Ken Wark at Goldsmiths 23.5.2013

Ken Wark - A (Post) Situationist, (Pre) Situationist Aesthetics

A talk by Professor McKenzie Wark of the New School for Social Research, NYC

McKenzie Wark

The New School for Social Research

There can of course be no such thing as a Situationist aesthetics, there can only be one that anticipates the realization and overcoming of the aesthetic into everyday life. Hence our topic is necessarily Pre-Situationist aesthetics. The particular examples I want to talk about are Debord’s films of the 70s: Society of the Spectacle and Refutation of All Judgements. Based on interviews with Debord’s film editor, I will talk about the process by which these films were made, but also how they are something more than theory texts illustrated with détourned images. There’s a critical logic to the editing as well. These films were of course made after the dissolution of the Situationist International, and so in that sense are post-Situationist.

Event Information

Location: 137, Richard Hoggart Building
Cost: free
Department: Centre For Cultural Studies
Time: 23 May 2013, 18:30 – 20:30

Docklands Cinema Club with CCS sun 26.5.2013

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)
Sun 26 May, 2-4pm (15)
Winner of the Best Actor and Best Screenplay awards at Cannes 2005, Tommy Lee Jones’ directorial debut follows the story of Pete Perkins,
a ranch foreman in the high desert of west Texas who undertakes a dangerous and quixotic journey into Mexico.

Venue Museum of London Docklands see here.

Goldsmiths UCU and SU Rally against Austerity 15.5.2013

Goldsmiths UCU and SU Rally against Austerity – (THURSDAY) 6pm

• In the light of our 0.8% pay offer – well below the rate of inflation
• In the light of today’s story about the impact of tuition fee rises (that many courses are not good ‘value for money’)
• In the light of today’s OECD report warning that austerity policies ‘are widening the gulf between rich and poor’ in the UK
  

please come to the rally 6pm Thursday 16 May, RHB 137 to hear

Andrew McGettigan, author of The Great University Gamble (Pluto)
Aaron Kiely (NUS Black Students Officer)
Save Lewisham Hospital speaker
Romayne Phoenix (Green Party and CoR)
Lindsey German (Stop the War)
Rachael Maskell (Unite national officer)

Mrinal Sen 90

Mrinal Sen is 90 today (May 14 2013) and all the best to him. I would argue that he is the greatest living film director, bare none.This YouTube page has some films by and on Sen: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22Mrinal+Sen%22&oq=%22Mrinal+Sen%22&gs_l=youtube.3…2259.6576.0.9023.12.11.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0…0.0…1ac.1.11.youtube. (Thanks Abhijit). I will screen a number of Sen films – especially the Maoist period Calcutta films – Interview, Calcutta 71 and Padatik – in the monday night film screening slot in Autumn term at Goldsmiths. He gave Amitabh B his first break, he made Shabana A an actress, he showed Louis M the way round the city, and more and more. Come along to the screenings – check the what’s on back here or the Goldsmiths Centre for Cultural Studies events calendar for info in late September (it will also be a course for credit as part of the new MA Critical Asian Studies, but its open to all comers like other CCS courses).

Smirk or shambles.

Guardian May 13 2013

riot notes –

This is a rough page of old notes from the work that became Tom and my article on a years worth of riot-chatter. The article was published in the Journal of Cultural Research (2012) here. Today I am updating this for a couple of talks at Goldsmiths where I hope to also frame a critique of jingoistic national feel good isms. Do keep calm dearie and all that sort of carry on. Talk one is “Public Engagement: the 11th thesis” Wednesday 15th May, 2013 Room RHB 137a. Talk two is ‘University Research in World War III’ at about 3pm in the “ethics/learning and teaching in higher education@ workshop – you can get the venue details after registering at: http://www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id=6211

NYC films

When Antonioni was asked if he would make a film about New York, he said: ‘yes I will, when the screen is no longer horizontal, but vertical’. Mrinal Sen calls this the language of cinema already projecting the city before our eyes (Sen 2002:288).

Brazil: Landscape in Motion 22.5.2013

Fire in Babylon 12 May 2013 Renoir

May Day London 2013

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  May Day March & Rally

  Date: 1 May 2013

  Venue: Form up at Clerkenwell Green at 12 noon.

  Join the 2013 May Day march and rally in London. The march will form up at Clerkenwell Green at 12 noon moving off at 1.00 pm. It  will end in a rally at Trafalgar Square.

  Further details are here http://www.londonmayday.org/

   

Common Ground Film Series

 

Film series leading up to Common Ground Conference on 24-25 June 2013.

