Saturday 17 December 2011

VHS sampling, VHS nasties...

Our thanks to Dr Andrew Burke for his fantastic talk "The Sound of Straight-to-Video: VHS Head's Trademark Ribbons of Gold".



Our next session is scheduled for 18 January - Mary Oliver on "Practice as Research" and Dr Xavier Mendik (familiar from our Extremities conference of a couple of months back), presenting and discussing his new documentary: "Reclaiming 'Cannibal Holocaust'".





Salford's Prof George McKay's Book of the Year!

George's new book Radical Gardening is getting a host of mentions in end-of-year round-ups of best books (including The Guardian and The Independent, copied below).

All reviews via his blog.

Independent On Sunday
If you thought gardening was a tame and rather bourgeois pursuit, here is a book to make you think again. George McKay traces the ways in which gardening and the garden have been, and remain, central to radical politics, from the Hyde Park riots of the 1860s, through the social utopianism of the garden city movement, the progressive left-wing and reactionary right-wing versions of organic gardening, foreign plants and the politics of immigration, peace gardens, gay gardens, counter-cultural gardens of the 1960s, and up to the ‘guerrilla gardening’ on urban wasteland today. A fascinating and erudite history that made me want to go and cultivate my garden. (Brandon Robshaw, Books of the Year, ‘Vegetable plots, ad the red roots of a green revolution’, 11 December)


The Guardian
This unusual book looks at the role the garden plays in politics and revolution. George McKay is an academic who specialises in the study of counterculture, and he has turned his gaze on gardening. As well as the more obvious and leftwing, such as environmentalism and garden cities, McKay writes about the affinity the Nazis felt with organic movement. Uncomfortable in places, but hugely thought-provoking. (Lia Leendertz, Weekend magazine, ‘When the garden sleeps’ [Christmas books article], 10 December 2011)

Friday 9 December 2011

MMP Grad Programme talks, Weds 14 Dec

Internal speaker: Dr Yu-Wei Lin


Technofeminism and Media Technologies
Following up my introductory talk on technofeminism last academic year, this talk will provide not only a more advanced view on technofeminism and other related theories around feminist technoscience studies, but also my own experience of adopting this analytical approach for the research on women in Free/Open Source Software communities and gendered participatory cultures in an age of media convergence.





External Speaker: Dr Andrew Burke

Andrew Burke is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Winnipeg where he teaches critical theory and cultural studies. His current project is on the representation of memory and modernity in contemporary British cinema.




The Sound of Straight-to-Video:

VHS Head’s Trademark Ribbons of Gold

Comprised primarily of samples drawn from a collection of 80s videocassettes layered over frenetic and fractured beats, the music of VHS Head points to the way in which memory and technology intersect. Occupying the space where glitchy electronica meets hypnogogic pop, the tracks on VHS Head’s debut album Trademark Ribbons of Gold trace a trajectory from the VCR to the mp3. The analogue remnants of the recent past are digitally reprocessed and reconfigured in a way that amplifies their force and menace. The work of VHS Head does not simply represent another example of the contemporary enthusiasm for dead media and obsolete technologies, but also serves as a model for how the recent past resides in the present day: as a discontinuous and disorienting barrage of fragments that continue to haunt and unsettle the present. Drawing on memory studies and thing theory, this paper examines the uncanny as it is embodied in the ungainly material form of the videocassette and let loose through the music of VHS Head.

followed by our Christmas Social!

Times for All Sessions:
3.10 – 4pm:     Internal Speaker
4.15 - 5.15:      External Speaker

Location:
All sessions: second floor lecture theatre, Adelphi House
Building 3 on page 3 of this map: http://www.salford.ac.uk/travel/campus-map.pdf
(NB: Not Adelphi Building, and beware of Google Maps that confuses the two).
If you need parking, please let Ben Halligan know ahead of time: b.halligan@salford.ac.uk

Seasonal Miriad Social and Networking event

Salford PGRs invited to MIRIAD’s networking event, which is taking place at The Salutation, on Thursday 15th December 2011. Directions here and http://www.salutationmanchester.co.uk/


Thursday 8 December 2011

Believe@MediaCityUK

video here: a behind-the-scenes film of the Believe event, produced by University of Salford students. Andrea Marcaccio and Nikola Brunelli, Erasmus students on the MA Creative Technology course, have captured and packaged preparations being made in the Digital Performance Lab for last month's popular event. The Believe event was a huge success with nearly 3000 visitors attending as the university invited the public to come and see our new MediaCityUK home.

Sunday 4 December 2011

MediaCity Christmas Party!!


 See the full line up and book your free ticket at http://mcukbigchristmasparty.eventbrite.co.uk/

Postgrad Enterprise

For the first time ever the University of Salford has collaborated with the University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan University to jointly host an event aimed at Postgraduates from all three Universities . The focus of the event will be on how to be entrepreneurial and/or intrapreneurial in your research, studies or whether you choose employment or self employment.

The event will be held on Monday 23rd January 2012 at Salford University, Media City.

During the course of the day, there will be keynote speakers, postgraduate and Alumni entrepreneurs as well as local entrepreneurs and business representatives.

This is a great opportunity to find out what is happening in the labour market, to network with peers from the University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan University and to gain some practical tips and advice on future career prospects.

Each University has been allocated 50 places, therefore it is imperative that people book early to avoid disappointment. Please find attached the promotional poster and full details can also be found on our website http://www.postgradenterprise.co.uk/

Thursday 1 December 2011

Prof David Sanjek (1952-2011)

Many of you will have heard the terrible news that our dear friend and esteemed colleague Prof Dave Sanjek passed away a few days ago on the journey back from New York to Manchester, where he was engaged in expert committee work for the Library of Congress.



