radar

Chaired by Les Back (Sociology, Goldsmiths University) with Simon Hattenstone, David Morley and Colleen Cotter.

Thursday, 27th October 2011, 5-7pm
Small Hall (Cinema) RHB

Speakers:
Bernd Kraeftner
(Vienna, University of Applied Art)
Bernd Kraeftner is trained as a medical doctor and teaches at the department of Digital Arts and Science and Art Visualization in Vienna. He is a member of the Research Centre for Shared Inc. / Xperiment and has led transdisciplinary research projects.

Judith Kroell
(University of Vienna)
Judith Kroell is a member of Shared Inc./ Xperiment since 1999. She is the co-founder and coordinator of the Association Researchers without Borders. She teaches at the Dept. of Social Studies of Science, University of Vienna.

Michael Guggenheim
(Goldsmiths, Sociology Dept.)
Michael Guggenheim us currently directing a research project on “Organising Disasters. Civil Protection and the Population.” He has been involved in research on change of use of buildings and projects at the intersection of art with ethnography. Form and Meaning in Oral History (1990).

Annual Methods Lab Lecture:
Ken Plummer

Thursday, 17th November 2011
5-7pm Small Hall (Cinema) RHB

A presentation by
Hannes Rickli

Tuesday 14th June 2011
11:00 – 13:00
The Small Cinema RHB

The artist Hannes Rickli has been working for 20 years with surplus audiovisual recordings resulting from experiments in behavioral biology. The media equipment furnishes biologists with the tools of their trade and is part of their experimental systems. Once they have been scientifically analysed, the products (“videograms”) do not normally have any further use. Studying these videograms, Rickli obtains unusual insights into experimental set-ups in the natural sciences. As “spillover” concomitants of scientific data they expose – in the shadow of objectivity, so to peak – how the production of scientific facts does not proceed according to established plans, but rather as a result of physical resistances between human, technical and animal actors. The artistic sphere renders observable the processes of research in the early stages of experimentation: the actions of building and assembling, matching objects, media and research subjects, spatial and lighting conditions, atmospheres, gestures of searching and hesitating. Image interference and transmission errors serve to remind us that the artist is working at the edge of what can be depicted.

Hannes Rickli will present and discuss together with Michael Guggenheim (Goldsmiths) the set-up and results of the artistic research project Spillover. Videograms of Experimentation (Zurich University of the Arts, 2007-2009), that involved artistic practice, STS, as well as close collaboration with biologists.

This event is part of the PhD/MPhil Visual Sociology Program of seminars, lectures and workshops, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths.

Are you concerned about your working life after graduation? | Is your financial uncertainty influencing your psychological well-being? | What support structures can we imagine in the face of the competitive job market?

June 8th 2011
Department of Design
Hexagon, 1st floor, Lockwood Building
17:00 – 19:00

SPEAKERS:

Carolina Bandinelli, PhD student in the Media and Communication Department at Goldsmiths, working on precarity.

Bianca Elzenbaumer, PhD student in the Design Department at Goldsmiths, investigating the relation between precarity, collaborative practice and the production of critically engaged work. She is part of the design collective Brave New Alps.

Adriana Eysler, cultural theorist teaching at London College of Communication and member of the Precarious Workers Brigade. She graduated from the MA in Design Futures at Goldsmiths.

Kirsten Forkert, artist, critic, activist and PhD student in the Media and Communication Department at Goldsmiths. Her research is about artistic labour in relation to postindustrialism, as well as labour organising in the arts.

Vlad Morariu, philosopher and PhD student at Loughborough University. There he is an active member of the Politicized Practice Research Group and runs the open seminar ‘Art and the Artist in the Age of the Precariat’.

Designing Economic Cultures is a series of seminars tailored for design students that takes the contemporary precarious working conditions of creatives as a starting point and investigates strategies of how to go beyond this current state of insecurity. As the crisis of the financial market seems to have turned into the crisis of all social relations and of everyday life itself, designers are as affected by these developments as most other actors in society. How can we face these conditions with our creative skills and deal with them in a more proactive and propositive way?

The seminars will serve as a platform to discuss and develop questions like the following:  How can designers avoid the conventional choice between either financial stability or critically engaged work? Which work settings may positively affect our abilities to address contested social, political and environmental issues? What alternative economic values and strategies can be adopted to overcome precarity? What can critically engaged creatives learn from the experiences of self-organised citizens and workers in other fields?

