Backdoor Broadcasting Company

Event date: 29 October 2011 
King’s Anatomy Theatre & Museum, 
6th Floor, King’s Building
King’s College London, 
Strand Campus, 
London, WC2R 2LS

THE LONDON GRADUATE SCHOOL

presents

Rhythm and Event

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 onto genetics 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.

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PROGRAMME:
Introductory Music (Claudia Martinho)

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Performance Rhythmic Materialism: dynamic patterning through corporeal mediaWith:

• Julian Henriques (Goldsmiths)
• Claudia Martinho (Goldsmiths)
• Paola Crespi (University of Surrey)

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Welcome by Eleni Ikoniadou .

 

Plenary

Matthew Fuller & Andrew Goffey: Sort, Work and Recurse: the stratagematic rhythmns of grey media events
[AUDIO HERE]

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Panel 1
Chair: John Mullarkey

Olga Goriunova (London Metropolitan University): Software, Time and Avant-garde
[AUDIO HERE]

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Simon O’Sullivan (Goldsmiths College): Two Diagrams of the Production of the Subject
[AUDIO HERE]

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Eleni Ikoniadou (Kingston University): Splice, Freeze, Stretch and Mutate: Digital rhythm as harbinger of the event
[AUDIO HERE]

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Panel 2
Chair: Jussi Parikka

Michael Goddard (Salford): Industrial Music for Post-Industrial People
[AUDIO HERE]

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Milla Tiainen (Anglia Ruskin): The voice as transversal rhythmics
[AUDIO HERE]

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Scott Wilson (Kingston University): Rhythm, a-rhythmia and the Revolutionary Drive
[AUDIO HERE]

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Panel 2 questions

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Plenary

Angus Carlyle (CRiSAP): Scales of Rhythm
[AUDIO HERE]

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Panel 3
Chair: Scott Wilson

John Mullarkey (Kingston University): Almost Nothing Happening: An Essay on Action and Event
[AUDIO HERE]

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Pasi Väliaho (Goldsmiths College): Rhythms of the Console Screen
[AUDIO HERE]

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Marcel Swiboda (University of Leeds): In Search of Lost Time-Images
[AUDIO HERE]

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Panel 4
Chair: Olga Goriunova

Stella Baraklianou (University of Portsmouth)
The photograph as pulsating event
[AUDIO HERE]

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Iain Campbell (Kingston University): Rhythmic Bodies, Rhythmic Relations
[AUDIO HERE]

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Judith Wambacq (Ghent University): What kind of structure defines a rhythm?
[AUDIO HERE]

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Panel 5
Chair: Pasi Väliaho

James Lavender (University of Leeds): Bodies of Sound
[AUDIO HERE]

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Chiara Alfano (University of Sussex): Caesura: The Rhythmed Event
[AUDIO HERE]

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Shintaro Miyazaki (Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart):
AlgoRhythmics. Microtemporal Transductions of Information, its Aesthetics, Production of Capital and Affects.
[AUDIO HERE]

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Panel 6
Chair: Eleni Ikoniadou

Corry Shores (Husserl Archives) & Scott Wollschleger (Manhattan School of Music):
Rhythm without Time
[AUDIO HERE]

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Frauke Behrendt (University of Brighton):
Rhythmanalysis. Lefebvre on a GPS Sound Walk
[AUDIO HERE]

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Tim Stephens (LSBU):
‘The End(s) of the Still’ – Releasing rhythm from photographic geometry
[AUDIO HERE]

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Plenary

Jussi Parikka (Winchester School of Art/ University of Southampton)
The Aesthetico-Technical Rhythm
[AUDIO HERE]

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LIVE PERFORMANCE   - Good luck Mr. Gorsky
[AUDIO HERE]

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photographs from the conference:

Event date: 29 October 2011 
King’s Anatomy Theatre & Museum, 
6th Floor, King’s Building
King’s College London, 
Strand Campus, 
London, WC2R 2LS

