OF SPACES IN-BETWEEN

New Book: The View from the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes

by Patrick Keiller (Verso, 2013)

Essays by the iconic British filmmaker on the relationship between film, cities and landscape

“Robinson believed that, if he looked at it hard enough, he could cause the surface of the city to reveal to him the molecular basis of historical events, and in this way he hoped to see into the future.”

In his sequence of films, Patrick Keiller retraces the hidden story of the places where we live, the cities and landscapes of our everyday lives. Referencing writers such as Benjamin and Lefebvre, this collection follows his career since the late 1970s, exploring themes including the surrealist perception of the city; the relationship of architecture and film; how cities change over time, and how films represent this; as well as accounts of cross-country journeys involving historical figures, unexpected ideas and an urgent portrait of post-crash Britain.

http://www.versobooks.com/books/1504-the-view-from-the-train

New Book: Seeing from Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture, Edited by: Mark Dorrian, Frederic Pousin. IB TAURIS 2013.

The view from above, or the “birds-eye” view, has become so ingrained in contemporary visual culture that it is now hard to imagine our world without it. It has risen to pre-eminence as a way of seeing, but important questions about its effects and meanings remain unexplored. More powerfully than any other visual modality, this image of “everywhere” supports our idea of a world-view, yet it is one that continues to be transformed as technologies are invented and refined. This innovative volume, edited by Mark Dorrian and Frederic Pousin, offers an unprecedented range of discussions on the aerial view, covering topics that range from sixteenth-century Roman maps, to the Luftwaffe’s aerial survey of Warsaw, to Google Earth. Underpinned by a cross-disciplinary approach that draws together diverse and previously isolated material, this volume examines the politics and poetics of the aerial view in relation to architecture, art, film, literature, photography and urbanism and explores its role in areas such as aesthetics and epistemology. Structured through a series of detailed case studies, this book builds into a cultural history of the aerial imagination.

http://www.ibtauris.com/Books/The%20arts/Photography%20%20photographs/Seeing%20From%20Above%20A%20Cultural%20History%20of%20the%20Aerial%20View.aspx

Coventry University Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) is pleased to invite you to the Digital Echoes symposium

Wednesday 8th January 2014; 10:00-17:00

Institute for Creative Enterprise, Coventry University, Parkside, Coventry

Convenors: Professor Sarah Whatley (Coventry University) and Dr Sarah Atkinson (University of Brighton)

Attendance fee: £30 (includes light lunch and refreshments);

Booking is essential.

Digital Echoes 2014 builds on the previous three ‘Digital Echoes’ events
and will bring together researchers, artists, educators, professionals
and practitioners from the field of digital archives and the archiving
of practice with an emphasis upon Art, Design,
Media, Film and Performing arts disciplines. The focus will be on
expanding dialogues across the arts and humanities to explore the
affordances of digital technologies upon archival practices.

Within digital archival practices, there is a notable shift from the
closed to the open and from the traditional single-user archive model to
emerging multi-user, collaborative forms of archival practices and
scholarship. The digital preservation and presentation
of archival materials dramatically impacts upon the nature and notion
of access. The types of discoveries, insights and findings that can be
made through online digital interfaces can be radically altered.

We now invite proposals to contribute presentations for the day, which
might focus on any aspect of digital archives, that consider national
and international collections, which might focus on archival strategies,
policy, copyright and education, and which
consider technological aspects of digital archiving including the
semantic web, analytics, meta-data, tagging and time-based meta-data. We
are interested in encouraging contributions from a range of contexts,
originating from academic research, policy making
and from the archival professions. We are also particularly interested
in contributions that examine the impact on digital archiving practices
on teaching and learning within a higher education context. Those
interested in presenting on the day should send
a short abstract (200 words max) together with names of presenter/s,
contact details, brief 100 word biog and any technical requests to researchadmin.ad@coventry.ac.uk. The
deadline for submissions is 30 November 2013.

Presenters will also be invited to submit to a special issue of
Convergence (Vol. 21, no 1), edited by Sarah Atkinson and Sarah Whatley,
that focuses on this same theme: Digital Archives and Open Archival Practices. Submission of full papers to the
Editors by February 28 2014. Full details about how to submit are available here: http://con.sagepub.com

Further information about the day and how to register to attend the event can be found on the C-DaRE website: www.c-dare.co.uk or
email researchadmin.ad@coventry.ac.uk

Deadline for proposals: Friday, 10th January 2014.

