Co-Organised by Sas Mays (Institute for Modern and contemporary Culture at Westminster) and Mervyn Heard (the Magic Lantern Society)

9.00 – 9.30: Coffee
9.30 – 9.45: Opening Remarks

9.45 – 11.15: Panel 1 – Archive, Culture, & Technology
Chair: Mervyn Heard
Madi Boyd (Independent): ‘Pepper’s Ghost for the 21st Century’
Olivia Plender (Independent): ‘A Stellar Key to the Summerland’
Wiebke Leister (LCC): ‘Towards an Iconography of the White Face’

11.15 – 11.30: Coffee

11.30 – 1.00: Panel 2 – Obsolescence, Failure and Transformation
Chair: Sas Mays
Naomi Kashiwagi (Independent): ‘Reinventing the Reel: Reclaiming the Everyday’
Dan Smith (Chelsea): ‘October Outmoded: Utopian Failure & Technological Possibility’
Ignaz Cassar (Leeds / Nottingham Trent): ‘The Image of, or in, Sublation’

1.00 – 1.15: Open Discussion I
Chairs: Sas Mays & Mervyn Heard

1.15 – 2.15: Lunch

2.15 – 3.45: Panel 3 – Obsolete Media, Contemporary Contexts
Chair: Mervyn Heard
Simon Warner (Independent): ‘Isolating V5: Towards a Human Zoetrope’
Ben Judd (Independent): ‘Magic, Belief, and Immersion’
Peter Ride (Westminster): ‘When Everything Old is New Again’

3.45 – 4.00: Coffee

4.00 – 5.30: Panel 4 – Audial-Visual Engagements
Chair: Sas Mays
Mark Ferelli (Independent): ‘Michael Reeves Directs’
Mark Jackson (IMT Gallery): ‘An Audiobook of the Dead: Burroughs & Raudīve’
Aura Satz (London Consortium): ‘Sound Seam: Gramophone Grooves & Primal Sound’

5.30 – 5.45: Open Discussion II
Chairs: Sas Mays & Mervyn Heard

5.45 – 6.00: Closing Remarks

The presentation will involve a screening and discussion around ‘Sound Seam’, a film featuring abstract imagery of close-ups of gramophone grooves, giving voice to the idea that every surface, in particular parts of our anatomy, is potentially inscribed with an unheard sound or echoes of voices from the past. The film’s sound-track, composed by musician Aleks Kolkowski, is interlaced with layers of voice-overs narrating a tale of mourning which draws on Rainer Maria Rilke’s text ‘Primal Sound’, where he reflects on the possibility of playing the coronal suture of a skull with a phonograph needle. The film uses microscopic photography, scanning electron microscopy, and sounds of otoacoustic emissions to uncover haunting aural bonescapes. The film was funded by the Wellcome Trust and produced during an artist-residency at the Ear Institute, UCL. The talk will address the sculptural and material quality of the phonograph and gramophone as obsolete media, the way in which the technology of inscription transformed the understanding of writing, and ideas around surface as a slate for memory.

Aura Satz is Fellow at the London Consortium. She completed a theory/practice PhD at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she held a Henry Moore Foundation Post-doctoral Sculpture Fellowship (2002-2004). She has taught at numerous art colleges, and has published in a variety of journals and art magazines. Together with Jon Wood, she is co-editor of Articulate Objects: Voicing and Listening to Sculpture and Performance (Peter Lang publishers, 2009). She has performed, exhibited and screened her work nationally and internationally, including FACT (Liverpool), Site Gallery (Sheffield), Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea di Trento (Italy), De La Warr Pavilion (Bexhill-on-Sea), the Zentrum Paul Klee (Switzerland), Whitechapel Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum (London). In 2008 she had solo shows at Beaconsfield Gallery and Artprojx Space. She recently completed ‘Sound Seam’, a film on gramophone grooves funded by the Wellcome Trust, during an artist-residency at the Ear Institute, London. ‘Sound Seam’ premiered as a film installation at the AV festival in Newcastle with Aleks Kolkowski, and will be shown at the Wellcome Collection in Dec 2010. She is also included in ‘Locate’, an exhibition at the Jerwood Space in August 2010, and will be performing her piece ‘I Am Anagram’ at the Barbican in September 2010. Her projects can be seen online

