Dear All, Happy 2008. Please find here info re our forthcoming Thursday Club events at Goldsmiths. I hope to see you there. Best Maria X :: NEW THURSDAY CLUB SEASON ** NEW THURSDAY CLUB SEASON ** NEW THURSDAY CLUB Supported by the Goldsmiths DIGITAL STUDIOS and the Goldsmiths GRADUATE SCHOOL 6pm until 8pm, Seminar Rooms at Ben Pimlott Building (Ground Floor, right), Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, SE14 6NW FREE, ALL ARE WELCOME *31 JANUARY with JOE BANKS / DISINFORMATION : Rorschach Audio * Through his ground-breaking Disinformation project (active since 1995), noise DJ and installation artist Joe Banks pioneered the use of electromagnetic (radio) noise from sources such as live mains electricity, lightning, industrial and IT hardware, laboratory equipment, trains, magnetic storms and the sun as the raw material of musical and fine-art publications, exhibits and events. Disinformation has been the subject of ten UK solo exhibitions, experienced by over 100,000 people and described by The Guardian as ?some of the most beautiful installations around. Banks will be demonstrating the illusions of sound discussed in his MIT Press published research project ?Rorschach Audio.? "Rorschach Audio" argues that credulous interpretations of EVP research (which are commonplace in contemporary art) are at best examples of wilful self-delusion, at worst examples of outright fraud. "Rorschach Audio" offers the primary hypothesis that an understanding of the relevant aspects of psychoacoustics provides a complete explanation for most EVP recordings, and a secondary hypothesis that an informed understanding of these processes is as important to understanding the emergent field of sound art as studies of optical illusions have historically been to understanding visual art. "Rorschach Audio - Ghost Voices and Perceptual Creativity" Leonardo Music Journal, The MIT Press 2001, and "Rorschach Audio - Art and Illusion for Sound" Strange Attractor Journal volume 1, Strange Attractor 2004. "Rorschach Audio" is COPYRIGHT Joe Banks. (text from Kinetika Museum and spectre mailing list) -- *7 FEBRUARY with KATE PULLINGER & CHRIS JOSEPH : Flight Paths: a networked book* "I have finished my weekly supermarket shop, stocking up on provisions for my three kids, my husband, our dog and our cat. I push the loaded trolley across the car park, battling to keep its wonky wheels on track. I pop open the boot of my car and then for some reason, I have no idea why, I look up, into the clear blue autumnal sky. And I see him. It takes me a long moment to figure out what I am looking at. He is falling from the sky. A dark mass, growing larger quickly. I let go of the trolley and am dimly aware that it is getting away from me but I can?t move, I am stuck there in the middle of the supermarket car park, watching, as he hurtles toward the earth. I have no idea how long it takes ? a few seconds, an entire lifetime ? but I stand there holding my breath as the city goes about its business around me until? He crashes into the roof of my car." The car park of Sainsbury?s supermarket in Richmond, southwest London, lies directly beneath one of the main flight paths into Heathrow Airport. Over the last decade, on at least five separate occasions, the bodies of young men have fallen from the sky and landed on or near this car park. All these men were stowaways on flights from the Indian subcontinent who had believed that they could find a way into the cargo hold of an airplane by climbing up into the airplane wheel shaft. No one can survive this journey. ?Flight Paths? seeks to explore what happens when lives collide ? the airplane stowaway and the fictional suburban London housewife, quoted above. 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 her collaboration with Chris Joseph (babel) on 'Inanimate Alice', a multimedia episodic digital fiction and 'Venus Redemption', a game for female casual gamers. 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' (with Kate Pullinger), an award-winning series of multimedia stories; 'The Breathing Wall' (with Kate Pullinger and Stefan Schemat), a digital novel; and 'Animalamina', a collection of interactive multimedia poetry for children. He is editor of the post-dada magazine and network 391.org, and a founding member of The 404, a network of artists. He is currently Digital Writer in Residence at De Montfort University, Leicester. -- *28 FEBRUARY with ELENA COLOGNI : The Film As Document In (Of) Real Time* A meta-linguistic performative experiment. Key questions: 1. In my video live installations I investigate the perception of time (psychological time ), non simultaneous artist and audience interchange in liveness, and the production of the video document. Live recording, pre-recording and their transmission, as overlapping layers of representation of time, unfold in duration. 