Visiting Thinkers and Artists

Daniel Gustav Cramer recipeint of the Oxford/ CFI 2009 Fellowship funded by the Arts Council England

Berlin-based artist Daniel Gustav Cramer is this year’s Arts Council England Oxford-Melbourne Fellow. He is spending the first three months of 2009 studying in Oxford at Lady Margaret Hall and the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art. This will be followed by four months of studio production at the Faculty of the Victorian College of Arts and Music in Melbourne.

When Daniel was young, his goal for life was to travel the oceans and protect and observe dolphins and whales. He then found out, that environmental activist groups (such as Greenpeace) would only accept supporters who have prior been active in their own neighborhood, by carrying overexcited frogs across the streets for example. This made him decide to become an artist instead.

Daniel describes his work as most successful, when it appears plain, bland and opaque. His search is for images that link to larger images, which link to even larger images that might eventually link back to the first one. Currently he is researching about the Solar System and the planets, which he plans to photograph himself later on in Australia. He is also gathering information about Jaques Piccard, the first man to dive to the ocean bed of the Mariana Trench (-10916m) in a submarine in 1960.

Since 2002 Daniel is developing a project, the Trilogy, which consists of three types of „Ur“- landscape images, Woodlands, Mountains and Ocean beds. For this series he has traveled all over the world including Transilvania, Japan, California, Scotland, Belarus and Europe. He has just started to exhibit a new project, Tales, which was shown recently in the Jerwood Room in Lady Margaret Hall. His practice includes books, paperworks and moving image. Daniel has received the Kunststiftung NRW grant supporting the development of this project later in the year.

Daniel is a winner of the Jerwood Photography Award, has shown in several exhibitions since graduating from the Royal College of Art, including New Contemporaries (Manchester), Berlin Biennale 5 (with Haris Epaminonda), Betonsalon, Paris, Kunstmuseum Bochum & Kunsthalle Emden in Germany. This year Daniel is invited to exhibit in the Athens Biennale (Infinite Library), solo shows at Vera Cortes, Lisbon, at BolteLang, Zurich and at Dortmunder Kunstverein, Germany and other group shows in Berlin, Istanbul, London and elsewhere.

 Professor J Hillis Miller is Distinguished Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California Irvine. Miller taught at Johns Hopkins University where he was heavily influenced by fellow Johns Hopkins professor and French literary critic Georges Poulet and the Geneva School of literary criticism, which Miller characterized as "the consciousness of the consciousness of another, the transposition of the mental universe of an author/artist into the interior space of the critic's mind." In 1972, he joined the faculty at Yale University where he worked alongside prominent literary critics Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, and Geoffrey Hartman and is the founder of the famous Yale School of Deconstruction. As a prominent American deconstructionist, Miller defines the movement as searching for "the thread in the text (work of art) in question which will unravel it all," and argues that there are multiple layers to any text, both its clear surface and its deep countervailing subtext. In 1986, Miller left Yale to work at the University of California Irvine, where he was later followed by his Yale colleague Jacques Derrida. Both at Yale and UC Irvine, Miller mentored an entire generation of American critics including noted queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

J Hillis Miller
 Professor J Hillis Miller the distinguished literary critic and founder of the Yale school of deconstruction will visit the Centre for Ideas 3 -5 August 2009 .


Free Public Lecture:
Wednesday 5 August, 6-8.00pm
Venue: Federation Hall, Victorian college of the Arts
234 St Kilda Road Southbank 3006
"Derrida as Medium"

This lecture explores the theories of telepathy in Freud's essays on the occult and in Derrida's commentary on Freud's essays in "Telepathy" and in "Envois." In this commentary Derrida serves as a medium through which or through whom Freud is brought back as a "revenant" and speaks once more.
 
Telepathy Seminars

Hillis Miller will present a seminar series on Telepathy:
 
Monday 3 August 3.00-5.00 pm
Venue: Seminar Room Arts Hub VCA
Seminar One: "The Boomerang Effect."

This seminar argues, following Jacques Derrida, that a given medium determines to some degree what can be said in it. The medium itself is performative, often in ways that turn back on the user like a boomerang. The change from print to digital media means radical changes in personal, social, and political life. Derrida, Freud, and Browning exemplify my thesis.


