Symposia and related events
Book launch for the latest volume of Transmission Annual
Tuesday 3 December from 18.30 to 20.00
at
Site Gallery
1 Brown Street
Sheffield S1 2BS
Taking up Hannah Arendt’s reflections on three important human activities – labour, work, action – this book addresses the role that might be played by artist or work of art, and how this makes for agents and agency.
The launch follows a talk by Oliver Ressler, entitled 'Spatial Occupations', 16.15 – 17.45, at S1 Art Space, 120 Trafalgar St, Sheffield S1 4JT.
Both events are free and open to all, but as places are limited for the talk, booking is advised: info@s1artspace.org
Oliver Ressler's film The Plundering is screened daily at BLOC Projects, 71 Eyre Lane, Sheffield S1 4RB as part of the programme of Art Sheffield 2013, ZERO HOURS.
Transmission Annual. Volume IV
LABOUR, WORK, ACTION
Edited by Michael Corris, Jaspar Joseph-Lester, Sharon Kivland
With guest editors Maureen Connor and Elizabeth Legge
Artwords Press, London, 2013
Designed by Fraser Muggeridge studios
Contributors: Ivana Bago, Jordan Bear, Pascal Beausse, Bernard Brunon, Pavel Büchler, Armin Chodzinski, Annie Coll, Michael Corris, Janeil Engelstad, Francesco Finizio, Charlie Gere, Jerome Harrington, David Hopkins, Shannon Jackson, Vincent Victor Jouffe, the Pedagogy Group, Elizabeth Legge, Dale MacFarlane, Roberto Martinez, Mary-Lou Lobsinger, Hester Reeve, Oliver Ressler, John Paul Ricco, Abigail Satinsky, Juliet Steyn
Gary Simmonds and Matthew Harrison: Razzle-Dazzle symposium
surface, manipulation, transformation
Friday 15 June 2012
1.15 to 6.30 p.m.
Centre for Creative Collaboration 16 Acton Street London WC1X 9NG
This event marks the beginning of a new collaborative research project led by artists Matthew Harrison and Gary Simmonds. The project aims to explore Dazzle Camouflage as a starting point for considering the relation between surface, form, and affect.
Dazzle Camouflage was a military paint scheme used on ships in World Wars I and II to confuse enemy pilots. Through collaboration between artists and Naval architects, Dazzle defied all camouflage convention and functioned by making the ship more visible to the observer. Norman Wilkinson, a marine painter, devised a disruptive pattern to confuse the gunner on the pursuing U-boat as to the speed and directionin which the ship was travelling. Consequently a team of artists was tasked to create the most effective range of ‘dazzling’ patterns, unique to each vessel. The contrasting and jarring motifs transformed the ship's surface to disrupt and confuse the enemy. The development of Dazzle camouflage also provides important insights into experimental working methods between artists and scientists. The framework in which it was created informs an ethos of practice and demonstrates the productive potential for interdisciplinary collaborations where problems and solutions are un-earthed through speculative enquiry.
The event at C4CC will involve a series of speculations, observations and reflections that explore how the decorative has agency; what it might mean to blind the audience through surface and glamour; how the nature of an object can be transformed through the manipulation of surface; how Dazzle was conceived through experimental and speculative interdisciplinary collaborations and how this working framework might support new methods for artists working today.
John W. Phillips, author of Modernist Avant-garde Aesthetics and Contemporary Military Technology (Edinburgh University Press, 2010) will present his research on camouflage followed by a series of presentations from invited artists. Matthew Harrison and Gary Simmonds will introduce images and artefacts generated by the project so far.
This event is free, but places are limited to thirty participants. The deadline for booking is Monday 11 June.
To register: email: G.L.Simmonds@shu.ac.uk
This event is supported by ADRC (Art and Design Research Centre), Sheffield Hallam University, and HARC (Humanities and Arts Research Centre), Royal Holloway University of London.
TRANSMISSION
McCormack & Gent. Dumb Fixity Symposium
Friday 23 March 201
Centre for Creative Collaboration
16 Acton Street London Greater London WC1X 9NG
Who’s looking at who?
