Hyphen Colloquium: Overflows and Interdependencies (2020)
Hyphen Journal presents:
Hyphen Colloquium: Overflows and Interdependencies
To mark the publication of Hyphen Journal Issue 2: Excess, we invite you to join us for an online colloquium on Wednesday 23 September, 2–6:30pm.
This colloquium reflects on the intersections between Overflows and Interdependencies in relation to creative and interdisciplinary modes of research, interplays between theory and fiction, ecologies in the expanded sense, as well as embodied knowledges and practices of resistance.
The colloquium will be held via Zoom. Please register your attendance here by 21 September. Information on how to attend will be sent out before the event.
Programme
Abstracts
Biographies
Keynote
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (Professor of Law & Theory, University of Westminster)
Tracing Submergence
Tracing layers of geology through paper, water, ink and gold. Thinking across disciplines: law, art, geology, ecology. Making across continents: Jan Hogan in Tasmania, Australia, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos in London, UK, a collaboration on Zoom and also physical, that found expression in a recent online exhibition. In this presentation, Andreas will talk about and through the artworks, weaving in theory from his work on atmospherics and fiction from his recent novel And our Distance Became Water.
Programme
Panel 1: Overflows
2pm–3:30pm
Diann Bauer (CREAM, University of Westminster)
Protocols for the Phase Transition, by AST
Jill Daniels (School of Arts and Creative Industries, University of East London)
Aesthetics of Resistance: Reframing the Nonfiction Oppositional Film
Kasturi Torchia (Esprit Concrete/Parkour UK)
Replaying Our Past or Starting Anew: Our Environment As Our Trigger or Our Solution
Moderator: Matthias Kispert (CREAM, University of Westminster)
Panel 2: Interdependencies
3:45–5:15pm
Elżbieta Kowalska (Institute of Theatre and Media Arts, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań)
Mapping the Gut Buddies
Amanda Egbe (School of Media and Performance, University of Bedfordshire)
Imitations: Representations of Blackness as an Ecology of Images in Cinema and Machine Learning
Manuela Johanna Covini (Independent artist)
The New Village Project (I Have to Change My Life)
Moderator: Mirko Nikolić (Department of Culture and Society (IKOS), Linköping University)
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (Professor of Law & Theory, University of Westminster)
Tracing Submergence
Moderator: Harshavardhan Bhat (School of Architecture and Cities, University of Westminster)
Abstracts
Diann Bauer (CREAM, University of Westminster)
Protocols for the Phase Transition, by AST
We now exist in an unstable condition of flux – highly volatile, as well as extraordinarily generative – and we are all accountable for and subject to the future that emerges from these shifting conditions. A future built through this flux demands new territories and creates nodes from which to act. The collaborative AST proposes a set of protocols for the construction of 21stcentury alliances traversing borders, nation states and species. Bauer, a member of AST, will briefly introduce these protocols and show a few of the short videos that were made to correspond with them.
strelkamag.com/en/article/protocols-for-the-phase-transition-towards-new-alliances
Manuela Johanna Covini (Independent artist)
The New Village Project (I have to Change My Life)
You have to change your life! Who could say this to whom? Our modern psyche is in the meanwhile organized in such a way that we would not allow anymore any authority to say to us that we have to do something.
But some things have to be changed. Now! One of those things is to live a good life.
What reads like an esoteric sentence are ultimately a lot of small things in everyday practice. Also in the practice of producing art.
Provided we understand the term „good“ as „being self-sufficient“ and „as resourceless as
possible“.
A self-sufficient life/ also speaking of a self-sufficient art production is naturally designed individually, because the political and moral context of independence is constantly being reformulated. Neither we nor our environment/ nature are in a static state.
And this is the challenge: A self-experiment, a process with new questions and unexpected or forgotten answers, a feeling as if you can see again. Meaning to organize myself and find out what are really my own wishes and desires. Sounds again like psychotherapy, but I’m afraid modern people probably need one.
Anyway: Since I discovered the richness of a simple and conscious life I am bored of wandering the pathways to promised prosperity.
So for this so for this Hyphen Colloquium: Overflows and Interdependencies on 23 September 2020 I like to suggest to speak about my quest for relief from dependencies and my production of a good live that involves changes or at least a more conscious approach to the things of daily life. The talk will be also about the joy of working and a new relation to nature, will talk about detaills how to restore/ manage a house and farm without electricity, but still keep up with the times, to be connected with the others. It is also about living with new neighbours and to build up a small functioning community. But above all it is a film about the love for the planet.
My references will relate amongst others to Joseph Beuys ́ Honeypump at work, the painter Andreas Erikkson and german philosopher Peter Sloterdijk.