From
their earliest inception, film and television have been concerned with
the registration of place through the unique capacity of the audiovisual
moving image to convey the experience of locale over time. In recent
years, screen studies has engaged with the politics of location
especially through the site of the cinematic city and inter-related
questions of modernity, architecture and urban cultural transformation.
The main theme of this year’s Screen conference will offer an
opportunity to extend critical debate into the fields of landscape and
the environment. In so doing, it will offer an exciting range of
inter-disciplinary perspectives in order to reflect on the real and
imaginary ways that we interact with the world through the portal of the
screen.

Martin
Lefebvre has argued that landscape manifests itself as an
interpretative gaze. It is anchored in human life not just as something
to look at but to live in socially as a cultural form. Cultural
geography now argues that landscape must not only be understood as the
outcome of interactions of nature and culture, but that practices of
landscaping such as walking, looking, driving and, of course, filmmaking
might also be the origin of our ideas about what ‘nature’ and ‘culture’
actually are. If human investment toward space produces the notion of
landscape, what then are the principal ways in which the moving image
articulates this process? How have film and television articulated the
necessary tension between embodied immersion within a specific
topographical space and critical reflection on the specific historical
and cultural contexts that shape global screen culture past and
present?

The
Screen Studies Conference, one of the longest running and most
successful events of its kind in the world, welcomes proposals for
papers/panels on any of these questions and on the following topics
related to the main conference theme (as usual, proposals for other
subjects beyond this focus will also be considered):

· The representation of geographically and historically specific screen landscapes

· Environmental politics and screen cultures

· Genre, narrative and the landscape

· Phenomenology and screen landscapes

· Landscape and television culture

· Journeys and landscapes: walking and travelling on screen

· The landscapes of world cinema

· Landscape and environment: autobiography, history, memory

· Screen cultures within the environment

· The dialectics of place and non-place in film and video

· Site-specific screening practices

To submit a proposal, please visit http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/screen/conference2014/

CENTRE FOR CRITICAL AND CULTURAL THEORY
CARDIFF UNIVERSITY

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF MEMORY

14-16 MAY 2014

CALL FOR PAPERS

The politics of remembering and forgetting are important social and cultural issues. The authority, power and resources with which to create hegemonic versions of the past – to give authoritative accounts that are available in the public domain – are largely the property of institutions. Questions of power, voice, representation and identity are central to Cultural and Collective Memory.

This interdisciplinary conference will address how hegemonic narratives of the past are reproduced or challenged. It will examine the role of Cultural and Collective Memory in shaping meanings, values and identities. Papers are encouraged to address the relationship between past and present in Cultural and Collective Memory and how this relates to social power relations.

Papers are welcome in areas such as:

• Cultural memory and the archive
• Curating memory
• Globalised memory
• Marginalised histories
• Memory and affect
• Memory and anti-colonial struggle
• Memory and class
• Memory as gender/sexual politics
• New technologies and memory
• Public history
• Racialised memory
• Religion and cultural memory
• Space, place and memory
• Theoretical approaches to cultural and collective memory

Please send a 300 word extract and a short CV to: cpm@cardiff.ac.uk

Deadline for the receipt of abstracts: 31 January 2014

New publication: A Story of Six Rivers: History, Culture and Ecology.
Peter Coates (Reaktion, 2013)

Includes chapter on the River Mersey.

[Re-blogged from Progressive Geographies]

A neat bit of cartography – taking a data feed from Transport from London and turning it into a live map. The Skyfall version is also very cool and there are others for mainline trains, etc. Thanks to Nistasha Kaul for the link.

http://traintimes.org.uk/map/tube/

Cinema and the postindustrial city

Call for papers
Association of American Geographers Annual
Meeting
8-12 April 2014 Tampa FL

Organiser: Johan Andersson, Department of
Geography, King’s College London

This session explores how the economic reorganisation of the city since the
1960s has impacted on the production, distribution, and mise-en-scène of urban
cinema. While there is a significant literature in economic geography on
post-Fordist changes in the film industry, this session specifically welcomes
scholarship that links the interconnected restructuring of the city and the
film industry with visual, aesthetic and narrative developments in urban
cinema. Such approaches may focus on how new trends in on-location shooting,
technical innovations (with regards to sound, lighting, digital animation,
lighter equipment and so on) and changes in the distribution of film (TV, video
and online) have resulted in novel modes of representing the city. Close readings
of individual films or genres that explore the changing occupational class
structure of post-Fordist cities (yuppie, ghetto and gentrification films as
well as corporate and legal thrillers for example) or the identity politics
associated with new urban social movements (feminist cinema, New Queer Cinema,
representations of race) are particularly welcome.