In 1935 a stenographer at the bedside of the mortally wounded gangster Dutch Schultz documented the patient’s delerious last words in the hope that it might give the police information regarding the gang’s criminal activities. In 1971, Konstantīns Raudive’s Unhörbares wird hörbar (1968) was translated into its English language equivalent: Breakthrough. Breakthrough documented Raudive’s research into, what he took to be, the voices of the dead recorded on magnetic tape, what is referred to as EVP. Both of these activities became of interested to author William S. Burroughs who had been introduced to potential creative use of the tape recorder by the painter Brion Gysin to replicate the cut-up experiments they had been exploring with written text. Rather than use tape recorders to create art, Burroughs took the activity to be “not an art proposition at all” and considered it a tool of sinister and potentially paranormal significance. In this presentation I suggest the idea that electronic voice phenomena, the belief that unexplained voices (usually of the dead) appear on audio recordings, can be appropriated into arts discourse and considered as the basis for a strategy of listening to audial practices. I propose a way of listening that acknowledges the idea of ghost voices in noise as an important interpretive strategy across audial art disciplines, demonstrating a process of interpretive feedback between work and listener.

Mark Jackson is a PhD student in the Sound Arts department of London College of Communication and a member of CRiSAP (Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice). His PhD research is a consideration of ’space’ in the work of William S. Burroughs and its potential adaptation as a theoretical model for audial arts discourse. In particular his research centres around Burroughs’ literature and audio-visual experiments of the 1960s and early 1970s. Mark is also project co-ordinator for IMT gallery where his is curating Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs, an ambitious forthcoming exhibition presenting two unreleased tape experiments by Burroughs from the mid 1960s alongside responses by 23 artists, musicians, writers, composers and curators.

‘Michael Reeves Directs’ is a twenty-minute Magic Lantern show comprised of original projected images, spoken word and musical soundtrack, conveying a form of narrative journey through the brief life and carreer of the sixties horror film director Michael Reeves. From its beginning, the show follows a strict, ritualistic pattern in its observance of Lantern operation, the use of scripted text and the strange, evocative lament of a funereal song at the close of the performance which draws matters to a conclusion. The show best operates under complete black-out conditions and within a small-medium sized space, giving the whole performance an atmosphere of unease, authenticity and intimacy.

Mark Ferelli became interested in the art of the Magic Lantern whilst working in antique restoration with ‘Automatomania’ sellers and restorers of collectable automata and stage magic. Through making his own slides, he found the Lantern the perfect vehicle from which to weave a performance that embodies both visual and sound elements in a ritualistic operation. ‘Michael Reeves Directs’ is the third part of a Magic Lantern trilogy which has seen several performances over the past seven years, and was initialy a commission for the 2007 Bloomsbury Festival.

This paper looks at the work of artists who re-investigate old technologies and asks why they appeal to a contemporary perspective on art making. The works of Rebecca Cummins (USA / Australia), Jo Babcock (USA), Abelardo Morell (Cuba / USA), Susan Collins (UK) and David Rokeby (Canada) will be examined. Each of the artists is significant in that they have developed a practice that either recognises and reproduces a specific form of image-making technology or addresses the visual affect produced by historic image-making. However all of the artists then re-imagine how an image of this nature can have meaning to a contemporary audience and the visual outcome that results owes as much to a modern notion of art practice and the position of the artist as provocateur, performer and cultural critic as it does to the notions of historical technology. Additionally, it can be argued, the viewing position of the contemporary audience is one in which the recognition of the juxtaposition of the old and new provides the essential frisson that transforms the images from being novelties, or nostalgic items, into being commentaries and reflections upon existence in the twenty-first century.

Peter Ride is Principal Research Fellow in Visual Culture at the University of Westminster. Through commissioning and producing new work, he is addressing the way that artists can use digital technology and develop new forms and systems that enable them to create innovative work. He is also exploring the processes of new media arts production, including how the roles of curators and producers of new media are changing and investigating the ways that digital arts projects are developed out of collaborative research with industry and academic sectors. Peter is also the Artistic Director of DA2, Digital Arts Development Agency, an organisation that develops commissions, artist residencies and curatorial training schemes. This role provides the focus for his research activity at Westminster through action research involving new projects. Previously he was the Arts Programme co-ordinator for Artec, the Arts Technology Centre, London (1995-7), and Director of the Cambridge Darkroom Gallery (1992-5). He was educated at the Australian National University. Publications include: The New Media Handbook, with Andrew Dewdney (Routledge, 2006).

My practice explores my relationship to specific groups and individuals who are connected with marginalised belief systems, such as witches, clairvoyants and shaman. Part of my interest in these belief systems is to position myself as both participant and observer when making the work, and to test the extent and nature of my own beliefs and preconceptions. My performative work explores how the ritualistic activities of these groups and individuals can be extended into an action (one that itself hovers on the border between immersion and a more self-conscious, knowing state), and how, in turn, this action can be interpreted in a moving image work.

