26th June 2020
UNCONFERENCE SPEAKERS
The following blurbs will guide your understanding of the speakers and presentations at unCONFERENCE 2020.
Wei Zhou
Down the Rabbit-Hole
Wei Zhou works as a London based artist and a PhD researcher in film and art, after graduating from Contemporary Art Practice, RCA in 2019. Her work focuses on visual & verbal information flow, non-fiction film and fictional journalism, all considered as a part of constructing the simulation of reality. She has been working with an idea of political aesthetic and has developed moving image works and mixed-media installations shown in Flat-Time House London, FACT Liverpool, Mazee Netherlands and some other galleries in Beijing. Her art practice and PhD research work collage current concerns which are in relation to issues about the post-modernity and the robustness of democracy as a format for which to live by. The rise of neoliberalism is key to critique and she has engaged with the politics of media dissemination to question the way in which opinions and values are constructed, to knowledge the ways in which the media operate as a debased public sphere.
Down the Rabbit-Hole is an on-going computing art project initiated by the artist, Wei Zhou and the computer software engineer, Henrik Hasell, launched at the beginning of 2020. It is built with a constant updating world-news-database and an AI text generator (THE RABBIT), further it will be developed and turned into a theatrical performance. In order to challenge the crooked ground of media dissemination derived from news production industry. This project attempts to discuss how and in which format information can be extracted from daily news - a simulation of real to reveal its mechanism. The dialectic relationship formed by the synchronisation between the world events and the immediateness of information production permeates in the reality we lived in and composes a new reality we are living. The random selection and constitution of information by the AI text generator from the news database stirs the mixture of mediated events and swinging of public opinions, to warp the already deformed information which are built around our perception and discernibility. The sense of absurdity and alienation of the generated text confront the contemporary issue of the political power-dynamic over information flow, post-truth and the leaking boat of public trust to news media, facing the crisis of the tilted objectivity and morality of contemporary journalism.
Michelle Williams Gamaker
Parting Gestures: a co-reading
Michelle Williams Gamaker, works with moving image, performance and installation. Through a wider interrogation of cinema and its artifice, she recasts characters as fictional activists, proposing critical alternatives to the colonial and imperialist approaches to storytelling in early 20th Century British and Hollywood studio films. Her trilogy Dissolution (2019), comprising House of Women (2017), The Fruit is There to be Eaten (2018) and The Eternal Return (2019), explores marginalised characters from Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1947). House of Women (2017) screened at BFI’s LFF Experimenta Programme (2018) and featured in the Arts Council of England collection shows: Women, Power, Protest at BMAG, Birmingham, As Seen on Screen, Walker Art Museum, Liverpool, Go On Being So at Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange, Penzance (2019-2020). She is completing The Silver Wave (2020) an Untold Stories commission for RAMM, Exeter and is also recipient of the Stuart Croft Moving Image Award 2020 for The Bang Straws (2021).
For my presentation, I would like to co-read Parting Gestures, which was written for the Goldsmiths BA Fine Art degree 2017 show catalogue in response to a request from the students to provide something to frame the year, thoughts on teaching, thoughts on art... I felt awkward about trying to talk about art on broad terms and so I tried to map the particularities of that year group and the dynamic we/they developed within the studio. The format borrows from stage plays, with a narrator, a tutor (read by myself) as one of the characters and the student body, as a morphing collective, which speak as one, like a chorus. This text has had an afterlife, one I did not expect when I wrote it. After its distribution in the catalogue, the text has since been performed with my then former Goldsmiths tuttees at Tintype, London for Work, Work (2018). This exhibition (co-curated by Jo Addison, Adam Gillam and Mark Harris, Kingston University) brought together artists who generate part of their income from their involvement in art education. Full-time, fractional, freelance, fixed term; the exhibition asked: what does it mean to fluctuate between doing work and making it in the orbit of the art school? With the premise that the works in the exhibition manifest something of the synthesis of teaching and making. It also was read aloud with students at Bath Spa and Kingston in 2019 at Inventory of Behaviours, Tate Exchange, and now here at the UnCONFERENCE. The text has become a generative tool for opening up conversations about exchanges between tutors and students, and to a certain extent it has become an invocation to a group of students in 2017, some of whom are continuing in education and some whom are practising artists today.
The text is below, the co-reading will require 4-5 students to participate live, in conjunction with the role or 'tutor' and 'narrator.'
Roy Claire Potter
Teaching for encounter: pedagogic reflections on writing as research practice method.
