Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities (June 5-6, 2015)

The aesthetics of animation has come to occupy a significantly expanded social and political role, moving well beyond the sphere of either children’s entertainment or avant-garde filmmaking. We now encounter digital animations, 3D simulations and computational models in contexts ranging from ecological activism, to human rights law, to military training regimes. As rhetorical tool, affective trigger and imaginative technique, the strategic use of the animated image has become a powerful means to both “re-animate” the past and speculatively predict or envision the future.  Digital and analogue animations intervene in life processes at both the intimate level of the body and the expansive scale of urban design and planetary phenomena.  In relation to living systems, animation may constitute an effort to capture or simulate that which already exists, or an attempt to bring into being that which could not exist otherwise. Given this apparent contemporary proliferation of animated life, this symposium will re-consider the place of animation and simulation within visual, material and political culture.

Confirmed Speakers:
Thomas Elsaesser
Eyal Weizman
Susan Schuppli
Toshiya Ueno
Pasi Väliaho
Liam Young
Sean Cubitt
Suzanne Buchan
Keisuke Kitano
Erika Balsom
Gillian Rose
Anselm Franke
Richard Squires

Screenings of Work by:
Harun Farocki
Hito Steyerl

Organised by: Esther Leslie and Joel McKim

The event is free, but booking is essential – book online now at Eventbrite

For further information, please contact:
Dr. Joel McKim
Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies
Co-Director BA Media and Culture
Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies
Birkbeck, University of London
43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD
tel: 020 3073 8364
e-mail: j.mckim@bbk.ac.uk

The Politics of U.S. Literature 1960s to Present

A one-day conference, sponsored by Birkbeck’s Centre for Contemporary Literature and the Department of English

Friday 3^rd July 2015, 9am-7pm, Birkbeck, University of London
The Keynes Library, Room 114, 43 Gordon Square, London

Free to attend, but advance registration compulsory. Email: actionwritingbbk@gmail.com 

Event Schedule
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10th of June 2015 at the University of Sussex

Keynote Speaker: John Duvall (Purdue University)

Writing also means trying to advance the art. Fiction hasn’t quite been filled in or done in or worked out. We make our small leaps.
– Don DeLillo, 1982

This one-day conference will address the state of fiction in contemporary American culture by focusing on the extensive oeuvre of Don DeLillo, from the 1970s to the present day and beyond. Shortly after the publication of The Names, DeLillo commented that fiction had not yet been ‘filled in,’ ‘done in,’ or ‘worked out.’ How do we read this thirty years later, in the shadow of not only DeLillo’s major works but also the events that have characterised our move into the Twenty-First Century? How have DeLillo’s small leaps between the New York of Players (1977) and the New York of Falling Man (2007) ‘filled in’ fiction? Has DeLillo’s pervasive influence across contemporary American culture ‘done in’ postmodernism? Is the novel in the Twenty First Century already ‘worked out’?

The full programme has now been announced and tickets are available at the website. For further information please visit the website, or you can email delilloconference2015@gmail.com.

Birkbeck, University of London 16th – 18th July 2015

Keynote Speakers:

Caroline Arscott (Courtauld Institute of Art, London) Tim Barringer (Yale University) Meaghan Clarke (University of Sussex) Kate Flint (University of Southern California) Hilary Fraser (Birkbeck, University of London) Michael Hatt (University of Warwick) Lynda Nead (Birkbeck, University of London) Jonah Siegel (Rutgers) Alison Smith (Tate Britain)

This conference will explore the ways in which nineteenth-century authors, artists, sculptors and musicians imagined and represented emotion and how writers and critics conceptualised the emotional aspects of aesthetic response. It aims to map the state of the field in this growing area of interest for nineteenth-century scholars by locating recent interdisciplinary work on sentimentality and art and writing and the senses within wider debates about the relationship between psychology and aesthetics in the long-nineteenth century.

Speakers will investigate the physiology and psychology of aesthetic perception and the mind/body interactions at play in the experience of a wide range of arts. Key questions include: How did Victorian artists represent feeling and how were these feelings aestheticised? What rhetorical strategies did Victorian writers use to figure aesthetic response? What expressive codes and conventions were familiar to the Victorians? Which nineteenth-century scientific developments affected artistic production and what impact did these have on affective reactions? The conference includes a panel discussion on the topic of ‘Curating Feeling’ with speakers Michael Hatt, Lynda Nead and Alison Smith. For more information on this panel, see our website.

To register for the conference, please visit: https://www2.bbk.ac.uk/artsandfeeling

Places are limited.

Please address any questions to Dr. Victoria Mills at artsandfeeling@gmail.com

More information will be available soon at www.artsandfeeling.com