Events

TORQUE SYMPOSIUM

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TORQUE SYMPOSIUM
an arts and science platform where international thinkers present new ways language, brain and technology are twisting together.

11 – 6pm / Wednesday, 30th April @ FACT, Liverpool

TICKETS
Featuring a range of talks, short film screenings and Q&A with leading thinkers in the arts, poetry, technology and cognitive sciences, the Torque Symposium seeks to address urgent questions around the changing nature of our relationship to language and thought in a digital age. In particular the day will address the ways technology affects our minds and modes of communication – and vice versa.

The symposium asks:
· As cyber-prosthetics are replaced by imperceptible interfaces, where do we draw the lines between technology, mind and modes of communication?

· What happens when technology becomes sentient?

· How is our behaviour corralled and twisted by online surveillance, targeted advertising and the compulsive spectacle of not-so-social networking?

· And how can we better understand and empower our interaction with technology?

Participants:
Lambros Malafouris // Anna Munster (online) // Cécile B Evans
Benedict Drew (video) // Imogen Stidworthy // Hannah Proctor
Holly Pester // Stephen Fortune // Alex McLean // Mez Breeze (video)

The symposium seeks in-part to foreground today’s technologies, and our use of them from the perspective of early tool making and use, and the feedbacks and blurred lines between mind and matter.”

The title of the symposium, a play on the verb ‘to talk’, and refers to torque’s original latin meaning ’to twist’, and also the twisting forces which distort language, technologies and cognitive processes by braiding them together. The cerebral torque is also a central term used by neuroscientist Tim Crow in his 2009 thesis that ‘Schizophrenia is the price Homosapians pay for language’.

Selected presentation summaries:
Keynote speaker and ‘cognitive archaeologist’ Lambros Malafouris will present his Material Engagement Theory through the lens of clay tablets and knapped flint, exploring implications that follow the human predisposition to reconfigure our bodies and extend our senses by using tools and material culture.
Artist Cécile B Evans presents and speaks about her character AGNES, which inhabits the Serpentine Gallery’s website, interacting with visitors and testing the bounds of affective relationships with technology.

Live coding practitioner Alex McLean explores the connection between silicone computers and human weavers, and how live coding is blurring the distinction between programming and natural language.

More at http://torquetorque.tumblr.com/symposium

Their eyes travel across the pages and their hearts search out meaning

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Saturday 26th April at 18:00–19:30. Goldsmiths’ Reading Room, Senate House Library, Russell Square, London, WC1E 7HU

Join Eros Press for an evening of readings and performances at Senate House Library, in association with Domobaal Gallery and The Jarman Film Lab.

Neil Chapman | Peter Jaeger | Rebecca La Marre | Tamarin Norwood | Holly Pester

Convened by Sami Jalili and Sharon Kivland, with Mura Ghosh.

£10 | Ticket price includes a limited edition publication produced for the event. To purchase, please visit: http://erosjournal.co.uk/product/senate-house-event

Withdrawn, intent, deaf and blind to the world, readers commune in silence. They scan and internalise, mouths made defunct in the passage of knowledge, and yet it was not always thus. Saint Augustine marvelled at the way Saint Ambrose read: ‘His eyes travelled across the pages and his heart searched out the meaning, but his voice and tongue stayed still.’ There is a certain amount of argument surrounding the exact moment in antiquity that the text became ingested in silence. Alberto Manguel, among others, suggests that this ‘silent perusal of the page’ was not commonplace until the tenth century. Did we lose something else, along with the innocence of our reading habits? In putting our ears away, as Nietzsche
would have it, did we too lose our voice – ‘all the crescendos, inflections, variations of tone and changes of tempo in which the ancient public world took pleasure’?
Silence is the law of the library, even in a place of such theatrical potential as the Goldsmiths’ Reading Room. In the wings though, in the private monastic spaces of its study carrels, where a reader’s lips can flutter away in a whisper, unheard, loud voices might muster. On the 26th of April, that potential will be realised, as six invited readers will make themselves heard in the silence of the public space. Emerging one by one from the privacy of their cells they will proclaim the meaning that their hearts have searched out.

Syndrome Sessions 1.0

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Sat 26 April / 8pm till 11pm + Afterparty till 2am 24 Kitchen Street. Tickets £5.

