GHost
Presents:
Hostings
8 & 9: Presence – ghost-makers
Two
nights of presentations and performances exploring the desire to
materialise what is absent by manifesting ghosts.
The
talks are FREE but please email: ghost.hostings@gmail.com to reserve
your seats.
Venue:
The Senate Room, First Floor, South Block, University of London,
WC1E
7HU
(An
apparition known as 'The Blue Lady' has been reported to haunt the
Senate room)
Hostings
8: ghost-makers 1
September
19th
6.30pm
– 9.00pm
Michelle
Hannah: BLACK
BLOC
Derek
Hampson: Ghosts –
metaphors of the irrational
Brendan
Walker:
The
Experiment LIVE
Hostings
9: ghost-makers 2
September
26th
6.30pm
– 9.00pm
Birgitta
Hosea: Medium
Rosie
Ward: Artful
Hauntings: How Artistic Intuition can Create New memories within
Landscape
Guy
Edmonds: Seancé du
Cinema - A synthesis of domestic resurrection media
GHost
is a visual arts and creative research project which brings together
artists, writers, academics, scientists, curators researchers and
others for workshops, so-called Hostings
and exhibitions and screenings of moving image art. The Hostings
have been taking place in the "haunted" rooms at Senate
House, University of London and the exhibition have been hosted
annually by St Johns on Bethnal Green and also by The London Art Fair
and Folkestone Triennial.
More
information:
www.host-a-ghost.blogspot.com
Contact:
Sarah Sparkes - ghost.hostings@gmail.com
Programme
for Hostings 8: Ghost-makers 1
September
19th
6.30pm
– 9.00pm
Michelle
Hannah: BLACK BLOC
BLACK
BLOC – is a performance where the fissure between the
intention and the perceived conveys moral and metaphysical ambiguity
through speaker and voice. The accompanying soundscape that gradually
builds, are radio emissions taken from a point offset from Saturn
that have been translated into soundwaves. The transcendental and
meditative experience at the core of this ‘dark matter’ noise is
disrupted by the disturbing presence of a singular unsexed voice.
This
performance is related to the video: I AM THE SUN AT NIGHT. Screened
at London Art Fair 2011 with GHost.
Born
in Alexandria, Scotland in the early 1980s, based in Glasgow and a
graduate of the MFA Program at Glasgow School of Art. Michelle Hannah
has exhibited and performed across Europe; Berlin, Glasgow, Belfast,
Newcastle, Gotland, Dresden, Brighton, Vetlanda, Edinburgh, Toulouse,
Leipzig, London..
www.michellehannah.org
Derek
Hampson: Ghosts
– metaphors of the irrational
Ghosts
is a series of paintings depicting members of the English working
class as spectral entities, engaged in everyday activities of
walking, talking, shopping and rioting.
The
impetus to represent this particular social group as ghosts came from
a desire to make artworks that captured the character of the riots
that broke out across England in 2011.
The
works depict the rioters as having ghostlike forms and qualities;
they come into view fleetingly, emerging from darkness into light,
disturbing the fabric of society, before being reabsorbed back into
the shadows. As ghosts they create an irresistible sense of threat
and disorder, bringing an alternative, uncertain reality momentarily
into being.
As
is usual when the irrational shows itself, observers of these civic
disturbances were provoked into a frenzy of rationalization, i.e.
driven to offer explanations. The works in this series go beyond
rational definition, the understanding of the subjects as ghost-like
is poetic rather than logical, created by joining images of the
working class to the world of the supernatural. As such the artworks
engage with their subjects metaphorically.
My
aim in the presentation will be to offer an analysis of the foregoing
from within the theory of rhetoric as developed by the Italian
philosopher Ernesto Grassi (1902 – 1991) central to which is the
role of metaphor.
Rhetoric,
the speech that acts upon emotion, does not offer logical concepts to
prove the truth of its assertions, instead it employs metaphor to
make what is hidden both visible and significant to others.
Metaphor
in making the invisible visible, demonstrates the capacity to be a
primary tool in the manifestation of the ghostly.