Tuesday 4 August 12.00 -2.00pm
Venue: Seminar room Arts Hub VCA
Seminar Two: "Mr. Sludge, c'est moi, or Why Browning Hated Home the Medium."
This seminar begins with reflections on the differences among different media at different times and goes on to explore Robert Browning's "Mr. Sludge, 'The Medium,'" one of his great dramatic monologues, as an example of a conflict among media.

Wednesday 5 August 3.00-5.00pm
Venue: Seminar Room VCA Arts Hub
Seminar Three: "Reading 'Telepathy' Right"

This seminar investigates the strange telepathic rhetoric of Derrida's "Telepathy" essay. I show that this essay does what it talks about. The essay is a powerful exemplification of my claim that "the medium is the maker."


Readings:
Nicholas Royle,  Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind,  Basil Blackwell,  1991.  Pp 9-27

Jacques Derrida, Telepathy in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, volume 1, Stanford, 2007.  Pp. 254 -261.

Sigmund Freud's essays on telepathy are "Psychoanalysis and Telepathy," "Dreams and Telepathy," "Dreams and Occultism," and "The Occult Significance of Dreams," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Vintage Books; The Hogarth Press, 2001), 18: 173-93; 195-220; 22: 31-56; 19: 135-38.

Professor Krzysztof Ziarek, teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature at SUNY at Buffalo. He specializes in 20th-century comparative literature, in particular contemporary poetry and poetics, aesthetics, philosophy and literature, and literary theory. He is the author of Inflected Language: Toward a Hermeneutics of Nearness SUNY, 1994), The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event (Northwestern UP, 2001) and The Force of Art (Stanford UP, 2004). Prof. Ziarek has also published numerous essays on Coolidge, Stein, Stevens, Heidegger, Benjamin, Irigaray, and Levinas, and co-edited two collections of essays, Future Crossings: Literature Between Philosophy and Cultural Studies (Northwestern UP, 2000) and Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions (Stanford UP, 2008). A volume of his poems in Polish, Zaimejlowane z Polski, was published in 2000. He has won NEH and ACLS fellowships. He is currently working on aesthetics and globalization.

Monday 6  October, 6.00 -8.00 pm
Venue : Cinema 2, School of Film and TV, Victorian College of the Arts

The Way of World: Cosmo-technology or Nothing

Biopower considered in terms of the global or planetary operations of techno-capital and world-wide telecommunicational networks has become the watchword guiding the philosophical discussions of the state of the world today.  The dominant discourse of the technologies of biopower works on the presupposition that it is indeed biopower in its global deployment that forms the operating dispositif of the modern world.  Yet, as both Nancy and Heidegger before him indicate, the inverse holds true, namely, that is technicity as the operative momentum of the opening and disposing of the world that makes large swathes of existence available to biopower and its formative infiltrations and regulatory investments.  For it is only when existence comes to be disposed technically, revealed into the Gestell, that is, as intrinsically “technic” or, in other words, available to power’s filtration (to Machenschaft, that is, to machination or manipulative power), to its creative and repressive articulations, that relations can become the purview of power and its modern technologies to the unprecedented degree seen today in the macroscopic operations of global capital and worldwide telecommunications and in the microscopic scale of genetic manipulations.  Biopower can be said thus to operate its regimens with respect to one, however extensive and varied, dimension of the technic revealing of being: namely, “life,” in its ambiguously delineated and interpenetrating zones of bios and zōē.   My proposition is that the global or planetary dimensions of the experience of reality as we come to know it today are constituted through a cosmo-technic disposition of being.  This cosmo-technics constitutes reality into the global span of the operations of power and its planetary technologies, whether we think about them in terms of global capital and its world market, as planetary life or “life of the planet” and the biopower which circumscribes it, or as macro-politics articulated through planetary power or Empire-like, virtual/actual operations of sovereignty, as Hardt and Negri suggested a few years ago.  
At issue is thus the critique of cosmo-technics and the question of freedom, where freedom is seen as the possibility of an otherwise to techno-power, seen as “action in the middle voice,” or an otherwise which would open up world as an alternative to the way in which cosmo-technics makes the globe available.  To echo my title here: is all experience cosmo-technic or can it come by way of, and thus come to be, world?  In this context, I consider Heidegger’s notion of the Ereginis or event, which is less about the rupturing of the chronological span of experience—though obviously such a rupture and displacement occur within the event--than about the opening up of another time-space, which necessitate a radical change in thought and practice.  What Heidegger calls “another time-space” is not an other, parallel reality or universe but the same “real” happening as world and not as a globe, that is, in the full force of its nihilating event, which ruptures and critiques the technic operations of planetary power.  The event marks the very force of “to be,” the silent force of the possible, which frees or releases what is into the play of its possibilities.

