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.

Exhibition: A Journal of the Plague Year. Fear, ghosts, rebels. SARS, Leslie and the Hong Kong story, 16 May - 20 July 2013, Hong Kong

Lam Qua, Portrait no 48.Yang Kang, 1830-1850. Oil painting. Courtesy Yale University, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library.

Independent art space in Hong Kong, Para Site, explore the changing stories of a city in a new exhibition A Journal of the Plague Year. Fear, ghosts, rebels. SARS, Leslie and the Hong Kong story over the may to July period.

Showcasing an impressive list of internationally established talents and local artists, the exhibition threads its way through the "disparate though interconnected" visions and revisions of Hong Kong (places, spaces and people) in the wake of epidemic, economic and political instability and waves of human migration which occurred as a result of the SARS outbreak of 2003. Pathogenesis, politics and xenophobia meet the funereal and civic solidarity in strange combinations in this often overlooked tale of the last decade of Hong Kong.

"When the city became the epicenter of the most significant airborne epidemic in recent years - the SARS crisis of 2003 - the unparalleled shutdown of the city and the atomisation of society in quarantined segments lead to an unexpected shift in the political awareness of the Hong Kong citizenry. ... After that moment, the image of a de-politicised and soullessly pragmatic commercial hub could not anymore tell the whole story about Hong Kong."

As the contributors come from an array of professional backgrounds, including academics, journalism, film-making and the more creative arts, the responses to this quite challenging theme promises to be both varied and intriguing. A Journal of the Plague Year also includes two outdoor performances by Lygia Pape on 17 and 25 May. Check the Para Site website for further details.

Article: Bernard J. Hibbitts, "Coming to Our Senses: Communication and Legal Expression in Performance Cultures"

Bernard J. Hibbitts was arguably well ahead of the legal scholaship curve when he published "Coming to Our Senses: Communication and Legal Expression in Performance Cultures" in the Emory Law Journal (41 (1992): 873-960), and he settled into this theme for the next few years until the currency of cyberspace pulled him into more intense study of the implications of technology upon the law. "Coming to Our Senses", the first of a series of publications devoted to the human senses and the law threw an ambitiously wide net into legal, anthropological and historical fields in order to contrast an American-style written legal culture with semi- or largely non-literate "performance cultures".

 

Perhaps a little outmoded today and a little unwieldy in the separation between performance and non-performance cultures, Hibbitts' article is nonetheless a fascinating tour of the unappreciated interventions of the five human senses upon legal discourse and tradition, as well as their cultural significance outside of contemporary Western legal modes. Framed as a survey loosely following anthropological research methods, Hibbitts looks to Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong for theoretical purchase alongside a horde of historical scholars.

"In their highest forms of cultural and intellectual exression, speech routinely gives voice to gesture and gesture gives shape to speech: music gives sound to sculpture, while sculptue gives sustance to music. Law is simultaneously heard, seen, and sometimes even felt and savored. Ultimately, the meaning of significant cultural and legal messages resides less in the individual components of communication (although these must be recognized) than in their synthesis, performance."

Hibbitt's article is available online at a dedicated site via the University of Pittsburgh, or as a pdf article as published in the Emory Law Journal from the Social Science Research Network. The BiM blog is indebted to the Sensory Studies website for providing the link to this text.



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.

Recorded Lecture: McKenzie Wark, "Telesthesia: How Class and Power Work in the Post-Internet Age"

One of Google's data centers, photographed by Connie Zhou.

McKenzie Wark prods at our understandings of class and social relations with this half-hour video recording, "Telesthesia: How Class and Power Work in the Post-Internet Age", presented at the Art, Technology, and Culture Lecture Series hosted by the University of Berkeley's Center for New Media on 19 December 2012.

Extracted from his recent book Telesthesia: Communication, Culture and Class (published by Polity in the tail end of last year), Wark offers us an intriguing snapshot at his thesis on the current "vectoral age". Tracing vectoral strategies from the deployment of military force at a distance, to creative reappropriation of spaces and information, and the tactics of growth deployed by rising Fortune 500 corporations such as Google and Apple, Wark proposes that in this post-internet age and "overdeveloped" (first) world, we have entered a third stage of commodity culture - beyond pastoralism and capitalism - of information ruled and managed by the vector. And as the concept of property becomes more abstract, he asserts that the vectoral class now unseats the capitalist in power and dominance.

"The vector becomes much more flexible, elaborate, refined in its flows of data. It is nowhere necessary to cluster related parts of the production process physically near one another. The vector opens the way to a spatial disaggregation of production. It isn't the multitude who fled the scene, it was capital." 

The lecture can be viewed at Archive.org, where various other Art, Technology, and Culture lectures can also be viewed and/or heard, kindly provided by the Berkeley Center for New Media.

Conference: Matter, Life and Resistance, 1-2 July 2013, Canterbury

The Centre for Critical Thought at the University of Kent in Canterbury has announced a two-day conference entitled Matter, Life and Resistance, taking place in Canterbury on 1-2 July 2013. Located within the general field of political theory, the event seeks to explore the crossover, feedback and influence (both historically and in current trends) of theories of materialism, vitalism and resistance within the discipline. The lineup of keynote speakers features Samantha Frost, whose work engages with the body, biology, feminism and new materialisms; and Sjoerd van Tuinen, prolific scholar specialising on Deleuze and Sloterdijk.

 

Proposals are still wanted, with suggested areas for contributions including, inter alia: reinterpreting the history of political thought, particularly the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century materialists; connecting a poststructuralist conceptualisation of of life, matter and resistance with biology and the neurosciences (ontogenesis, transductive relations, plasticity, synaptogenesis); and the consequences of speculative materialism in political theory. The deadline for abstracts is set for 5 May 2013. More details can be found on the Matter, Life and Resistance conference blog.

Website: Sensory Studies

With inquiries into the interventions and intersections of the bodily senses hitting their stride in current academic discourse, it seems only right that a dedicated website like Sensory Studies [www.sensorystudies.org] is rapidly finding purchase online. Managed by the Concordia Sensoria Research Team (of Concordia University) in collaboration with members of the University of Copenhagen, the website promises to become a valuable resource for scholars working in the area(s) of the sensory, as long as the wide thematic ambit does not dissuade visitors:

"Sensory Studies arises at the conjuncture (and within) the fields of anthropology • sociology • design • history • geography • performance • philosophy • literature • art history • film • phenomenology • aesthetics • architecture • urbanism • disability • communications"

The information within has been ordered into nine sections including: "Books of Note" listing texts engaging directly with the subject by publication year; a "Sound Gallery" containing a variety of sound recordings updated every six weeks; a selection of free-access articles exploring "Sensorial Investigations"; and a constantly updated calendar of events. The "Of Related Interest" section of Sensory Studies is particularly useful, providing a series of links to centres, labs, institutes, groups, individuals, and many other resources which involve what can loosely be described as revolving around or investigating the senses.

For those engaging with these themes, Sensory Studies appears to be a space of reference to watch, both now and in the future.