I visited the University of Liverpool in London campus for the first time this week. I remember when the building it occupies was the Bank of Nova Scotia. This was back in the 1990s when I was working in the area for a period (the bus stopped right outside). The building still has the feel and corporate ambience of an investment bank, which I suppose seems appropriate given the ‘trading’ of knowledge that is now expected to take place in the brave new marketised world of the neoliberal university.
Anyway, the reason I was there was to attend the Digital Memories symposium that I nominally co-organised (the bulk of the heavy lifting was done by Jordana Blejmar and Silvana Mandolessi). On the second day (18 June) the Culture, Space and Memory research group (myself, Alyssa, Wallis, and Jordana) presented some current work in progress. This was in a session held in a space called the ‘Executive Room’ (they could have at least given it a different name, one more befitting the kind of activity one would expect to be taking place at an academic conference or a university seminar room). My paper was a slightly revised version of the presentation I gave at the Geomedia Conference in May: ‘Homing in to Dwellspace: Inhabiting The Presentness of Memory’.