My series of stereoscopic photographs used cameras from the 1950s; the images reference spirit photography and were displayed in Victorian stereoscopic viewers. This work was included in Seeing is Believing at the Photographers’ Gallery, London. My performances in part mirror spirit séances and occult salons at the turn of the 19th century, including Presence (2008), for which I invited two psychics to give a live demonstration of clairvoyance and stage a séance, Close to You (2008) in which I attempted to demonstrate clairvoyance to a group of trainee psychics, and the collaboration Conversations with the Other Side at the David Roberts Art Foundation (2009). In March 2010 I staged Concerning the Difference Between the Delights of Pleasure and True Happiness at the Swedenborg Society, London, which further explored notions of belief and immersion, and incorporated a live magic lantern show, operated by Mervyn Heard. The rotating chromotrope images acted as metaphors for the visions described by Emanuel Swedenborg in his writing, which were spoken and sung by actors and musicians.

In this paper, illustrated with digital slides and live video, I attempt an overview of the Zoetrope phenomenon, detailing its origins in scientific discourse, its commodification as an optical toy, and the longevity of its influence – from late-19th century motion studies to early 21st century film making. With the help of a bogus scientist from a prestigious overseas institution I unravel the neurological functions underpinning what we erroneously refer to as ‘persistence of vision’, and finally describe my own unrealized vision of a living zoetrope using the human figure. What is the relationship between the still and moving image? Photography and cinema have always taken care to preserve their own spheres of interest. Now at last, with consumer cameras that shoot stills and HD video of almost equivalent quality, the question has to be put: is the photograph simply a video that hasn’t yet started to move? My current fascination is with the threshold between stasis and movement – the photograph that starts to flow. Something happens at that boundary – the still point of the dance – that resists analysis. The explosion of interest in optical phenomena in the early Victorian period almost amounts to a rediscovery of the eye, and the privileging of sight over other senses. We are heirs to this legacy, and contemporary neurology reveals the world of perception to be richer than we dreamed – but far less dependable.

Simon Warner is a photographer, video artist and researcher with interests in the history of photography and visual media. With a NESTA Fellowship he has created a series of impersonations of key figures in European culture: Goethe, Daguerre, Lavater and Herschel, and has taken part in the Arts Council England touring exhibition Alchemy (2006–7). Recent projects include Victorian photography workshops for the Brontë Parsonage and Florence Nightingale Museums, and silhouette drawing installations for The Last Tuesday Society and The House of Fairy Tales. www.simonwarner.co.uk

This presentation considers the intersecting but differing temporalities brought to bear in the space of the photograph upon its entry into an archive. It can be argued that any document, photographic or otherwise, that enters the topology of the archive is, paradoxically, rendered into obsolescence by that archive and its sedentary drives. Following thinkers of the archive such as Derrida, Foucault, Groys, among others, one of the ethical functions of the archive is to enable differentiation: to do ‘archival work’ is to unlock difference. Yet how is one to think the archival content outside of those moments in which we engage with it deliberately? More specifically, how is one to think the spectatorial relation to images that, assigned to the sequestered space of the archive, remain most of the time without spectators? In thinking the archival mode through the philosophical lens of sublation and its Hegelian precursor of Aufhebung that performs alteration through preservation-as-cancellation, the paper sets out to articulatea phenomenology of the archived photograph as ‘an image of, or in, sublation’. Exploring the fragile dynamics at stake between the archived and its outside, non-archived, the paper emphasizes the critical contradictions inherent in the logics of archivization: seeking to preserve, the archive cannot do so without also engendering another differentiation.

Ignaz Cassar works as a writer and artist. He gained his PhD at the University of Leeds, England. His dissertation, entitled ‘Declining Images’, advanced a critique of the photographic production of visibility by exploring the phenomenology of the photographic image in relation to the spaces and temporalities of photographic production. Wider research interests comprise modern art theory, the historiography of art and photography, lens-based media practice and theory, and psychoanalytic and poststructuralist thought. Currently he has teaching engagements in aesthetics at the University of Leeds and in photographic theory and practice at Nottingham Trent University. He has published in the journals parallax, Photography & Culture, Journal of Visual Arts Practice.