Topics may include but are not limited
to:

Representations of urban
space/landscape

The political economy of film
industries in postindustrial cities and the role of film/television in the
cultural economy of cities

Film as urban branding

The politics and economics of
on-location shooting

Theoretical approaches to space/place
in contemporary film studies, and to the moving image in urban studies

The gendered, racialised, and sexual
geographies of urban cinema

Representations of class

The hedonistic city in film

Urban crisis and cinema

Abstracts of up to 250 words to Johan Andersson by October 1, 2013.

I was invited to present at an event organised by Liz Stewart from the Museum of Liverpool on behalf of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire. The event, ‘Getting There: Exploring the History of North West’s Transport Links’, was held at the Museum on 18th September 2013. My talk was called ‘Making Connections: Amateur Transport Films and Merseyside’s Historical Geography’. Other speakers included Sharon Brown from the Museum of Liverpool, Richard Knowles, Professor of Transport Geography at the University of Salford, and Martin Dodge, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Manchester.

Liverpool Echo article on the publication of World Film Locations: Liverpool (Intellect 2013) featuring an interesting photo gallery of location filming images provided by the Liverpool Film Office:

http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/whats-on/film-tv/liverpools-hollywood-film-locations-recognised-6085119

There was also a short article on the book launch in the 26 Sept edition of the Echo. This features an embarrassingly contrived photo of myself, Roger Shannon (who organised the event), and the fabulous Liverpool-born actress Rita Tushingham:

See also Bay TV piece on the book launch:
http://www.baytvliverpool.com/vod/index.php?vid=EBV52472b9f766ec

//www.youtube.com/embed/uQf-PZWFMzY

The Liverpool edition of Intellect’s World Film Locations series has now been published, edited by Jez Conolly and Caroline Whelan. I have a short article in the book called ‘The Last of Liverpool: Liminal Journeys Around the Port City’, which takes as its main point of departure Derek Jarman’s 1987 film ‘The Last of England’, parts of which were shot in the city: http://www.amazon.co.uk/World-Film-Locations-Jez-Conolly/dp/178320026X

At long last the fieldwork for the Concrete Island project has now been completed (22-3 August 2013). 18 hours spent on a motorway island surrounded by the relentless flow, rhythms and roar of high-speed traffic. Returned with 15 hours of ambient sound recording, video footage, photographs, GPS tracks, not to mention a stiff back and lacerated arms from all the machete hacking through dense undergrowth. Over the coming months will work through the material gathered, which hopefully will form the basis of an academic paper, some creative writing, a short film, soundscape, map and photo gallery. All, or some of which will no doubt find its way onto the website in due course.

Information about the MyStreet project, part of Open City Docs festival activities founded by Michael Stewart from the anthropology dept at UCL.

http://mystreetfilms.com/#

MyStreet is a living on-line
archive of everyday life, encouraging you to make your mark and bring your area
to life through film.

MyStreet
revives the radical project at the centre of the 1930s Mass Observation
movement (founded by the anthropologist Tom Harrison, poet Charles Madge, and
film-maker Humphrey Jennings). This earlier quasi-anthropological attempt to
democratize ethnography in the service of the ‘everyday’, combined with the
potential of film as a vehicle of contestation within the public sphere led to
the creation of a digital project documenting life in the UK and above all in
London.