I
am an artist, writer and lecturer; Course Leader, School of Fine Art,
University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury, UK. I am currently
researching connections between speech and the visual, informed by
readings in phenomenology, particularly Martin Heidegger. My work has
in the past explored some of painting’s more neglected forms, such
as ceiling painting, in parallel with developing other modes and
mediums of expression. Commissioned works include The Loves of the
Plants, for the University of Nottingham, a painting based upon the
Enlightenment polymath Erasmus Darwin’s epic poem of the same name.
I was lead researcher on Chat Moss, an AHRC funded research into the
representation of landscape, with the University of Nottingham’s
School of Geography. In 2008 I published Structures of Perception –
the phenomenology of looking in ‘Geographic Visualization –
concepts, tools and applications’, pub. Wiley. In 2010 I curated
Hearing Bertolt Brecht for the British Art Show fringe.
Brendan
Walker: The
Experiment LIVE
31st
October 2011: "For one night only, Thrill Laboratory present an
experiment like no other: real scientists, amateur paranormal
investigators, and the live exploration of a haunted building.
University researchers have developed cutting-edge medical technology
to monitor the effect of paranormal beliefs on the bodies and minds
of those susceptible. Dr Brendan Dare brings to you the unpredictable
results of their scientific research from the remote basement of a
reputed Broad Street haunting. The Experiment will be captured by a
film crew and transmitted real-time to a live cinema audience"
Reason
for manifestation: Creating a taster for reality horror TV series.
Technical requirements of transmitting live AV and bio data to the
cinema, via hardwired link-up, required finding a local haunted site.
There were none. A haunting was created to provide a strong context
to underpin the experience of investigators and audience. The
resulting ghost, 'The Sobbing Boy of Lee Rosy’s Tea Shop', was
manifested and validated in several ways:
Reports:
Newspaper clippings were fabricated featuring a distressing
drug-related death in 1986, and a light-hearted story of flying
teacups in 2006.
Scientific
Interest: A fictitious University research group portrayed academic
interest in the ghost. Their story evolved through a private blog,
which was leaked to the public
http://theexperimentnotts.blogspot.com/
Media:
BBC News ran a genuine story about "Nottingham's most notorious
ghost". The Sobbing Boy appeared in the National Paranormal
Database.
Entertainment:
An artist's impression of The Sobbing Boy appeared in an
advertisement for The Experiment.
Live
Readings: Investigators were given tools to report changes in
environmental conditions, along with unexplained sensations,
feelings, and physical phenomena – some of which were manipulated.
Bio
Data: The most unusual manifestation of the ghost was through its
possession of medical monitoring equipment during the séance, which
gave the ghost recognisable human qualities.
www.thrilllaboratory.com/TheExperiment
Credits:
The
Experiment LIVE was written, produced, directed and presented by
Brendan Walker, and supported by the Horizon Digital Economy Research
Institute. http://www.aerial.fm/docs/projects.php?id=183:0:0:0
Brendan
Walker is often described as "the world's only Thrill Engineer".
He originally trained as a military aeronautical engineer, before
researching and teaching in Interaction Design at the Royal College
of Art. Brendan now runs Aerial - a design practice specialising in
the creation of tailored emotional experience, with clients such as
Nissan, The Science Museum, Merlin Entertainment, and Disneyland
Paris. Brendan is also a Senior Research Fellow in the Mixed Reality
Laboratory at the University of Nottingham, a Professor in Creative
Industries at Middlesex University, and a presenter on Channel 4.
Programme
for Hostings 8: Ghost-makers 2
September
26th
6.30pm
– 9.00pm
Birgitta
Hosea: Medium
“The
cinema is the art of ghosts, a battle of phantoms... it's the art of
allowing ghosts to come back. Jacques Derrida”
Inspired
by Victorian spirit photographs, this tableau vivant will explore the
act of mediation that is involved in the digital image making
process. Taking the role of a techno-medium, Birgitta Hosea will
channel messages from dead actresses captured on film and from
disembodied radio signals. This messages will be manifested through
her multiple video doubles and live projections of automatic writing,
ectoplasmic drawing and animation.