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Event Information

Location: Council Rm, n/a, Laurie Grove Baths
Cost: Free. All Welcome
Department: Centre For Cultural Studies

Times:

• 3 June 2013, 19:00 – 22:00
  The Black Power Mixtape
• 10 June 2013, 19:00 – 22:00
  Geschwister
• 17 June 2013, 19:00 – 22:00
  Five Obstructions
• 24 June 2013, 19:00 – 22:00
  Delicatessen

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Mind map for Princeton talk on Saturday.

BREAKING THE RULES talk Braga Uni of Minho Portugal 9.4.13

12th ENGLISH OPEN DAY

THE 60′S – BREAKING THE RULES

 

APRIL 9-10 2013

 

Detailed programme:

 

Organized by Joanne Paisana, Fernando Alves, Salomé Osório 

and Isabel Ermida

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talking at Princeton 19.3.13

Manual Labours

8-12 April, 10-6pm

 Peltz Room, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD

 For more info: http://manuallabours.wordpress.com/

FREE Public Events (no need to book):
Wednesday 10 April, 7pm
The Trainee – Screening and Discussion | Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD
Marina Vishmidt will discuss Pilvi Takala’s performance and film ‘The Trainee’ (2008) in light of her research into how art models the anomalous labour conditions of financialized capitalism.Friday 12 April, 1-2pm

The Working Lunch | Peltz room, Birkbeck University, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD
Public lunch hour and discussion led by Sophie Hope and Jenny Richards.  Food provided!

Manual Labours is a long term research project exploring people’s physical relationships to work, initiated by Jenny Richards and Sophie Hope. This project reconsiders current time-based structures of work (when does work start and end?) and reasserts the significance of the physical (manual) aspect of immaterial, affective and emotional labour.

Manual Labours starts with a 35 hour ‘working week’-long investigation into the embodied, sensory, emotional affects of work which will include meetings with our co-workers, a 9 mile walk to work, film screenings and a Public Lunch Hour.

Through this project we are interested in exploring the transformation of labour processes through an investigation into the ‘physical’ relationship to work in order to map complex and overlapping experiences of work/life entwinement. During this first public manifestation of Manual Labours we will be building an archive of films and publications, alongside public screenings and discussions with co-workers to inform ways in which we can recapture a sense of agency within our current positions.   Developing research in a public setting through performative actions, each day of our week-long presence at Birkbeck focuses on one worker stereotype in order to research how these different ‘posts’ are de-stabled through everyday practices.Two public events hope to generate conversations and contributions which will shape the evolvement of Manual Labours and allow us to explore the shared, collective concerns and tactics for reclaiming a critical and sensory experience of work/life.  Join us on Wednesday 10th April 7pm when writer Marina Vishmidt will discuss Pilvi Takala’s film ‘The Trainee’ and on Friday we’ll be offering a communal lunch hour with home cooked food and a discussion reflecting on the week’s activities led by Sophie Hope and Jenny Richards.

Visit www.manuallabours.wordpress.com for full details of the daily programme.

Films accessible within the Manual Labours archive include: ‘Sweet Sugar Rage’ (1985) by the Sistren Theatre Collective which explores different theatre methods to highlight the harsh conditions facing female workers on a Jamaican sugar estate, distributed by Cinenova;  Moira Zoitl’s ‘Exchange Square’ (2007) exploring domestic workers in Hong Kong; Can Altay’s ‘We’re Papermen, He said’ (2003) which follows the operations of unofficial recyclers and rubbish men in Ankara; extracts of Marie Barrett’s ‘Remnant’ (2008), documenting oral histories of the closure of the garment factories in North-West Ireland and Kennedy Browne’s ‘How Capital Moves’ (2010), a film which uses anecdotes of redundancy and insecure working conditions to explore the precarious nature of working for a multinational company.

Manual Labours is supported by the Centre for Media, Culture and Creative Practice, Birkbeck (http://www.bbk.ac.uk/creative/), Sophie Hope and Jenny Richards.

For updates on the weekly programme of talks, discussions and screenings visit www.manuallabours.wordpress.com
To find out more, get involved or contribute, please contact manual.labours@gmail.com

Brazil: A Landscape in Motion – workshop 22.5.2013

Full details download here: folder-brazil. 10am- 6pm.

VENUE Council Room Laurie Grove Baths Laurie Grove, Goldsmiths London SE14 6NW Centre for Cultural Studies | Goldsmiths University of London London SE14 6NW

ORGANIZERS Rosana Martins is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Cultural Studies, at Goldsmiths University, London. Holly Eva Ryan is a fourth year PhD student at the City University, London and visiting ERASMUS fellow at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam.