THE LONDON GRADUATE SCHOOL

presents

Rhythm and Event

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Eleni Ikoniadou (Kingston University)
Splice, Freeze, Stretch and Mutate: Digital rhythm as harbinger of the event

As digital media become more ubiquitous, pervasive and dominant, attempts to theorise their limitations and possibilities start to seem mundane. Whether positive or negative, most accounts agree on the capacity of digital technology to converge and redistribute older media forms, to reorganise production, consumption and transmission, and to fundamentally alter our understanding of spatiotemporally distributed events. The machine aesthetics of digital media art have contributed to the idea of a reality generated out of bits and bytes, zeros and ones, the atomistic ontology of code. Yet the age old dilemma ‘is the universe discrete or continuous’ now translated to ‘is reality digital or analogue’, appears to miss the complexity of the event by confining it to an actual, or at best possible, state of affairs. The paper argues that experimental digital sound techniques such as splicing, freeze frame, time-stretching and others, commonly used in new media artworks today, may be able to challenge the metaphysical distinction between continuity (duration) and discontinuity (the instant). Emerging at the margins of time, these art events become rhythmmachines of the future, exposing our human timescales to a time that is not ours, is no longer or does not yet exist. As this talk will suggest, this rhythmic time summons and expresses the contingent side of the event, a dimension beyond the present that actualises it.
Eleni Ikoniadou is Lecturer in Media at Kingston University and an executive member of the LGS. Her research looks at the relationship between technology, art and media theory and the capacity of their encounters to generate new concepts and alternative experiences. She is currently working on a monograph that investigates the underlying dimensions of rhythm in experimental sound and media art events.

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talk:

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questions:

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accompanying images:

Event date: 29 October 2011 
King’s Anatomy Theatre & Museum, 
6th Floor, King’s Building
King’s College London, 
Strand Campus, 
London, WC2R 2LS

THE LONDON GRADUATE SCHOOL

presents

Rhythm and Event

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Simon O’Sullivan (Goldsmith’s College)
Two Diagrams of the Production of the Subject

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talk:

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questions:

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Event date: 29 October 2011 
King’s Anatomy Theatre & Museum, 
6th Floor, King’s Building
King’s College London, 
Strand Campus, 
London, WC2R 2LS

THE LONDON GRADUATE SCHOOL

presents

Rhythm and Event

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Olga Goriunova (London Metropolitan University):
Software, Time and Avant-garde 

This paper focuses on computational processing of time, especially in relation to sound analysis and synthesis and the concepts of delay, digital delay line and a buffer. The new and multiple forms and behaviours time assumes in and as the result of such computational processes extending to embrace various lives of culture go hand in hand with the ways and timing by which avant-garde artistic work can take part in the present. Avant-garde generally enters a specific relation with time, becoming something I call ‘future-in-the-past’, but it is today that such deep connection between aesthetics and time is joined by a third party: software, through which the present becomes multiple, full of pockets and expands. The paper draws
exampled from early Soviet sound pioneers, Constructivists, net and software art, Max/MSP, Nato, and Pd.

Olga Goriunova is senior lecturer in Media Practice at London Metropolitan University. She is the author of  ‘Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet’ (Routledge, 2011).
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talk:

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questions:

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Event date: 29 October 2011
King’s Anatomy Theatre & Museum,
6th Floor, King’s Building
King’s College London,
Strand Campus, 
London, WC2R 2LS

THE LONDON GRADUATE SCHOOL

presents

Rhythm and Event

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Grey media events emerge from and disappear into the imperceptible rhythms of background noise.  They are written into work systems, social networks, and the failures and workarounds of such. A grey event is the indeterminate switching from one kind of setting to another, a loop being initiated, nothing noticable happening, a faint stirring amongst the pages of a manual 
no-one ever reads, an cloudy unease generated by managerial brainstorms and corporate overcompensation for collapses that are impending or imagined. Grey media events are secreted by the rhythmatic throbs of experience undergone by the abstract infrastructures of the present day. The stratagematic approach of Evil Media is to draw out means to make these formations of rhythm and event tractable and amenable to manipulation and 
we present stratagems for sorting, recursion and workflow.

