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

The proposed paper tries to resonate with the concept of rhythm as an elementary movement of matter, which oscillates in-between the discrete and the continuous, hence between the symbolic and the real. The attention on micro-temporal and molecular zones of mediated experience created by time-critical processes generated by technologies of information storage, transmission and processing shall be cultivated further and sharpened to a focus on its underlying rhythmic structures, which are generated by an inter-play and orchestration of abstract organisational, calculational respectively algorithmic concepts and real-world signals with measurable physical properties. This interleaving I called algoRhythm (2010; 2011), which was firstly a heuristic word play and combination of algorithm with rhythm, but then became a critical media archaeological concept, that allowed to track down some unrevealed aspects of the current digital culture and its history. Algorithm is a term crucially used in computer science and means a finite sequence of step-by-step instructions, a procedure for solving a problem, often used in computers as a fundamental principle of software or in everyday life for example as cooking recipes. Algorithms are abstract structures, but at the same time they „bear a crucial, if problematic, relationship to material reality (Goffey 2008, 16).“ Under such conditions algorithms are mathematical structures, but still not to be mistaken as algebraic formulas, for assignments or instructions operated or performed by algorithms are non-reversible. They are vectorized and have build in a time function. This boundedness to machinic reality and operativity makes algorithms time based and as such part of rhythmic procedures, which are able to cause effects in reality.

Rhythm on the other side is defined since the ancient Greek philosopher Plato as a time based order of movement, whereas movement should be understood as movements of materials that can be measured by technical, but at the same time epistemological tools. AlgoRhythms are consequently combinations of symbolic and real physical structures. They occur when real matter is controlled by symbolic and logic structures like instructions written as code. The proposed paper describes and explains some case studies of concrete historical situations, where an algoRhythmic approach brought new insights of a more accurate understanding of current digital cultures. Firstly I will account some concrete aural engineering practices of mainframe computers (late 1950s), where machine operators and programmers listened to the processes of the computers via build-in loudspeakers, which amplified the electronic signals of computational processing (with audio examples). Secondly I will briefly explain some basic sets of algoRhythmic processing in the realm of digital signal processing and wirelessness (Mackenzie 2010). Thirdly I will briefly describe the recent algoRhythmic breakdown and crash of US-financial markets on the 6th of May 2010. Finally as an outlook into further areas I could briefly mention a possible coupling of algorhythmics with neural coding and brain-machine-interfaces. Generally formulated I will try to answer the question, “Is rhythm is capable of theemergence of the new?”, by trying to read Deleuze/ Guattari with Bachelard and not against them. It is important to combine the micro-temporal concepts posed in Bachelards “La dialectique de la durée” (2006, 129 et seq.) with the seemingly continuous understanding of catastrophic processes and non-linear dynamics of Deleuze/Guattari. The essential update and escalation of our current culture of knowledge since the late 1970s is, that many seemingly non-linear, dynamic, rhythmic, non-digital processes, operations, situations and becomings can be simulated with symbolic, thus discrete, abstract, non-continuously operating, digital instrument of computation.

Shintaro Miyazaki holds a M.A in media history and theory, musicology and philosophy, University of Basle, Switzerland. He is a PhD candidate of Humboldt University Berlin at the Chair of Media Theory, Wolfgang Ernst and will be a research fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany from November on. His PhD in-review is about computer and media archaeology, rhythms and algorithms. Other recent research interests include, history of neurosciences, electrophysiology, media technology and science of complexity.

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talk:

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