Towards a Physiological Novel / Wednesday, 4th of May at 7pm / Speaker Isak Winkel Holm

Søren Kierkegaard on Trauma: The Concept of Anxiety as a Theory of Traumatic Time
Speaker: Isak Winkel Holm.
Wednesday 4th of May at 7pm.

In The Concept of Anxiety, Søren Kierkegaard presents his dense and demanding theory of “the moment” – a fragment of time “in which time and eternity touch each other”. This paper will argue that the concept of the moment must be understood not in theological or philosophical, but, rather, in psychological terms. The theory of the moment is, in fact, a proto-theory about what was later to be known as a traumatic experience: a violent wounding event which is incomprehensible for the person experiencing it and which breaks down the chronological order of time. The paper will focus on Kierkegaard’s complicated web of metaphors and literary images in order to show that The Concept of Anxiety is, among other things, a book about the relationship between art and trauma, between aesthetic representation and psychic breakdown.

Isak Winkel Holm is a Ph.D, Associate Professor at Department for Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. He is the author of: Thinking in Images: The Poetics of Søren Kierkegaard(Tanken i billedet. Søren Kierkegaards poetik). He has written on Rousseau, Schlegel, Kleist, Hegel, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Musil, Kafka, Kundera, DeLillo, Sebald, McCarthy, etc. In his current research he focuses on: “Disaster Fiction”, and “Kafka: Forms of Injustice”.

(BL)

‘Towards a Physiological Novel’ is a series of 8 bi-weekly talks and screenings initiated by Sidsel Meineche Hansen on the subject of communication and Angst, and the production of noise and nervousness in an electronic era. The talks will operate as a mode of research for a physiological novel that examines how information circulates – how it, in physiological terms, is embodied, and consumed in our current society. The series will bring together a diverse range of theoreticians, artists and fiction writers whose works’ provide a flexible foundation for dealing with these ideas. The events are free. .

1. Dissonance at the Threshold; or Interfering in Systems Thinking. Speaker: Matt Clemments.
Wednesday 23 March, 2011.
2.  Medieval Scandinavianism: Asger Jorn’s search for a Vandalist Aesthetics. Speaker: Niels Henriksen.
Wednesday 6th of April, 2011.
3. The Artistic Dérivative, or Some Things I Learned About Life and Labor from a Dead Hare Speaker: Stevphen Shukaitis.
Wednesday 20th of April, 2011.
4. Søren Kierkegaard on Trauma: The Concept of Anxiety as a Theory of Traumatic Time Speaker: Isak Winkel Holm.
(Wednesday 4th of May, 2011.)

Towards a Physiological Novel / This Wednesday 20th of April at 7pm / Speaker Stevphen Shukaitis

‘Towards a Physiological Novel‘

(BL.)

‘Towards a Physiological Novel’ is a series of 8 bi-weekly talks and screenings initiated by Sidsel Meineche Hansen on the subject of communication and Angest, and the production of noise and nervousness in an electronic era.

The Nervous System is a collection of cells, tissues, and organs through which the body receives information from its surroundings and then directs the body in how to respond to that information. The reception and transmission of information and affect is a form of constant communication that models the biochemistry and neurology of the subject.

The talks will operate as a mode of research for a physiological novel that examines how information circulates – how it, in physiological terms, is embodied, and consumed in our current society.

The series will bring together a diverse range of theoreticians, artists and fiction writers whose works’ provide a flexible foundation for dealing with these ideas. To inform and compliment the talks, there will be a selection of literature available, including books and journals relating to critical theory and art, which together establish a bibliography. These events are free.

#3.

The Artistic Dérivative, or Some Things I Learned About Life and Labor from a Dead Hare

Speaker: Stevphen Shukaitis.

Wednesday 20^th of April.
Open 7pm, talk starts at 7.15pm

“Everyone is an artist” proclaimed Joseph Beuys. Beuys, as an inheritor of the avant-garde desire to abolish the separation between art and daily life, argued for the realization of a multitude forms of creativity through out many areas of social life, or forms of social sculpture as he called it. What can we make of this goal in age of semiocapitalism where the dream of everyone an artist has been realized in perverse form as “everyone is a worker” all the time? That is to say where the relationalality ‘sculpted’ through the circuits of an always-present network culture are rendered into opportunities for capitalist valorization, all YouWork and MyProfit? Is it possible to reclaim any of the subversive impulse of the avant-garde when the difference between the advertising firm and the détournement of the art provocateur is increasingly imperceptible? Drawing from a compositional approach to political analysis this presentation will examine the ways that social energies and processes created within various tendrils of the avant-garde have influenced the development of the capitalist production. From this it will elaborate the notion of the artistic dérivative, or a form of production where value is created through the labor of circulating creativity through the productive basin of the metropolis, configured as a factory.

Stevphen Shukaitis is an editor at Autonomedia and lecturer at the Essex Business School at the University of Essex. He is the author of Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Day (2009, Autonomedia) and editor (with Erika Biddle and David Graeber) of Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization (AK Press, 2007). His research focuses on the emergence of collective imagination in social movements and the changing compositions of cultural and artistic labor. For more on his work and writing, see http://stevphen.mahost.org.