Between June 2019 and May 2020 I delivered four academic workshops to students in university fine art departments. I taught writing as research practice methods, as it is derived from my own studio practice as an artist writer. Here, I reflect on these as case studies within the broader frame of a pedagogic research attuned to deconstructing the mechanics of linguistic knowledge production within the university. I make a claim for the liberatory potential of this as an encounter with ‘the sound of different voices’ within such a cohort and as ‘an exercise in recognition’ as members practise articulating individual fine art research concerns within the academic community.
Roy Claire Potter is an artist writer working across performance, publication, installation and film to address modes of articulation, particularly within the contexts of interpersonal and social violence. In February they were in session with Korean musician Park Jiha for BBC Radio 3's Late Junction, and in November they gave a reading of a commissioned short story at Tate Britain for Mark Leckey's exhibition O Magic Power of Bleakness. Roy is a senior lecturer in fine art at Liverpool John Moores University and their work is represented by A+A Gallery, Venice.
Julie Brixey-Williams
'Towards a Vitreous Engagement: a game of two halves'
Julie Brixey-Williams is a multi-disciplinary artist, sculptor and performer, born in Essex in 1961, whose practice engages site-responsively, to co-author works with Place. She lives and works in London and is a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors. After a long physiotherapy career working in intensive care, (including two years in Hong Kong where she became interested in the bodily gesture of calligraphic expression), she completed BA in Fine Art Sculpture (Kingston University 2000) and MA Art and Space (Kingston 2001). Currently she is a PhD researcher at the University of Reading working on a thesis titled: A Juicy Mixture: does R.D Laing’s experimental approach to the “Psychotherapeutic Crucible” provide a useful methodology for a multi-disciplinary site-based practice?
She has worked extensively in collaboration, is a co-founder of the collective point and place, and also has a longstanding creative relationship with performer, Libby Worth. Works are held in collections including The Yale Center of British Art, Tate Gallery Artists’ Publication archive, National Art Library, Birmingham Museum of Art Library, Kingston University, University of Kent, National College of Art and Design in Ireland, Laban Centre, Queen Charlotte’s Hospital and The Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland.
http://www.juliebrixey-williams.co.uk
Julika Gittner
'Manufacturing Dis-Content'
Julika teaches and practices across the disciplines of art and architecture. Her sculpture, performance, sound and video works have been shown internationally and explore the social and political role of art and architecture. She has taught art and architecture at universities in the UK and abroad and has been Design Fellow in Architecture at the University of Cambridge since 2010 where she is currently teaching on the MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design (MAUD). Last year Julika was awarded the SWW DTP PhD studentship to undertake an interdisciplinary practice-based PhD in Fine Art and Architecture at the Universities of Reading and Cardiff. Her thesis is entitled Manufacturing Dis-Content - Sculpture as a tool for counter propaganda and aims to develop a sculptural art practice that can communicate counter evidence in today’s contested politics of space. Julika is
currently collaborating with the London based social housing campaign group ASH (Architects for Social Housing) on resisting controversial housing estate regenerations schemes by challenging the deliberate mis-information characteristic
of so-called resident consultation processes through sculptural interventions.
Manufacturing Dis-Content - A short video guide
The video sketches out a visual guide to the principles behind the manipulation and disinformation techniques commonly used by local authorities and their hired consultants to influence residents’ opinions in estate regeneration schemes. Based on findings from the ongoing consultation process part of the St Raphael’s estate regeneration project in North West London the piece illustrates examples of the council’s deliberate use of misinformation and explores how sculptural representations can be used to communicate counterevidence to the residents. The video combines found and filmed footage as well as sculptural diagrams relating to key facts and figures employed in the council’s push for the demolition of the estate. The piece questions the aesthetics of common factual persuasion methods and proposes an alternative visual language for the illustration and propagation of counter-knowledge.
Giosuè J. Prezioso
'Re-discovering a Global Patron: Contemporary Art Practices in the Vatican.'
Giosuè has international experience as an art curator, art and business instructor and advisor - working for companies in Austria, France, Italy, Poland, US, and Spain. He is a PhD Candidate from the University of Reading and holds a Master of Science (MSc) in Art, Law and Business from Christie's Education London - the world's leading art business. Giosuè is Professor and Academic Affairs Coordinator at the Florence University of Arts - The American University of Florence (FUA-AUF). He taught for international (post)graduate programs at John Cabot University, Roma Film Academy (Cinecittà), Camera dei Deputati, Rome Business School, and Banca d'Italia - among others. Giosuè is a nominated examiner from the University of Cambridge (ESOL), a Business and Management examiner for the International Baccalaureate (IB) and is currently completing an advanced program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Re-discovering a Global Patron: Contemporary Art Practices in the Vatican.