2. I am now starting to contextualising the recent work, which I believe challenges the early Bergsonian differentiation between memory and perception based on the assumption that the former is linked to the past (representation) and the latter to the present (action) (as in latest Deleuzean scholar Guerlac ?s book). 3. I also contribute to the debate on performance documentation in parallel to recent Auslander?s publication : embedding the document (eg.: video recording) in the event allows audience to witness its very production, thus emphasising the document?s ?performativity? aspect. ELENA COLOGNI is an art practitioner. Currently Research Fellow at York St John University, her PhD ?The Artist?s Performative Practice Within The Anti-Oculatcentric Discourse? is from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (CSM), London. After the post-doc AHRC and CSM awarded project 'Present Memory and Liveness in delivery and reception of video documentation during performance art events', she was at Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts for a Creative Lab residency focusing on questions of migrations, remoteness and transmission of information over time and space. She is active in the debate on practice as research methodologies, as well as the relationship between performance and new media. Her artwork has been presented internationally. -- *13 MARCH with ANNA HOWITT : The Empty Space Gallery* The Empty Space Gallery exists to foster creativity, and encourage debate about what ?art? is and what ?artists? are. It?s a novel way of encouraging people to engage with this thing we call ?art? and what it might be. Ultimately it is an experiment in ?art?, ?artists?, those that believe in them and those that think they are. The Empty Space Gallery can also be considered an anonymous art fair, where more established and well-known artists share the same space and audience as unknown doodlers. How does The Empty Space Gallery work? Individuals, whether ?artists? or not, are invited to submit anything they deem to be ?art?, in any medium whatsoever. The purpose of the experiment is to gain some insight into, not so much how work is created, but how it is received, consumed, and engaged with. The aim is to uncover some of the processes we employ in order to decide whether something is ?art? or not. Once the ?works? are received they are catalogued and sealed in plain white A4 envelopes. Only these envelopes are placed on display; no details of the ?artist? are available at this time. Visitors to the gallery are invited to pick, at random, any envelope they choose and own whatever they find inside. In addition, visitors are also invited to create an ?artwork? there and then, for inclusion in the gallery, which is then passed on again to another visitor. ANNA HOWITT is artistic director of The Forward Company, an interdisciplinary arts company based in Berkshire. She also is an arts and literary reviewer. She finished her MA in Contemporary Arts at the Manchester Metropolitan University in 2001 and has since had a residency at the South Street Arts Centre in Reading (2003-4). -- 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). THURSDAY CLUB BOARD MIGUEL ANDRES-CLAVERA PhD Candidate Goldsmiths Digital Studios; Member of Social Technology and Cultural Interfaces Research Group. MARIA CHATZICHRISTODOULOU [aka MARIA X], Thursday Club Programme Manager PhD Candidate Goldsmiths Digital Studios; Sessional Lecturer Birkbeck FCE; Curator; Producer. BRONAC FERRAN Director of boundaryobject.org; Member of DCMS Research and KT taskgroup; Director of Interdisciplinary Arts at Arts Council England until March 2007. JANIS JEFFERIES, Thursday Club Convener Professor of Visual Arts, Department of Computing, Goldsmiths; Co-director Goldsmiths Digital Studios; Director Constance Howard Resource and Research Centre in Textiles; Curator; Artist. SARAH KEMBER Dr.; Reader in New Technologies of Communication, Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths College; Writer. MICHELA MAGAS PhD Candidate Goldsmiths Digital Studios; Co-director Stromatolite Design Studio. CARRIE PAECHTER Professor of Educational Studies, Goldsmiths College; Dean of the Goldsmiths Graduate School. ROBERT ZIMMER Professor of Computing, Goldsmiths College; Co-director Goldsmiths Digital Studios. For more information check http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/gds/events.php or email Maria X at drp01mc@xxxxxxxxxx To find Goldsmiths check http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/find-us/ -- Maria Chatzichristodoulou [aka maria x] PhD Art & Computational Technologies 15 Rodmell Regent Square London WC1H 8HX