Previous events (2009-2010)
"Yesterday's Objects: The Death and Afterlife of Everyday Things"
Autopsies Research Group Study Day
Friday, 4 June 2010, UCL (University College London)
Roberts G08 Sir David Davies Lecture Theatre [campus map]
Sponsored by The Film Studies Space: The Centre for the Cultural History of the Moving Image
This event is free and open to all.
The Autopsies Project explores how objects die. Just as the twentieth century was transformed by the advent of new forms of media--the typewriter, gramophone, and film, for example--the arrival of the twenty-first century has brought with it the disappearance of many public and private objects that only recently seemed essential to ‘modern life.’
Responding to recent work in cultural history, spatial studies, and 'thing theory,' this study day reflects on the ends of objects, raising questions of modernity, obsolescence, memory, collecting and recording. How can critical theorists and cultural historians participate in the reflexion on the ends of objects—from their physical finitude to the very projects for their disposal, the latter increasingly of concern with the multiplication of things that do not gently decompose into their own night?
This study day on ‘Yesterday’s Objects’ will investigate the everyday objects—the fridges, typewriters, and jukeboxes—that have irrevocably changed our lives. Invited papers will explore how these objects have refashioned and reimagined our work, home, and leisure spaces.
Responding to recent work in cultural history, spatial studies, and 'thing theory,' this study day reflects on the ends of objects, raising questions of modernity, obsolescence, memory, collecting and recording. How can critical theorists and cultural historians participate in the reflexion on the ends of objects—from their physical finitude to the very projects for their disposal, the latter increasingly of concern with the multiplication of things that do not gently decompose into their own night?
This study day on ‘Yesterday’s Objects’ will investigate the everyday objects—the fridges, typewriters, and jukeboxes—that have irrevocably changed our lives. Invited papers will explore how these objects have refashioned and reimagined our work, home, and leisure spaces.
"Yesterday's Objects: The Death and Afterlife of Everyday Things"
Programme
Friday, 4 June 2010
9 a.m. Coffee and Welcome
9:30-10:45, Session One, Chair, Laszlo Strausz, Film Studies, UCL
Keeping Yesterday's Objects: Museums and Collections
--“Video Game Culture- Making the Same Mistakes With a New Medium”
Mark Carnall, Curator, Grant Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy, UCL
--“Status Anxiety, or Missing the Pictures: Film Performativity in the Museum Space”
Jenny Chamarette, Department of French/Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge
11:00-12:30, Session Two, Chair, Jann Matlock, UCL
Lost Objects/Objects at Risk
--“Mourning in the Age of the Digital: Memory, Loss, and Materialist Filmmaking”
Martine Beugnet, Film Studies, University of Edinburgh
--“Slide Tape: An Abandoned Technology”
Mo White, Fine Art, Loughborough University
--“Documents of Barbarism: Saving the Comic Book as Symbolic Object”
Ernesto Priego, Department of Information Studies, UCL
12:30-1:30 Lunch Break
1:30-2:45, Session Three, Chair, Roland-François Lack, UCL.
Filmic Afterlives
--“The Brave Little Toaster from Print to Film: Obsolescent Appliances and Capitalist Allegories”
Margaret D. Stetz, Women’s Studies and Humanities, University of Delaware
--“Godard’s Dictations: The Histoire(s) du cinéma and the Erasure of Memory”
Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, Film Studies, University of Edinburgh
3:00-4:30, Session Four, Chair, Lucia Vodanovic, Media and Communications, Goldsmiths
Dead Object Crises and Telling Things
--“The Temporality of Waste”
Will Viney, Humanities and Cultural Studies, The London Consortium
--“Vinyl Farewells?”
Richard Osborne, Popular Music, Middlesex University
--“Tales of Things: Memories, Stories and Archives of Everything”
Andrew Hudson-Smith, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), UCL
4:30-5:45, Round Table: Yesterday’s Objects
The Autopsies Research Group in Discussion
6-7 p.m. Drinks Reception
Please click on icon below to download full programme, paper abstracts and
information about speakers
Programme
Friday, 4 June 2010
9 a.m. Coffee and Welcome
9:30-10:45, Session One, Chair, Laszlo Strausz, Film Studies, UCL
Keeping Yesterday's Objects: Museums and Collections
--“Video Game Culture- Making the Same Mistakes With a New Medium”
Mark Carnall, Curator, Grant Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy, UCL
--“Status Anxiety, or Missing the Pictures: Film Performativity in the Museum Space”
Jenny Chamarette, Department of French/Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge
11:00-12:30, Session Two, Chair, Jann Matlock, UCL
Lost Objects/Objects at Risk
--“Mourning in the Age of the Digital: Memory, Loss, and Materialist Filmmaking”
Martine Beugnet, Film Studies, University of Edinburgh
--“Slide Tape: An Abandoned Technology”
Mo White, Fine Art, Loughborough University
--“Documents of Barbarism: Saving the Comic Book as Symbolic Object”
Ernesto Priego, Department of Information Studies, UCL
12:30-1:30 Lunch Break
1:30-2:45, Session Three, Chair, Roland-François Lack, UCL.
