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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James Lavender (University of Leeds):
Bodies of Sound: Towards an Immanent Sonic OntologyThis paper begins by affirming that the Spinozist edict ‘we do not know what a body can do’ is a vital premise for understanding the creative force of contemporary electronic music. However, if we take Spinoza’s ‘body’ to simply mean a human body (of the listener or musician, for example) then the true impact of the innovations in electronic music over the last twenty years remains opaque to us. It is only by thinking the bodies of sound itself that we can evade the residual idealism of music-as-communication; an idealism would co-opt the profound inhumanity of techno-aesthetic acceleration central to both dance musics and art-music experimentalism. In opposition to a moralising dichotomy of radical and reactionary, an immanent ontology of discontinuous vibrational bodies would open up a new perspective on these diverse but interrelated elements of sonic culture. My conceptualisation of a sonic body will advance initially through a retooling of the notion of rhythm, deploying it as a synthetic model of achieved consistency rather than simply a metric principle of pulsed time. My paper ultimately aims to construct a model of non-linear ‘texturhythm’ from a populous and dynamic ‘ecology of speeds’ (Goodman), machining an a-chronological temporality from sine waves and broken beats, synth stabs and bass drones.James Lavender is currently pursuing a PhD in Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. His research utilizes recent work in post-continental materialism and realism to develop a synthetic and speculative perspective on digital musics and sonic culture.

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talk:

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