(Dave hosting the Tony Palmer masterclass in 2010)

This was so unexpected - in the last fews week he was about town, as usual, for films (The Black Power Mix Tape, which he found incredibly moving since the times and places were his own), for live music (The Fall, where he was more enthused by the rhythm section than the singer), for theatre (One Man, Two Guvnors, on which he and I agreed to differ!), for food (we were gradually winning him around to Zouk, but he held fast to Red Chilli too) and for general conversation (I picked his brains Friday gone on the subject of 1970s late night New York cable television screenings of horror films for a piece I was writing - he was, as always, encyclopedic and with an enthusiasm that swept you along as well). As you'll see from the picture further down this blog, he was hosting a Graduate Programme talk only a couple of weeks ago.

Recently completed chapters concerned Captain Beefheart, the Medicine Ball Caravan and Wildman Fisher, and recent conferences he convened included Sights and Sounds: Interrogating the Music Documentary, a Northern Soul event, and a symposium on music and copyright.

Dave's passing is a great loss to us and to the wider community, and to anyone who has ever enjoyed his company, his writing, his teaching, and his friendship.

--- Benjamin Halligan  



Facebook Memorial page here

Some of Dave's recent writing, on the films Johnny Guitar
and My Man Godfrey for Senses of Cinema.


Tuesday 29 November 2011

Trauma Film Screenings in December

Trauma Film Screenings present: Capitalism in Cinema: A Brief History

Presented by Gözde Naiboğlu

This season will see the screening of three thrillers framing three different periods of capitalism experienced in three different settings: 1950’s in a South American vil...lage, 1920’s oil boom in California, and Hanover of former West Germany, present. What unites these three films is not their exploration of the savage virulence of capitalism according to the thriller genre conventions, but the questions that they provide us with: what sort of subjects does capital require and produce? What are the desires and beliefs that mobilize the (non)characters on screen and what symptoms of the capital-logic do these processes of desire production demonstrate? The season aims to delineate these symptoms by following the transformation of subjectivities throughout the transformation of labour. From the naturalist settings of the early to mid 20th century industrial capitalism to the eeriness of the post-industrial world of contemporary finance capitalism, the three films attempt to expose the in-human quality of capitalism’s operational logic.

Monday 5th December
Le Salaire de la Peur (1953)
Dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot
France
We (along with a long list of filmmakers) shall forever be thankful to the author of the novel “Le Salaire de la Peur”, Georges Arnaud for his arguably bigoted decision to give the rights to the film to a French filmmaker instead of Hitchcock. Set in an abject town in Venezuela, the film opens with an American oil firm boss’s offer to pay a big amount of money to whoever accepts to transport two trucks filled with highly explosive nitro-glycerine which will be used to extinguish a nearby oil-well fire. The slow paced, nightmarish journey is one of the most intense trips in the film history that is, in Karel Reisz’s words, “unselectively and impartially anti-everything”.

Monday 12th December
There Will Be Blood (2007)
Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
USA
Set in early 1900’s California and loosely adapted from Upton Sinclair’s novel “Oil!”, There Will Be Blood is a dark dialectical account of capital and religion which touched a nerve for its relevance today. The main character of the film, the greedy oil pioneer Daniel Plainview, which won the actor Daniel Day Lewis an Academy Award for Best Actor in 2007 is one of the most fascinating characterizations of the archetypal “homo economicus” ever performed. Day-Lewis’s affect-free performance of Daniel Plainview is the focus of the introduction to the film - with its pure beastly quality it is a perfect exhibition of the pre-subjective and inhuman quality of capitalism.

Monday 19th December
Yella (2007)
Dir. Christian Petzold
Germany
The “Berlin School” director Christian Petzold’s Yella tells the story of a recently divorced young woman leaving her hometown in former East Germany to find a job and start anew in the World Expo 2000 host city Hanover in former West Germany. The whole film is about money, as the director explains in an interview there is not a single scene without money’s presence in it. Yet the strictly materialistic and mundane non-spaces of the post-industrial German town paradoxically exude an atmosphere of otherworldliness. The non-characters pass through these spaces and barely leave footprints behind, and are constantly chased by the ghosts of the past. Yella presents an almost clinical exploration of the operations of today’s finance capitalism.

All screenings are FREE and start at 6pm in Manchester Lecture Theatre, All Saints Building, Oxford Rd.


Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TraumaFilm
 

Monday 28 November 2011

Salford Art and Design PGR session, 7/12

2.00 – 5.00 Wednesday 7 December 2011 in Room HT210, Centenary Building.

The topic is "Intellectual Property Rights and Research Ethics in Art and Design"

The session will be led by Professor Alex Williams and Dr Rob Partington.

Friday 25 November 2011

Scottish Clarinet Quartet concernt

Sunday 27th November 2011 // 3:00pm // Admission: Free

Venue: University of Salford,

Digital Media and Performance

Lab, MediaCityUK,

With Matt Hulse

‘Songs of the Earth’ & The Parlour

Guide to Exo-Politics

In a rare trip ‘south of the border’ the Scottish Clarinet Quartet (SCQ) presents

‘Songs of the Earth’, in which composers including Stephen Davismoon, David

Fennessy, Sadie Harrison and Anna Meredith collaborated closely with

photographer Terry Williams to create an audiovisual synthesis: sound and image

together evoking the wild natural world of Skye.

The concert will also include SCQ’s latest commission, ‘The Parlour Guide to

Exo-Politics’, work produced by ‘Gameshow Outpatient’ and featuring

visuals from film maker and video artist Matt Hulse. This work has been made

possible through the support of Creative Scotland. www.scq.org.uk

Thursday 24 November 2011

30/11 talks postponed

In anticipation of industrial action this coming Weds, the two talks scheduled for the Graduate Programme will be postponed until the new year.

The next talks will be on 14 December (followed by a Christmas social):

Internal session: Dr Yu-Wei Lin, "Technofeminism and Media Technologies"
External speaker: Dr Andrew Burke (University of Winnipeg), "The Sound of Straight-to-Video: VHS Head’s Trademark Ribbons of Gold"

I'll send out email reminders prior.

