Starting this Wednesday, February 1, those of us interested in CCE will meet for fortnightly lunches. During these lunches, we will arrange for an activity of some sort: a screening of a film; a discussion of an art or design project, or a text; a research presentation or paper by one of the participants in the group… Our intention is to open up an on-going dialogue around CCE and the research in this field carried out at the Department of Design and elsewhere. It is also potentially a platform for collaborations between us and for exchanges of information regarding exhibitions, conferences, publication opportunities, etc. Anybody at the Department of Design – including external consultants and academics from other departments collaborating with us – are welcome to join. At the first two CCE lunches, we will watch and discuss the film Leaviathan, featured at Bruno Latour’s recent exhibition Reset Modernity. We’ll meet in M1099, just after 12 noon.

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At the next CCE-lunch, on February 15, 12.10-1pm, we will continue our discussion of the film Leviathan. We’ll meet in the large conference room, M2096, I believe.  We watched a section of the film at our last lunch, the idea now is that we watch the rest of it at our leisure and spend the forthcoming lunchdiscussing the film in relation to an essay from the exhibition catalogue Reset Modernity. You can find the essay here: http://cinemaguild.com/homevideo/ess_leviathan.htm

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This lunch we met for an interesting discussion around a catalogue text engaging with the film Leviathan. Our discussion centred around forms of expression that seek to displace a dominant, arguably anthropocentric, perspective. We discussed the difficulty of this task, how this difficulty may be different to different media (say, video and text), and what the value of transmedial processes may be in this respect (that is, practices that moves between different media).

Amongst many other things, we also talked about the value of creative-critical work and how to get into dominant academic frameworks such as journals and other publications, concluding that our research and the discussion we conduct should perhaps be defined more carefully as being not simply about artistic practices with a critical dimension, but specifically about critical research finding a creative expression or articulation.

In order to continue this discussion, we decided to look at some example of writing that is conceived of and conducted at least partly within academic frameworks and that, in some ways, attempts to displace the anthropocentric “gaze” in ways similar to the film the Leviathan.

This will also give us an opportunity, perhaps, to discuss the relationship between images and text, and processes of creativity that oscillate between them.

In two weeks, on Wednesday, March 1, we’ll meet in M2096, to discuss the following three examples:

Maria Fusco, Master Rock

http://www.mariafusco.net/events/Artangel-BBC/

Laura Watts, Orkney Standard Time

http://sand14.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Watts-OrkneyStandardTime.pdf

Christian Bök, Xenotext

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/04/the-xenotext-works/

https://books.google.se/books?id=SmmHCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA33&lpg=PA33&dq=christian+bök+xenotext+extract&source=bl&ots=-oQxAkZhzT&sig=fvhYMZZoqUdtIUQOb84Lq78x3cA&hl=sv&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiEiN6YyZLSAhVE1ywKHRERAL0Q6AEITzAF#v=onepage&q=christian%20bök%20xenotext%20extract&f=false

We’ll all get some lunch, meet at around 12.10 and finish by 1pm.

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Next lunch seminar: Wednesday, march 29, as soon as we’ve got some food (12.10-ish), M2096.

In our last meeting with discussed the work of, amongst others, Maria Fusco. At Goldsmiths, she set up the MA program in Art Writing, a term that, in many ways, resonates with what we refer to as creative critical practices, though the two terms don’t necessarily overlap. I suggest that we explore this in our next meeting on the basis of the manifesto-like text by Fusco (et al) attached to the email, and a lecture Fusco on art writing, and, more generally, working beyond the divide of the critical and the creative. You can find the lecture here: https://vimeo.com/92968640.