Seminar Series – Opera Forward Festival 2019

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Seminar Series – Opera Forward Festival 2019

1-3 March 2019, Dutch National Opera, Amsterdam

The 2019 edition of the Opera Forward Festival (Dutch National Opera) in Amsterdam bears the theme “Identity and Confrontation”. The festival organises a seminar series on the 1, 2 and 3 of March 2019, wherein questions of decolonization in relation to the arts and culture will be at the forefront. Leading scholars and artists will discuss what the critique of Eurocentrism entails in their own artistic practice and what challenges the call for epistemic diversity poses in researching the arts.

Friday 1 March 2019

14-15h: Attendance of public rehearsal

17.30h: Keynote by Peter Sellars, opera director

Saturday 2 March 2019

16.00-17.00 Seminar with Dr. Olivia Rutazibwa

17.30h: Keynote by Dr. Olivia Rutazibwa, Senior Lecturer Development Studies, University of Portsmouth: Decolonising Western European cultural traditions

https://oliviarutazibwa.wordpress.com/category/english/

Preparatory reading:

https://issblog.nl/2018/07/04/epistemic-diversity-understanding-epistemic-diversity-decoloniality-as-research-strategy/

Sunday 3 March 2019

16.00-17.00 Seminar with Neo Muyanga

17.30h: Keynote by Neo Muyanga, musician, composer, researcher at University of Cape Town: Decolonising Western European Music

http://www.neosong.net

Preparatory reading:

Songs in the Key of Revolution: Brad Evans interviews Neo Muyanga

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/histories-of-violence-songs-key-revolution/#

Open to all. RMA Students can receive 3 EC for attending all the sessions and writing a review assignment of 1000 words.

Register by sending an email to: e.hermus@operaballet.nl stating your university programme and student number.

For further information contact Sruti Bala, s.bala@uva.nl

 

Opera Forward Festival 2019

http://operaforwardfestival.nl

On Crime, Crowds, and the City: Poe, Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche

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On Crime, Crowds, and the City: Poe, Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche

Masterclass and lecture by Jeremy Tambling  organized by Ben Moore

Date/Time/Location: March 7th 2019. Masterclass at 13.30-15.30 in PC Hoofthuis 6.25. Lecture at 17.00-18.00 in PC Hoofthuis 1.04.

Abstract: This event explores the relationship between crime/the criminal and the city, in relation to a range of mainly nineteenth-century authors: Poe, Dickens, Collins, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, Stevenson, but also James Joyce. The main theoretical approach is drawn from Nietzsche, and Klossowski’s readings of him, and from Freud. The masterclass and talk link crime as transgression with the idea of writing (especially writing the city) as transgressive, where writing is understood as an attempt to produce the ‘new word’ that Raskolnikov speaks of when justifying crime and transgression in Crime and Punishment. Baudelaire’s prose poems and Joyce’s writing are taken to be examples of this new word, or movements towards it, which exerts a price in the case of Joyce, as seen in the arguments raised about schizophrenia in his writing. Conceptualisations of criminality in the writers mentioned above are compared to Nietzsche on the pale criminal from Zarathustra, and what Freud discusses when he thinks of ‘criminals from a sense of guilt’. In both cases, questions of identity are at the heart of the discussion: crime as fixing identity; crime as escape from rationalising forces which define what the subject is.

These topics will be explored in a 2-hour masterclass (aimed primarily at graduate students), followed later by a 1-hour lecture and discussion. If you wish to take part in the masterclass, please contact Ben Moore (B.P.Moore@uva.nl) to register and receive selected readings in advance.

1EC is available via NICA for Research Masters students who participate in both parts of the event.

Guest Speaker: Jeremy Tambling was formerly Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong, and previously Professor of Literature at the University of Manchester. His work is wide ranging, with particular interests in topics such as Dante, Blake, Dickens, literature and the city, allegory, and psychoanalysis. His recent book publications include Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Dance of Death (2019), Histories of the Devil: Marlowe to Mann, and the Manichees (2017), The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and the City, (editor, 2016), and Dickens’ Novels as Poetry: Allegory and Literature in the City (2014).

The Afterlife of the Object

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CALL FOR PAPERS

European Summer School in Cultural Studies

University of Copenhagen, 18-22 June 2018

An object causes passion, as in the figurative notion of a loved object. “The Afterlife of the Object” 2018 summer school will contemplate how we establish narratives of the past and the self through objects.