This
live, intermedial performance is intended to draw parallels between a
medium, such a s film or digital code, through which a message is
encoded, stored and transmitted and the psychic medium, a person who
transmits messages from the spirit world. It continues Birgitta's
interest in process based art works, which explore animation as a
performative act rather than as an end product. Merging her own
physical presence with that of the avatars she creates her live,
post-animation practice investigates the performance if animation and
the performative identity. In her work, she combines a range of
media – drawing, manipulated video, paper sculpture, animation,
holographic projection, live video feeds and interactive technology –
with the corporeal body. Haunted by her creations, her presence is
animated into existence and obliterated. She is both animator and
animated, creator and projection screen, self and other.
Birgitta
Hosea has exhibited widely in both the Uk and internationally and has
been the recipient of numerous awards and artists residencies. Most
recently she was artist in residence at Digital Arts and Animation
Department, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern
California, Los Angeles, USA and at the Centre for Drawing, Wimbledon
College of Art. Recent exhibitions include Decode/ Recode at the
University of Salford and D R A F T a collaboration with M K Palamar
at Parasol Unit. She is a Research Leader for Performance and Course Director of MA Character Animation at Central Saint Martins.
Rosie
Ward: Artful
Hauntings: How Artistic Intuition can Create New memories within
Landscape
Within
this paper I will describe my intuitive and pragmatic approach to
making site-specific work. I rely predominantly upon my
sensory-energetic response to the presence and energy within the site
to inspire and lead the creative process. To exemplify this I
will focus specifically upon the work ‘Breathing Space’, a
site-specific video projection installation performance created
specifically for the site of the Arches (Glasgow), 16th century
vaults located under Glasgow railway station (see image 01).
Breathing Space was exhibited as part of New Territories, National
Review of Live Art (2005 and 2010).
I
shall describe the life of the work, beginning at my initial site
visit where, upon entering the site, I immediately had a vision of a
young girl hanging suspended in mid-air, gazing directly at the
audience. I brought this vision to life through a technique of
super-imposing the site directly back upon itself to create an
illusion of existing reality. This exploits the uncanny effect when a
pre-recorded virtual presence appears to be animate and live.
There
are a number of theoretical concepts associated to this practice. I
use a bricolage approach to ensure that no aspect of site goes
unnoticed or un considered. Closely associated to spatialism and the
brioculeur points of view, I take up Merleau Ponty’s phenomenology
of perception to develop a super-imposed reality in which the
audience understands the experience to be pre-recorded, and yet
responds to it as if it were live. By placing this virtual experience
within the context of 3D space (as appose to 2D flat screen), I also
pose questions concerning our relationship to hybrid spaces, virtual
and non-virtual.
Prior
to exhibiting the work for a second time at the National Review of
Live Art 2010, I overheard group of people within the festival
audience discussing the ghost of a young girl who was said to haunt
the corridor. Maybe the presence of the girl that I had super-imposed
upon the space now lives on as a collective memory embedded in the
site.
For
further information please see: http://www.rosieward.co.uk
Rosie
is a practitioner currently developing her practice within a research
context of a practice based PhD at the University of Sheffield
supported by Sheffield Hallam.
Since
completing her Masters in Scenography at Central St Martins in 2005
she has been Artist in Residence at the Cable Factory, Helsinki, in
partnership with HIAP (Helsinki International Artist-in-residence
Programme) and Arts Council of England.
She
has been an AA2A artist in collaboration with BA Interactive Design,
University of Lincoln and has since worked as visiting lecturer
within MA design and BA Creative Advertising and visiting lecturer
within Performance and Visual Art Dance, University of Brighton.
Guy
Edmonds: Séance
du Cinema - A synthesis of domestic resurrection media
In
performance events which I have called Séance du Cinema I have
linked together two late 19th
century phenomena: The domestic film show and the spiritualistic
séance. My intention is to remind us how film achieves a kind of
resurrection of its subject, through the simple fact that the
material of film can outlive the material of our human bodies. It can
therefore be said, after the passage of time, to have provided what
many spiritualists and psychical researchers were seeking: contact
with dead loved ones. Someone filmed in 1900 can 'live' again today
when we show that film record of them. This is such a basic function
of film that it is now largely overlooked.
One
reason for the neglect is that mainstream filmmaking became very much
a device for telling stories rather than making documents for
posterity. However within home movie making the idea of recording
loved ones for posterity survived and, as a historian of amateur film
and also a practicing film restorer, I would suggest that these ideas
can come to form the beginning of a new theory of archiving: One
which sees the film archivist as a kind of medium between modern day
relatives and their filmed antecedents, partly because the technology
of film is becoming increasingly esoteric to a modern day public.