In 2002, the journal October marked its 100th issue with an edition themed explicitly around the outmoded and the obsolete. This brought together existing readings of these ideas, consolidated them and perpetuated them. The central proposition underlying the approach to obsolescence here is that it is a site of resistance. This suggested power to oppose, reveal and disrupt comes predominantly from engagements with Walter Benjamin and Theodore Adorno. There is also a very strong and overbearing correspondence with the fetishising of failure, and by implication, with a distorted version of utopia as pure failure. These ideas have, for at least the past decade, circulated as a broad and ongoing set of assumptions. I will revisit some of these arguments in order to rethink the terrain, and propose some alternative ways of thinking about art and obsolescence. In particular, I wish to present a speculative theme that I call total compatibility – a fantasy that is perpetually deferred, but which is increasingly becoming a framework in which technologies from different periods coexist. A tension here could be seen between market forces that deliberately defy compatibility and the fueling of desires sold back to us as illusions of complete usability. Negotiations around these gaps and obstructions offer some form of illumination here, as do opportunities to refuse compatibility in favour of other forms of experience. Instead of assuming that obsolescence is a site of resistance, obsolete forms, mediums, techniques and technologies might be seen to offer artists the means to make decisive gestures.

Dan Smith is a writer, editor of the online publication Altertopian, and currently Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Theory at Chelsea College of Art and Design. He is writing a book on the presence of nineteenth century forms of material culture as active forces in the fabric of the present, to be called Traces of Modernity. He is also working on a book exploring relationships between contemporary art and utopia.

Reinventing the everyday and the functions of obsolete technologies has the potential to catalyse liminal experience in everyday life and contribute to the practice of reclaiming the everyday. My practice considers and exploits the fringes of disciplines and genres; the intersections and impacts of visual art, music and language upon one another; and the cyclical nature of obsolescence and technological innovation. I create verbal/visual puns and tautologies out of existing materials, systems and objects to reveal the ordinary as being inherently extraordinary. I look for unintended conceptual or visual connections between objects, ideas and functions, ritualise repetition and explore the potential of things beyond their prescribed uses. The way I work is also a reflection of my identity, an intrinsic fusion of two cultures, English and Japanese. I work through reinvention – recycling the redundant, the everyday and that of the established order: reusing obsolete technologies and everyday objects to reveal the curiosities and enchantments of the everyday that are inherently strange. The habitualised nature of everyday life has the potential to be transformed and illuminated by eradicating its everydayness.

Naomi Kashiwagi studied MA Fine Art at Manchester School of Art and MA Art Gallery and Museum Studies at the University of Manchester. She also studied at the Academy of Art in Venice and Tokyo University of Art and Music. Group exhibitions include The Intertwining Line: Drawing as Subversive Art, Cornerhouse, Manchester; Wind-up, Barbican, London; Unplugged, Herald St Gallery, London; Paperworks: Paper Art in the 21st Century, Bury Art Gallery, and Meeting Point, Axel Lapp Project, Berlin, Progress Reports: art in an era of diversity, Iniva, London. Kashiwagi’s work is published in the book, Drawing Now: Between the Lines of Contemporary Art.

Building on my earlier work ´Lovers, Liars and Laughter´ and its investigation into the different readings of an ´Inverted Mask´, I am currently looking at depictions of the White Face as a visual trope with many incantations and invocations echoing across time and space.
Just as remnants from mystical figures – such as ghosts, mimes, death masks, Mephistopheles – are present in everyday street encounters, we experience the presence of the white face in different imagery, connecting traces of our subconscious with phantoms, symbolic images and figures from all times. Accordingly, I see my current research as a form of sighting, archiving and re-disseminating photographic images that are in many ways ´haunted´ by themselves. I am particularly interested in what I call ´photographic latency´, describing an imaginary composite made of the image and the viewer´s encounter with it.

Wiebke Leister is a German artist and writer living in London. She studied photography at the University in Essen and holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art in London. She lectures on the MA Photography programme at the London College of Communication and at the University of Applied Sciences in Bielefeld. As well as writing for magazines and organizing conferences, she has exhibited and published her work internationally, receiving several awards. Her research investigates the nature of photographic portraiture beyond the limits of individual likeness – currently focussing on representations of faciality, including the laughing, mocking or kissing mouth in relation to its facial canvas. She is a Research Associate of the Photography and the Archive Research Centre at the University of the Arts London, which commissioned her recent publication ´Lovers, Liars and Laughter´, launched with a performance at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in November 2008 and displayed as an outdoors installation at the Elephant and Castle roundabout during the summer of 2009. Recent academic publications include ´Performing Laughter´ (in: About Performance #8, University of Sydney, June 2008) and the forthcoming ´Mona Lisa on a Bad Day´ (in: Journal of Photography and Culture, Berg, Summer 2010).