We will view objects, not only loved, but also hated, ignored, collected, thrown away, performed, written, rewritten, translated, lost and found. The “object” of our study will be considered broadly, including but not limited to art, books, collections, fetishes, poems, letters, song, and beyond.

For example, in “The Daughters of the Moon,” Italo Calvino imagines the afterlife of earth’s only permanent natural satellite when she has she become too old and worn to be seen as “full.” Calvino’s story is a troubling allegory on consumerism, ecology, gender, destruction and desire, written in the ripe year of 1968.

In Slaves and Other Objects (2004), the classicist Page duBois looks at our erasure of slaves as an idealization of the afterlife of ancient Greece, resulting in a collective blind-spot (a de-realization) that has fed and still feeds troubling views on race, including America’s nostalgia for the antebellum South.

Han Kang’s 1997 short story “The Fruit of My Woman” takes the afterlife of animals as objects of food as entry into becoming plant.

Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive puts a stop to mortgaging our future through the body of the child in an acceptance of the death drive through the afterlives of Hitchcock’s films.

The summer school week will feature keynote lectures (to be announced) as well as short papers presented by PhD candidates and other young scholars and a series of seminars in which we will closely examine the texts mentioned above, along with other works, including Dan Chaisson’s book of poems, entitled The Afterlife of Objects and Michael Ann Holly’s The Melancholy Art.

We welcome papers dealing with these questions from art historical, cultural, literary, cinematic, material, affective, technological, machinic, linguistic and other perspectives.

Applicants do not need to present a paper. However, those wishing to present should send a proposal of no more than 300 words and a short bio (max. 150 words) to:

afterlifeoftheobject@gmail.com by 25 January 2019. You will be informed whether your contribution has been accepted by 8 February 2019. Papers will be circulated before the conference and will have to be submitted in full (max. 4,000 words) by 1 May 2019.

PhD students are credited 3,8 ECTS if certain requirements are met. For more information, please contact the organizers.

The ESSCS is an annual network-based event offering interdisciplinary research training in the fields of art and culture. The network comprises the University of Amsterdam, Leiden University, University of Copenhagen, University of Giessen, Goldsmiths College, Université de Paris VIII, the Lisbon Consortium, Ljubljana Institute for Humanities, University of Trondheim and Catholic University Rio de Janeiro.

Organizers: Frederik Tygstrup, Rune Gade and Carol Mavor.

Off the Grid

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Call for Papers – Soapbox: Journal for Cultural Analysis 1.2 “Off the Grid”

Grids govern our landscapes and cityscapes, our paintings and grocery lists, our maps and our borders, both walled and imaginary. They get us our energy and water, they fuel our online social lives, and structure the ways we perceive and move through space. On the one hand, the grid is a representational mode, one of rendering the world under a Euclidean regime of points, lines, and areas. On the other, it is the material infrastructure of utilities, transit routes and architecture. In an increasingly networked control society, data, numbers, and figures are in a constant feedback loop with material reality. Across this material-physical and the cultural-technical – between instantiations of the grid as artistic practice and as the “stuff you can kick” (Lisa Parks 2015) – we find a mess of politics and ideology, corporate and common interest.

For this issue, we encourage thinking ‘Off the Grid’ – calling for papers that envision and/or enact within, outside, through or against systems of perception, matter, energy and space. Papers might explore perspectives against logics that distribute power across concepts and cables, design and tarmac, techniques and technologies. This might mean engaging with what Shannon Mattern calls the “ether and ore” of contemporary urban and rural societies (2017), or it could involve tracing (dis)order in less concrete structures of visuality, spatiality and discourse. Is there a connection between a landscape gridded with pipelines and by modern scientific cartography? Or perhaps a shared logic between a grid of fiber-optics and the data societies it facilitates? To what extent is the grid by its very operation an instrument of national or corporate power – or can it be appropriated for the commons?

Ultimately, going ‘Off the Grid’ might be considered a romantic, futile gesture; a slantwise shift across preordained perspectives; an impossible step outside ideology; or an urgent tactic of resistance. If Western modernity and the grid go hand in hand – as suggested by Rosalind Krauss’ account of modern art’s gravitation towards “flattened, geometricized, ordered” forms (1985) – then what would it mean to challenge, repurpose or reject it? Does the concept still help us to understand the world, or limit expression within it?