This seminar series is organised by the Department of Design, Goldsmiths University London.

with Professor Andrew Abbott

A widespread belief in modern informatics is that keyword indexes will speed scholarship. In this paper Prof Abbott investigates the effects of keyword indexes to British poets on the production of scholarship about those poets. He considers 22 concordances to major British poets in the years 1850 – 1950 and examine their effects on the production of PhD dissertations, MA theses, books, and articles.

Prof Andrew Abbott is the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Sociology and the College at the University of Chicago. Known for his ecological theories of occupations, Abbott also pioneered algorithmic analysis of social sequence data. He has written on the foundations of social science methodology and on the evolution of the social sciences and the academic system. Abbott is currently working on a general work of social theory entitled The Social Process as well as a book on the future of knowledge. Other recent work concerns ideas of outcome in the social sciences, the notion of “lyrical sociology,” and the problem of continuity in social entities. Abbott has also written extensively on libraries and their development in the modern university.

Professor Franck Cochoy

“The curious marketing fate of human curiosity: technologizing consumers’ inner states to build market attachments.”

STS (Science and Technology Studies) did a terrific job in exploring the sociology of technical devices, but in so doing they somewhat tended to neglect the properties of human subjects. I would like to bring a better symmetry in the analysis, in focusing on some market dynamics that bring devices and dispositions together. More precisely, I would like to focus on a particular disposition – curiosity – and the technologies market professionals developed as a means to seduce consumers. The idea is that better than any other disposition, curiosity helps to understand how market professionals and technologies, in playing on human subjects’ inner states, may reinvent their very identity and behavioral logic. I will show that from the Genesis to the curiosity cabinets of the 15th-18th centuries to the modern shop windows and the
“teasing” strategies of today’s advertising, seducers and merchants have constantly built “curiosity devices”, that helped ordinary persons to become curious and/or consumers, to free themselves from previous action schemes such as routine and tradition, but also to behave along other action patterns than interest and calculation which we know better. The contemporary commercial game introduces a real market of consumer drives, where “Blue Beard’s curiosity” ends up facing a real “rainbow market” of
competing dispositions.

Franck Cochoy was born in Nice and obtained a master’s degree in French literature in 1986 at the Université de Paris VII and a master’s degree in Sociology in 1989 at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He obtained his PhD in 1995 at the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan. He is currently a professor at the Université Toulouse II and has been appointed Visiting Professor of Marketing at The School of Business, Economics and Law Graduate School, University of Gothenburg. His work on the sociology of markets focuses on the different mediations that frame the relation between supply and demand, such as marketing, packaging, self-service, trade press, etc. He is the author of Une histoire du marketing (La Découverte, 1999) and Une sociologie du packaging ou l’âne de Buridan face au marché (Presses Universitaires de France, 2002). His most recent publications in English appeared in Theory, Culture and Society, Marketing Theory, the Journal of Cultural Economy and Organization.

A book launch and discussion
Friday, December 10 2010
New Academic Building LG01, 2-4pm
Goldsmiths, University of London

Blog Theory offers a critical theory of contemporary media. Furthering her account of communicative capitalism, Jodi Dean explores the ways new media practices like blogging and texting capture their users in intensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance. Her wide-ranging and theoretically rich analysis extends from her personal experiences as a blogger, through media histories, to newly emerging social network platforms and applications.

Set against the background of the economic crisis wrought by neoliberalism, the book engages with recent work in contemporary media theory as well as with thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Zizek. Through these engagements, Dean defends the provocative thesis that reflexivity in complex networks is best understood via the psychoanalytic notion of the drives. She contends, moreover, that reading networks in terms of the drives enables us to grasp their real, human dimension, that is, the feelings and affects that embed us in the system.

In remarkably clear and lucid prose, Dean links seemingly trivial and transitory updates from the new mass culture of the internet to more fundamental changes in subjectivity and politics. Everyday communicative exchanges—from blog posts to text messages—have widespread effects, effects that not only undermine capacities for democracy but also entrap us in circuits of domination.

24th of November 2010
Goldsmiths University, RHB Cinema, 15:00-17:00
A free talk by Metahaven, Studio for Design and Research
www.metahaven.net

Metahaven (Vinca Kruk, Daniel van der Velden) is a studio for critical graphic design with a focus on identity and branding. They are based in Amsterdam. Their book Uncorporate Identity was published in 2010 by Lars Müller.

From research projects, such as the Sealand Identity Project (2004), Museum of Conflict (2006), and Quaero (2007), the group has moved into installation making and speculative design projects, such as Affiche Frontière (CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, 2008) and Stadtstaat (Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and Casco Utrecht, 2009).