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talk:

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questions:

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Event date: 29 October 2011 
King’s Anatomy Theatre & Museum, 
6th Floor, King’s Building
King’s College London, 
Strand Campus, 
London, WC2R 2LS

THE LONDON GRADUATE SCHOOL

presents

Rhythm and Event

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Jussi Parikka (Winchester School of Art/ University of Southampton)
The Aesthetico-Technical Rhythm

Despite the insistence on the objective materiality as a grounding for technical media culture, a key realization that framed also technical media was that of rhythm – or more widely vibrations, waves, rhythms, and patterns. From the 19th century discoveries concerning Hertzian waves and Fourier transformations, Helmholtz and Nikola Tesla to mid 20th century research into brains and brain waves mapped and modulated through EEG (W.Grey Walter and the British Cybernetics), and onto contemporary digital culture of algo-rhythms (Miyazaki 2011), this talk maps a short genealogy of rhythmic technical media. The talk focuses especially on the epistemological mapping of sound words by the Institute for Algorhythmics (Berlin), and argues for an aesthetic-technical connection to think through the sonification of non-sensuous digital worlds. Referring to Wendy Chun’s (2011) ideas concerning the invisibility-visibility pairing in digital culture, the talk addresses not code, but rhythm as the constituting element for technical media.

Jussi Parikka is Reader in Media & Design at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton) and Adjunct Professor in Digital Culture Theory (University of Turku, Finland). His writings have addressed accidents and the dark sides of network culture (Digital Contagions, 2007 and the co-edited volume The Spam Book, 2009), biopolitics of media culture (Insect Media, 2010, the co-edited special issue of Fibreculture “Unnatural Ecologies”, 2011 and the edited digital book Medianatures, 2011 ) and media archaeology (the co-edited volume Media Archaeology, 2011 and the forthcoming book What is Media Archaeology?, 2012). Website and blog:   http://jussiparikka.net 

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talk:

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questions:

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Event date: 29 October 2011 
King’s Anatomy Theatre & Museum, 
6th Floor, King’s Building
King’s College London, 
Strand Campus, 
London, WC2R 2LS

THE LONDON GRADUATE SCHOOL

presents

Rhythm and Event

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Good luck Mr. Gorsky -
Live Performance

Good Luck Mr. Gorsky were formed in Thessaloniki in 2004 by Savvas Metaxas (Inverz), Spyros Emmanouilidis, Athanasios Papadopoulos (Hana) and Thanos Badis (Hana). Their electronic compositions emerge from a combination of both artificial and natural materials. Their latest creations are based on field recordings, analogue synthesizers, piano and trumpet, as well as other sources. Their new album will be released on vinyl in the winter of 2011 by Granny Records (www.grannyrecords.org).

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Event date: 29 October 2011 
King’s Anatomy Theatre & Museum, 
6th Floor, King’s Building
King’s College London, 
Strand Campus, 
London, WC2R 2LS

THE LONDON GRADUATE SCHOOL

presents

Rhythm and Event

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Tim Stephens (LSBU):
‘The End(s) of the Still’ – Releasing rhythm from photographic geometry 