MyStreet has
set out to unleash the potential of a new form of collaborative anthropology,
to grasp the ‘minor’ importance of the non-canonical media expressions that My
Street provides a forum for, and also a means of dissemination. The project
rests on an appreciation of the transformative power of ‘minor’ practices but
also attempts to circumvent decaying print-age vehicles. MyStreet aims to
provide a window onto, and means of active assertion by, those marginalized
sections of the population whose voices are not heard or who, too often, the
state seeks to suppress and incarcerate.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=H9ypBjuQahA%3Ffeature%3Dplayer_detailpage

Andy Merrifield, Edward Soja and Maria Kaika debate on ‘Wither urban studies’ at the University of Manchester (16/11/2012)

http://player.vimeo.com/video/64849738
Tim Ingold is a preeminent anthropologist, Chair of Social Anthropology
at the University of Aberdeen. Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal
Society of Edinburgh and author of numerous books on anthropology. Taking an
unconventional view of his discipline. Professor Ingold tries to bring the “4
A’s” [anthropology, architecture, archaeology, and art] together, looking at
the ways in which environments are perceived, shaped, and understood.

http://anthem-group.net/2013/06/15/placing-lecture-tim-ingold/

Invited to give a talk at the ‘Placing Morecambe’ symposium organised by David Cooper and Jo Carruthers and held at the Dept. of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University on 13 June 2013. This event followed on from the ‘Practising Morecambe’ field excursion and group exercise on 30 May (which for me also involved a night in the legendary Midland Hotel, replete with endless piped 1930s dance music – eerily reminiscent of the barroom music from The Shining). In my presentation I discussed some ideas relating to spatial anthropology and the relationship between the critical and the creative. I also provided some reflections on the creative process and outputs developed from the Morecambe field exercise, including a slide show of images gleaned from my walks around the town, and a poem, ‘Frontierland’, inspired by the practice of ‘placing Morecambe’.

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/english/event/4440

University of Tartu, Estonia
October 30 – November 1, 2013

The Sixth Autumn Conference of the Centre of Excellence in Cultural Theory (CECT) focuses on the issues of embodiment, personhood, subjectivity, and experience, as well as on the connection of these concepts with the understanding of cultural identity. The notion of identity is often treated in the framework of controversial efforts of dialogic interpretation. Recognising the individuality of the studied subjects, it becomes tricky to merge a variety of self-understandings into a coherent whole. Identity appears to us as an interconnected play of superficial and fundamental, ideological and physical, essentialised and dialogic. The conceptual initiative of our conference is inspired by these controversial cognitive dimensions. We encourage our colleagues to develop theoretical and empirical approaches through a conceptual matrix that focuses primarily on the proposed concepts of understanding and interpreting cultural identity.

Panel I: Revisiting key issues in the methodology of studying culture: reflexivity, representation and experience
Panel II: Negotiating embodied experiences
Panel III: Learning landscapes: stories, senses and sensitization
Panel IV: Dynamics between public and private
Panel V: Death as the transformation of personhood

Key Dates and Deadlines:
Abstracts Due: June 1st, 2013
Acceptance Notification: July 1st, 2013
Registration Deadline: September 15th, 2013
Full Paper Submission: October 15th, 2013

http://www.ut.ee/CECT/tegevus/sygiskonverentsid.html

This is the rather nice heritage plaque that Sara Cohen and Gurdeep Khabra kindly awarded me to mark my departure from the POPID project. A fitting gift for a project in which all things heritage – and plaques in particular – were the focus of much activity. This will hang pride of place on the wall of whichever office I might happen to find myself in the (hopefully) not too distant future, but for the time being I thought it appropriate to display here in virtual form (again, a fitting scenario in view of the theoretical discussions surrounding heritage and its ineluctably in/tangible properties…).

Here I am transacting/exchanging some knowledge with the good people of Rotterdam at the 2013 Film Festival (IFFR). George McKay and myself were invited to share some thoughts on the music documentary ‘Let Fury Have the Hour’ that had just been screened at the Scopitone cafe. The ‘Re/Soundings: Documenting Music and Memory’ programme was a HERA-funded partnership between the IFFR and the collaborative European research project POPID. The programme was organised as part of Popular Music Heritage, Cultural Memory and Cultural Identity conference which took place at the Erasmus Research Centre for Media, Communication and Culture, 30 Jan-1 Feb 2013.

The idea for the Re/Soundings knowledge exchange initiative was developed by myself and Sara Cohen and I drafted the successful HERA grant application which was costed as €40,000. However, for reasons probably best not gone into here, that remained the extent of our contribution to this initiative, bar this brief and last minute burst of KE activity (George and I both gave the film something of a pasting, by the way). It would be nice to be able to say that Sara and I could lay claim, or at least in part, to the official credit for this grant, or some of its monies, but alas that was not to be. Such is the nature of the collaborative research process I guess.