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Programme
click on the green session titles for more details
Tue 29 June: FILM
10-11am
Registration and welcome
Jessel and Court Rooms, Senate House South Block, 1st floor
11am-1pm
Proust, planes and telephones'
Seminar/Workshop
led by Dr Akane Kawakami (Birkbeck College, University of London)
Court Room, Senate House South Block, 1st floor
1-2pm
Lunch
sandwich lunch provided
Jessel Room, Senate House South Block, 1st floor
2-4pm
Found footage filmmaking and the archive: Colonialism and War
Seminar
led by
Prof Robert Lumley, UCL
Court Room, Senate House South Block, 1st floor
4-4.30pm Coffee break
teas and coffees provided
Jessel Room, Senate House South Block, 1st floor
4.30-6pm
film screening of film by Yervant Gianikian & Angela Ricci Lucchi
6.30-8pm:
Patrick Keiller: The view from the train
Plenary Lecture
chair: Dr Katia Pizzi (IGRS)
(open to the public)
Chancellers Hall, Senate House South Block, 1st floor
Wed 30 June: ARCHIVES
10am - 12.30
The Warburg Library
led by Dr François Quiviger (Warburg Institute)
The Warburg Library, Woburn Square
12.30 - 1.30pm
Lunch
sandwich lunch provided
Jessel Room, Senate House South Block, 1st floor
2.30pm - 4.30pm:
Visit to the Stanley Kubrick Archive, London College of Communication, University of the Arts
led by Richard Daniels (University of the Arts) and Dr Ricarda Vidal (IGRS)
Stanley Kubrick Archive, London College of Communication,
Elephant & Castle,
London SE1 6SB
Thu 1 July: PHOTOGRAPHY
9.15am - 10.15
Writing with light
Lecture by Dr Junko Theresa Mikuriya (University of Kent)
Court Room, Senate House South Block, 1st floor
Take tube from Holborn High to Bethnal Green and walk to Roman Road
11am - 12.30
Writing with light
Practical workshop
led by Dr Junko Theresa Mikuriya (University of Kent)
Darkroom in Bethnal Green
Four Corners, 121 Roman Road, Bethnal Green, London E2 0QN
12.30 - 1.30pm
Lunch
own arrangements - best to bring own sandwich
1.30pm - 5pm
Architectural tour of London on a Routemaster bus
led and driven by Prof Joe Kerr (Royal College of Art)
pick-up point in Bethnal
Green - set off in Archway
includes coffee break at the Wapping Project
5pm - 7pm
The Archway Polytechnic
Practical workshop led by the artist Ruth Maclennan - the session includes a presentation at Byam Shaw School of Art and an exploratory walking tour in Archway (North London). Bring digital cameras/phone cameras and cable to connect to laptop.
http://www.archwaypolytechnic.org/manifesto.html
Fri 2 July: MUSIC/FILM
10am - 12noon:
Guns and the memory of the First World War: The case of the Imperial War Museum
Seminar
led by Dr
Gabriel Koureas (Birkbeck University of London)
Court Room, Senate House South Block, 1st floor
12noon - 2pm
Analogue memories: shellac and vinyl records
Seminar
led by Dr Richard Osborne (Middlesex University)
Court Room, Senate House South Block, 1st floor
2pm - 3pm
Lunch
sandwich lunch provided
Jessel room, Senate House South Block, 1st floor
afternnoon: visit to Imperial War Museum - own arrangements
5pm - 7.30pm:
The Big Smoke: Films from a Lost London 1896-1945
Film screening
Jessel room, Senate House South Block, 1st floor
Sat 3 July: FILM/DIGITAL/ON SITE 9.30am - 11.30am
The British Empire on film
Seminar
led by Dr Richard Osborne (Middlesex University)
Court Room, Senate House South Block, 1st floor
11.30am - 1.30pm
Digital memories
Seminar
led by Dr Eleanor Chiari (Harrow School)
Court Room, Senate House South Block, 1st floor
1.30pm - 2pm
Lunch and introduction to Riverwalk with Derek Keene
sandwich lunch provided
Jessel Room, Senate House South Block, 1st floor
2pm - 7pm
London, the river, technology and memory
walking tour
led by Prof Derek Keene (Institute of Historical Research)
includes ferryride from Embankment to Greenwich.
7.30pm
summer school dinner at the Trafalgar Tavern, Greenwich
'Proust, planes and telephones'
led by Dr Akane Kawakami
This session – half lecture, half workshop – is based around some texts from A la recherche du temps perdu (in translation), on the subject of how memory is altered, improved and at times destroyed by the technological inventions of the telephone and the aeroplane. The two will be dealt with separately to start off with, then brought together in the conclusion.