Thursday 17 November 2011

MMP Grad Programme talks

Our many thanks to Dr Eithne Quinn for her fantastic talk on grime lyrics as legal evidence

(Salford's Prof David Sanjek introduces Dr Quinn)

Here's a link to Eithne's book on gangster rap.

Our next session (30/11) potentially clashes with industrial action across the public sector, in which case I'll reschedule our talks. Information to follow.

Wednesday 9 November 2011

Grad Prog talks, 16/Nov

Internal session: Dr Benjamin Halligan
(3.10 - 4pm; second floor lecture theatre, Adelphi House)

Questions of Anti-Establishment Art

How is the history and ontology of the “English establishment” preserved and maintained in postmodern times? This presentation of current research examines Jarman’s 1992 painting “Queer”, the 2002 track “Time for Heroes” by The Libertines, and Mario Testino’s official wedding photograph of Kate Middleton and William Wales from 2011. To what extent do these three texts from the last two decades seek to subvert and/or renew notions of the establishment - its aesthetics, ideology, rituals and prejudices? In what ways is this establishment both called into creation, and called to account, in these three documents? And how does the radical or bohemian tradition of English modernist art fare in this context? The discussion will take as its starting point Stephen Frears’ gelding for the 2006 film The Queen.




External Speaker: Dr Eithne Quinn
(4.15 - 5.15; second floor lecture theatre, Adelphi House)

Dr Eithne Quinn of the University of Manchester is author of Nuthin’ But a “G” Thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap (Columbia University Press, 2005). She is currently completing a book entitled A Piece of the Action: Race and Labour in Post-Civil Rights Hollywood.


Taking the Rap: The Use of Violent Grime Lyrics in Criminal Cases
In three recent murder cases in London, prosecution counsels presented violent ‘grime’ rap lyrics written by defendants as evidence of guilt. As author of a scholarly book on gangsta rap, Eithne Quinn acted as an expert witness for the defence in the three trials. This paper gives an account of the legal use of violent rap and argues that, in these cases, lyrics should not be admissible as evidence.

The Future of Television Talk by Alex Connock

What kind of TV are you going to be working in for the next 40 years ? It's going to be global, interactive and online - and very different from the one we all grew up with. Visiting Professor Alex Connock, who co-founded the large factual TV production company Ten Alps, and has now founded Salford-based digital content company Pretend, tries to find some answers. Social media content, big-hitting interactive TV formats, more than ever from the North, and a TV business geared to sell programmes around the world will all feature, with loads of examples, and questions for the audience. Alex is also Chairman of the Royal Television Society in the North West, and a visiting fellow in journalism at Oxford University.


Monday 14 Nov, 5.15pm, Digital Performance Lab, MediaCityUK
Free to attend but please email d.hughes1@salford.ac.uk to let them know.

Thursday 3 November 2011

Seven Sites project


Link to the Seven Sites project, which consists of 7 separate but inter-related performance events at various sites around Manchester, below. The project is being supported by the University and we have students involved gaining work experience. The next event is taking place on November 23rd.




Innovation through Heritage event

Innovation through Heritage: How do we maximise the use of heritage assets in businesses, the cultural sector and higher education?

Date: - Friday 11th November 2011; Time: - 12.00 noon until 4 p.m.

Location: University of Salford, The Old Fire Station, Acton Square, The Crescent, M5 4WT

Join us at this FREE seminar organised by University of Salford's Leisure, Heritage & Recreation Research Group, in conjunction with the International MNEMOS project – www.enterpriseculturalheritage.org, ISOS research group and UKAIS.

Cultural Heritage – How can it open new opportunities?

Kath Doran MD for Spectrum Plastics, a business which has been around since 1922. Kath will talk about learning through experience and the wealth of knowledge that has been passed down the generations. This heritage has helped the organisation to diversify, increase and widen marketopportunities and develop new products whilst maintaining the core values the business was originally built on. www.spectrumplastics.co.uk


Tools and Technology – Satisfying local needs online

Sarah Hartley Sarah will talk about the community engagement project, www.n0tice.com, which re-examines the idea of local news and information in the context of a SoLoMo (social-local-mobile) context to create a digital community noticeboard. She blogs about journalism, social media, local news and online communities and is also a regular writer at The Guardian's Northerner blog www.guardian.co.uk/uk/the-northerner


Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before

Steven Flower will talk about how Salford Lads' Club utilises a chance connection with the 1980's band The Smiths to help preserve and continue it's 100 year legacy of providing services to young people and to continue to "Brighten Young Lives and Make Good Citizens" (its moto) using Social Media Surgeries, Digital library of fans on Flickr and much more…


Struggling To Get Your Voice Heard?

Maintaining quality in an age of quantity Lynette Cawthra was appointed Manager at the Working Class Movement Library in 2006 with a remit to 'explore, develop, and implement methods of presenting the resources of the Library in new, more exciting and accessible ways'. At a time of public expectation of ever-present access to digital information and yet also of severe funding cuts, how can this be achieved?


Programme:

12:00 Light lunch and informal networking

13:00 ”Pecha Kucha“ from researchers and practitioners in the Heritage area

14:00 Keynote speakers

15:50 Closing remarks


How to book?

If you would like to attend this free event, please complete an online booking form by visiting: http://ech.eventbrite.com
Places are limited please book early - before 7th November http://ech.eventbrite.com
Guests are invited to participate in this event by submitting a Pecha Kucha. See tips for presenters (www.isos.salford.ac.uk/pechakucha.php) and submit your slides by 1st November by emailing l.walker@salford.ac.uk and e.vasilieva@salford.ac.uk

Help us to promote this event by sharing the event leaflet with those who might be interested - download the Innovation Through Heritage event leaflet here.

For more information please contact us:

Liz Walker on 0161 295 2888 l.walker@salford.ac.uk
Elena Vasilieva on 0161 295 3510 e.vasilieva@salford.ac.uk

Colman / Deleuze talk

Our many thanks to Manchester Metropolitan University's Dr Felicity Colman (left) for her fantastic talk on Deleuze and cinema yesterday.