Metahaven also produces commissioned work for clients, such as the Antennae paperback series for publishing house Valiz. Metahaven’s work has been included in group exhibitions like Forms of Inquiry (Architectural Association, London, 2007, cat.), On Purpose – Design Concepts (Arnolfini, Bristol, 2008), and Manifesta8 – The European Biennial for Contemporary
Art (Murcia, Spain, 2010).

Organised by Celia Lury, Department of Sociology.

more info:
www.e-flux.com/journal/view/53
www.e-flux.com/shows/view/7144

A music spatial performance marking 70 years of the very night the blitz (code named Operation Moonlight Sonata by the Luftwaffe) started over the city.

14th of November, 20:30
Coventry Cathedral (Free)

Organised as part of AHRC funded Noise of the Past:

A collaborative public intervention in war and memory, launched in Coventry Cathedral during Remembrance. Team included Sanjay Sharma (Brunel University), Kuldip Powar (Film Director, Poet), Sawarn Singh (poet/war veteran), Nitin Sawhney (composer/musician) & Coventry Peace Festival (AHRC, Principle Investigator), Nirmal Puwar (Project Co-Director, Goldsmiths University)

Produced by Noise of the Past the starting point for this commission was an inter-generational dialogue in poetry about how one asks and tells of the experiences of war between Sawarn Singh – a WWII soldier who fought in Burma, the Middle East and Africa before moving to Coventry – and his grandson Kuldip Powar.

Musical composer Francis Silkstone responded to the haunting poetic dialogue as the basis of Post Colonial War Requiem, which will be performed by moving musicians in spatial interaction with the Cathedral. Benjamin Britten’s original War Requiem inaugurated the newly-built Cathedral in 1962 which also took the poetry of Wilfred Owen as its inspiration.

The poetry in the piece is a very touching moment of inter-generational exchange. With the grandson wanting to know and the grandfather finding it difficult to face the traumas of war he saw in WW2. There is a line for instance that states “If only the world understood there is no glory in war.”

This piece brings an international and multi-cultural perspective to a series of events on the blitz taking place nationally, that normally offer a European angle, with little recognition of the labour and lives of those from the colonies during WW1 and WW2. Many of whom were through family and friends involved in these war.

It takes the classic War Requiem by Benjamin Britten as a source of inspiration, which is in itself a pacifist piece and turns it around to face the colonies.

more info:
www.gold.ac.uk/sociology/calendar
www.gold.ac.uk/news

A talk by Adam Arvidsson
4th of November 2010
Goldsmiths University, RHB 256, 16:00-18:00

Adam Arvidsson teaches Sociology at the University of Milan, and sometimes at the Copenhagen Business School. His interests focus on the political economy of information, the current fusion of ethics and economics, the creative economies of cities and the phenomenology of creative work. He is the author of Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture, Routledge 2006, and The Ethical Economy, co-authored with Nicolai Peitersen, Columbia University Press, forthcoming.

Organised by Celia Lury, Department of Sociology.

The Birth of Histories from the Spirit of Mourning
A talk by Paul Connerton (University of Cambridge)
28th of October 2010
Goldsmiths University, RHB 309 17:00-19:00

Paul Connerton is author of How Modernity Forgets (2009) and How Societies Remember (1989).
You can listen and view his lecture here
Organised by the Methods Lab, Department of Sociology

Friday 24th September 2010,  9:00-18:00

A conference exploring the intersection of social science and design. Location: Lecture Theatre, Ben Pimlott Building, Goldsmiths University, ore info here (and see programme below).

At the beginning of the year, Kat and Britt (Studio INCITE) made two short videos to promote the MA World Cities and Urban life and MA Critical and Creative Analysis in the Department of Sociology. They are now online:

MA PHOTOGRAPHY AND URBAN CULTURES
graduate students present:

16th September – 3rd October 2010

at APT Gallery / Harold Wharf / 6 Creekside / Deptford / London SE 8 4SA

www.repairmanualexhibition.net

An exhibition showing the work of 17 graduates from the MA Photography and Urban Cultures of Goldsmiths University of London and the Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR).

With work by: Adrian Burnham / Amy Spencer / Ana-Fredina Mihaila / Anouchka van Driel / Beatrice Jarvis / David Ramkalawon / Estelle Vincent / Faiq Airudin / Harriet Smith / Jonathan Burbidge / Jose Paulo Caldeira / Laura Wester / Marjolein Houben / Nora Alissa / Seng Jariangroj / Sian Gouldstone / Zaira La Ragione

REPAIR MANUAL: A CONVERSATION

“Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away”, Walter Benjamin once wrote.