24 Kitchen Street, Baltic Quarter, Liverpool.

Session 1.0 : Celebrate the launch of this year-long programme of arts and technology experimentation and see three new works exploring the sensational potential of our new performance resource, The Drome. Featuring new performance works from Hannah Silva, Nathan Jones & Mark Greenwood, and The Hive Collective. More here.

Text Festival opening

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Bury Art Museum and Bury Sculpture Centre, Moss St., Bury, BL9 0DF.

Friday 2nd May 2014 / 7.00pm.

A first chance to see the Text Festival exhibitions and experience the new Bury Sculpture Centre in the company of many of the Festival artists.

The Text Festival in Bury is an internationally recognised event investigating contemporary language art (poetry, text art, sound and media text, live art), curated by Tony Trehy.

Storm and Golden Sky

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FRIDAY 25th April, Zoe Skoulding and Keston Sutherland

Up the stairs (at the back of the barroom) at the Caledonia pub, Catharine Street, in the Georgian Quarter, Liverpool, £4, 7 pm spot-on start!
Keston Sutherland is the author of The Odes to TL61P, Stupefaction, Stress Position, Hot White Andy and other books, and lots of essays, many of them about Marx and poetry. He lives in Brighton, where he runs the Sussex Poetry Festival, and where he founded Brighton Left Unity. He co-edits Barque press.
Zoë Skoulding is primarily a poet, though her work encompasses sound-based vocal performance, collaboration, translation, literary criticism, editing, and teaching creative writing. She lectures in the School of English at Bangor University, and has been Editor of the international quarterly Poetry Wales since 2008. Her recent collections of poems are The Museum of Disappearing Sounds (Seren, 2013), Remains of a Future City (Seren, 2008), long-listed for Wales Book of the Year 2009. You Will Live in Your Own Cathedral is a multimedia soundscape, video and poetry performance with Alan Holmes that has been presented across Europe in several languages.

Born of a Liverpool taste for variety and drama, ‘Storm and Golden Sky’ offers literary high style from across the poetic landscape. Programmed by a collective of Liverpool-based poets, Michael Egan, Nathan Jones, Robert Sheppard and Eleanor Rees.

RIVET

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The Northern Charter presents the first ever RIVET. Wednesday, April 30th – from 7pm. The Northern Charter, Floor 5, Commercial Union House, 39 Pilgrim Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 6QE.

With Rebecca Wilcox & Sarah Rose, Frances Kruk and Ed Luker.

POETRY // TEXT // PERFORMANCE

Blue Bus – Keith Jebb, Doug Jones & Holly Pester

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The Blue Bus is pleased to present a reading by Holly Pester, Doug Jones and Keith Jebb , on Tuesday , 15th April from 7.30 at The Lamb (in the upstairs room), 94 Lamb’s Conduit Street, London WC1. This is the eighty-seventh event in THE BLUE BUS series. Admissions: £5 / £3 (concessions). For future events in the series, please scroll down to the end of this message.
Keith Jebb runs the Creative Course at the University of Bedfordshire and is Vice Chair of the National Association of Writers in Education.  He has been publishing in magazines since the eighties, including Reality Studios and Joe Soap’s Canoe; more recent work in Veer About and the Reality Street Book of Sonnets.  Kater Murr’s Press brought out hide white space (2006) and tonnes (2008).  Doubles as bus conductor for the Blue Bus.
Doug Jones is 45, married with children, and is currently working as a junior doctor in Norfolk. He completed an MPhil on Bill Griffiths at Kings College in London and was a regular attender at the Writers Forum workshops under Bob Cobbing. Veer Press published Posts last year.  He has also had work published recently in Zone and scabsarerats magazines.
 
Holly Pester is a poet and multidisciplinary writer. Her performances and sound installations have featured at international events including a British Council funded visit to Mexico City, an artist’s residency at the dOCUMENTA 13, the Text Festival in Bury, and the Serpentine Gallery Poetry Marathon. Holly Pester’s poetry collection, Hoofs, was released with if p then q press in 2011 and her next collection, Folkslop is due out with Veer Books late 2014. She is currently artist in residence at the Women’s Art Library.

Poetry and Protest

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24 Aprilm 19:30. Rich Mix, 35 – 47 Bethnal Green Road, London, E1 6LA.