Here's a link to her recent book on the same.

New series of Invisible Histories talks

Talks at the Working Class Movement Library:

Wednesday 9 November 2pm Alison Gill and Helen Ostell 'Safety in numbers: life in Prestwich Asylum in 1900'.

Wednesday 16 November 2pm Tim Gee ‘Counterpower'.

Wednesday 30 November 2pm George McKay - ‘Radical Gardening'.

Friday 28 October 2011

Salford Grad Programme talk 2/Nov: "How to use Deleuze in thinking about Screen Media"

2 November / 4.15 - 5.15 / 2nd floor lecture theatre, Adelphi House
External Speaker: Dr Felicity Colman

Dr Felicity Colman is a Reader in Screen Media in the Dept of Media at MMU. She is the author of Deleuze and Cinema (Berg 2011) and editor of Film, Theory and Philosophy (2009) and co-editor of Sensorium: Aesthetics, Art, Life (2007). She is working on a number of book projects that engage screen media forms, including Bergson and Film, and Screen Media Semiologies.





How to use Deleuze in thinking about Screen Media
Gilles Deleuze published two radical books on film: "Cinema 1: The Movement-Image" and "Cinema 2: The Time-Image". Engaging with a wide range of film styles, histories and theories, Deleuze’s writings treat film as a new form of philosophy. This cine-philosophy offers a startling new way of understanding the complexities of the moving image, its technical concerns and constraints as well as its psychological and political outcomes. In this talk I'll look at some of the key concepts behind Deleuze’s revolutionary theory of the cinema (affect, time, thought, politics, etc), and discuss how Deleuze’s radical methodology is useful for all forms of for screen media analysis.



Tuesday 25 October 2011

Oberhausen Film Festival -- Call for Entries

58th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 26 April - 1 May 2012
Press release

Calling for entries for the 2012 competitions

The 58th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen is now calling for entries for its competitions. In 2012, a record 44,000 euros of prize money will be distributed.

The new Promotional Prize of the Festival is the main cause of the increase in prize money at Oberhausen. For this prize, the festival will donate 10 cents per admission. With an average of almost 18,000 admissions per year, Oberhausen is expecting to award a sum of around 1,800 euros. In addition, the prize money in the International Children's and Youth Film Competition has increased from 2,000 to 3,000 euros and the Zonta Prize for a female filmmaker in the International or German Competition was raised from 500 to 1,000 euros.

Oberhausen organises five competitions: International, German, North Rhine-Westphalian, International Children's and Youth Films and the MuVi Award for the best German Music Video. Entry forms and regulations are available as downloads from kurzfilmtage.de. The festival recommends submission via reelport.com, where films can be registered and uploaded online.


Deadlines:

- Submission deadline for international productions: 13 January 2012

(max. 35 minutes running time, produced after 1 January 2010)


- Submission deadline for German productions: 15 February 2012

(max. 45 minutes running time, produced after 1 January 2011)


- Submission deadline for the MuVi Award: 21 February 2012

(the director or production company must be located in Germany, produced after 1 January 2011)


Online:


Oberhausen, 25 October 2011
Press contact: Sabine Niewalda, T +49 (0)208 825-3073, niewalda@kurzfilmtage.de

Monday 24 October 2011

Black History Month talk at Salford

Empire Pays Back

Lecture and film screening: Dr. Robert Beckford

Wednesday 26th October, 7.00pm

Dr Robert Beckford is an educator, author and award-winning broadcaster in the field of religion, culture and politics. A firm believer in teaching for social change, Dr. Beckford has retained a commitment to teaching outside of traditional contexts. In his film ‘Empire Pays Back’, Dr Beckford believes that Britain should pay reparations to the descendents of slaves, and hires a team of experts to put a monetary figure on the amount owing.


Venue: University of Salford, Lady Hale Lecture Theatre, Lady Hale Building, Peel Campus, M5 4WT

Admission: Free

For a more information and to book tickets:



T: 0161 295 9003  
E: blackhistorymonth@salford.ac.uk

If you are interested in attending then please use the email address/phone number above to book a place.

Thursday 20 October 2011

The Media, Music and Performance Graduate Programme for 2011/12

I am delighted to be able to present the full programme of talks, from Salford colleagues and visiting guest lecturers, for the current academic year. Abstracts and further information below, and everyone is welcome to attend!

This programme features a wealth of national and international expertise. We focus this year, in particular, on censorship and extreme artistic expression, on using Deleuzian theory, on class and British popular culture, and on theorising new media and old.

My thanks to MMP PGRs for their requests and recommendations, which have been formative in shaping the programme. Look forward to seeing you there ---



Dr Benjamin Halligan

Director of the Graduate Programme, MMP


Times for All Sessions:
3.10 – 4pm:     Internal Speaker / PGR presentations
4.15 - 5.30:      External Speaker
5.30:                King’s Arms for refreshments


Location:
All sessions: second floor lecture theatre, Adelphi House
Building 3 on page 3 of this map: http://www.salford.ac.uk/travel/campus-map.pdf
(NB: Not Adelphi Building, and beware of Google Maps that confuses the two).
If you need parking, please let Ben Halligan know ahead of time: b.halligan@salford.ac.uk


19 October:

External speaker: Dr Toni Sant

(Host: Richard Talbot)



Dr Toni Sant is Director of Research at the University of Hull’s School of Arts and New Media in Scarborough. He has also lectured about performance and new media at New York University and the University of Malta. For more see http://www.tonisant.com



Preserving a History of the Future:

Archiving the Avant-Garde in a Digital Environment at Franklin Furnace
Established since 1976, Franklin Furnace is a renowned New York-based arts
organization whose mission is to preserve, document, and present works of
avant-garde art by emerging artists - particularly those whose works may be
vulnerable due to institutional neglect or politically unpopular content.
Drawing on his book Franklin Furnace & the Spirit of the Avant-Garde: A
History of the Future (Intellect, 2010), Toni Sant discusses how new
technology raises new issues in regard to preservation and archiving for
Franklin Furnace. Aside from the issues that arise during the creation and
primary dissemination of works on the Internet, long-term distribution
arrangements and digital-rights management are relevant for making the art and its documentation available on demand as part of a long-term plan for
preservation and dissemination. Identifying the best preservation strategies
is the first step, but there are also intellectual-property matters to
consider. Such issues have become major concerns for Franklin Furnace since
the late 1990s and it has not only braced itself to tackle them but also
pushed itself into the frontline of finding solutions for them, along with
others who have similar concerns.





