LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images Symposium
May 26-27
ICA Theatre, The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH
In addition to the talks programme, the students of the LUX/Central Saint-Martins MRes Art: Moving Image course will co-produce a two-day student symposium for UK-based MA and PhD students to present their research into artists’ moving image. The two days will explore ideas around ‘failure’ and ‘contemporary currents’.
On Failure
Saturday 26 May, 10am – 1pm, ICA Theatre
Keynote address: Jan Verwoert, Why Rudie Can’t Fail
Jan Verwoert is a critic, writer, curator, art historian, and contributing editor to Frieze magazine.
Further papers by:
Anirban Gupta-Nigam, Failure as Possibility: Reading Two Fragments of Moving-Image Work
Jawaharlal Nehru University, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Delhi
Conventionally, in radical political and aesthetic practice, the body of the exhausted person is sought to be energised, radicalised and politicised. Failed, exhausted bodies must be re-energised so that they can engage in the project of (political) transformation. Following a different path, through a reading of two fragments of moving-image work, this paper argues for failure as possibility and attempts to locate exhaustion and failure as potentiality, as moments when, freed from the teleology of the search for a ‘better future’, we see every moment in the now as being open to various possible futures.
Robert Rapoport, The End of Ethnographic Representation in Huyghe’s ‘The Host and the Cloud’
Ruskin School, Oxford
In The Host and the Cloud (2010), Pierre Huyghe initiated a number of events in an abandoned museum of French folk culture. The film that attempts to document these events questions the very possibility of ethnographic representation today. Jean Rouch in Chronicle of a Summer (1960) concluded that the camera can only ever represent the social artifice it creates; Huyghe goes further, suggesting an incommensurability between the grammar of film and contemporary social forms.
Rosa Menkman, The Intentional Faux-Pas
Kunsthochschule für Medien, Cologne
Today it is completely normal to pay for aesthetically appealing plugins like Hipstamatic or Instagram, that imitate (analogue) imperfections or nostalgic errors (artefacts), like lens flares and lomographic discolorations. While Twitter and Facebook deliver these ‘faux vintage’ images almost every minute, this relentless flow of ‘faux vintage’ imagery is starting to look more and more like a collection of ‘more of the same’ effects. Is this over-indulgence in intentional faux-pas a ‘new’ phenomenon? And how does the growing fetishisation of nostalgic, ‘faux vintage’ imperfections relate to the growing trend of glitch art, a strand in art that celebrates the digital flaw?
Emily Candela, No signal: Failures of transmission in the moving image from analogue ‘snow’ to the ‘blue screen of death’
Royal College of Art and the Science Museum, London
This is a farewell to snow, the vibrating speckled image that appears when analogue television reception fails. As we switch to digital television, a frozen or – in many cases – blue screen replaces snow in these moments of failed transmission. The contrast between snow and the blue screen, and the corresponding opposition between ‘transparency’ and the ‘black box’, are explored in this talk through artworks that employ artefacts and glitches of viewing technologies, as well as through found YouTube videos.
Contemporary Currents
Sunday 27 May, 10am – 1pm, ICA Theatre
Keynote address: Maeve Connolly, Television, Cultural Legitimation and Contemporary Art
Maeve Connolly is a writer, lecturer and research fellow at Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM), Weimar Bauhaus University
The past decade has been marked both by proclamations of the ‘end of television’ and by the cultural validation of ‘quality television’. But while the cultural status of shows such as The Sopranos and Mad Men is often asserted through reference to concepts associated with art discourse (such as authorship, distinction and preservation), contemporary artists and curators have actually been drawn toward genres that are usually excluded from the ‘quality’ discourse, such as reality TV, sitcoms and soaps. Informed by these contradictions, this paper explores recent and ongoing televisual currents in exhibition-making and art practice.
Further papers by:
Katy Connor, From Solid Light to Satellite: the materiality of the moving image as broadcast signal and data
EMERGE, Bournemouth University Media School
Considering the age of electromagnetic networks, broadcast and invisibility as necessary context, this paper will discuss the material qualities of the live, digital video signal embedded within satellite telecommunications; how this shares a profound relationship with light, space, sound and noise.
Drawing on a rich history of conceptual moving-image practice, specific reference will be made to PURE FLOW (2011), a live moving image APP that visualises the noise in networked GPS data; exploring audiovisual disturbance in its aesthetic value.
Christopher C de Selincourt, Where is the Mind of the Media Editor?
Cardiff School of Art and Design
As new technologies claim cognitive territories previously identified by humans as human, some would argue that it becomes increasingly difficult to locate where the human mind stops and the rest of the world begins (Clark & Chalmers, 1998). Moving image editors occupy a key position with respect to this enquiry, one that is situated between both human and machine, actual and virtual, self and other, and will be used in this paper to examine the boundaries between mind and world.
Rebecca Birch, Field Montage
Loughborough University School of the Arts
This paper looks at immediacy and the montage of disparate ‘presents’ in the live broadcast moving image artwork, as enacted by the project Field Broadcast, where moving image artworks are sent directly from remote locations to the viewer’s computer. The production of the broadcast is affected by contingent factors such as location weather and light, whilst the viewer receives the broadcast as an individual montage within their computer desktop, and wider surroundings: radio, email and film. In this simultaneous production and reception, the ‘now’ of the artist co-habits unexpectedly with the ‘now’ of the viewer.
Marialaura Ghidini, Working through and beyond web-based video platforms: towards a redefinition of moving image
CRUMB, University of Sunderland
The wide access to web tools, which have progressively become user-friendly, has produced an increase in the number of artistic operations which employ (or exploit) web-based video platforms as modes of distributing work. Working with such online sites has also affected artistic strategies of production; generating a realignment between distribution and content creation that might require a renewed look at the merging of form, content, context and channels of dissemination. Through a brief investigation into selected moving image projects and works, this paper aims to highlight the idea of ‘working through and beyond’ web-based video platforms, suggesting a tendency to move between online and offline dimensions.
Andy Weir, Deep Time Contagion: Nuclear Storage and the Nonhuman Temporality of Moving Image Artwork
Goldsmiths College, London
The deep geological repository is designed to store waste securely deep underground. Necessarily alluding to a time span exterior to that of the human, it acts as a figure for twisting this inassimilable ‘outside’ into experience. Embodying and manifesting this contact as video, as it is proposed, suggests an alternative to regimes of experimental temporality that rely upon a subjective reconfiguration of time