The ‘telephone’ section will focus on depictions in the novel of phone conversations between (in the main) the Narrator and his grandmother; the interventions (often unwelcome) of the operators; the disembodiment of the voice and its effect on the self’s perception of the other; and how this results in a foreshadowing of the death of the loved one and one’s memories of him/her. We will also look at the memory of the telephone itself as an artefact, i.e. how Proust’s depiction of it contributes to our memory of the evolution of the object.
Next, we will look at how the aeroplane evolves over the course of the novel, from the image of an impossibly romantic ‘bee’ buzzing high up in the sky to a ferocious killing machine in the First World War; again, the development of our cultural memory of the aeroplane as artefact will be discussed. We will also talk about how our perception of the aeroplane is evolving even now, since the events of 9/11 in particular, and how Proust is adept at capturing the moment at which something ‘new’ enters our ken and vocabulary: how our memories are always struggling to catch up with the latest transformations of the technological invention, both as an object and as a meaningful component of our everyday lives.
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Found footage filmmaking and the archive: Colonialism and War
led by
Prof Robert Lumley, UCL
We will explore Italian colonialism and WWI as refelcted in film. We will look at excerpts from the following films by Yervant Gianikian & Angela Ricci Lucchi: From the Pole to the Equator ( Dal polo all'equatore, 1986; 16mm, colour, 101 minutes),
On all the Heights there is Peace (Su tutte le vette è pace, 1998, 16mm and 35mm, colour, 72 minutes) and Oh! Man (Oh! Uomo, 2004, 35mm, col. and b/w, 71 minutes).
Students can choose which film they would like to see in full length after Prof. Lumley's session.
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Patrick Keiller: The view from the train
Plenary Lecture
In his essay Surrealism (1929), Walter Benjamin wrote that ‘the true creative overcoming of religious illumination … resides in a profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration …’ and of ‘the lovers who convert everything we have experienced on mournful railway journeys (railways are beginning to age), on Godforsaken Sunday afternoons in the proletarian quarters of the great cities, in the first glance through the rain-blurred window of a new apartment, into revolutionary experience, if not action. They bring the immense forces of ‘atmosphere’ concealed in these things to the point of explosion.’
Photography and the railway journey both date from the 1820s: the Stockton and Darlington Railway was inaugurated in 1825; Joseph Niépce’s View from the Window at Le Gras was made in 1826. One might see cinema as their belated combination. The first moving-camera film is supposed to have been a view of Venice photographed from a gondola, but it was closely followed by the first of the railway panoramas and phantom rides that are among the forms most strikingly characteristic of the first decade of cinema.
In my experience, the view from the train also features as a way of finding subjects that can be visited later, on foot or otherwise, for more extensive exploration. This lecture will revisit a few examples, beginning with an account of a bicycle journey along Harrow Road, in north-west London, in August 2008.
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Warburg Library
led by Dr François Quiviger
This session presents the Warburg Library and its classification system as an extension of Warburg's research and method.
The first part summarizes Warburg's research and ideas, in particular his concept of afterlife (Nachleben), and their application in his Mnemosyne Bilderatlas. The second focuses on the Library classification system. The last part is a survey of images of the Graeco Roman gods as they appear in various sections of the four floors of the Library. It illustrates how the architecture of the Library allows to study the processes of memory and afterlife across time and across disciplines.
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Visit to the Stanley Kubrick Archives, London College of Communication, University of the Arts
led by Richard Daniels (University of the Arts) and Dr Ricarda Vidal (IGRS)
This session consists of a lecture/seminar with film-screenings and a tour of the Stanley Kubrick Archives, which will focus primarily on Kubrick’s use of London as location. Kubrick disliked travelling and believed that London was multifaceted enough to stand in for New York or Vietnam. And so, while the Beckton Gasworks in East London became the ruined city of Huế in Full Metal Jacket, Boreham Wood in Greater London was turned into outer space for 2001 A Space Odyssey. We will look at the extensive work of the location scouts, at costumes and props and the tricks and techniques of converting one location into another. We will mainly look at Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut. Further we will also explore the future of the past and memories of the space age through the archive’s holdings of material around 2001 A Space Odyssey.
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Writing with light
led by Junko Theresa Mikuriya
(Birkbeck College)
This workshop explores the origins of the photographic medium as writing with light Participants will learn how to take pictures with the pinhole cameras that they make. Pinhole photography does not require the interference of a lens, a shutter or any other complex device. All that one needs is a light tight container. A small hole is pierced into one side of the box. A film or a piece of photographic paper is placed inside the container, on the other side facing the hole. Light bursts through the opening, inundating the dark container and fixing the shadows of the exterior world onto the light-sensitive emulsion.