2 November:

External Speaker: Dr Felicity Colman

(Host: Ben Halligan)



Dr Felicity Colman is a Reader in Screen Media in the Dept of Media at MMU. She is the author of Deleuze and Cinema (Berg 2011) and editor of Film, Theory and Philosophy (2009) and co-editor of Sensorium: Aesthetics, Art, Life (2007). She is working on a number of book projects that engage screen media forms, including Bergson and Film, and Screen Media Semiologies.



How to use Deleuze in thinking about Screen Media
Gilles Deleuze published two radical books on film: "Cinema 1: The Movement-Image" and "Cinema 2: The Time-Image". Engaging with a wide range of film styles, histories and theories, Deleuze’s writings treat film as a new form of philosophy. This cine-philosophy offers a startling new way of understanding the complexities of the moving image, its technical concerns and constraints as well as its psychological and political outcomes. In this talk I'll look at some of the key concepts behind Deleuze’s revolutionary theory of the cinema (affect, time, thought, politics, etc), and discuss how Deleuze’s radical methodology is useful for all forms of for screen media analysis.





16 November:

Internal session: Dr Benjamin Halligan



Questions of Anti-Establishment Art

How is the history and ontology of the “English establishment” preserved and maintained in postmodern times? This presentation of current research examines Jarman’s 1992 painting “Queer”, the 2002 track “Time for Heroes” by The Libertines, and Mario Testino’s official wedding photograph of Kate Middleton and William Wales from 2011. To what extent do these three texts from the last two decades seek to subvert and/or renew notions of the establishment - its aesthetics, ideology, rituals and prejudices? In what ways is this establishment both called into creation, and called to account, in these three documents? And how does the radical or bohemian tradition of English modernist art fare in this context? The discussion will take as its starting point Stephen Frears’ gelding for the 2006 film The Queen.





External Speaker: Dr Eithne Quinn

(Host: David Sanjek)



Dr Eithne Quinn of the University of Manchester is author of Nuthin’ But a “G” Thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap (Columbia University Press, 2005). She is currently completing a book entitled A Piece of the Action: Race and Labour in Post-Civil Rights Hollywood.


Taking the Rap:

The Use of Violent Grime Lyrics in Criminal Cases
In three recent murder cases in London, prosecution counsels presented violent ‘grime’ rap lyrics written by defendants as evidence of guilt. As author of a scholarly book on gangsta rap, Eithne Quinn acted as an expert witness for the defence in the three trials. This paper gives an account of the legal use of violent rap and argues that, in these cases, lyrics should not be admissible as evidence.



30 November:

PGR presentations



External Speaker: Professor Brian Ward

(Host: David Sanjek)



Brian Ward is Professor of American Studies at the University of Manchester, UK, having previous taught at the Universities of Florida and Newcastle upon Tyne.
His major publications include Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations (Berkeley: U of California P, 1998), Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2004), and The 1960s: A Documentary Reader (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). He is just completing editorial chores on a three volume series of books devoted to new directions in the study of the American South, is just starting a book on pre-World War Two Artists and Repertoire men, and is perpetually working on a book about the relationships between the American South and the world of British popular music from Delius to the Kings of Leon.



“The ‘C’ is For Christ”:

The Beatles, Arthur Unger and Datebook Magazine
While much has been written on the “more popular than Jesus” controversy which engulfed the Beatles in 1966 during their final US tour, little attention has been paid to Arthur Unger, the man whose decision to re-print an English interview with John Lennon in his magazine Datebook sparked the furore. This talk explains that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Datebook was not a typical teen magazine, but a vehicle for the progressive politics of its publisher-editor Unger who had been using it for years to expose various kinds of intolerance and bigotry to American teens. Moreover, the Beatles had known Unger and supported his magazine's covert politics long before 1966. Indeed, far from cynically ripping Lennon's quote on religion—and an equally important one from Paul McCartney on racism—out of context and without permission to make a quick profit, it was the band’s own management which initially encouraged Unger to use the interviews. Ultimately, the argument here is that it is impossible to understand impossible to understand the genesis, evolution, or cultural significance of the “Jesus” controversy without attention to Unger.



14 December:

Internal speaker: Dr Yu-Wei Lin



Technofeminism and Media Technologies
Following up my introductory talk on technofeminism last academic year, this talk will provide not only a more advanced view on technofeminism and other related theories around feminist technoscience studies, but also my own experience of adopting this analytical approach for the research on women in Free/Open Source Software communities and gendered participatory cultures in an age of media convergence.





External Speaker: Dr Andrew Burke

(Host: Ben Halligan)



Andrew Burke is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Winnipeg where he teaches critical theory and cultural studies. His current project is on the representation of memory and modernity in contemporary British cinema.



