Thursday Club Summer Season, 2008

Supported by the Goldsmiths GRADUATE SCHOOL and the Goldsmiths DIGITAL STUDIOS

6pm until 8pm, Seminar Rooms at Ben Pimlott Building (Ground Floor, right), Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, SE14 6NW

FREE, ALL ARE WELCOME. No booking required.

17 APRIL with RACHEL BETH EGENHOEFER

Knitting Intangibles

Rachel Beth considers her Commodore 64 Computer and Fischer Price Loom to be defining objects of her childhood. She creates tactile representations of cyclical data structures in candy and knitting and is currently exploring the intersection of textiles, technology, and the body in contemporary art practice. Rachel Beth is currently working as an Artist in Residence at the University of Brighton, Lighthouse Brighton, and Furtherfield London as part of the Arts Council England Initiative, commissioned by Distributed South and curated by SCAN and Space Media.

Rachel Beth will be presenting work in progress from her residency that explores the motion of knitting and the motion of code. Some of the work includes a knit zoetrope, interactive virtual knitting, knitting with the Nintendo Wii and others.  She describes the interactive virtual knitting as demonstrating “the motion from the knitting actions are tracked and translated into a visualization of “knit code” displayed on screen (and eventually on the web). The action of engaging or knitting with the piece naturally produces a physical cloth, while it also shows that code is constructed from the same types of patterns to create a type of virtual cloth (or software). Visually the piece will reflect our bodily interaction with machines, tracing the circular motion of the needles to our body’s give and take of working at a machine.  Cloth is often seen as an element of comfort and protection. Machines are perceived to assist us with advancing technology and communication while they are also harming our bodies with carpel tunnel syndrome, back pain, sore eyes, and other strain as we interact with them. This piece explores that delicate space in-between.”

RACHEL BETH EGENHOEFER received her BFA from the Fiber department with a concentration in Digital Media from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and was an MFA fellow at the University of California, San Diego where she also was a graduate researcher at UCSD’s Center for Research and Computing in the Arts (CRCA). Her work has been exhibited internationally in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) London, the Banff Centre for the Arts, ISEA 2004 and others. She formerly worked on the editorial staff of Artbyte Magazine in New York City, and continues freelance writing on art, modern society, and media culture.
www.rachelbeth.net

24 APRIL with KATE PULLINGER & CHRIS JOSEPH

Flight Paths: a networked book

“Flight Paths” seeks to explore what happens when lives collide –an airplane stowaway and a fictional suburban London housewife. 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 ‘Inanimate Alice’. 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’, ‘The Breathing Wall’ and ‘Animalamina’. He is currently Digital Writer in Residence at De Montfort University, Leicester.

8 MAY with CAMILLE BAKER & MARILENE OLIVER

MINDTouch
&
Making DICOM Dance – The Digitised Body as a site for performing subjectivity

MINDTouch explores ideas of non-verbal transference, telepathic collaboration, and the participant as performer, using biofeedback and mobile phone technology under meta-goals of studying “liveness” within mobile networked environments. MINDTouch involves creating a mobile networked performance that utilizes a database of streamed and/or archived video-clips created by video-enabled mobile phones, to then be retrieved, streamed and remixed during (a) live visuals performance(s). The participants invited to contribute to the video blogs are asked to explore their own consciousness, non-verbal emotional /affective senses and dream states, embodiment and communication.
www.smartlab.uk.com/2projects/mindtouch.htm

CAMILLE BAKER is a Ph.D. Candidate at SMARTlan, University of East London, conducting research on Networked Performance Media, funded by BBC R+D.
www.swampgirl67.net

&

Making DICOM Dance: Marilene Oliver’s practice-based research looks at medical and laser imaging technologies that scan bodies and break them down to bytes. Oliver examines from an artist’s perspective, the processes needed to convert flesh to pixel (digital photography), flesh to voxel (MRI, CT and PET) and flesh to xyz co-ordinates (3D laser scanning). Oliver will present a selection of artworks made using MRI data (where the subject of the scans is bespoke) and CT data (where the subject of the scans are either infamous or anonymous). The presentation will be both technical and theoretical, concentrating on the performative puppeteering activity that emerges when working with MRI and CT data.

