[spectre] New Thursday Club Season - Goldsmiths, London

[Maria Chatzichristodoulou]

APOLOGIES FOR CROSS-POSTING



** NEW THURSDAY CLUB SEASON ** NEW THURSDAY CLUB SEASON ** NEW

Supported by the Goldsmiths GRADUATE SCHOOL and the Goldsmiths DIGITAL
STUDIOS

6pm until 8pm, Seminar Rooms at Ben Pimlott Building (Ground Floor,
right), Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, SE14 6NW

FREE, ALL ARE WELCOME. No booking required.



*17 APRIL with RACHEL BETH EGENHOEFER
:
Knitting Intangibles*


Rachel Beth considers her Commodore 64 Computer and Fischer Price Loom to
be defining objects of her childhood. She creates tactile representations
of cyclical data structures in candy and knitting and is currently
exploring the intersection of textiles, technology, and the body in
contemporary art practice. Rachel Beth is currently working as an Artist
in Residence at the University of Brighton, Lighthouse Brighton, and
Furtherfield London as part of the Arts Council England Initiative,
commissioned by Distributed South and curated by SCAN and Space Media.

Rachel Beth will be presenting work in progress from her residency that
explores the motion of knitting and the motion of code. Some of the work
includes a knit zoetrope, interactive virtual knitting, knitting with the
Nintendo Wii and others.  She describes the interactive virtual knitting
as demonstrating “the motion from the knitting actions are tracked and
translated into a visualization of “knit code” displayed on screen (and
eventually on the web). The action of engaging or knitting with the piece
naturally produces a physical cloth, while it also shows that code is
constructed from the same types of patterns to create a type of virtual
cloth (or software). Visually the piece will reflect our bodily
interaction with machines, tracing the circular motion of the needles to
our body’s give and take of working at a machine.  Cloth is often seen as
an element of comfort and protection. Machines are perceived to assist us
with advancing technology and communication while they are also harming
our bodies with carpel tunnel syndrome, back pain, sore eyes, and other
strain as we interact with them. This piece explores that delicate space
in-between.”


RACHEL BETH EGENHOEFER received her BFA from the Fiber department with a
concentration in Digital Media from the Maryland Institute College of Art,
and was an MFA fellow at the University of California, San Diego where she
also was a graduate researcher at UCSD's Center for Research and Computing
in the Arts (CRCA). Her work has been exhibited internationally in the
Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) London,
the Banff Centre for the Arts, ISEA 2004 and others. She formerly worked
on the editorial staff of Artbyte Magazine in New York City, and continues
freelance writing on art, modern society, and media culture.
www.rachelbeth.net
---


*24 APRIL with KATE PULLINGER & CHRIS JOSEPH
:
Flight Paths: a networked book*

“Flight Paths” seeks to explore what happens when lives collide –an
airplane stowaway and a fictional suburban London housewife. This project
will tell their stories; it will be a work of digital fiction, a networked
book, created on and through the internet. The project will include a web
iteration that opens up the research process to the outside world,
inviting discussion of the large array of issues the project touches on.
Questions raised by this project include: what are the possibilities for
new narrative forms? How do we “write to be seen” or “write to be heard”
when creating multimedia narratives, and can we imagine writing to be
smelled, tasted, felt? What are the effects of collective authorship
across multiple forms?

KATE PULLINGER works both in print and new media. Her most recent novels
include A Little Stranger (2006) and Weird Sister (1999). Her current
digital fiction projects include 'Inanimate Alice'. Pullinger is Reader in
Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University.

CHRIS JOSEPH is a digital writer and artist who has created solo and
collaborative work as babel. His past projects include 'Inanimate Alice',
'The Breathing Wall' and 'Animalamina'. He is currently Digital Writer in
Residence at De Montfort University, Leicester.
---


*8 MAY with CAMILLE BAKER & MARILENE OLIVER
:
MINDTouch
&
Making DICOM Dance – The Digitised Body as a site for performing
subjectivity*


MINDTouch explores ideas of non-verbal transference, telepathic
collaboration, and the participant as performer, using biofeedback and
mobile phone technology under meta-goals of studying "liveness" within
mobile networked environments. MINDTouch involves creating a mobile
networked performance that utilizes a database of streamed and/or archived
video-clips created by video-enabled mobile phones, to then be retrieved,
streamed and remixed during (a) live visuals performance(s). The
participants invited to contribute to the video blogs are asked to explore
their own consciousness, non-verbal emotional /affective senses and dream
states, embodiment and communication.
www.smartlab.uk.com/2projects/mindtouch.htm

CAMILLE BAKER is a Ph.D. Candidate at SMARTlan, University of East London,
conducting research on Networked Performance Media, funded by BBC R+D.
www.swampgirl67.net

&

Making DICOM Dance: Marilene Oliver’s practice-based research looks at
medical and laser imaging technologies that scan bodies and break them
down to bytes. Oliver examines from an artist’s perspective, the processes
needed to convert flesh to pixel (digital photography), flesh to voxel
(MRI, CT and PET) and flesh to xyz co-ordinates (3D laser scanning).
Oliver will present a selection of artworks made using MRI data (where the
subject of the scans is bespoke) and CT data (where the subject of the
scans are either infamous or anonymous). The presentation will be both
technical and theoretical, concentrating on the performative puppeteering
activity that emerges when working with MRI and CT data.