The Sound of Straight-to-Video:

VHS Head’s Trademark Ribbons of Gold

Comprised primarily of samples drawn from a collection of 80s videocassettes layered over frenetic and fractured beats, the music of VHS Head points to the way in which memory and technology intersect. Occupying the space where glitchy electronica meets hypnogogic pop, the tracks on VHS Head’s debut album Trademark Ribbons of Gold trace a trajectory from the VCR to the mp3. The analogue remnants of the recent past are digitally reprocessed and reconfigured in a way that amplifies their force and menace. The work of VHS Head does not simply represent another example of the contemporary enthusiasm for dead media and obsolete technologies, but also serves as a model for how the recent past resides in the present day: as a discontinuous and disorienting barrage of fragments that continue to haunt and unsettle the present. Drawing on memory studies and thing theory, this paper examines the uncanny as it is embodied in the ungainly material form of the videocassette and let loose through the music of VHS Head.



followed by our Christmas Party (including buffet)





18 January:

Internal Speaker: Mary Oliver



Mary Oliver has been a performance artist for almost 30 years working across the fields of theatre, music, fine art and creative technology. For over a decade she has focussed on the creation of digital performance works and has collaborated with animators, film-makers, composers, computer programmers and most recently with a cognitive psychologist on the creation of interactive performance works that often play with the humour of the human-technological interface. Mary is Reader in Performance, Head of the Performance Research Centre and is leading the development of Digital Performance Research at the new Digital Media Performance Lab at MCUK.


“Practice as Research” Seminar
This session will be useful for anyone interested in research methods for creative practitioners. Mary's will use a number of her recent interdisciplinary performance and technology projects as case studies with which to distinguish the differences between practice and practice-as-research. She will focus on planning, writing proposals, execution (specifically working in interdisciplinary teams) documentation and dissemination of PAR.



External Speaker: Dr Xavier Mendik

(Host: Ben Halligan)



Xavier Mendik is Director of the Cine-Excess International Film Festival and DVD label at Brunel University, from where he also runs the Cult Film Archive and research centre. He has written extensively on cult and horror traditions, and some of his publications in this area include The Cult Film Reader (2008), Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945 (2004), Shocking Cinema of the Seventies (2002), Underground USA: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon (2002) and Dario Argento’s Tenebrae (2000). Xavier has recently completed 100 Cult Films (with Ernest Mathis), to be released in October 2011 as part of the BFI/Palgrave film guide series, and is currently completing a monograph on 1970s Italian cult film. Beyond his academic writing, Xavier has an established profile as a documentary filmmaker and distributor. He was responsible for the 2011 high-definition UK restoration of Dario Argento’s Suspiria for the Nouveaux Pictures / Cine-Excess. Further details of these activities can be found on www.cine-excess.co.uk



The Long Road Back From Hell:

Reclaiming Cannibal Holocaust

A Documentary Screening and Discussion

In 1979, Italian director Ruggero Deodato created Cannibal Holocaust, a film that was to revolutionise and scandalise the nature of realist horror cinema. Deodato’s influential and infamous tale centres on four intrepid documentary filmmakers who go missing in the Amazonian wilderness, leading to fears that they have been butchered by local ‘savages.’  However, when the famous NYU anthropologist Harold Monroe discovers the group’s final filmed diary, a far more shocking tale emerges…

With its complex narrative and innovative use of documentary style techniques, Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust initiated a trailblazing trend of ‘found footage horror’ that continued through to The Blair Witch Project (1999) and beyond. However, the film’s stylishness was overshadowed by it savage imagery, which lead to the movie being banned and heavily censored in many European countries.

In Britain, the film became the most notorious ‘video nasty’ of the early 1980s, and was only subsequently released in the UK in a heavily censored version. However, in 2011, Cine-Excess and Brunel University academics including Xavier Mendik and Professor Julian Petley framed the official BBFC submission of the new HD master of Cannibal Holocaust on behalf of the distributor Shameless Films. This application resulted in a landmark BBFC ruling, which now allows the most complete cut of Cannibal Holocaust to be released across the UK in September 2011.

To tie in with this newly restored, high definition release of the film, Xavier Mendik will be discussing the long road back from hell for one of cinema’s most contentious titles. The seminar includes a screening of his new documentary The Long Road Back From Hell: Reclaiming Cannibal Holocaust, which is included on the new Shameless Films Blu-ray and DVD release of the film. The documentary charts the film’s controversial history, as well as its even more confrontational use of realist techniques, whilst also assessing its socio-cultural context in relation to Italy’s turbulent ‘Years of Lead’. 





1 February:

Internal Speaker: Dr Phoebe V Moore-Carter



Arts work and subjectivity in the era of austerity

Walter Benjamin, in 1921, notes that ‘capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers’. The way capitalism and contemporarily, neoliberal capitalism, manifests itself biopolitically is through work and production, but the ‘cult’ of capitalism does not offer the luxury of a differentiation between weekends and ‘weekdays’ but instead, ‘creates guilt, not atonement’. The attempted subsumption of labour to capital is seen particularly in precarious digital work environments such as peer to peer production, as I have argued elsewhere.

This paper will provide case studies that demonstrate the value of production within the culture industries in the context of recent cuts to arts budgets for the sake of austerity measures, to identify how work within arts communities is intimately linked to subjectivities. Empirical evidence will be supplied with interviews conducted with cultural workers in Manchester and in London in the contemporary context of the recent policy, linking this to the propaganda noted in Big Society policies and their subjectification. People responsible for the production of arts and culture survive in industrialised capitalist economies despite generally precarious labour conditions, and rely on immeasurable returns rather than capital returns, despite ongoing commitment and a work ethic of loyalty and willingness to work for no pay. I have interviewed a number of arts workers and will include this data in support of my arguments.





External speaker: Prof Jackie Stacey

(Host: Kirsty Fairclough)



Professor Stacey’s academic background is an interdisciplinary one, combining European Studies (Sussex), Women’s Studies (Kent) and Cultural Studies (Birmingham). She currently works at the University of Manchester, specializing in feminist cultural theory and its bearing upon questions of political transformation. As well as being a co-editor of two journals, Screen and Feminist Theory, her publications include Star Gazing: Female Spectators and Hollywood Cinema (1994) and Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer (1997) and (as co-author with Sarah Franklin and Celia Lury) Global Nature, Global Culture (2000). She has also co-edited a number of books, including Romance Revisited with Lynne Pearce (1995), Screen Histories: A Screen Reader with Annette Kuhn (1998), Thinking Through the Skin with Sara Ahmed (2001) and Queer Screens with Sarah Street (2007).