MARILENE OLIVER is currently a research student in the Fine Art Print department at the Royal College of Art. Oliver has exhibited widely in the UK and Europe including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Royal Academy, Royal Institution, Science Museum (UK). Oliver was awarded the Royal Academy print prize in 2006 and the Printmaking Today prize in 2001.

15 MAY with COLM LALLY & VERINA GFADER

Condensation revisited: strategic walking / access to knowledge / economics of things / conversation pieces

In June 2007 Colm and Verina were invited to take part in the residency programme: Reference Check, a co-production lab taking place at the Banff New Media Institute in Banff, Alberta, Canada.
During the residency they expanded the notion of “interface” associated with various forms of online communication and exchange, to other, perhaps more radical, forms of spaces between different entities. At the core Colm & Verina’s actions emerges the search for where a site of potential resides beside of technologies’ restrictive mode of ex/inter-change and so-called collaborative or networked practices. Colm & Verina will present the “document” of the process that their project Condensation took during the residency at Banff. This includes questions of: the necessity of temporary frameworks; the character of dialogical communication processes; the failure as a site of potential. In an informal setting the “document” will take the format of a line, or “walking” – of virtually making a tour through various landscapes…

COLM LALLY is founder and director of E:vent. Since 2003 Colm has taken a hands-on role developing the E:vent programme, focusing on media art; video; performance; and electronic music. Colm was a co-organiser of Node.London 06 and is co-director of Arts in Action artists community.

VERINA GFADER completed a practice-based Ph.D. in Fine Arts at Central Saint Martins College, London in 2006, and recently joined CRUMB (web resource for new media art curators) as post-doc research assistant.

29 MAY with RICHARD COLSON

Linking the Senses

Richard Colson considers the role of gesture as part of any process of making art and reflects on its use in his painting and in his work using digital technologies. The talk will try to unravel aspects of experience that have a direct bearing on the interdependence of vision, auditory phenomena, gesture and spatial changes in both the creation of art and its reception by the viewer. Richard will use visual art works and examples of creative writing and will try to show how an awareness of spatial position can have a critical influence on the nature of what is perceived.

RICHARD COLSON is the author of The Fundamentals of Digital Art (AVA Publishing Uk Ltd) and co-curated Sense Detectives at Watermans Arts Centre. He is a Director of the annual Takeaway Festival of DIY Media at the Dana Centre, Science Museum. His paintings are in collections at the House of Lords, the House of Commons, Royal Dutch Shell and Pearson PLC.
www.kwomodo.com

5 JUNE with ALEX MCLEAN & DAVE GRIFFITHS

Live Coding

Live coders program in conversation with their machine, dynamically adding instructions and functions to running programs. Here there is no distinction between creating and running a piece of software – its execution is controlled through edits to its source code. Live coding has recently become popular in performance, where software is written before an audience in order to generate music and video for them to enjoy. McLean and Griffiths have played around Europe together with Adrian Ward as the live coding band “slub”. They will talk about the history and practice of live coding, and give some demos of their own live coding environments.

ALEX MCLEAN has been triggering distorted kick drum samples with Perl scripts for far too long. He is a PhD student at Goldsmiths Digital Studios.

DAVE GRIFFITHS writes programs to make noises, pictures and animations. He makes film effectis software and computer games.

Dave & Alex are both members of the Openlan free software artists collective and the TOPLAP organisation for live algorithm promotion.
slub.org ; toplap.org ; pawfal.org/openlab ; pawfal.org/dave ; yaxu.org

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).

For more information email Maria X at drp01mc@gold.ac.uk

To find Goldsmiths check http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/find-us/