Seminar Series Title: Art/World in the Age of Globalization

Seminar 1. "Art's World: Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art"
Thursday 9 October, 3.00-5.00pm
Venue: Cinema 2 , School of Film and TV

Seminar 2. Globalization or World-forming: Jean-Luc Nancy on Creation.Friday 10 October, 3.00-5.00pm
Venue: Cinema 2, School of Film and TV


Seminar 3. Silence and Alterity: On Myung Mi-Kim Poetry and Krzysztof Wodiczko's Art.
Monday 13 October, 3.00-5.00pm
Venue: Philip Law Room, Elizabeth Murdoch Building VCA

Footage from Wodiczko's projection in Hiroshima. http://www.ufer.co.jp/works/wodiczko/english.html
http://www.bombsite.com/categories/24

Professor Eduardo Cadava teaches English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, and he has been a visiting professor in art colleges, including the San Francisco Art Institute. Cadava is the author of Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton UP,1997), a reading of Walter Benjamin’s concept of history and its relation to photography. This has been the most influential book on the philosophy of photography since Susan Sontag’s book on photography. Cadava has also published Emerson and the Climates of History (Stanford UP,1997), a study of the politics of Emerson’s meteorological reflections. He co-edited Who Comes After the Subject? (Routledge, 1991), and is the translator of many essays by contemporary French philosophers, including the work of Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Blanchot. He is currently writing Music on Bones, a book length meditation on the relation between music and techniques of reproduction, memorization, and writing. In addition, he is current working on a book in progress entitled Mourning America, on the relationship between mourning and nationalism.

Since the establishment of the CFI in 2001 a wide range of prominent international and local artists, performers, writers, and thinkers have contributed to the program including:

Eduardo Cadava Graduate Seminars <>

Seminar 1 – Monday, March 10, 2008 5-7 pm
Location: JT Reid Room (Elizabeth Murdoch Building, 234 St Kilda Rd)
Nadar
Readings
Nadar, “Nadar: My Life as a Photographer,” trans. Thomas Repensek, October 5 (summer 1978): 6-28.
Rosalind Krauss, “Tracing Nadar,” October 5 (summer 1978): 29-47.

Seminar 2 – Tuesday, March 11, 2008 5-7 pm
Location: CFI Seminar Room (Arts Hub, Level 2, 234 St Kilda Rd)
The Poetry of Photography
Readings
Baudelaire, “Correspondences,” “Blind Men,” “A une passante,” “A Strange Man’s Dream” (translations provided)
Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” trans. Thomas Y. Levin, Critical Inquiry 19 (spring 1993): 421-436.

Seminar 3 – Friday, March 14 2008, 5-7 pm
Location: T Reid Room (Elizabeth Murdoch Building, 234 St Kilda Rd)
Photography and Reproduction: Walter Benjamin
Readings
Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” trans. E. Jephcott and K. Shorter, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol.2, 1927-1934 (Cambridge, MA.: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999): 507-530.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” trans. H. Zohn and E. Jephcott, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938-1940 (Cambridge, MA.: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2003): 251-283.

Everyone is welcome to attend the seminars.
Readings are available as PDF files - CLICK HERE

Louise Wilson is the recipient of the 3rd Ruskin School of Drawing, Oxford/Centre for Ideas Fellowship. Louise will be in residence at the Centre for Ideas from 3 July - 2 October.

Biography
Louise K Wilson is a visual artist who makes installations, sound works and single channel videos. Born in 1965, she studied Fine Art at the University of Northumbria (1987) and Studio Arts at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada ( MFA, March 1996).
She has exhibited widely in North America and Europe, most recently in A Record of Fear (National Trust Orford Ness, 2005); Artists Airshow, RAE Farnborough (Arts Catalyst, 2004); Arena, Baltic (2003); Runway/ Spadeadam, Gallery TPW, Toronto (2003); Spectacular Bodies, Hayward Gallery, London (2000) Space Camp, Dunlop Art Gallery, Canada, (2000) and Dreams in the Void, Temple Gallery, Philadelphia, (2000). Her curatorial project Flock opened in Britain in 2003. Her published writing includes an interview with Paul Virilio (CTHEORY, 1994), a commissioned essay for Private Views: Artists Working Today (Serpents Tail, 2004) and artist pages for Zero Gravity - A Cultural Users Guide (Arts Catalyst, Cornerhouse books 2005).