The Uneasy Cosmopolitans of Code Unknown
Across the humanities and social sciences we are currently witnessing a move towards a renewed cosmopolitanism. In these debates, cosmopolitan ideals blend a liberal notion of ‘openness to others’ with a sense of 'worldliness' that might welcome the flow of diversity and proximity to the unfamiliar. This talk questions the celebratory tone of this renewed cosmopolitanism through a reading of Code Unknown (Michael Haneke, 2000). If the promise of the cosmopolitan project is to be found in the notion of what we might call a more ‘open sociality’, then this talk explores how Code Unknown turns the processes of spectatorship into the ethical testing ground for such a vision.





15 February:

Internal session: Professor Stephen Davismoon



Accordion Resonance
In this presentation Steve will discuss and illustrate his new commissioned work from Tempo Reale (Italy) for 2 accordions and interactive electronics. He will discuss the diverse cultural traditions drawn upon for the work and how these were imbedded in the work (by way of evolving probabilistic, Markovian hierarchic structures) as well as present the compositional strategies employed for the various strands of the finished work: live instrumentalists, fixed media electronics and interactive electronics.





External Speaker: Professor Mark Wheeler

(Host: Seamus Simpson)



Mark Wheeler is Professor of Political Communications at London Metropolitan University. Publications include Politics and the Mass Media (Oxford: Blackwells, 1997), European Television Industries (with Petros Iosifidis and Jeanette Steemers) (London, British Film Institute, 2005) and Hollywood: Politics and Society (London: British Film Institute, 2006).



The Democratic worth of Celebrity Politics in an era of Late Modernity

As there has been an exponential increase in celebrity political interventions a debate has emerged about the worth of celebrity and democracy. In post-democratic societies, Henrik Bang and John Keanes’ respective constructs of Everyday Makers and Monitory Democracy have placed an emphasis on the importance of ‘involvement’, ‘voice’ and ‘output’ in terms of political representation, and provide an ideological framework through which to capture the value of celebrity politicians. Subsequently, it may be argued that Barack Obama utilised a form of ‘liquid’ celebrity in his 2008 United States (US) Presidential campaign to reconnect with a disenfranchised American electorate. However, this article contends that it remains necessary to consider how far celebrity politicians have ‘inputed’ aggregated forms of ‘agency’ to affect political outcomes. From these differing perspectives, it seeks to define a normative position concerning the worth of celebrity politics in an era of late modernity.





29 February:

Internal session: Professor Seamus Simpson


Public Service Journalism and Converging Media Systems
Concepts and practices of public service have been an integral part of the evolution of communication media systems for decades in Europe and beyond. However, the process of media convergence has called forth an examination of the place of public service in communications. Ideas of public service have been an important part of the development of journalism and have too come under increasing pressure in the era of media convergence. This session will commence with an exploration of some of the key ideas that have shaped articulations of public service in media systems and journalism. It will then go on to explore some of the challenges and opportunities for public service journalism which have arisen from the development convergent media platforms and services. It will conclude by exploring the extent to which public service journalism is relevant today in our diverse-yet-converging, highly commercialised, digital multi-media systems.





External Speaker: Dr Sian Barber

(Host: Ben Halligan)



Sian Barber is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. She completed her PhD at the University of Portsmouth as part of the AHRC-funded 1970s project and has published on British cinema and cinema going. She has recently completed a book on the British Board of Film Censors in the 1970s which draws heavily on unused archive material. Her other research interests include cultural history in an online environment and the challenges posed by websites and the internet to methods of research. She is currently working on the EUscreen project which aims to provide online access to Europe’s television heritage.



Reading the BBFC archive: Film Censorship in the 1970s
This seminar will draw upon work recently undertaken at the British Board of Film Classification to explore film censorship in Britain in the 1970s. My examination of over 250 files offers new evidence about the operation and implementation of active film censorship in this period. Yet what can these individual files tell us about standards of permission and popular taste in a given period? And how can this material be used to further debates about film and censorship?

The BBFC files provide a wealth of unused material which reveals the operation, history and development of a crucial and often secretive part of the British film industry which deserves critical attention. Yet the BBFC itself is uncertain how best to present its material to researchers and is concerned about the way in which such material may be used and how it reflects upon them as an organisation. This talk will consider the ethical and practical issues of ‘reading’ this archive and how these challenges can be addressed to provide new insights into British film censorship, both historic and modern.





14 March:

Internal speaker: Dr Richard Talbot



Opportunities and challenges of an Internet-based PhD submission.

Richard Talbot will discuss the process of a web-based PhD project in Performance Studies. The discussion will consider the process of designing, programming, creating and developing content, content- management systems and the user interface. This paper will touch on some challenges with performance documentation and reflection in the context of PhD viva and final submission criteria. He will draw primarily on his own PhD by practice-as-research The Clown Who Lost His Memory: Multiple Faces of the Clown in Practice & Theory (University of Roehampton, 2008). See www.ninaandfrederick.co.uk/pollard



External Speaker: Owen Hatherley

(Host: Michael Goddard)



Owen Hatherley’s recent publications include the widely acclaimed A Guide to the New Ruins of Britain (Verso, 2011) and Militant Modernism and Uncommon (Zero Books, 2009, 2011), as well as a chapter for Mark E. Smith and The Fall: Art, Music and Politics (ed. Michael Goddard and Benjamin Halligan, Ashgate, 2010). Hatherley is a regular contributor to Building Design, New Statesman and New Humanist and has also written for The Guardian, Icon, Socialist Worker and Socialist Review. He sits on the editorial boards of Archinect and Historical Materialism, and maintains three blogs, Sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy, The Measures Taken and Kino Fist.



Britpop vs Class Consciousness - the case of Pulp

Though it is doubtful that actual musicians ever saw it that way, the welfare state and British pop music were mutually dependent phenomena, and both died around the same time. This talk will consider how this starts to come to consciousness in the work of Pulp, an arguable final member of the art school pop lineage, who brought to the surface the largely suppressed class politics of the poujadist 90s pop movement known as Britpop.




