2019
For 2019, the Stanley Picker Public Lecture series revolves around notions of sound, collage and the digital. These closely interrelated areas of contemporary art practice are at the heart of artistic research at Kingston School of Art and the Fine Art Department in particular. The series of talks, events and screenings will explore the entanglement of sound, collage and the digital as a key preoccupation for contemporary art practice. Central to such enquiries is a sense of rupture that questions established assumptions about the production and reception of artworks. With content increasingly available on-line, the Stanley Picker Public Lectures programme seeks to explore innovative ways for the presentation and dissemination of contemporary art practice.01/05/19 N. Katherine Hayles
“Nonconscious Cognition” and Kathy Acker’s “Language of the Body”
For 2019, the Stanley Picker Public Lecture series revolves around notions of sound, collage and the digital. These closely interrelated areas of contemporary art practice are at the heart of artistic research at Kingston School of Art and the Fine Art Department in particular. The series of talks, event and screenings will explore the entanglement of sound, collage and the digital as a key preoccupation for contemporary art practice. As part of this programme of events the Fine Art Department at Kingston School of Art is delighted to host N. Katherine Hayles’s presentation on “Nonconscious Cognition” and Kathy Acker’s “Language of the Body”.
In “Against Ordinary Language: The Language of the Body,” Acker muses on her experiences in body-building and why it is so difficult for her to write, in “ordinary language,” about those experiences. This talk will explore convergences between her experiences with the “language of the body” and recent neuroscientific research on nonconscious cognition, as developed in Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious(2017). Acker’s exploration of the limits of language hints at the limits of consciousness itself as a representation of the world’s reality and opens a window on why we need art to say the unsayable and represent the unrepresentable.
N. Katherine Hayles, the James B. Duke Professor of Literature Emerita at Duke University and Distinguished Research Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angles, teaches and writes on the relations of literature, science and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. She has published ten books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles, and her research has been recognized by a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, a Rockefeller Residential Fellowship at Bellagio, a National Humanities Center Fellowship, and a University of California Presidential Award, among other awards. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her books have won numerous awards, including the Rene Wellek Prize for the Best Book in Literary Theory in 1998-99 for How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, and the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship for Writing Machines. She teaches courses on media theory, experimental fiction, literary and cultural theory, science fiction, and contemporary American fiction. She has won two teaching awards, and has held visiting appointments at Princeton, University of Chicago as the Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor, and Institute for Advanced Studies at Durham University UK, among others. Her most recent book is Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
01/05/19 Daniel Shanken
INTERNET AUTOSARCOPHAGY (2019)
HD application, infinite duration (excerpt recorded from 3:15 - 3:21pm on 16-03-19)Shown at ICA London, preceeding N. Katherine Hayles Stanley Picker Public Lecture Series.
Internet Autosarcophagy is a moving image platform that executes ongoingrenderings of "real-time" or "live" material with no beginning or end. It acts as a base skeleton to siphon incoming bits of information that self-organize around its frame, such as YouTube video search results and comments, live internet radio, BBC news feeds, local time, Google Image search, Reddit updates, and images from a webcam on the host computer. At its base is an autonomous first person shooter system that switches from a cell phone, displaying live Twitch chat messages, to different weapons, that initiate and react to incoming data using Natural Language Processing through machine learning to gauge the sentiment of the information coming in from its sources. The main character becomes more or less violent depending on the mood of the incoming data determined by the NLP algorithm, which also influences character actions, camera transitions, and the generative environment the characters inhabit, fluctuating continuously with the incoming stream of information.
http://www.dshanken.com/
07/02/19 Steven Warwick
"The Riddle of the Imp on the Mezzanine"
For 2019 the Stanley Picker Public Lecture series revolve around notions of sound, collage and the digital. These strongly interrelated areas of contemporary art practice are at the heart of artistic research at Kingston School of Art and the Fine Art Department in particular. The series of talks, event and screenings will explore the entanglement of sound, collage and the digital as a key preoccupation for contemporary art practice. Central to such enquiries is a sense of rupture that questions established assumptions about the production and reception of artworks. With content increasingly available on-line, the Stanley Picker Public Lectures programme seeks to explore innovative ways for the presentation and dissemination of contemporary art practice.
The first Stanley Picker event of 2019 will be the premiere of a new work by Steven Warwick to be presented at the ICA on 7 February 2019. Warwick’s practice is paradigmatic of an interdisciplinary approach which encompasses, amongst other areas, music, fine art, writing, DJing and theatre. His work is disseminated on a multitude of platforms including records, galleries, the internet, nightclubs and print-publications. Warwick’s is a prime example of contemporary practice that seeks to re-define how we navigate various spaces through experiential events.
The latest iteration of Warwick’s mutating Mezzanine series, ‘The Riddle of the Imp on the Mezzanine’ is part platform as performance, part live event reflecting on how forces of social evils and religious undertones of retribution or redemption manifested themselves in popular culture and folklore, be in the Lincoln Imp (the county symbol of where Warwick grew up), Pinhead from ‘Hellraiser’ or popular literary sleuths such as Poirot.
Steven Warwick is an artist, musician and writer based in Berlin. His solo practice constructs situations and activates a space with interweaving narratives across various media such as performance, installation, sculpture, plays and films. He also has recently collaborated on projects including the “Mezzanine” musical performance series choreographed with dancers, the artist duo Elevator to Mezzanine (with DeForrest Brown Jr) which has produced exhibitions, a look book and recently a Western musical titled "Performing America (Iconic America)" and the audiovisual performance-lecture series “Fear Indexing the X- Files” with writer Nora Khan, recently issued as a book by Primary Information.
Warwick’s writing has appeared in Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Frieze, Spike and Urbanomic. As a musician working under his own name and, previously, as "Heatsick", he produces and performs a hybrid live/ DJ set, releasing recordings with the club/experimental label PAN and has played at Berghain, Berlin; London Contemporary Music Festival; Trouw in Amsterdam; Bergen Konsthall; LAMPO/ Stony Island Arts Bank, Chicago; Issue Project Room, New York; and the Mutek and Unsound Festivals. His visual work has been shown at KW Berlin; SMK, Copenhagen; The Modern Institute, Glasgow ; The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Cleopatra's, Brooklyn; Beach Office, Berlin ; Balice Hertling, New York.
Steven Warwick will participate in Reading International and will present another performance on Saturday, 9th February 2019.