Recent works by Manuela Johanna Covini: The Honey and the Pump (2020), Hybris (2020), We – The Distance between You and Me (2019), A Short Lecture (2019)
Jill Daniels (School of Arts and Creative Industries, University of East London)
Aesthetics of Resistance: Reframing the Nonfiction Oppositional Film
In 2010, Hito Steyerl noted in her article, Aesthetics of Resistance? Artistic Research As Discipline and Conflict, that throughout history moments of extreme conflict and crisis gave rise to the development of a new range of aesthetic approaches to artistic research–including the essayistic documentary film–which may undermine the dominant division of labour. Observing that the effects of the current Covid-19 pandemic is likely to lead to increased political and economic crisis, conflict and nationalism I consider whether the reflexive oppositional essay film may act as a poetic catalyst for action as well as reflection. I reference the methodological decisions I took in the construction of an interlinked trilogy of epistolary films Breathing Still, Breathing Still 2020 and a work still in progress, Resisters. I adopted a method influenced by Alexander Kluge, who compared the production of a film to the creation of a construction site, bringing all the elements together in an order, but by its fragmented nature it has no definitive closure. The openings that this creates may enable spectatorial reflection and lead to the possibility of action.
Vimeo link to Breathing Still 2020
Amanda Egbe (School of Media and Performance, University of Bedfordshire)
Imitations: Representations of Blackness as an Ecology of Images in Cinema and Machine Learning
This paper reflects upon the visual framework developed by the author in her video essay Imitations. The film utilises Douglas Sirk’s film Imitation of Life as a starting point, to consider the ways in which blackness is represented in moving image in the forms of cinema and machine learning (Artificial Intelligence).
Imitations begins as a critique of Laura Mulvey’s proposition of “delayed cinema” an analysis that fails to go beyond the privileged gaze, in deciphering the visibility of blackness in Sirk’s film. Rather a revelatory practice is developed in the film that builds upon critiques of ways of seeing/looking that are co-produced with technology. This includes the encoding of information within machine vision and learning frameworks which purport an objectivity of vision. The approach taken with this film, considers the idea of an ecology of images, the production of an umwelt, as related to Jackob von Uexküll’s thought experiment. In this framework, rather than the reciprocal worlds of animals and their environments, umwelt speaks to the interconnectedness of histories, politics, practices, technologies and gazes that inform the visual. The ecology utilised in Imitations is as a problematising practice to allow for the reading of moving images in their relations of apparatus, content and solidarity, to overcome the dichotomy between technological and cultural readings of the moving Image in relation to that of seeing or looking at blackness.
The critiques of how media and other forms visualise blackness are present in notions such as situated gaze and the coded gaze, found in critiques of computer science, sociology and critical race theory, and offer support in this paper’s framework to develop an approach to image making that conceptualises blackness beyond notions of visible and invisible, rather as an ecology of images, that also leaves it’s trace upon the wider environment.
Elżbieta Kowalska (Institute of Theatre and Media Arts, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań)
Mapping the Gut Buddies
John Brian Harley was one of the first strong voices of human geography science, challenging the way we understand maps and space representations. Taking a notion on the very act of mapping is crucial here. As the act of having power over broadly understood knowledge production, it does matter who is the maker, what types of data are chosen, and how the final form is represented. As Deleuze and Guattari write, the transformative process of creating a new map for each case and each situation can lead to revolution. Map-making can be a performative act, constructing connections between the unconscious, fostering connections between earlier unknown fields.
As an artist and person who experienced Small Intestine Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO), I want to investigate whether the gut dysbiosis mapped by modern science tools can create representations taking into account the multiple components of this spectrum. Taking an approach from the Guattari’s three ecologies, I would like to propose a way of experimental, ethico-aesthetic, transversal mapping of the subjectivity microbiome.
Commonly mapping the human microbiome in the sciences takes into consideration data obtained by medical research. Quantitative data are produced out of the bodies, tested by human-machine assemblage in the laboratory, represented in special units, in relation to proposed by science norms. Interviews, based as much on the doctor’s knowledge and approach as on the patient’s consciousness of one’s body, and images from the gut exploration, belong to non-quantitative data.
The gut buddies, as called by Jamie Lorimer, have great impact on human health, mood and cognition. The unbalanced bacterial flora can influence at least the body comfort of everyday life, social relations and political engagement, and without special treatment it can lead to more bodily painful and socially excluding effects. Reducing representation of microbiome dysbiosis to already mentioned data is not enough to tell the story about the aftermath of those increasingly occurring in modern society symptoms. Through an speculative finding and founding, including the experimental thinking and different set of activities, I will try to reformulate already existing connections and create enriching, diversifying representations.
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (Professor of Law & Theory, University of Westminster)
Tracing Submergence
Tracing layers of geology through paper, water, ink and gold. Thinking across disciplines: law, art, geology, ecology. Making across continents: Jan Hogan in Tasmania, Australia, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos in London, UK, a collaboration on Zoom and also physical, that found expression in a recent online exhibition. In this presentation, Andreas will talk about and through the artworks, weaving in theory from his work on atmospherics and fiction from his recent novel And our Distance Became Water.
Biographies
Diann Bauer
Diann Bauer is an artist and writer based in London. She studied both art and architecture at the Cooper Union in NY and Goldsmiths College, London. She is currently a researcher at Westminster University working on questions regarding the discrepancy between time at extra-human scale and the linear persistence of temporality focusing on what this discrepancy means for how we understand ourselves as a species in relation to the anthropocene.