However
there is one particular class of home movie that poses a special
problem. These are films that have somehow become separated from the
family context that created them and perhaps reappear on a flea
market stall. The anonymous undead people contained therein could be
said to haunt those archivists and artists who sometimes work with
these documents.
The
Séance du Cinema attempted a synthesis of the resurrection media of
film show and medium led séance: a psychic medium was invited to see
what she could discern from the experience of watching such found
home movies. Both medium and audience were challenged to divine
something of the lost lives of these people and to help reconstruct
the context which is so valuable to an archive document.
My
proposal is to describe and critically evaluate these events which
provoke some interesting questions about how we engage with archive
imagery as well as further examining the figure of the archivist as a
modern day medium.
Guy
Edmonds is a graduate of the University of Amsterdam’s Preservation
and Presentation of the Moving Image MA programme. He is an
experienced film archivist and film restorer having worked for the
Cinema Museum in London and the EYE Film Institute Netherlands in
Amsterdam. Publications “Amateur widescreen; or, some
forgotten skirmishes in the battle of the gauges”, Film History,
Vol. 19 no. 4, 2007 “Associazione Home Movies, l’Archivio
Nazionale del Film di Famiglia”, Film History, Vol. 19 no. 4, 2007
“Verborgen levens”, Skrien, Jaargang 40 nummer 4
“Necromancy
at home and in the workplace”, Blik, October 2008. éance
du Cinema events
Worm,
Rotterdam. 10-12-08, Mediamatic,
Amsterdam. 16-01-09
Guy Edmonds: Séance du Cinema - A synthesis of domestic resurrection media
In
performance events which I have called Séance du Cinema I have
linked together two late 19th
century phenomena: The domestic film show and the spiritualistic
séance. My intention is to remind us how film achieves a kind of
resurrection of its subject, through the simple fact that the
material of film can outlive the material of our human bodies. It can
therefore be said, after the passage of time, to have provided what
many spiritualists and psychical researchers were seeking: contact
with dead loved ones. Someone filmed in 1900 can 'live' again today
when we show that film record of them. This is such a basic function
of film that it is now largely overlooked.
One
reason for the neglect is that mainstream filmmaking became very much
a device for telling stories rather than making documents for
posterity. However within home movie making the idea of recording
loved ones for posterity survived and, as a historian of amateur film
and also a practicing film restorer, I would suggest that these ideas
can come to form the beginning of a new theory of archiving: One
which sees the film archivist as a kind of medium between modern day
relatives and their filmed antecedents, partly because the technology
of film is becoming increasingly esoteric to a modern day public.
However
there is one particular class of home movie that poses a special
problem. These are films that have somehow become separated from the
family context that created them and perhaps reappear on a flea
market stall. The anonymous undead people contained therein could be
said to haunt those archivists and artists who sometimes work with
these documents.
The
Séance du Cinema attempted a synthesis of the resurrection media of
film show and medium led séance: a psychic medium was invited to see
what she could discern from the experience of watching such found
home movies. Both medium and audience were challenged to divine
something of the lost lives of these people and to help reconstruct
the context which is so valuable to an archive document.
My
proposal is to describe and critically evaluate these events which
provoke some interesting questions about how we engage with archive
imagery as well as further examining the figure of the archivist as a
modern day medium.
Guy
Edmonds is a graduate of the University of Amsterdam’s Preservation
and Presentation of the Moving Image MA programme. He is an
experienced film archivist and film restorer having worked for the
Cinema Museum in London and the EYE Film Institute Netherlands in
Amsterdam. Publications “Amateur widescreen; or, some
forgotten skirmishes in the battle of the gauges”, Film History,
Vol. 19 no. 4, 2007 “Associazione Home Movies, l’Archivio
Nazionale del Film di Famiglia”, Film History, Vol. 19 no. 4, 2007
“Verborgen levens”, Skrien, Jaargang 40 nummer 4
“Necromancy
at home and in the workplace”, Blik, October 2008. éance
du Cinema events
Worm,
Rotterdam. 10-12-08, Mediamatic,
Amsterdam. 16-01-09