MARILENE OLIVER is currently a research student in the Fine Art Print
department at the Royal College of Art. Oliver has exhibited widely in the
UK and Europe including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Royal Academy,
Royal Institution, Science Museum (UK). Oliver was awarded the Royal
Academy print prize in 2006 and the Printmaking Today prize in 2001.
---


*15 MAY with COLM LALLY & VERINA GFADER
:
Condensation revisited: strategic walking / access to knowledge /
economics of things / conversation pieces *


In June 2007 Colm and Verina were invited to take part in the residency
programme: Reference Check, a co-production lab taking place at the Banff
New Media Institute in Banff, Alberta, Canada.
During the residency they expanded the notion of “interface” associated
with various forms of online communication and exchange, to other, perhaps
more radical, forms of spaces between different entities. At the core Colm
& Verina's actions emerges the search for where a site of potential
resides beside of technologies’ restrictive mode of ex/inter-change and
so-called collaborative or networked practices.
Colm & Verina will present the “document” of the process that their
project Condensation took during the residency at Banff. This includes
questions of: the necessity of temporary frameworks; the character of
dialogical communication processes; the failure as a site of potential. In
an informal setting the “document” will take the format of a line, or
“walking” – of virtually making a tour through various landscapes...

COLM LALLY is founder and director of E:vent. Since 2003 Colm has taken a
hands-on role developing the E:vent programme, focusing on media art;
video; performance; and electronic music. Colm was a co-organiser of
Node.London 06 and is co-director of Arts in Action artists community.

VERINA GFADER completed a practice-based Ph.D. in Fine Arts at Central
Saint Martins College, London in 2006, and recently joined CRUMB (web
resource for new media art curators) as post-doc research assistant.
---


*29 MAY with RICHARD COLSON
:
Linking the Senses *

Richard Colson considers the role of gesture as part of any process of
making art and reflects on its use in his painting and in his work using
digital technologies. The talk will try to unravel aspects of experience
that have a direct bearing on the interdependence of vision, auditory
phenomena, gesture and spatial changes in both the creation of art and its
reception by the viewer. Richard will use visual art works and examples of
creative writing and will try to show how an awareness of spatial position
can have a critical influence on the nature of what is perceived.

RICHARD COLSON is the author of The Fundamentals of Digital Art (AVA
Publishing Uk Ltd) and co-curated Sense Detectives at Watermans Arts
Centre. He is a Director of the annual Takeaway Festival of DIY Media at
the Dana Centre, Science Museum. His paintings are in collections at the
House of Lords, the House of Commons, Royal Dutch Shell and Pearson PLC.
www.kwomodo.com
---


*5 JUNE with ALEX MCLEAN & DAVE GRIFFITHS
:
Live Coding*

Live coders program in conversation with their machine, dynamically adding
instructions and functions to running programs. Here there is no
distinction between creating and running a piece of software - its
execution is controlled through edits to its source code. Live coding has
recently become popular in performance, where software is written before
an audience in order to generate music and video for them to enjoy. McLean
and Griffiths have played around Europe together with Adrian Ward as the
live coding band "slub". They will talk about the history and practice of
live coding, and give some demos of their own live coding environments.

ALEX MCLEAN has been triggering distorted kick drum samples with Perl
scripts for far too long. He is a PhD student at Goldsmiths Digital
Studios.

DAVE GRIFFITHS writes programs to make noises, pictures and animations. He
makes film effectis software and computer games.

Dave & Alex are both members of the Openlan free software artists
collective and the TOPLAP organisation for live algorithm promotion.
slub.org ; toplap.org ; pawfal.org/openlab ; pawfal.org/dave ; yaxu.org
---


THE THURSDAY CLUB is an open forum discussion group for anyone interested
in the theories and practices of cross-disciplinarity, interactivity,
technologies and philosophies of the state-of-the-art in today’s (and
tomorrow’s) cultural landscape(s).

For more information check http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/gds/events.php or
email Maria X at drp01mc at gold.ac.uk

To find Goldsmiths check http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/find-us/

-- 
Maria Chatzichristodoulou [aka maria x] PhD Art and Computational
Technologies  Goldsmiths Digital Studios skype: mariax_gr
www.cybertheater.org