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.

—————————————

PROGRAMME:
Introductory Music (Claudia Martinho)

PLAY

 

download

Performance Rhythmic Materialism: dynamic patterning through corporeal mediaWith:

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

PLAY

 

download

 

Welcome by Eleni Ikoniadou .

 

Plenary

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

———————————————–

Panel 1
Chair: John Mullarkey

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

———————————————–

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

———————————————–

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

—————————————————–

Panel 2
Chair: Jussi Parikka

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

———————————————–

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

———————————————–

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

———————————————–

Panel 2 questions

PLAY

 

download

—————————————————–

Plenary

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

—————————————————–

Panel 3
Chair: Scott Wilson

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

———————————————–

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

———————————————–

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

———————————————–

Panel 4
Chair: Olga Goriunova

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

———————————————–

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

———————————————–

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

———————————————–

Panel 5
Chair: Pasi Väliaho

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

———————————————–

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

———————————————–

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

———————————————–

Panel 6
Chair: Eleni Ikoniadou

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

———————————————–

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

———————————————–

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

———————————————–

 

Plenary

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

———————————————–

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

———————————————–

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

———————————————–

Milla Tiainen (Anglia Ruskin):
The voice as transversal rhythmics

Milla Tiainen (Anglia Ruskin University)
The voice as transversal rhythmics: Rethinking vocalities in contemporary arts and culture
The voice has figured as a multifaceted problem in contemporary, especially deconstructionist and poststructuralist, philosophy, social theory, and the study of culture and arts. The issues examined in connection with voice have stretched from presence to subjectification and language, gender, sexuality, mediation and more. All these approaches have nevertheless pondered the peculiar relationship(s) of voice to the body and society. Often, they have inquired the very ways that the voice plays out at and occasionally challenges that intersection. Of keen importance here has been voice’s inherent traversing of conventionally, even foundationally, separate categories: its simultaneous unfolding within and attachment to inside and outside, signification and ‘pure’ sonority, bodily sensation and thought, subject and the other, biological matter and culturally embedded techniques.

Existing perspectives, from Jacques Derrida’s critique of phonocentrism to Adriana Cavarero’s political philosophy of vocality, have incisively attended to the workings of the voice at the above intersections or to its transversality. Yet this article claims that the idea of transversality would need to be pushed further and new conceptual tools developed to even more effectively address the entanglements of individual enunciating bodies and wider social realities, as well as the interactions between various kinds of bodies, within events of vocal expression, transmission and reception. This holds particularly for the voice’s modes of emergence and affective capacities in today’s techno-cultural, hypermediated milieus of social existence and artistic activity. To this end, I propose a distinctly defined concept of rhythm that draws on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Elizabeth Grosz, Brian Massumi, Amy Herzog and others. Essentially, rhythm signals, in these frameworks, temporary groupings of heterogeneous material/sentient elements or agencies. It is what moves between the elements, coordinating their participation in shared events while not annihilating their mutual and internal divergences. This concept of rhythm is crucially useful when trying to rethink the voice beyond traditionally anthropocentric scenarios in terms of the current “enlarged ecologies” (Braidotti) of its becoming that contain a range of different, interacting components and ‘bodies’ from technical devices and environments, individual embodied agencies and emergent social collectives to (mediated) memories and multisensory impressions. I will mobilize the concept in relation to some examples from avant-garde vocal art and popular music/video art that point instructively to the broader sensual, social and political ‘rhythmics’ that the voice, in its contemporary incarnations, may be involved in and generate.

Milla Tiainen lectures in Media and Film Studies at Anglia Ruskin University, and she’s the Pathway Leader for Media Studies. Her publications – a monograph, an edited collection of essays, and various articles in English and Finnish – have dealt with musical and dance performance, theories of bodies in movement, affect, the voice, and neomaterialist cultural analysis.

———————————————–

PLAY

 

download