Object abuse: beyond tools, beyond brands, beyond auratic fetishism
This event considered a less-explored reading of objects and things, questioning our relation with them and exploring the potential of other forms of address. McCormack & Ghent propose that a new intention should be employed to interrogate our role in relations with objects – that in object abuse there lies the question of who or what is abused. Does co-presence allow another position, redressing our intentions and interactions – who’s looking at who? Might the animistic gaze reveal objects to be more than tools or resources? Or are we blinded by our fetishes?*
- Fiona Candlin, Gabriel Gbadamosi, & Dale Russell presented a ten-minute provocation in response to this question.
- An Open Space process will be engaged in for the assembled audience and speakers to address this question.
- People participated in an active way, producing a dynamic debate.
- Participants were co-present in a non-hierarchial structure.
Dumb Fixity
a McCormack and Gent project
Dumb Fixity is a process of fixity, an attempt to plot the proximities, connections, and allegiances of things, and trace the associations of their auras. There are several strands to this work: while the live research continues, The Listening Series is another manifestation of the research, which has been explored first at LoBe in Berlin and recently at Kettle’s Yard Gallery, Cambridge. Dumb Fixity. The Impossible Question was published by Artwords, London, in 2010.
This event is part of Transmission, a project convened by Dr Jaspar Joseph-Lester and Dr Sharon Kivland, with the support of ADRC (Art and Design Research Committee), Sheffield Hallam University, and HARC (Humanities and Arts Research Committee), Royal Holloway University of London.
*’They (the Moderns) do have a fetish, the strangest one of all: they deny to the objects they fabricate the autonomy they have given them. They pretend they are not surpassed, outstripped by events. They want to keep their mastery, and they find its source within the human subject, the origin of action’.
Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods
BIOGRAPHIES
TC McCormack is an artist based in London. His practice exhibits social, political, and behavioural attributes of place, referring to design to consider the architectonics of community. He is currently researching the phenomenon of resistance space and the possibility of language to delineate the relational affinities of forms, while acknowledging the shifting nature of subjectivity. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and he works both collaboratively and individually. He is a lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University.
Martin J Gent has a varied practice as an artist, working in performance, live, and visual arts. He is a director, designer, curator, collaborator, and performer. Over the past decade he has balanced this practice with his interest in leadership and cultural change, using arts practice to consult and work with organisations to develop and deliver challenging experiential programmes that initiate and support change. He teaches and lectures at a number of universities and is currently an Associate Director of The Map Consortium and Director of Creativity at Spinach, a qualitative research agency.
Professor Fiona Candlin is Senior Lecturer in Museum Studies in the School of Arts at Birkbeck, University of London. With Raiford Guins she is editor of The Object Reader (2009), and her research on audiences, museums, and the senses culminated in Art, Museums and Touch (Manchester University Press, 2010). She has just begun a new book entitled Micromuseology, which rethinks museum studies from the perspective of very small independent organisations. Between 2005 and 2007 Fiona Candlin was Visiting Professor at Gothenburg University, Sweden.
GabrielGbadamosi is an Irish-Nigerian Londoner, a writer and broadcaster. His radio play The Long, Hot Summer of '76 won the Richard Imison Award; his recently completed novel Vauxhall won the Tibor Jones Pageturner Prize at the London Book Fair. He was AHRC Creative Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Cambridge University. His essay on the African male nude was recently broadcast on BBC Radio 3.
Professor Dale Russell is internationally renowned design practitioner as futurist and academic. Her creative and strategic guidance inspires visionary design cultures and projects within design and technology teams across a diverse blue-chip portfolio. She is Visiting Professor, Innovation Design Engineering, Royal College of Art / Imperial College, honorary Fellow RCA, Visiting Professor, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and advisor to UAL research centres: Design Against Crime (DACRC); Textile Futures (TFRG); and Spatial Practices. She is author of six books and a contributor to the areas of research and media.
In July 2011, the following event was held:
Hospitality
Two evenings of presentations, events and talks
Friday 1 and Saturday 2 July 2011
Transmission Annual, Monument for Historical Change
LoBe and Plato’s Symposium
Hosted by the Verein zur Förderung von Kunst und Kultur am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz e.V. in L4
Two evenings outlining the role of L40 as a site of hospitality and collaboration through the Berlin launch of Transmission Annual: Hospitality and the renovation of Clegg and Guttmann’s Monument for Historical Change (with a live performance of Joy Religion. The second evening will involve discussions around LoBe with responses from artists involved in ongoing collaborations followed by a screening of Plato’s Symposium (2011), a film by Anu Pennanen and Stéphane Querrec that was shot in L40. http://www.rosa-luxemburg-platz.net
