A celebration of art's 1.000.052nd birthday: what is peace?

Roddy Hunter (Director of Programme, Fine Art) curated a series of special events to take place in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Robert Filliou: “Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense”’ at Richard Saltoun Gallery

Postscript, Posthuman: Werner Herzog's “Crocodile” at the End of the World

This chapter explores posthumanism, inscription, technics, and futurity in Werner Herzog’s 3D documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010). Specifically, I discuss the relationship between the film’s preoccupation with paleoart and the birth of humanity on the one side and its representation of the nonhuman animal on the other. I argue, first, that Cave of Forgotten Dreams ends with an animal biography. Herzog’s postscript pivots away from his film’s documentary style and narrates a speculative fiction: a posthuman future in which supposedly mutated albino crocodiles outlive humanity. And I argue, second, that this animal biography discloses the technical interpenetration of human and nonhuman life. By putting Herzog’s film in conversation with the work of Georges Bataille, Bernard Stiegler, and Jacques Derrida, I demonstrate how even this posthuman postscript is not post-script. The “script” of humanity survives its own destruction and lives on in the irradiated bodies of Herzog’s crocodiles

Avant-garde Studies

The symposium aims to further explore and debate the key themes of the Dal\ued / Duchamp exhibition, including the relationship and shared interests of Salvador Dal\ued and Marcel Duchamp, two of the 20th century\u2019s greatest artists

Liquid crystals: a roundtable

This Roundtable began life as a public event on the subject of liquid crystals in our visual, material, media, scientific and artistic cultures. The event’s premise was that liquid crystals are the ur-form that constitute and govern Modernity and its after-shocks. For sure this is because the dialectic of liquidity and crystallization, of flow and refraction, is key to the advent of screen-based media (LCD TVs, computers and mobile devices) and thus how we perceive, image and imagine the world. As such, liquid crystals as a ‘phase of matter’ are epochal. But more than this because, while the emergence of such a brave new world is manifestly contemporary and their ‘discovery’ is comparatively recent (1888), the very fact of liquid crystals goes back at least 4.5 billion years: water, for instance, is crystalline and thus our planet, our ecology and we ourselves are always already liquid crystal. Such a self-evident but underacknowledged fact, discerned and foregrounded superbly by Esther Leslie in her recent book Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (2016), becomes an occasion to bring together historians, theorists and practitioners of the convergences of design-science, media-ecology, political-aesthetics, and graphic-technologies. Using Leslie’s book as a springboard, each of the five contributors, including Leslie herself, were invited to deliver a 10-minute presentation, an opening statement to set the scene, and raise fundamental questions to be considered further in the ensuing discussion. This structure is retained here, along with some of the informality that live conversation afford

'Frankenstein2...' in The Book is Alive!

'Frankenstein2...' introduces an extract from my ongoing artwriting project involving the reconfiguration of the entirety of Shelley's 1831 'Frankenstein' using all and only the words from the original in the creation of an expanded contemporary novel and associated works. Presented at The Book is Alive! two-day international symposium, and subsequently published in print and open access digital forms