Friday 10 August 2012

Coming Soon: Hostings 8 & 9




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