Statement
My work explores perceptual and cultural aspects of science and technology. Processes of research are central to this practice and I frequently involve the participation of individuals from industry, museums, medicine and scientific research in the making of work. Previous associations have included the Montreal Neurological Institute, the Science Museum in London, the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training facility in Moscow and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

My practice typically involves an immersive process, some video and broadcast audio pieces for example have sprung from a curiosity about how the technology of flight affects our physiological states and psychological selves. To this end I have participated in a movement experiment in zero gravity (Arts Catalyst 2001-5), co-opted a team of air traffic controllers in formation cycling on an airport runway (for the Arena project, 2003) and been a passenger in an aerobatics plane repeatedly looping the loop in Northumbria airspace (for Artists' Airshow, 2004).

One aspect of my practice that I am seeking to develop through a range of different strategies and dialogues is an examination of certain spaces through the recording of sound. Essentially I am using sound as a means to explore Cold War sites. As such I want to touch upon the idea of recording corporeal memory and sensory accounts to respond to a historical era within living memory that continues to touch lives in complex ways.

Thursday, March 13, 2008 5-7 pm
Location: Federation Hall, Victorian College of the Arts
PALM READING:
FAZAL SHEIKH’S HANDBOOK OF DEATH

The talk focuses on a series of photographs by the New York born, Pakistani photographer, Fazal Sheikh. Fazal spent the winter of 1997 along the Afghanistan/ Pakistan border photographing Afghan refugees, in secret, in the middle of the night, and under the light of a small lamp. He recorded innumerable images of the refugees, of the devastated landscapes, the wounded bodies, and so on. In particular, though, I’ve been interested in a series of images of hands, just hands, holding small photographs of dead sons, brothers, and fathers. I wish to read these images in terms of what they can tell us about the relation between life and death, movement and stasis, the erasure and preservation of human traces, and memory and forgetting – all of which belong to the motifs and issues we most generally associate with the photograph in general. In other words, I wish to read these images in order to think about what it means to read a photograph, and this because these are, among other things, photographs of photographs. You can see this project on Sheikh’s website at: www.fazalsheikh.org.

The public lecture is co-sponsored by the School of English, Communication and Performance Studies, Monash University

Jalal Toufic is a thinker, writer, and artist. He is the author of Distracted (1991; 2nd ed., 2003), (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (1993; 2nd ed., 2003), Over-Sensitivity (1996), Forthcoming (2000), Undying Love, or Love Dies (2002), Two or Three Things I’m Dying to Tell You (2005), ‘Âshûrâ’: This Blood Spilled in My Veins (2005), and Undeserving Lebanon (2007). His videos and mixed-media works have been presented in such venues as Artists Space, New York; ICA, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel; and the 16th International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA) in a “Focus Jalal Toufic” program. He has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, California Institute of the Arts, USC, and the Rijksakademie, and he is currently a Professor at Kadir Has University in Istanbul. www.jalaltoufic.com.

Seminar 1
Thursday 6 March, 2008 5.00-7.00 pm
Location: Postgraduate Lounge (Arts Hub, Ground Level, St Kilda Rd 234)
Title: “Two or Three Things I'm Dying to Tell You about The Thousand and One Nights”

Abstract: “Morning overtook Shahrazâd, and she lapsed into silence… The king thought to himself, ‘I will spare her until I hear the rest of the story; then I will have her put to death the next day.’” Borges errs when he writes: “Why were there first a thousand [the apparently Persian version: Hazar Afsana, the thousand tales] and later a thousand and one?” It is confounding that despite all his flair Borges should miss the displacement from tale in the Persian version to night in the Arabic one: I consider that the first title refers to the stories Shahrazâd tells, while the second refers to the nights, the one thousand nights of the one thousand unjustly murdered previous one-night wives of King Shahrayâr plus his night with Shahrazâd, a night that is itself like a thousand nights.

