Symposium: Rhythm & Event
The London Graduate School, Saturday 29 October 2011
King’s Anatomy Theatre & Museum, 6th Floor, King’s Building King’s College London, Strand Campus, London, WC2R 2LS
How can we think of novelty without attributing ontological prominence and metaphysical distinction between discreteness and continuity, or between the actual and the virtual, the analog and the digital, or the spatial and the temporal? Can a concept of ‘rhythm’ understood as a vibratory movement detached from substance, structure, metric property, and lived experience, become a method with which to account for how the new comes to be? Certainly, on the one hand, Bergson and, following him, Deleuze allow room for the coexistence of these concepts away from opposition. On the other hand, Bachelard and, following him, Lefebvre, have attempted to construct a rhythmanalysis of newness, while Badiou’s theory of the event signals an interruption in the spatiotemporal order. But perhaps there are yet other connections to be made between (what is absent in) these thinkers and towards conceiving ‘a rhythmics of the event’. For example, for theorists such as Kodwo Eshun and Steve Goodman rhythm points to a complex ecology of speeds, inciting mutations across the human-machine network to allow for the construction of a sonic futurity: a virtual coexistence of past and future in the present.
The purpose of this symposium is to elaborate a philosophy of rhythm as an appropriate mode of analysis of the event. Whether aesthetic, cultural, strategic, or other, we understand the event to be an instance of rhythmic time, summoning, expressing and animated by the abstract yet real (virtual) movements of matter. A rhythmic ontogenetics of this kind necessarily departs from a binary split between, on the one hand, natural bodily rhythms (breath, heartbeat and so on) and, on the other, a mechanics of steady tempo or pulse presupposing the metric organisation of spacetime. Instead, this symposium seeks to explore rhythm as an interface between diverse elements (human, machine or other) and a somewhat non-sensory, irregular and amodal movement, lurking at the most potentially unknown or ‘unthought ’ dimensions of the event.
Key speakers include, Matthew Fuller & Andrew Goffey, Angus Carlyle, and Jussi Parikka
For details and registration please visit: www.tiny.cc/rhythm-lgs
For further information please email Eleni Ikoniadou: E.Ikoniadou@kingston.ac.uk
Ticket/ entry details:
WAGED: £20
UNWAGED (Concessions and Kingston University staff/students: £10
(includes coffee, tea and reception)
For directions please see http://atm.kcl.ac.uk/location
PROGRAMME
9.30 –10.00: Registration
10.00 – 10.45: Performance (plus discussion):
Rhythmic Materialism: dynamic patterning through corporeal media
Julian Henriques (Goldsmiths) Claude Saint-Arroman (Goldsmiths) Claudia Martinho (Goldsmiths) Paola Crespi (University of Surrey)
10.45 – 11.30: Plenary:
Matthew Fuller & Andrew Goffey
11.30 – 11.45: Coffee Break (provided)
11.45 – 13.00:
Parallel 1: Anatomy Theatre
Chair: John Mullarkey
Olga Goriunova (London Metropolitan University): Software, Time and Avant-garde
Simon O’Sullivan (Goldsmiths College): Two Diagrams of the Production of the Subject
Eleni Ikoniadou (Kingston University): Splice, Freeze, Stretch and Mutate: Digital rhythm as harbinger of the event
Parallel 2: Museum
Chair: Jussi Parikka
Michael Goddard (Salford): Industrial Music for Post-Industrial People
Milla Tiainen (Anglia Ruskin): The voice as transversal rhythmics
Scott Wilson (Kingston University): Rhythm, a-rhythmia and the Revolutionary Drive
13.00 – 14.00: Lunch Break (not provided)
14.00 – 14.30: Plenary:
Angus Carlyle (LCC, CRiSAP)
14.30 – 16.00:
Parallel 1: Anatomy Theatre
Chair: Scott Wilson
John Mullarkey (Kingston University): Almost Nothing Happening: An Essay on Action and Event
Pasi Väliaho (Goldsmiths College): Rhythms of the Console Screen
Marcel Swiboda (University of Leeds): In Search of Lost Time-Images
Parallel 2: Museum
Chair: Olga Goriunova
Christian Driesen (Freie Universität Berlin): Rhythm as the event of undetermined forms
Iain Campbell (Kingston University): Rhythmic Bodies, Rhythmic Relations
Judith Wambacq (Ghent University): What kind of structure defines a rhythm?
16.00 – 16.30: Coffee Break (provided)
16.30 – 18.00
Parallel 1: Anatomy Theatre
Chair: Pasi Väliaho
James Lavender (University of Leeds): Bodies of Sound
Chiara Alfano (University of Sussex): Caesura: The Rhythmed Event
Shintaro Miyazaki (Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart): AlgoRhythmics. Micro- temporal Transductions of Information, its Aesthetics, Production of Capital and Affects.
Parallel 2: Museum
Chair: Eleni Ikoniadou
Corry Shores (Husserl Archives) & Scott Wollschleger (Manhattan School of Music): Rhythm without Time
Frauke Behrendt (University of Brighton): Rhythmanalysis. Lefebvre on a GPS Sound Walk
Tim Stephens (LSBU): ‘The End(s) of the Still’ – Releasing rhythm from photographic geometry
18.00 – 18.30: Plenary
Jussi Parikka (Winchester School of Art/ University of Southampton)
18.30 – 19.00: RECEPTION
19.00 – 19.30: LIVE PERFORMANCE:
Good luck Mr. Gorsky