Filmic Afterlives
--“The Brave Little Toaster from Print to Film: Obsolescent Appliances and Capitalist Allegories”
Margaret D. Stetz, Women’s Studies and Humanities, University of Delaware
--“Godard’s Dictations: The Histoire(s) du cinéma and the Erasure of Memory”
Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, Film Studies, University of Edinburgh
3:00-4:30, Session Four, Chair, Lucia Vodanovic, Media and Communications, Goldsmiths
Dead Object Crises and Telling Things
--“The Temporality of Waste”
Will Viney, Humanities and Cultural Studies, The London Consortium
--“Vinyl Farewells?”
Richard Osborne, Popular Music, Middlesex University
--“Tales of Things: Memories, Stories and Archives of Everything”
Andrew Hudson-Smith, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), UCL
4:30-5:45, Round Table: Yesterday’s Objects
The Autopsies Research Group in Discussion
6-7 p.m. Drinks Reception
Please click on icon below to download full programme, paper abstracts and
information about speakers
| autopsiesabstractsjune2010two.doc |
London, 9 March 2010
PUBLIC LECTURE ON THE DANUBE EXODUS
"ON THE RIVER: History as a palimpsestic narrative in Péter’s Forgács's The Danube Exodus"
6pm, Tuesday 9th March 2010
Gavin De Beer Lecture Theatre
Anatomy Building
University College London
Gower Street
London
WC1E 6BT
A public lecture by Dr. Laszlo Strausz (UCL Centre for Intercultural Studies), sponsored by the UCL Film Studies Space and hosted by the Autopsies Research Group.
Eastern European feature films from the last decades seem to be obsessed
with historical memory. From Péter Forgács's documentary The Danube
Exodus (1999) it seems that non-fiction films can create a different, in a
sense more self-reflexive representation of the past. In the director’s
hand, the creative reworking of a found-footage film becomes a
multi-layered, archival record, on which several different eras have left
their fingerprints. This palimpsestic document allows the viewer to
understand her own “authorship” in current political narratives.
The documentary about the two river-stories directed by an Eastern
European filmmaker turns thus into a contemplation on interconnectedness,
national cross-pollination and the inscription of the viewer into these
processes. Following the amateur filmmaker and the professional
documentarian, viewers are obliged to rewrite the story of the double
exodus. By analyzing its shifting, mobile enunciative structure, I give a
reading of the film that displays its relevance for the constructions of
post-communist, transnational identities of the Eastern European region.
This lecture is free and open to all.
London, 2 March 2010
BARTLETT PhD RESEARCH PROJECTS 2010
Autopsies Group member Jacob Paskins will present a paper entitled "Under construction: building sites and nation building in France during the 1960s" at the Bartlett's annual PhD conference and exhibition.
Time: 10.00am-6.00pm, Tuesday 2nd March 2010.
Location:
Room G02
Bartlett School of Architecture
University College London
Wates House
22 Gordon Street
London
WC1H OQB
Exhibition Opening and Bar: Bartlett Lobby Gallery, 6.00pm Tuesday 2nd March 2010.
Exhibition Dates: 2-18 March 2010.
Time: 10.00am-6.00pm, Tuesday 2nd March 2010.
Location:
Room G02
Bartlett School of Architecture
University College London
Wates House
22 Gordon Street
London
WC1H OQB
Exhibition Opening and Bar: Bartlett Lobby Gallery, 6.00pm Tuesday 2nd March 2010.
Exhibition Dates: 2-18 March 2010.
Liverpool, 25-26 February 2010
CONFERENCE: MAPPING THE CITY IN FILM
Autopsies Group member Karolina Kendall-Bush will be speaking at the "Mapping the City in Film Conference" at the University of Liverpool on 25-26 February 2010. Her paper is entitled "Walking the Reel Streets of Wonderful London: Harry B. Parkinson’s London Travelogue Series Wonderful London (1924) and the Walking Tour."
Here's the conference website:
http://www.liv.ac.uk:80/lsa/cityinfilm/mappingmemory/index.html
Here's the conference website:
http://www.liv.ac.uk:80/lsa/cityinfilm/mappingmemory/index.html
London, 24 February 2010
PUBLIC LECTURE ON THE WIRE
Object Lessons: Dead Media, Live Wires, and the 21st-century Police.
6pm, Wednesday 24th February 2010
Ambrose Fleming Lecture Theatre (G06)
Roberts Building
University College London
Gower Street
London
WC1E 6BT
A Public Lecture on The Wire by Dr Jann Matlock (UCL French and Film Studies Space), sponsored by UCL’s Film Studies Space and hosted by the
autopsies research group.