28 March:

Internal speaker: Dr Carole O’Reilly



‘Facts are not for me’: Journalism and Ethical Dilemmas

Facts are not for me. They are sordid, narrow; they cramp my soul’. So wrote Henry Franks, a nineteenth century Manchester journalist. Franks’ candid admission suggests that ethics (or lack of them) played an important role in the history of journalism and profoundly affected the pursuit of the trade. Many early journalists found themselves working for newspapers with unashamedly political origins and owners and negotiating critical relationships with leading business and commercial interests. This paper examines the development of ethical dilemmas in the history of British journalism and considers why these dilemmas continue to plague the practice of journalism.



External speaker: Dr Rachel Moore

(Host: Michael Goddard)



Dr Rachel Moore teaches in the Media and Communications Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. She received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for her current project, In the Film Archive of Natural-History, which investigates the use of old movies and footage in current artistic practice.  She is the author of (nostalgia) (Afterall/MIT Press, 2006), Savage Theory: Cinema as Modern Magic (Duke, 2000), as well as articles on various film-makers including Patrick Keiller (LUXonline), James Benning, and Kenneth Anger (Afterall). She is a member of the Leverhulme Spaces of Media Project investigating the use of screens in urban spaces today in Cairo, London and Shanghai.





Tesseract: The beginning of the end.
Digital Media have forced us to look again at what distinguishes photography from film as well as the values we attach to them. This paper goes back to photography's origins to re-evaluate 'the instant' drawing on Hollis Frampton's recently republished theoretical work.





May 9:

Internal speaker: Professor David Sanjek



You’re Either On The Bus or Off The Bus:

Images of Inclusion & Exclusion in the 1960s

The period of the 1960s is somewhat stereotypically thought of as a time when barriers were toppled and divisions dissolved. Recent revisionist historians of the period have reminded us that painting the period in such a broad fashion can lead to sloppy brush work. This presentation will examine some of the complexities of the period through recent research on media and music figures, including Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and Wild Man Fischer.



External Speaker: Professor Martine Beugnet

(Host: Michael Goddard)



Martine Beugnet is Professor in Film Studies, and heads the film studies section at the University of Edinburgh. To-date she has completed four books: Sexualité, marginalité, contrôle: cinéma français contemporain (L'Harmattan, 2000), Claire Denis (M.U.P, 2004) and, together with Dr Marion Schmid, Proust at the Movies (Ashgate, 2005). Her fourth book, entitled Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression was published by Edinburgh University Press in September 2007 with a second edition due in 2012. She has written articles and essays on a wide range of contemporary cinema topics.



Encoding Loss:

Corporeality and (Im)materiality in the Age of the Digital

Focusing on film-based works by contemporary French film-makers and multimedia artists (De Van, Calle, Akerman amongst others), this talk explores tropes that are associated with interrogations or anxieties about the seemingly dematerialising power of contemporary, technology-driven modes of existence, in particular where the female body is concerned. I look at the conscious or implicit responses that these works offer to the growing sense of immateriality arguably endemic to the age of digital encoding and – to paraphrase Baudrillard’s classic quote  – ‘superfluous’ bodies. 





May 23

PGR presentations



External Speaker: Dr Christopher Weedman

Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgina Institute of Technology



British Cinema and Modernity: Losey, Pinter, Bogarde

Abstract forthcoming.





June 6:

Internal Speaker: Dr Michael Goddard



A Deleuzian 21st Century?: Deleuze and Contemporary Media and Cultural Research

Of any of the post-structuralist theorists associated with the ‘68 generation (Foucualt, Derrida, Lyotard etc), Deleuze’s work is perhaps the most contemporary with the present. In the 1970s Foucault said “perhaps the [20th] Century will become known as Deleuzian” but, in fact, Deleuze’s work, especially in an Anglo context, has had something of a delayed impact. It is only now that this work is beginning to take root in the academy while still enjoying the popularity it has had for decades among art students, postgraduates, autodidacts and range of academic outsiders. So perhaps it is the 21st Century that is becoming Deleuzian.

Rather than the impossible presentation of Deleuze’s work in its entirety, this seminar will give a sketch of its take-ups at various times and in various contexts and focus on its use value for media and cultural research. It will suggest some useful paths into Deleuze’s work via key interviews and short texts as well as suggestions for further reading, and especially deal with those aspects of his work which engage directly or indirectly with questions of media and culture, culminating in an opening to his work on cinema.



External Speaker: Dr Andy Robinson

(Host: Dr Phoebe Moore-Carter)



Dr. Andrew Robinson is a critical theorist and activist working on a range of topics around social movements, radical theory, oppressive discourse, global power-structures and everyday life. He is co-author of Power, Conflict and Resistance in the Contemporary World, which applies Deleuzian theory to the analysis of social movement networks, reactive networks and the world-system. He has two dozen published articles and papers including “Symptoms of a New Politics: Networks, Minoritarianism and the Social Symptom in Zizek, Deleuze and Guattari”, “Living in Smooth Space: Deleuze, Spivak and the Subaltern”, and pieces on Gramsci, Zizek, Laclau, Virilio, Negri, Sartre, post-left anarchy, global justice, the Zapatistas, anarchist theories of war, social movements in Manipur, revolutionary subjectivity, US foreign policy, and global exclusion.



Time and Dialogism in Deleuzian Theory

This paper will examine the Deleuzian theory of time, developed in Deleuze’s books on Bergson and Cinema, with a focus on the themes of dialogue and the Event. It will begin by summarising Deleuze’s concepts of past, present and future. It will explain how each perspective is differentiated as a sensorimotor zone constructed through attention to life, providing a particular zone of resonance unique to each person. It will also explain how Deleuze proposes to understand possibilities for dialogue between such zones through the Bergsonian idea of intuition. It will also discuss how the event is seen to interrupt monological sequences of time. Finally, it will explore the idea of “absolute deterritorialisation” and the relevance of Deleuze’s theory of time for social transformation.