Transmission
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Conference thanks
We would like to thank all the delegates and speakers for taking part in the conference for making it such a lively, stimulating event. We hope you enjoyed your time in Sheffield and look forward to seeing you again. We would like to thank the following people for chairing the dialogue sessions, often in addition to presenting their own papers:
David Cotterrell
Kathy Doherty
Juliet Flower MacCannell
Rachel Garfield
Peter Jones
Ahuvia Kahane
Esther Leslie
Penny McCarthy
Dany Nobus
Lucy Reynolds
Blake Stimson
We would also like to thank our stewards Lou, Gill, Dale, Brian, Jamie, Harriet, Kerry, Joe and Diana for supporting the delegates and organisers throughout the conference and for Conference21, in particular Jill Hitchenor, for all their hard work in perparing in for the conference.
best wishes
Kirsty Christer, Sharon Kivland and Jaspar Joseph-Lester
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Transmission is a series of artists’ talks organised by Sheffield Hallam University in association with Site Gallery. In this series of lectures, staff from the department of fine art have each invited a friend to speak. The series is convened by Dr Jaspar Joseph-Lester and Dr Sharon Kivland.
This website contains information about the Transmission series of events and publications. It also includes details of the recent conference Transmission: HOSPITALITY, held in July 2010, and Transmission: Annual, the new journal launched at the conference:
About the conference
Please go to the Conference bookings page for details of how to book your place.
Transmission: HOSPITALITY is an interdisciplinary conference that addresses the relation between the modes of
analysis and communication for comprehending art, through addressing the ethics and politics of hospitality and the
positions of host, stranger, and friend.
Keynote Guest Speakers
Clegg
and Guttmann (Artists, Germany), Juliet
Flower MacCannell (Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and
English, UC Irvine)
Ahuvia Kahane (Professor of Greek, Royal Holloway, University of London), Esther Leslie (Professor in Political Aesthetics, Birkbeck, University of London)
Dany
Nobus (Professor, School of Social Sciences, Brunel, University
West London), Blake
Stimson (Professor of Art History, University of California)
Dialogue sessions explored themes of art and responsibility, art and ethics, art and psychoanalysis, cultures of
curating, hospitality and film, art and the foreigner (or the odd, eccentric and uncanny), art and philosophy,
multidisciplinary practice, art and dialogue, art and community, art and politics, collaborative practice.
A new journal Transmission Annual was launched during the conference. The pilot issue takes up hospitality,
incorporating both the stranger and the friend in the dual host relation.
Go to the Conference programme page for more details about the conference themes, panels and speakers.
Venue and Contact Details
Transmission was hosted by the Art & Design Research Centre, Sheffield Hallam University and took place from 1st - 3rd July 2010 in the heart of Sheffield's Cultural Industries Quarter. Go to the Delegate info page for full details.
Transmission: Annual
At the end of André Breton’s semi-autobiographical book Nadja, he notes an extract from a morning newspaper: a wireless operator in charge of the telegraph post on the Ile de Sable had picked up a fragment of a message. It said: ‘Something isn't right’, but did not give the position of the aeroplane at that moment and, due to the very bad atmospheric conditions and the interference produced by them, the operator was unable to make any other phrase or to enter into communication. The message was transmitted on a wavelength of 625 metres, and given the strength of reception, the wireless operator was able to localise the aeroplane within a radius of 80 kilometres around the island. Then Breton adds his last line: Beauty must be convulsive or not at all. It was a real press article, from the 27th December 1927, and possessed, for Breton the value of an oracle, revealing what he called ‘le hasard objetif’ (objective chance). ‘Something isn’t right’, but nonetheless a message is carried, a message of transmission itself, as though what is sent and received lies in the acts of sending and reception.
Transmission is the act of passing something on, via a channel. One might make a list of a multiplicity of ways of transmission, including wisdom, enlightenment, education, messages sent over a distance through electrical or electronic means, and disease (which has both locus and route). In transmission, there is a move from one to another, and each may be changed in the move, in the encounter. To date, our transmission (or Transmission) has encompassed a yearly lecture programme, an annual symposium, a print portfolio, five volumes of discussions between speakers (artists and academics) and their audiences (Transmission: Speaking and Listening), an on-going series of books (The Rules of Engagement), and a series of chapbooks (Transmission: Host), produced as an exchange between a host and his/her guest. There is research, there are documents, and these are played out wherever co-respondents announce themselves. There is oral transmission and there are written records; the former may be assumed to be less trustworthy than the latter and also, somehow, more true (that it is constructed, subjected to careful editing or victim of lost recordings, is often forgotten). Transmission: Annual, a journal that is our new locus and route, extends the work undertaken in the lecture programme, which follows a theme, though as a theme it has no rules (does not pathologies its object), other than those of hospitality (to honour the guest, we might say, though the guest has his/her own duties and obligations). The journal also escapes the lecture series, drawing on broader horizons, wider paths, diverse fields. What it is not is a fetishisation of the social encounter or the reduction of conversation to an aesthetic genre.
The pilot issue, which will be published in July 2010, takes up the three-year discussions on hospitality, incorporating the stranger and the friend, folding them into our hospitable fold, introducing writers, thinkers, artists to each other (and to a supposed reader), and mixing the drinks generously, even when ‘something is not right’, especially because ‘something is not right’. Transmission too easily goes off air; it is not registered and without register, disappears (this is always the threat). Speculation elides what is (and which we should not seek to avoid), while confirming what is already known is equally risky (even odious). We are here, headphones on, eager, inviting reception, asking for a reply. Roger, over, copy and out; ça va, ça va pas. Say again.