 

 

Talk: Braga 9.4.2013

‘Seems like the funky days, they’re back again’ - 1960s fashion and subcontinental politics in the 21st Century? – John Hutnyk

 

This talk will consider the resurgence of an Asia-inflected 1960s aesthetic and a thoroughly modern politics in the present. To what extent does a kaleidoscopic reference in fashion and sound make room for a political activism that owes more to street protest than an updated digital-cultural exoticism. The work of Sri Lankan musician M.I.A will feature, as will Frank Zappa and the Monkeys psychedelic era masterpiece ‘Head’.

2:30 9 April 2013

Location: Braga, North of Portugal, at the Gualtar campus of the University of Minho. The building is the Institute of Arts and Humanities (Instituto de Letras e Ciências Humanas – ILCH) and the room is the ILCH Auditorium.

Call for Papers: Common Ground 24-25 June 2013.

Common Ground – A Two-Day Conference organized by the Centre for Cultural Studies

24-25 June 2013. Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

Call for Papers:

Postgraduates in the Centre for Cultural Studies are pleased to announce their annual conference. This year’s theme is Common Ground and we would like to invite papers, artistic presentations, workshops and panel proposals on all aspects of this topic.

This conference comes out of a shared frustration with the framing of canonical discourses. For every subject and object in the world, there is a linear story of its explanation– a forward-projecting narration of origins, development, transformation and signification. What is accomplished in this expository process is a reductivism that not only privileges particular modes of explanation, of knowing, but in doing so also neutralizes the grounds of subversive potential.  How can we explode these centralizing rationalities and reconfigure the conceptual space of knowing? How can we think critically about literal and metaphorical spaces and the accompanying temporalities which claim to bring individuals together and form alternative modes of collective being but simply end up privileging dominant, homogenising discourses of social control and organization?

Possible topics could include but are by no means limited to:

-       Privileging narratives

-       Writing and Rewriting History

-       Time, history and asynchronicity

-       Dissenting Voices

-       Homogeneity and hegemony

-       Interiority/exteriority

-       Discourses of Inclusion/Exclusion

-       The collective vs. the individual

-       Who are the 99%?

-       Nationalism and Identity

-       Digital Technologies and posthumanism

-       Crossing borders and limits

-       Institutional Critique

-       Spaces of convergence – the street, the square

-       Public vs. private spaces

-       Encounters, confrontations, conflicts

-       The production of difference

-       Subversive spaces and temporalities

Abstracts should be no longer than 500 words and emailed to:

ccscommonground2013@gmail.com. Deadline for submissions is 26 April 2013. For more information please visit www.commonground2013.wix.com/conference

Communist Horizon – book talk 7pm today (19.3.13)

A book talk by Jodi Dean, author.

The Communist Horizon charts the re-emergence of communism as a magnet for political energy following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the stalling of the Occupy movement.

Jodi Dean will introduce the book – 45 minutes approx – then answer questions from the audience, followed by wine reception and book signing. Lal salaam.

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Event Information

Location: rm309, 3rd floor, Richard Hoggart Building, Goldsmiths
Cost: free
Department: Centre For Cultural Studies
Time: 19 March 2013, 19:00 – 21:00

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For Further Details

E-mail: john.hutnyk

- See more at: http://www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id=6283#sthash.ly0s3RBo.dpuf

THE CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASS: 8 May 2013

THE CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASS (82 mins)

A new documentary feature film by Michael Wayne & Deirdre O’Neill

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SCREENING FOLLOWED BY Q&A WITH DIRECTORS

Goldsmiths RHB Room 144, 6.30pm. Weds 8 May 2013.

Synopsis

Everything changes and yet everything stays the same. 1844: Friedrich Engels writes his book ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’, a classic denunciation of the appalling living conditions for working people living at the heart of the industrial revolution in Manchester, England.  In 2012: a group of working class people from Manchester and Salford have the job of devising a theatrical show from scratch based on their own experiences and Engels’ book. They have 8 weeks before their first performance. The Condition of the Working Class follows the process from the first rehearsal to first night and situates their struggle to get the show on stage in the context of the daily struggles of working people facing economic crisis and austerity politics.

‘This is not a film, it’s a rehearsal for revolution’ – Film International.

“If you want to see how, fundamentally, the way people see and treat each other in Britain has not changed in over 160 years watch this film. Some things have changed. People have sewers now, £9 JSA a day, are taught to read, but not really to write or speak. We still look up and down at each other in ways we did then, betray ourselves through our accents, our dress  our work – if we can get a job. It might be theatre but it’s not acting. It’s a blow against the mean low money grabbers.”   -   Danny Dorling

See The Trailer for The Condition of the Working Class, a new documentary film directed by Mike Wayne and Deirdre O’Neill
at: http://www.conditionoftheworkingclass.info/about-2