Much of her practice is collaborative and interdisciplinary with projects including Laboria Cuboniks, with whom she collaboratively wrote and published Xenofeminism, A Politics for Alienation in 2015. (laboriacuboniks.net) and A.S.T. (the Alliance of the Southern Triangle), a working group of artists, architects and curators that use the art field as a platform to broaden interdisciplinary collaboration with a focus on urbanism and climate change.
Bauer has screened and exhibited independently at Tate Britain, The ICA, The Showroom and FACT Liverpool, Deste Foundation, Athens, The New Museum, and Socrates sculpture park, New York. She has recently completed a project with Arts at CERN and is currently working as part of a team on the German Pavilion for the 2021 Architecture Biennale in Venice. She has taught and lectured widely at universities and cultural institutions including: Cornell University, Yale University, the New School and Cooper Union (US), HKW (Germany), ETH (Switzerland), DAI (Netherlands), Ashkal Alwan (Lebanon), The Tate and the ICA London.
Manuela Johanna Covini
Born 1960 in Germany, worked a long time as TV journalist in Switzerland. Since 2012 lives and works in Mexico City and Berlin.
Basically, Covini sees her artistic work as an irritating interaction that tells how life goes beyond its own subjective limits. But her narrations have no clear action. They are more productions/stagings that initially refuse the viewer to orient themselve in time and place. Also important to Covini is to explore the subject of simultaneity in her projects: simultaneity of space and time, of memory and present, of dream and reality, truth and lies…
In particular the digital image, allows her to present the dimensions of space and time as a tangible, fictional universe in her own visual vocabulary (as an aesthetically resilient material).
covini.com
kulturstadt.org
mentalmetropolis.com
Amanda Egbe
Amanda Egbe is an artist and media lecturer at the University of Bedfordshire, her research and practice is concerned with the moving image, emerging technologies, ethics, and justice. Amanda’s most recent artistic project Where Were You in 1992? (https://1992.maydayrooms.org) was a collaborative project investigating the rise of racism, fascism and nationalism in the 90’s through archival materials and oral histories. Her research is concerned with the history, design and application of media technologies, often utilising archives, repositories and found materials as part of a participatory visual practice.
Jill Daniels
Jill Daniels is an award winning filmmaker and scholar. Over thirty years she has made numerous experimental documentary and essay films, including Not Reconciled, (2009), The Border Crossing (2011), My Private Life (2013), My Private Life II (2014), Journey to the South (2017), Breathing Still (2018) and Breathing Still 2020 (2019). She is the co-editor of Truth or Dare: Art and Documentary Revisited (2013) and Memory, Place and Autobiography: Experiments in Documentary Filmmmaking (2019). She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Media Practice and Education and Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of East London.
Elżbieta Kowalska (Institute of Theatre and Media Arts, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań)
Elżbieta Kowalska is a media theorist with background in visual communication and interaction design. She has finished BA in Printmaking and in Visual Communication at the Art University in Poznań, then MA in Interactive Media and Performance at Institute of Theater and New Media at Adam Mickiewicz University. Elżbieta has over 8 years of experience in visual art projects, commissions and strategies for institutional and commercial use, using various traditional and digital techniques. Furthermore, she explores creative coding implemented into art installations, websites and games.
Building on experience gained on interdisciplinary projects, Elżbieta focuses her work on critical engagement with distribution of knowledge through mapping. Her goal is to explore new methods of creating spatial representations that are lead by spatial and mobility turn. These embodied and cognitive maps, radical cartography and new media poetics in contemporary art and science influences her writing and projects.
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos works with performance, photography and text, as well as sculpture and painting. He has performed at the 58th Venice Art Biennale 2019, the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale 2016, the Tate Modern, Inhotim Instituto de Arte Contemporânea Brazil, the Danish Royal Cast Collection, the Royal Music Academy of Sweden, and other institutions, and has shown his work at the London College of Communication, The Arebyte Gallery, the Palais de Tokyo etc. He is a fiction author, with his first book The Book of Water published in Greek and to be published in English by ERIS press. He is also Professor of Law & Theory at the University of Westminster, and founder and Director of The Westminster Law & Theory Lab, as well as permanently affiliated to the University Institute of Architecture, Venice since 2009. His academic books include the monographs Absent Environments (2007), and Spatial Justice: Body Lawscape Atmosphere (2014).
Kasturi Torchia
Kasturi Torchia, co-founder of Esprit Concrete and Mental Health Lead for Parkour UK, is an awarded psychotherapist researching lack of progression within parkour through a counselling psychologist’s lens. Her research and practice centres heavily on somaticized pain, re-experienced trauma and re-enactment through movement-based mediums such as art du deplacement. Kasturi is an art du deplacement practitioner herself in her final months of doctoral training in counselling psychology, her method exploring one’s unconscious responsiveness to one’s environment, mapping one’s management of their environment as embodiment to their relational conflicts to themselves and others. Seeing movement as a visceral demonstration of one’s internal processes projected onto the outside world, conjugally with a means by which one’s internal process can be moulded and even altered by the world, Kasturi enjoys to innovatively fuse her skills as a therapist to guide people on a path of self-discovery, facilitating the learning of movement while healing one’s sense of self.