The Vatican Museums are among the most prestigious art repositories worldwide. According to Prof. Cees B.M. Van Riel from the Rotterdam School of Management, they are “both the 5thmost visited museums globally and the 5thlargest in the world,” housing over 70,000 artefacts from all epochs and geographical locations. These numbers are strong indicators of a cultural industry that after more than 500 years continues to be one of the most admired and influential art collections in the world.
Being the most complete global observatory of the Vatican State, the Vatican Museums should therefore be considered as a valuable synecdoche to understand the cultural health of a State that, for religious, demographic and cultural reasons, is among one of the most influential worldwide - covering a virtual net of more than a billion spiritual and religious followers on a global scale.
While there is a certain wide knowledge and understanding of the Vatican patronage of the past - where it acted with a certain monopoly - there is a void in the understanding of the Vatican as a cultural patron today. Indeed, both academic and non-academic literatures do not provide a clear and comprehensive corpus of understanding on the contemporary art scene in the Vatican today, interrupting a narration that has lasted for centuries.
This presentation will reflect on the role of the Vatican patronage in contemporary art, trying to identify curatorial models, projects, and cultural operations that exacerbate the spirit of a (maybe forgotten) player in the contemporary history and practice of the visual arts.
Aaron Tan
'The LYC Museum and Art Gallery'
Aaron Tan is an artist and PhD student at the University of Cumbria and recipient of the LYC studentship.www.aarontan.info
The LYC Museum and Art Gallery is an artwork by the artist Li Yuan-Chia, which astride Hadrian’s wall in Bankside, a rural hamlet in Cumbria. Over its 10 year period (1972-83), it hosted more than 330 artists in its galleries, which included a diverse and non-hierarchical mix of local, national and international artists. The LYC also had a printing press, children arts room, theatre, library and a sculpture garden. It attracted a wide heterogeneous public not exclusive to a network of art insiders, amounting to an estimated 30,000 visitors a year at its peak, sustained by Li’s artistic labour.
This paper is an experimental live reading and writing on the transmission of alterity, through my practice-led research on the LYC Museum by the artist Li Yuan-Chia. Enacted in the digital co-presence of shared screens in lockdown communication technologies, this modulation of the event space of the presentation is interested in ideas surrounding hospitality, embodiment and usership through the inhabitation of the contingency of a porous artwork. What materialities and epistemologies can emerge from an experience of the other as event, and what are the forms of participation that can be choreographed from this performative paradigm?
Adam Walker
Scene B
Adam Walker is an artist with a research based practice focussed on critiques of self-perpetuating structures of inequality and speculative profferings of other ways of being. His work takes textual, performative, collaborative and digital forms. Recent projects, performances and exhibitions have
taken place at and with the Serpentine Gallery and Tyneside Cinema (UK), Izolyatsia and Yermilov Centre (Ukraine) and online at www.skelf.org.uk. He is a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art where his research project is developing a concept of ‘radical care’ as a way of being. Documentation of artworks can be found at www.adamjbwalker.co.uk
Dr Eleanor Dare, Joseph Pochodzaj, Dr Rathna Ramanathan & Tom Simmons
'Mediating tacit knowledges: a visual and sonic essay'
Crafting Futures is a British Council funded project which addresses global threats to material and intangible craft practices and heritages. As researchers in the School of Communication, Royal College of Art, our role has been to co-create methods for knowing with, not knowing about, the largely tacit community knowledge of craft in Central Asia and its surrounding networks of meaning.
Bios
Eleanor Dare is the Head of Programme for MA Digital Direction at the RCA, a course which addresses the future and present of storytelling with emergent and traditional technologies. She is also Reader in Digital Media at the RCA, with many publications addressing epistemology and digital culture. https://www.rca.ac.uk/more/staff/dr-eleanor-dare/
Joseph Pochodzaj is a Tutor in MA Visual Communication at the Royal College of Art. His work and research focuses on the relationship between graphic design and socio-political engagement – exploring how visual communication can create platforms for debate, activate forms of dialogue and directly influence our understanding of political issues within the public sphere. http://studio.joepochodzaj.com/
Rathna Ramanathan is the Dean of Communication at the Royal College of Art, she is an international practitioner and researcher known for her expertise in intercultural communication and typography, as well as nonmainstream and experimental publishing practices. http://m9design.com/catalogue
Tom Simmons is a Senior Tutor in Research and Research Leader for the School of Communication. His research focuses on the politics and aesthetics of sound in interconnected communities, communication systems and situations, including its social, cultural and environmental implications.