“What else have they got down there in Property? Eight-track tapes? Victrolas?” asks Detective Jimmy McNulty in Season 1 of The Wire, the HBO series that took as a leitmotif the inadequacy of the technology of those working in the Baltimore Police Department. Antiquated typewriters instead of computers, reel-to-reel tape recorders instead of digital surveillance equipment, black-and-white television sets and analogue
cameras provide comic relief as well as commentary on the state of funding for narcotics investigations in a post-9-11 America obsessed with “the war on terror.” Meanwhile the dealers use the outdated technologies of the “postwar modern” to elude surveillance: pay phones and pagers leave fewer traces than the digital technologies to which the police aspire.
Media technology--whether obsolete, outmoded, or state-of-the-art--serves as a central narrative and thematic concern throughout the five seasons of The Wire. In this lecture, Matlock will take literally the media objects foregrounded by The Wire, discussing the stuff on the screen as a way of interrogating fantasies about what media technology can do.
London, 27 January, 2010
PROFESSOR JEFFREY JACKSON TALKS ON "PARIS UNDER WATER"
"Paris Under Water: Seeing the Great Flood of 1910"
18.00 on 27 January, 2010
UCL (University College London)
Roberts 106
Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT
In this talk open to scholars and the general public, sponsored by the UCL Film Studies Space and hosted by the Autopsies Research Group, Professor Jeffrey H. Jackson will tell the dramatic story of the flood of the Seine, the worst disaster in the modern history of Paris, which took place exactly 100 years ago in January 1910. He will discuss the imagery of the flood in photographs, the visual narratives which were created in 1910 to tell the story of the flood, and how the images obscured the lived experience of the event. This presentation is based on research from Jackson's forthcoming book Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 published by Palgrave Macmillan. Jackson is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Environmental Studies program at Rhodes College.
See his website for his Paris Under Water project here: http://www.parisunderwater.com/index.html
and his personal website here: http://parisunderwater.blogspot.com/
18.00 on 27 January, 2010
UCL (University College London)
Roberts 106
Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT
In this talk open to scholars and the general public, sponsored by the UCL Film Studies Space and hosted by the Autopsies Research Group, Professor Jeffrey H. Jackson will tell the dramatic story of the flood of the Seine, the worst disaster in the modern history of Paris, which took place exactly 100 years ago in January 1910. He will discuss the imagery of the flood in photographs, the visual narratives which were created in 1910 to tell the story of the flood, and how the images obscured the lived experience of the event. This presentation is based on research from Jackson's forthcoming book Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 published by Palgrave Macmillan. Jackson is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Environmental Studies program at Rhodes College.
See his website for his Paris Under Water project here: http://www.parisunderwater.com/index.html
and his personal website here: http://parisunderwater.blogspot.com/
London, 9 December 2009
FOUND FOOTAGE FILM NIGHT
An evening of films using found footage by the UCL Film Studies Space and hosted by the autopsies research group.
9th December 2009, 6.00 pm-10.30pm
Chadwick Lecture Theatre, Chadwick Building,
UCL, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT.
The Found Footage Film Night will be featuring:
The Danube Exodus (Peter Forgacs, 1998)
Reconstruction (Irene Lusztig, 2002)
and much more.
This event is free and open to all.
9th December 2009, 6.00 pm-10.30pm
Chadwick Lecture Theatre, Chadwick Building,
UCL, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT.
The Found Footage Film Night will be featuring:
The Danube Exodus (Peter Forgacs, 1998)
Reconstruction (Irene Lusztig, 2002)
and much more.
This event is free and open to all.
London, 2 December 2009
OBJECTS AFTER LIFE: MUSEUMS AND FILM STUDIES IN DIALOGUE
Geffrye Museum Mirror by Xacti
A museum round-table sponsored by the UCL Film Studies Space
and hosted by the Autopsies Research Group
Wednesday, 2 December 2009
UCL (University College London)
Foster Court 114
Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT
Panellists include Alexandra Goddard, Geffrye Museum,
Oliver Winchester, Victoria and Albert Museum
Jann Matlock, UCL French & Film studies Space
Download the poster here:
and hosted by the Autopsies Research Group
Wednesday, 2 December 2009
UCL (University College London)
Foster Court 114
Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT
Panellists include Alexandra Goddard, Geffrye Museum,
Oliver Winchester, Victoria and Albert Museum
Jann Matlock, UCL French & Film studies Space
Download the poster here:
| objects_after_life_-_museum_roundtable_poster.jpg |
Leeds, 26-27 November 2009
CRESC CONFERENCE ON THE WIRE
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The Wire as Social Science Fiction?
CRESC Conference 26-27 November 2009 Leeds Town Hall At this conference, Dr. Jann Matlock will be giving a paper entitled "Object Lessons: Dead Media, Live Wires, and 21st-Century Policing" Here's the conference program:
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