The story makes claim for a place in the listener’s memory. To the extent that the story is able to integrate with the listener’s own experience, the greater the chance that the story will be re-told and re-experienced. Such assimilation demands from the listener a state of total relaxation, a state of self-forgetfulness – the very condition for the story’s entanglement with memory, with language – to become dream and myth.

What is the tension or relation between imagination and production forces; in fabricating, in making material, our dreams, thoughts, and deadlines? We do not yet know what overall impact our work will make in Repair Manual.

Perhaps it is an inversion of Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Man equals Man’, where rather than a “man reassembled like a car”, we look at how a machine can be reassembled like a man. Looking at how each piece cannot be described in isolation but requires a functional element in order to make its existence necessary. This piece fits here to turn the camera on, without it the camera will not be able to function.

We are forced to ask: what is it that the camera demands? From the bare metal body to the glass of the lens, is it not possible to create an aesthetic that draws attention to its method of production, rather than to the visual story? For this is what the repair manual suggests.

Geometry, calculus, algebra is what constitutes the language of the repair manual. This language of science has been usurped by the language of cultural studies, photographic history, visual sociology, all their methods of interpretation would be far better off without the formula needed for the correct camera exposure of any given lens.

Be aware! The repair manual includes the possible scenario of being hijacked, pirated and used in reverse for deconstruction of the same apparatus of function and operation. The repair manual bears with it a possibility of the search for fissures, for anarchic uses of a camera that do not look like when it was originally created.

Unlike a repair manual that requires highly specialized skill in the production of the component diagrams, knowledge of electronics for the connection of parts to the battery and the task of printing the manual onto paper, the title of the exhibition Repair Manual was incidental.

Repair manual is just a metaphor. But, this exhibition and the work produced comes from a more organic encounter with the environment, un-categorized, and bringing together practice and theory in a dialogue, where each informs, and feeds the other.

Some participants are working from the perspective of outsiders, passing through, whilst for others, lives are fully merged into the city that becomes their work site. The passages and terrains both imaginary and material that we have selected varies, but our desire to find and to portray something is consistent.

What brings Repair Manual together is the blurry intersection of photography, sociology, and urban cultures that together speaks the city. Repair Manual tells a story, re-tells a myth through a provisional language of urban change; the dialogue between cities and people – conveying the story of multiple cities, of a dream that never claims either the right to the city or the right to truth, but will tell you a temporal story of the urban.

The Market as an Object of Attachment

6th May 2010, 17:00-19:00
Goldsmiths University London

Lecture by Prof Karin D.Knorr-Cetina

Karin Knorr Cetina is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology, University of Constance, Germany and Visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Chicago where she holds the George Wells Beadle Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology, Sociology and of the Social Sciences.

She was awarded the John Desmond Bernal Prize for Distinguished Contributions to the Field by the Society for Social Studies of Science and Thomson Scientific in October 2009. She specializes in economic anthropology/ sociology, the anthropology of science, knowledge and technology, globalization and global society studies, contemporary social theory, and qualitative methods.

‘In this paper, I consider the foreign exchange market from a particular perspective: I will not focus on market participants and their activities, but rather on the object in which they are participating – on the market and how it engages participants and ensnares them in its project.’

Books and articles include:
Knorr Cetina, K. D. 2009. The Synthetic Situation: Interactionism for a Global World. Symbolic Interaction 32(1): 61-87.
Knorr Cetina, K. D. and Preda, A. 2004. The Sociology Of Financial Markets. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Knorr Cetina, K. D. 1999. Epistemic Cultures. How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press.

Maximising Impact through Research Methods:
a View from Early British Sociology

Lecture by Prof. John Scott
(University of Plymouth)
Discussant: Prof. Les Back (Goldsmiths)

19th February 2010, 16:00-19:00
Goldsmiths University London
Organised by Nirmal Puwar at the Methods Lab, Sociology Department, Goldsmiths University London

The Methods Lab, based within the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths is calling on our inter-disciplinary resources and traditions to critically inhabit the space of social intervention and social impact. This initiative hopes to build a laboratory to stimulate creative debate about the ways in which the practice of sociology is changing, what social research should look like today, and how sociology can best respond to the demands of users of social research. The Lab is intended to provide a space for us to question and develop our own methods of sociological reasoning, to be open to the possibilities of practicing a sociological imagination in a world in which the fundamental co-ordinates of social life are held to be undergoing change.

In the context of the current growth in visual methods, John Scott will deliver a lecture on how early British sociologists used dramatisation & film documentary alongside mass observations surveys to offer resourceful methodologies, as well as ways of speaking to publics beyond the academy.

