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.

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.

Colloquium: Extending Gesture, Edinburgh, 26-28 October 2012

After a busy early July and sadly prolonged absence, Ky is back again to flag a fascinating colloquium to take place in Edinburgh on 26-28 October of this year. Extending Gesture, organised by Tami Gadir and Fiona Hanley, who some of you may recognise from the BiM Conference two years ago, addresses the much overlooked and undervalued notion of the gestural in its many expressions, contexts and phenomenologies.

The organisers are currently calling for proposals of any length, form and discipline on the embodied nature of gesture. Arranged with a view towards academic intimacy and discussion, attendance will be limited to twelve, including keynote guests Dr Nancy Ann Roth (senior lecturer at University College Falmouth and key translator of the writings of Vilém Flusser into English) and Rolf Inge Godøy (professor in Musicology Studies at the University of Olso). Each presenter wil be given a full hour to present and discuss their work in whatever manner and distribution of time they deem is appropriate to the content.

Enquiries and proposals should be submitted to the organisers at edinburghextending@gmail.com by 10 August; further information and a contact form can also be found at their website.

"...What provokes the pulsating body to dance? Or the scribbling hand to scratch? What are the urges and itches that manifest the various gestures of our being? What is the character of their inception and how do we conceptualise them? What too, is this strangeness that shadows our gestures? What is its unique character in relation to each particular gesture? How can we capture and de–scribe such strange movements? What can the pauses in–between the gesture tell us about its nature? What role does anticipation play in gesture?"

Article: Luciana Parisi and Stamatia Portanova, "Soft Thought (in Architecture and Choreography)"

The first issue of the new open-access journal Computational Culture publishes, among other fascinating works, Luciana Parisi and Stamatia Portanova's "Soft Thought (in Architecture and Choreography)", which explores the possibilities and potentials of digital code as autonomously aesthetic object.

This aesthetic of "soft thought", Parisi and Portanova argue, relies on neither the generative framework of software failure nor the conceptualisation of algorithm as bodily extension. Herein lies their deviation from glitch aestheticists such as Tony Sampson and Andy Clarke's extended functionalism. Parisi and Portanova consider two algorithm-based projects: "I've heard about it... (a flat, fat, growing urban experiment)" by R&Sie(n), in which urban structure is generated from random and contingent secretions; and the choreographical project "Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced" led by William Forsythe, Maria Palazzi and Norah Zuniga Shaw which seeks to reimagine dance through a variety of organisational structures. By departing from what they perceive as a dependency on matter and material realisations, Parisi and Portanova argue for a concept of soft thought which distinguishes algorithmic code as an aesthetic object by virtue of the abstraction, incompleteness and incomputability that infects and constitutes all algorithms.

"...we want to emphasise that the main limit of computation is not its incapacity to include material contingencies. Quite the opposite, computation, or the formal architecture of algorithms, only remains limited to a closed formalism if one does not take into consideration how algorithms themselves tend towards abstraction, infinity, or the reality of the incomputable."

The journal "special issue", entitled "A billion gadget minds" also includes contributions by Michael Wheeler, Anna Munster and Ingmar Lippert. It can be found online here. Computational Culture is now inviting contributions for their second issue.