                                                                                          
Sidsel Meineche Hansen is an artist and researcher. Her current work titled “Towards a Physiological novel” is a mode of research for a novel that contest the relationship between physiology and fiction. She has recently obtained an MA from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths in London. In this context she co-initiated the ongoing collaboration Model Court that deals with technological, spatial and aesthetic aspects of legal procedures. Contact: Sidselmeineche@gmail.com

# 4. On the Concept of Angest in Kierkegaard. 

Next in the series is the 4th of May at 7pm.
Speaker: Isak Winkel Holm (DK)

‘Towards a Physiological Novel’
Bi-weekly talks on Wednesdays at 7pm.

X Marks the Bökship
210 / 3 Cambridge Heath Road
London E2 9NQ
http://bokship.org

Screening: The Films of Sally Cruikshank / Sunday 17 April / 6pm / Presented by The Coelacanth Press

THE COELACANTH PRESS INVITES YOU TO A FREE SCREENING OF
‘THE FILMS OF SALLY CRUIKSHANK’
Sunday 17 April, 6pm

Sally Cruikshank (born 1949) is an American animator, most famous for her 1975 animation ‘Quasi at the Quakadero’, a cartoon that follows two ducks, Quasi and Anita, and a robot called Rollo at an amusement park with attractions such as the Tunnel of Youth, Think_O_Blink Paints Pictures of Your Thoughts, and Madame Xano and her Fabulous Dream Reader. ‘Quasi’ was a ‘midnight movie’ favourite at the time, and as well as being voted as one of the 50 greatest cartoons by members of the animation industry, was selected in 2009 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. Her work has featured in many episodes of CTW’s Sesame Street and in title sequences for films such as Mannequin (1987). She was the head animator for Snazelle Films in San Franscisco from 1972 to 1981, and in 1986 Cruikshank won the initial Maya Deren Award for Independent Film and Video Artists given by the American Film Institute, along with Stan Brakhage and Nam June Paik. Today she lives in California. Sally Cruikshank at Snazelle Films in the 1970s.

An interview with Sally Cruikshank features in The Coelacanth Journal No. 6 – It Came in the Night.

The Coelacanth Press is Publisher of the Month at X Marks the Bökship.

A Coelacanth Reading List will be distributed at the event and a display of books and other material from the Coelacanth collection is available to view at the space.

YOURS THE COELACANTH PRESS
www.thecoelacanthpress.co.uk

X Marks the Bökship
210 / 3 Cambridge Heath Road
London E2 9NQ
http://bokship.org

Book Launch and Exhibition / Black Light, Roisin Dunne / Ditto Press / Thursday 14 April / 6.30pm

Black Light by Roisin Dunne, combines her often anatomical and surreal illustrations with the short story ‘Earth Eaters’, by Marc Atkinson. The book is an exploration of the idea that black is a multi-dimensional space, rather than just a shade or colour.

Black Light
Roisin Dunne
Published by Ditto Press, 2011
260mm x 380mm, 98pp
Screen printed cover
£40

http://www.dittopress.co.uk/shop.php

Talk: Towards a Physiological Novel #2. Medieval Scandinavianism: Asger Jorn’s search for a Vandalist Aesthetics

Medieval Scandinavianism: Asger Jorn’s search for a Vandalist Aesthetics.
Speaker: Niels Henriksen
Wednesday 6th of April, Open 7pm, talk starts at 7.15pm

Medieval Scandinavianism: Asger Jorn’s search for a Vandalist Aesthetics. From 1961 to 1964 Danish painter and former member of the Situationist International, CoBRA and Helhesten, Asger Jorn, devoted much of his energy to the Scandinavian Institute for Comparative Vandalism, an ambitious research initiative aimed at medieval art. Looking at Jorn’s predilection for stonecarvings of human-animal morphologies against the background of his appropriative reading of formal art history, popular science, positivism and pragmatist philosophy, the outline of a radical politics of sex, change, and difference emerges.

>>>

‘Towards a Physiological Novel’ is a series of 8 bi-weekly talks and screenings initiated by Sidsel Meineche Hansen on the subject of communication and Angest, and the production of noise and nervousness in an electronic era.

The Nervous System is a collection of cells, tissues, and organs through which the body receives information from its surroundings and then directs the body in how to respond to that information. The reception and transmission of information and affect is a form of constant communication that models the biochemistry and neurology of the subject.

The talks, held at the bookshop in Cambridge Heath Road, will operate as a mode of research to examine how information circulates – how it, in physiological terms, is embodied, and consumed in our current society.

The series will bring together a diverse range of theoreticians, artists and fiction writers whose works’ provide a flexible foundation for dealing with these ideas. To inform and compliment the talks, there will be a selection of literature available, including books and journals relating to critical theory and art, which together establish a bibliography. The events are free.

‘Towards a Physiological Novel’
Bi-weekly talks on Wednesdays at 7pm.
X Marks the Bökship
210 / Unit 3. Cambridge Heath Road
London E2 9NQ