A sound recording of this lecture can be listened to here:
Sound file of talk by John Scott [mp3]

John Scott’s new book is Social Theory: Central Issues in Sociology, an overview of historical and contemporary debates. His previous books include, A Matter of Record: Documentary Sources in Social Research (1990), Who Rules Britain? (1991), Social Network Analysis (Second Edition, 2000),Poverty and Wealth (1994), Sociological Theory (1995), Stratification and Power (1996), Corporations, Classes and Capitalism (1985), Corporate Business and Capitalist Classes (1997), and Power(2001).

(Irit Rogoff, Deepa Naik, Sounding Difference, 2006 / image: Van Abbemuseum)

A TALK BY
IRIT ROGOFF

(Professor of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths)
at Goldsmiths, University London
21st January 2010, 17:00 – 19:00

What does it mean to take part in culture? Beyond the roles that culture assigns to us; beyond the roles of viewers and voters, listeners and demonstrators, visitors and protestors? Can we find new modes of engagement within the spaces of contemporary art, perhaps even by galvanising the attention that these spaces demand, for some other form of inhabitation?

This research project on participation tries to veer away from the inclusive prescription that characterises the so called ‘participatory turn in contemporary art’ in which various protocols were created to invite subjects into projects and spaces. Instead it asks what does it mean to take part in culture beyond the roles that culture allots us for taking part? By looking to the work of Arendt, Agamben, Nancy questions of community and collectivity are fleshed out through the concept of ‘singularity’ rather than that of identity. Equally, this engagement with the blurring of lines between makers, viewers, objects and spaces has required the development of an alternative vocabulary to capture the shifting relations within the art world.

Irit Rogoff is a theorist, curator and writer. She is Professor of Visual Culture at Goldsmiths, and has published extensively at the intersections of critical theory, politics and contemporary arts practices including “Museum Culture” 1996, “Terra Infirma” 2001, A.C.A.D.E.M.Y 2006 and “Unbounded – Limits’ Possibilities” 2010. Her curatorial work included 3 versions of “De-Regulation with the work of Kutlug Ataman” (Antwerp 2006, Herzilya 2008, Berlin 2010) and Academy (Eindhoven 2006) and “Summit – Non Aligned Initiatives in education Culture” Berlin 2007 and “Turning” in e-flux journal 2010.

Also, interesting articles:
‘Turning’ in e-flux journal 11/2008
‘Education Actualizes’ in e-flux journal 03/2010
‘Free’ in e-flux journal 03/2010

THURSDAY 12. NOVEMBER

6.30 – 8.30pm
Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre
Goldsmiths College, University of London

Two talks and a discussion about presence, liveness and the importance of participation:

KRIS COHEN (Art History, University of Chicago)
“Intimacy without Reciprocity: Suffragists, Trolls, and Sharon Hayes; Art of Protest”

EDGAR SCHMITZ (Art, Goldsmiths)
“Some rather ambient attitudes: “Indefference, exit and the question of affirmation”

Chair: Nina Wakeford (Socoiology, Studio Incite)

How are contemporary artists dealing with the question of participation, particularly in light of the promise of new media to promote greater reciprocity through interaction? How important is the collective creation of atmospheres of participation? Are artistic strategies caught between generating enthusiasm and constituting indifference? How do artists contribute to emergent forms of atmospheres through technologies?

Organised by the INCITE research group, Department of Sociology, Centre for Cultural Studies and the Leverhulme Media Research Centre, with the support of the Economic and Social Research Council and Intel Research.

FRIDAY 13. NOVEMBER
ATMOSPHERES OF PARTICIPATION: A WORKSHOP (invited guests only)
Organised by Nina Wakeford, Sociology & Goetz Bachmann, CCS

Irmela Schneider (University of Cologne):
“Tele-dialogue in 20th Century German Television: a case study of participation.”
Respondent: Goetz Bachmann (Goldsmiths)

Anne Cronin (University of Lancaster):
“Urban billboards, fabulation, and the animation of public space”.
Rachel Moore (Goldsmiths): ‘Not what the neon sign says…’
Respondent: Celia Lury (Goldsmiths)

Karen Mirza (artist): “The Museum of Non Participation”
Karen Tam (Goldsmiths Cultural Studies):
“Orientally Yours: Karaoke Singers, Opium Addicts, and Chinese Diners”
Nina Pope (artist): “Fully Engaged?”
Respondent: Kris Cohen

Scott Lash (Goldsmiths): “Public Sphere as Atmosphere”
Respondent: Ken Anderson (Intel)