My presentation will compare two projects based on research into the Modern Spiritualism and the Kibbo Kift Kindred (a British youth movement that existed between 1920-1951), with a more recent project titled ‘Aadieu Adieu Apa (Goodbye Goodbye Father)’ shown at Gasworks Gallery, London in 2009. This installation delves into the history of mass public spectacle and its relationship to issues of sovereignty in order to interrogate the methods and approaches used to record, interpret and recount historical events. Focussing on the British Empire exhibition that took place in Wembley in 1924, the installation addresses the construction of English national identity, theatricality and ritual in contemporary British politics.

References are made to technologies and methods of display popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries, such as the magic lantern lecture and museum-like dioramas, in order to explore the theatrical ways in which imperial power and the idea of ‘progress’ were visualised in such events. The apparent purpose of the British Empire exhibition was to educate the public about Britain’s trading relationships with the countries that were part of the Empire in order to demonstrate the apparent ‘benefits’ of Imperialism. However the year-long event also played a key role in promoting the emerging leisure and tourism industries, as well as the westward expansion of London, which promised a new suburban lifestyle. Therefore parallels can be made with the economic and social effects of the contemporary tourism industry and mega-events, such as the 2012 Olympics.

Olivia Plender has exhibited internationally, in exhibitions, including Aadieu, Adieu Apa (Goodbye Goodbye Father), Gasworks Gallery (2009); Altermodern: Tate Triennial 2009, Tate Britain; The Greenroom, Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard, New York, (2008); Monitor, Art in General, New York (2008); The Great Transformation, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (2008); Not Quite How I Remember It, The Power Plant, Toronto, (2008); Information, Education, Entertainment, Marabou Parken Annex, Stockholm (2007); Athens Biennial/ How to Endure, Athens, Greece (2007); Moscow Biennial/ Left Pop, Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia (2007); Le Truc, The Project, Dublin (2007); Mystic Truths, Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand (2007); Tate Triennial, Tate Britain, London (2006); Busan Biennial, Busan, South Korea (2006); Becks Futures, ICA, London, Arnolfini, Bristol and CCA, Glasgow; London (2006); BMW: 1X Baltic Triennial of International Art, CAC, Vilnius (2005); Romantic Detachment, PS1/ MoMA, New York (2004); East End Academy, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2004). Her graphic novel A Stellar Key to the Summerland was published by Bookworks in 2007. Curatorial projects include the touring group exhibition ‘There is no Alternative’ currently showing at Konsthall C Stockholm; and later this year she will participate in the Bucharest Biennial, Bucharest, Romania; the Taipei Biennial, Taipei, Taiwan; as well as the British Art Show 2010.

The ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ illusion, where phantoms apparently appear on stage and people metamorphose into gorillas, delighted 19th century audiences. This new and intriguing theatrical tool later lost popularity as new technologies took over. However, the 21st century has given it an unexpected resurgence as developments in high definition projectors, and new materials to replace glass, have allowed the illusion of people and objects on stage to reach a new level of reality. In 2006, this trick was used to fool millions of people in the live and TV audience at the Grammys into believing that Madonna was on stage interacting with the virtual band ‘Gorillaz’, when in fact both acts were simply holographic projections of previously recorded digital videos. In my presentation, I will describe how my practice, by experimenting with such holographic technology, produces work that investigates how and why we see what we do, and the role illusions can play in helping to understand perception. In this context, I have been working with an iconic 19th century institution, London Zoo, and plan to site work made through this technology at the Zoo. In this work, I will be collaborating with zoologists around the country to create immersive environments demonstrating how various animals see. Drawing on 19th century science, this work will also engage with contemporary theories, and question what kind of perspective this gives us on animals and our relation to them. As part of the work, I hope to invoke this institution’s past by creating life size virtual elephants to inhabit the original 1960s Elephant house. The work thus also reflects upon the Zoo as an archival institution, as filming the animals for the project will build up a virtual catalogue of species that are disappearing in reality.

Madi Boyd studied at the Slade (BA), and Edinburgh (MA). Her work involves constructing large scale installations comprising of built environments fused with digital projections. Currently, she is collaborating with scientists at UCL to create work which exists as both art and science. The immersive spaces they have produced, investigate ambiguity in perception, making the viewer more aware of themselves seeing. This work was presented at The Slade research Centre in September 2009, will be shown as part of the Norfolk and Norwich festival in May 2010, and an installation is planned for the Science Museum later in the year. The project is funded by The Wellcome Trust and The Arts Council. Madi also works with 3D holographic projections, and made a film, using this technology, about the recent disappearance of bees which won an award in 2009. She was selected to exhibit at Kinetica Art Fair in 2010, The Cut Arts Centre in 2009, The Launch of the Cultural Olympiad and the Launch of the Cube Car at Nissan Design in 2008, The London Group Show at the Menier Gallery in 2007.