For the second issue of Soapbox, a graduate peer-reviewed journal for cultural analysis, we invite young researchers to submit abstracts that critically engage with notions of the ‘Grid’. We encourage submissions that are directed towards, but not limited to, the following themes:

 Modes of resistance or alternatives to the grid as mode of organization
 The grid as (or as alternative to) network, assemblage, empire and/or entanglement
 Grids at the intersection of cultural geography and cultural analysis
 Infrastructure: infrastructural crises and failures, the edge of infrastructure
 (De)centralised power: the energy commons, democracy and climate crisis
 Cityscapes, urban ecologies and planning
 The rural as ‘off the grid’, against the grid, or as a grid
 Living off the grid: alternative lifestyles and escapism; survivalism and wilderness
 Grids in modern and contemporary art, architecture and design
 Visual (dis)order and film: quadrants, grids and golden ratios in mise-en-scène
 Grids in and as gaming; ‘NPCs’, ‘normies’ and meme culture
 Data, networks and digital traces

Please submit your abstract (max 300 words) to submissions@soapboxjournal.com by December 1. The full papers (3000-5000 words) are due February 15. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions

Soapbox also welcomes texts on any topic, all year-round – send full drafts of 4,000-6,000 words to submissions@soapboxjournal.com.
Also consider contributing to our website, where a variety of styles and formats is encouraged, including short-form essays, reviews, experimental writing and multimedia. Please get in touch to pitch new ideas or existing projects for us to feature there.

Website: https://soapboxjournal.com/2018/10/31/call-for-papers-1-2-off-the-grid/

Transmission in Motion Seminar 2018-19

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Experiment/Experience

“Have we forgotten experience?” wonders Scott Lash (Experience, 2018). If this is so, we are currently witnessing a comeback with a vengeance. New forms of research and communication explore and experiment with various dimensions of experience. Art and science meet in experimental approaches that foreground sensation, substance and practice. Technological developments “expand the sensible” (Mark Hansen) beyond human experience, challenging the centrality of human experience and raising the question of the relationship between human experience, technological agents and data. Critical thinkers  from a diversity of backgrounds (including media, archaeology, new materialism, post-phenomenology, radical empiricism, human geography and embodied cognition) unpack aspects of the intimate relationship between experience and knowing and point to meaning as material practice of experience.

The Transmission in Motion Seminar is a more-or-less monthly gathering of researchers and students from across disciplines. To participate, please send an email to TIM@UU.nl to receive additional information and readings. RMA Students can acquire 3 EC (awarded by NICA) if they attend all meetings and write blogposts after each meeting. Please register at TIM@UU.nl. For more information, contact Maaike Bleeker at m.a.bleeker@uu.nl.

Seminar program TiM seminar 2018-19

25 October 2018 (15-17h): Prof. dr. Derek McCormack (Oxford University) “Experience/experiment and atmospheric things.”
Place: Parnassos Bar, Kruisstraat 201, Utrecht.

22 November 2018 (15-17h): Prof. dr. Sarah Bay Cheng (Bowdoin College) “Everybody’s Historiography: When Museums Play Digital Games.”
Place: Parnassos Bar, Kruisstraat 201), Utrecht.

13 December 2018 (15-17h): Prof. dr. Nathalie Sinclair (Simon Fraser University): “Multiplication as Experience: Whitehead, aesthetics and gesture-based, touchscreen technology.”
Place: Grote Zaal, Kromme Nieuwegracht 20, Utrecht.

23 January 2019 (15-17h): Prof. dr. Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen) title tba.
15-17h, Parnassos Bar, Kruisstraat 201, Utrecht.

28 February 2019 (15-17h): Dr. Adam Nocek (Arizona State University): “Designing the Dispositif: Between the Art and Reason of Government.”
15-17h, Parnassos Bar, Kruisstraat 201, Utrecht.

28 March 2019 (15-17h): Dr. Arun Saldanha (University of Minnesota): “The Stratification of Cyberspace: from Experience to Waste”
15-17h, Parnassos Bar, Kruisstraat 201, Utrecht.

2 May 2019 (15-17h): Dr. Eef Masson (University of Amsterdam): “The Sensory Moving Image.”
15-17h, Parnassos Bar, Kruisstraat 201, Utrecht.

 

 

6 June 2019, TBA

Transmission in Motion is a hybrid research community that brings researchers from across disciplines together with artists and other partners from outside the academy. Transmission in Motion provides a platform for seminars, meetings and presentations, and mediates the development of partnerships and research projects. https://transmissioninmotion.sites.uu.nl/