Haus at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere houses "BUSY. Exhuasted Self / Unlimited Ability", an exhibition which critically responds to the changes in human relations to labour economies, replacing the "role conflicts and schizophrenia" symptomatic of hierarchical, industrial society with "stress, depression, and burn out" which characterises information capital.

 

Curator Bettina Steinbrügge adapts the idea of Cosima Rainer in cooperation with the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna to provide this comment on work, precarity, artistic process and the valuation of time. The pieces selected for this show springboard from the always "busy", work-time and life amalgamation in contemporary culture and the resulting disappearance of time itself. As contributing artist Manfred Erjautz comments in a slick podcast of interviews of those involved, "We've got enough time anyway - we only handle it the wrong way".

"Art was once the utopian counter model to achievement-oriented and other-directed gainful employment, a realm of freedom opposing the realm of necessities. Today, it has developed before our eyes to a model for a mobile and autonomous “Ich-AG,” or “Me-inc.,“ to the ideal of project-related work."

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."

 

Lecture: Anna Gibbs, "Gestural Dispositions: On the Intermedial Migrations of Writing", Edinburgh, 26 October 2012; & Exhibition: "Art & Music - Search for New Synesthesia, Tokyo, 27 October 2012 - 3 February 2013

Those based in Edinburgh have the opportunity to attend a public lecture by Anna Gibbs, "Gestural Dispostion: On the Intermedial Migrations of Writing" next Friday (26 October), at the University of Edinburgh. Exploring the interstices of writing and gesture, Gibbs' presentation promises an incisive exploration of experimentation and corporeal imbrication in the practices of reading and writing.

 

The event is free and officially opens the Extending Gesture Colloquium (which Ky blogged here), a fascinating and intimate weekend event addressing concepts of the gestural in a number of different artistic and cultural fields. Registration to the public lecture is not necessary. More information on the event and the colloquium can be found at their website.

"Printed text suppresses the relation between writing and gesture, but what happens when text becomes a moving architecture into which we can enter, and when - becoming animated - it begins to exhibit strange behaviours?"



Otomo Yoshihide + Yasutomo Aoyama, "without records," 2012. Exhibition view from "x sound : On and After John Cage and Nam June Paik", Nam June Paik Art Center, Gyeonggi-do, Korea.

For any readers of the BiM blog currently based in Tokyo (or planning to travel there within the next five months), The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo is soon to be opening the third exhibition in their "Tokyo Art Meeting" series. Art & Music - Search for New Synesthesia (27 October 2012 - 3 February 2013) introduces internationally-established musician Ryuichi Sakamoto as general advisor to a project which sees to explore, sample and inhabit the complex relations between "music", form, texture and the visual. It features work by sonic artists such as John Cage, Tōru Takemitsu, Ryoji Ikeda, Otomo Yoshihide and  Florian Hecker.

 

The exhibition kicks off with a concert by Carsten Nicolai and is run in conjunction with the "Tokyo Sonic Art Award" open competition for young sonic artists.

"According to Sakamoto, our humanocentric modern society has developed a system of control over the social environment, information and nature. This microcosmic inclination is gradually being destroyed through globalization and the energy crisis. Against this sociopolitical background, Sakamoto uses sound and the visual to reconsider our relationship with nature in a broad sense, attempting to recall a macrocosmic way of thinking."

 

Blog: Dataisnature

Dataisnature is the exciting blogging labour of Paul Prudence, an audio-visual performer and installation artist whose intimate addessal of "computational, algorithmic and generative environments" ensure that his finger is very much on the digital pulse of contemporary process- and procedure-generated artistic creations and creators.

The blog, which has been publishing on and off since 2004, contains samples of some truly hypnotic graphic, sound, video and generally multimedia works, including in the relatively recent past the eerily fleshy sound-video multimedia piece Aequa by outfit Idrioema and Leondardo Solaas's abstractly seething series Affinitive Swarms, as well as works by earlier artists such as, most recently, Nicolas Schöffer's "Spatio-Lumino-Chronodynamic" sculpture.



Leonardo Solaas, part of Affinitive Swarms series (2011)

While exploring the various nooks and crannies of this long-running blog, follow the links listed under the "innerspace" menu to the left to Paul Prudence's own experimental audio-visual works.

Conferences: Zombies: Walking, Eating and Performance, Plymouth, 13 April 2013; and Cannibals: Cannibalism, Consumption and Culture, Manchester, 25-26 April 2013

For the brave amongst us, April 2013 presents a cornucopia of UK conference choices to whet the appetite of the serious horror buff. On 13 April, Plymouth University hosts a one-day symposium entitled Zombies: Walking, Eating and Performance, designed "to explore, interrogate and celebrate zombies as a cultural phenomenon through the paradigms of performance, as well as models of performance through the quintessential zombie activities of eating and walking". Contributors are asked to focus on the contemporary (rather than historical) zombie mythos, and are encouraged to take an interdisciplinary approach to a wide range of topics from the ethics of survival in zombie landscapes to zombie gaming and acting dead.

The deadline for proposals to this symposium is set for 30 November of this year. All delegates will also be invited to a zombie film festival which takes place the evening of 12 April and will have the option to participate in an "early morning performance, Just after Dawn of the Dead, in the streets of Plymouth, followed by a conference breakfast".

Manchester-based creative writing and literature collective Hic Dragones follows up zombie marches with a like-minded conference focus, Cannibals: Cannibalism, Consumption and Culture, on 25-26 April 2013. Not quite as specifically concentrated on contemporary modes, this two-day conference seeks papers from all disciplines which address cannibalism in any setting, "from contemporary horror film to Eucharistic devotion, from Freudian theory to science fiction" and beyond. It seeks proposals on topics such as theorisations of cannibalism, maternal infanticide and eating the enemy. The deadline for proposal submission is set at 31 December 2012.

Exhibition: "Superhuman", 19 July - 16 October, Wellcome Collection, London

The collection of curios at the Wellcome Trust (self-coined as "a free destination for the incurably curoius") organises around the theme of "Superhuman" until October of this year. Designed to overlap with the furor of the London Olympics and its celebration of engineered, amplified and sculpted athletic bodies, "Superhuman" explores the limits of corporeality through the interventions of technology, prosthetics and medicine.


Metalosis Meligna, 2006 by Floris Kaayk

Enhancements take centre stage in the Wellcome Collection's exhibition, which encompasses myth, ancient history, the comic genre, medical objects, the work of contemporary artists and more to structure its panoptic investigation. Various events are also part of the Collection's itinerary, including poetry and performance afternoons (entitled "We Are All a Cyborg"), a chance to fondle some synthetically fashioned body parts, and a symposium on "Human Limits" (28-29 September) at which will be screened one of the first films to depict space travel alongside panels of academic speakers from multiple disciplines.

"Glasses, lipstick, false teeth, the contraceptive pill and even your mobile phone - we take for granted how commonplace human enhancements are. From Icarus to i-Limbs, ‘Superhuman’, which opens at Wellcome Collection today, explores the extraordinary ways people have sought to improve, adapt and enhance their body’s performance."

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."