Seminar 2
Friday 7 March, 2.30 – 4.30 pm
Location: Cinema 2 (Film and TV School, St Kilda Rd 234)
Title: “Arriving Too Late for Resurrection”

Abstract: “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. Yet when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days” (John 11: 5-6). The narrator of Blanchot’s Death Sentence writes: “I think in saying that, she was announcing that she was going to die. This time I decided to return to Paris. But I gave myself two more days.” By the time both arrive, the moribund is already dead. Similarly, following his disappearance, the Johannes of Dreyer’s Ordet shows up only after Inger dies.… Johannes and Death Sentence’s narrator must have intuited that they can do nothing to save the dying person, and that they may not recover from their complete helplessness to prevent her death. Johannes and Death Sentence’s narrator arrive only once the doctor, who, at least until now, functions in the timely, and who has center stage as long as the patient is still struggling to maintain her life, now that she was dead, has withdrawn. Jesus Christ, Johannes and Death Sentence’s narrator arrive just in time for the resurrection.

Everyone is welcome to attend the seminars.

Wednesday 12 March 5 -7 pm
Location: Federation Hall, Victorian College of the Arts, 234 St Kilda Rd

Screening of the following Videos:

-- Saving Face, video, 8 minutes, 2003
-- Mother and Son; or, That Obscure Object of Desire (Scenes from an Anamorphic Double Feature), video, 41 minutes, 2006
-- The Sleep of Reason: This Blood Spilled in My Veins, video, 32 minutes, 2002

The screening will be followed by a discussion with Jalal Toufic

The Centre for Ideas honoury Research Fellow Dr. Albrecht Dümling has been awarded the prestigious Prize for European Culture KAIROS. The prize was for work on rediscovering persecuted musicians.
More information (in German): www.toepfer-fvs.de/magazintexte.html

Dr. Albrecht Dümling was awarded a PhD in 1978, from the Technical University, Berlin. He is a musicologist whose research focuses the music banned by the Nazis and labelled 'degenerate music'. He created the exhibition 'Entartete Musik' which has toured Europe, the UK and the US. In 2003 he was an honorary research associate at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. He is currently a researcher with the Centre for Studies in Anti-Semitism at the Technical University, Berlin.

He is President of "musica reanimata", the society for the re-discovery of Nazi-persecuted musicians and their music.

Dr. Dümling will return to the Centre for Ideas in 2008 to write his forthcoming book on refugee musicians in Australia.

http://www.duemling.de/biografie.htm (German language biography)

Wendy Woodson (Professor of Theatre and Dance, Amherst College) is a Fulbright Fellow and Visiting Artist at the Centre for Ideas, Semester 1 2007.

Wendy, artistic director and founder of Present Company Inc., has created over 80 movement, theater,and video works that have been presented throughout the U.S. and in Europe. She has received numerous awards and grants for her performance and video work including Choreography, Theater and Interdisciplinary Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Boston Film and Video Foundation. Her full-length movement theater pieces and videos have been shown extensively in the U.S. at such venues as the Washington Project for the Arts, P.S. 122, Jacob's Pillow, Emerson Majestic Theater, the John F. Kennedy Center, Wolf Trap, New Playwrights Theater, the DeCordova Museum, at numerous colleges, universities, and national and international video/film festivals. Most recently she was the recipient of a playwrights/new theater fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

In addition to her credits as a writer, director, choreographer and video artist, Ms. Woodson is also a dedicated arts educator. She worked as an artist-in-the-schools with the National Endowment for the Arts (Delaware, North and South Carolina and District of Columbia Arts Commissions) and has been guest and resident artist with numerous universities and colleges since 1980 (including the George Washington University, Middlebury College, Mt. Vernon College, Catholic University, University of Maryland, University of Wisconsin,
Williams College, Trinity College etc.). She is a Professor of Theater and Dance Department at Amherst College and the Five College Dance Department where she has taught since 1987. She holds a Master of Arts in Dance from the George Washington University and studied and/or performed with Meredith Monk, Maida Withers, Martha Graham, Attic Theater, Erick Hawkins, Mirjam Berns, Ping Chong, Free Association Dance Theater, Twyla Tharp, Kei Takei, and Dan Wagoner. In addition, she was a Gulbenkian scholar in Lisbon, Portugal and lived and danced in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil.