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