Join English PEN for a night of poetry, music and discussion on how literature and activism can come together. Featuring poets James Byrne, Sophie Mayer, Laila Sumpton, Aoife Mannix and Sonority Turner. Hosted by Shane Solanki.

The evening will also highlight PEN’s campaign for the release of imprisoned Camerooian poet Enoh Meyomese and celebrate the publication ‘Jail Verse’ a collection of his poems translated into English.

7.30pm Open-mic performances from Student PEN
8.00pm Panel discussion on How to be a literary activist with Sophie Mayer, Laila Sumpton and James Byrne.
9.00pm Performances from Sonority Turner and Aoife Mannix

Intercapillary Places: Mystery & Medicine

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Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art, 14 Wharf Road, London N1 7RW. Thursday 10 April, 7 pm.

Three speakers will examine medical history and poetry, place and allegory. Tessa Whitehouse will focus on a literary exploration of the medical geography of Moorfields in East London into the 18th century; Fabian MacPherson will read poetry drawn from medical and scientific text and Edmund Hardy will speak on the relationship between alchemy, power and language.

Speakers:
Tessa Whitehouse is a lecturer in English at Queen Mary University of London. Her first book, The Textual Culture of English Protestant Dissent, 1720-1800 is contracted to Oxford University Press.

Fabian MacPherson is a poet based in London. His pamphlet ‘A Waspshire Lad’ was published by Crater Press (2012).

Edmund Hardy is a writer and publisher. His critical work on the history of poetry and dialectic Complex Crosses is forthcoming from Contraband Books. He co-edits the small press Capsule Editions who are dedicated to the essay form.

Fjender films

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Held on March 15th 2014, at the Rich mix arts centre in Shoreditch, London, Fjender (part of the SJ Fowler’s Enemies project) celebrated cutting edge avant garde poetry from Europe, centred around contemporary Danish poets. A selection of British poets were asked to write original works as commissions in response to the themes of Morten Sondergaard’s Wordpharmacy,  including Stephen Emmerson, above.

Wrogowie films

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Wrogowie, organised by SJ Fowler, celebrated contemporary Polish poetry in collaboration with British poetry on February 8th 2014 at the Rich mix arts centre in London. Six pairs of poets premiered original collaborative works specifically for this event, including Marcus Slease and Grzegorz Wroblewski, above. Links to the other performances below.
Amy Cutler & Ula Chowaniec http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6LdC442EKk
Angus Sinclair & Laura Elliott http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrH3G34BQ_M
Francesca Listette & Joanna Rzadowska http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZukpdL6Cxk0
Philip Terry & Adam Zdrodowski http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHzymaGAgPQ

Storm and Golden Sky

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Friday 21st March

LEE HARWOOD AND SARAH CORBETT

Born of a Liverpool taste for variety and drama, Storm and Golden Sky offers literary high style from across the poetic landscape; experimental, lyric, performance and all that is in-between.

Programmed by a collective of Liverpool-based poets Michael Egan, Nathan Jones, Robert Sheppard and Eleanor Rees, we aim for a literary experience felt in your bones as juxtaposition and surprise correspondence. New metaphors will be forged, similarities caught, trajectories flown.

Up the STEEP stairs at the Caledonia pub, Catharine Street, in the Georgian Quarter, Liverpool, £5, 7 pm spot-on start!

Lee Harwood began writing in the 1960s and was at the heart of the British Poetry Revival. A Collected Poems from Shearsman shows the range of his work from that time until now: New York poems in the style of Frank O’Hara, a period of notebook and place poems influenced by Charles Olson, through to intense lyrics that always surprise by their surreal edges and by a collagist sense that nothing is ever only one thing. Harwood lives in Brighton and a new book is due from Enitharmon in May
2014.

Sarah Corbett lives in Hebden Bridge, but she grew up in North Wales, ever an English outsider. She has published three collections of poetry with Seren Books:The Red Wardrobe (1998),The Witch Bag (2002) and Other Beasts (2008).The Red Wardrobe won an Eric Gregory Award and was shortlisted for the T.S Eliot and Forward prizes. She has written several short films and a full length script – a collaboration with a film director that may extend to TV Drama. She nearly has a first draft of a children’s novel, and has just started working on lieder with a young composer.