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Architectural tour of London on a Routemaster bus
led and driven by Prof Joe Kerr (Royal College of Art)
This tour will take us from Bethnal Green in East London via London Bridge and Tower Bridge to Wapping. After a coffee break and tour of the Wapping Project we will continue via Limehouse and the Olympic site through Hackney Marshes to Highgate in North London. We will conclude with a tour of Highgate Cemetery.
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Workshop with the artist Ruth Maclennan
Ruth Maclennan will introduce the Polytechnical Institute for the Study
of the Expanding Field of Radical Urban Life, also known as Archway
Polytechnic, a collaborative art project based in Archway since
2007. Students will join Archway Polytechnic to work in small groups to explore Archway and
prepare their own site survey, using found materials and simple
tools. There will be a performance/ presentation of findings at the end of the
day. "The polytechnic is a forum for the study of urban life and a
catalyst for the production of ideas and artworks that enable
participants and audiences to imagine and enact formal, civic,
surprising, critical, helpful, questioning, funny, difficult,
spirited, profound, demanding, beautiful, fleeting or perpetual
interactions with the city, with other places, and with each other,
that do not involve commercial exchange." Polytechnical Institute
for the Study of the Expanding Field of Radical Urban Life--a
Manifesto, Ruth Maclennan, AIR 2007
www.archwaypolytechnic.org
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Digital memories
led by Dr Eleanor Chiari
We will focus on and analyse three different kinds of digital memories on the internet: official memorial sites, digital/virtual memory museums and private mourning sites.
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Analogue memories: shellac and vinyl records
led by Richard Osborne
The 45, the LP, the 78 - these sound recording formats are time capsules. They are called ‘records’ for a reason: they can preserve moments in time. Yet they are also subject to the ageing process. Analogue records attract dust; they can be scratched; they have sleeves that become worn. They age just as their owners do. These contradictory qualities of preservation and disintegration have meant that the analogue record has a particular relationship with time. Taking a close look at shellac and vinyl discs, this session will examine the ways in which records have provided the soundtrack to peoples’ lives. It will also ask if the move to digital technologies has altered the relationship between music and memory.
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The British Empire on film
led by Richard Osborne
The travelogue was one of the most popular genres in the early years of cinema. Audiences in Britain could, for the first time, see moving images of the people of the Empire countries. Royalty was also a popular subject of early film. News reports covered the ceremonial events and the tours of the British Royal Family. Drawing upon films held in the collections of the BFI and the Imperial War Museum, this session will focus upon the ways in which Britain and its Empire were represented on film. It will also look at the ways in which these film representations became embedded in tradition.
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Guns and the memory of the First World War: The case of the Imperial War Museum
led by Dr
Gabriel Koureas (Birkbeck University of London)
The atrium of the Imperial War Museum (London) with its vast collection of machinery of war is one of the most arresting images of the museum. This image has not changed much since the first exhibition of the IWM at Crystal Palace in 1920. The exhibition of war machinery in the museum space addresses the question of the construction of the space as a ‘site of memory’. We will look at the establishment of the IWM and the narratives that it employed in order to investigate the way in which museums functioned and are still functioning within the cultural realm. Museums are a vital component in reclaiming and defining a concept of collective memory and the constitution and re-constitution of certain cultural icons. Can the machinery of war constitute a cultural icon? What are the implications of transforming killing machines into aesthetic objects?
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London, the river, technology and memory
led by Prof Derek Keene
The session will focus on a walk along the river frontage of the Greenwich peninsula from the O2 to the Royal Naval Hospital. A short preliminary session, with accompanying visual material, will introduce its principal topics and ideas: rivers as bearers of memory; technology and the technological sublime in the city landscape; the relationship between London, the river Thames and, eventually, empire; the riverside, industrial development and technological innovation; the history and industrial sites of the Greenwich peninsula and adjacent areas from the twelfth century to the present day. During a river voyage from Waterloo to the O2, We will encounter many technological features of the riverside and its history. On the Greenwich peninsula itself industry has almost entirely ceased, but during the walk we will identify its surviving traces and reflections in the new landscape and along the foreshore. We will consider the ways in which those traces may, or may not, reinforce the memory of major phases and activities in London’s past.
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Ruth Maclennan,The Archway Polytechnic
all images are copyright Ricarda Vidal, unless otherwise indicated.
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