This paper is part of a longer work currently in progress on Rhythm in relation to Photography. The argument here is concerned with undoing the assumed, inherited or automatic associations of rhythm with space, and geometric space or structure, in particular, in philosophic thinking (Agamben 1994) and following the implications of Lefebvre’s work. In photography theory that may prefer the term, should it rarely occur in this respect, spatiotemporal to temporospatial is revealed a shorthand philosophic tendency to subordinate time to movement ‘from the Greeks to Kant’ (Deleuze 1989). But what is photographic space, in any event? It is a much debated issue and now familiarly draws on affinities between photographic and architectural theory. This is a type of space that I will describe using Heidegger, that is both mathematical-technological and specifically western and hence bound up with the formation of the Modern/ Subject. I will also use Heidegger’s work on Building Dwelling Thinking, and ‘Art and Space’, to exceed this model and propose a different type of space, a temporospatiality, a rhythmic space, closely reading his notion of what could be called non-local dimensionality, or, the contiguity between real and represented space. Other terms will emerge in a discussion of various examples.
A concept of ‘ Photographic Rhythm’, a temporospatial term, furthers the debate by contributing a nondualistic and four dimensional term which is fundamental in undoing the artificial separation of ‘the arts of time’ from ‘the arts of space’ and therefore reveals the assumed spatialised ground on which some medium-specific notions in photography theory are also based. Recent work on photographic time and temporality also acknowledges this (Baetens, Streitberger, Van Gelder 2010). This theoretical approach therefore also requires a redefinition of rhythm, to enable its transdisciplinary potential as a term with both temporal and spatial dimensions, as we can agree it is a very under-theorised notion in the history of aesthetics and philosophy (Hamilton, 2007). I argue, drawing on Heidegger, Irigaray and Deleuze, that rhythm constructs a temporo-spatial field through its quality as non-local dimensionality, energetic flow and differential intensity, respectively. The upshot of which is, finally, to be able to delineate the very ends of the concept of the ‘still’ photograph, and all that that implies.

Tim Stephens Tim Stephens is a lecturer at London South Bank University in Photography, Art and Theory. He is also an editor of the Philosophy of Photography Journal and teaches Philosophy and Photography at The City Lit. He also maintains a freelance practice as a photographic artist primarily working in the public art realm and acts as an art & education consultant.

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Event date: 29 October 2011 
King’s Anatomy Theatre & Museum, 
6th Floor, King’s Building
King’s College London, 
Strand Campus, 
London, WC2R 2LS

THE LONDON GRADUATE SCHOOL

presents

Rhythm and Event

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Frauke Behrendt (University of Brighton)
Rhythmanalysis. Lefebvre on a GPS Sound Walk

This talk makes Lefebvre’s temporal concept of rhythmanalysis productive for analysing the role of the audience in  ‘Core Sample’, a mobile sound artwork by Teri Rueb (2007). ‘Core Sample’ is an example for a ‘Placed Sounds’ piece. In these kinds of sound art works sounds are distributed in space by the artist and are then experienced by the audience who ‘remix’ their own versions of the piece depending on their paths. This talk understands this GPS sound walk as exploring the relation between the topography of a landscape (Boston harbour island) and its various rhythms (contemporary, historical, technological), as translated into sounds.

I argue that rhythmanalysis is productive to understand the audience experience (drawing on guest book entries, and my own experience) of this GPS sound walk that gives ‘voices’ to secret historic layers of an urban landscape. It allows me to analyze moments of sensory synchronicity, the intertwining of linear time (GPS) and organic time (walking bodies) in the performance of the audience trajectory, and to discuss how auditory and embodied immersion into the experience at the same time allowed for critical reflection.

Frauke Behrendt’s research interests include the areas of digital cultures, sound studies, mobility and media theory. Her research combines empirical and theoretical investigations of the link between mobility, sound and media and how this is articulated both in contemporary art and in everyday live. Frauke is on the Steering Committee of the European COST Action on ‘’Sonic Interaction Design’ and of the International Workshop of Mobile Music Technology. In addition, she is a member of NYLON (international research network in sociology, history and cultural studies), and the ‘Centre for Material Digital Culture’ (Sussex University). She is a Research Fellow at the Cultures of the Digital Economy Institute (CoDE), Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge and will start a new position as Senior Lecturer at the University of Brighton in June 2011. Previously, Frauke was Visiting Assistant Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design (US) in the Digital+Media graduate department. She completed her PhD on ‘Mobile Sound. Media Art in Hybrid Spaces’ at the University of Sussex and her MA in Cultural Studies at the Leuphana University (Germany).

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