THURSDAY CLUB OPEN CALL

OPEN CALL FOR PROJECTS & PROPOSALS

The Thursday Club is an open forum discussion group for anyone interested in the theories and practices of cross-disciplinarity, interactivity, technologies and philosophies of the state-of-the-art in today’s (and tomorrow’s) cultural landscape(s). The Club is supported by the Goldsmiths Digital Studios (GDS) and the Goldsmiths Graduate School.


Originally set up in October 2005 by GDS as a more informal setting for research discussions, it has grown to include over 150 members, artists, technologists, scientists, in fact, a growing diversity of people from different communities worldwide, that are now connected via a mailing list and online forum.


There are also regular meetings in ‘real' space at the Ben Pimlott site of Goldsmiths, University of London. Anyone can attend these events. By keeping these meetings free, informal and open to all, we provide a platform for diverse and open ended discourse, for people who perhaps would not have the opportunity to discuss ideas outside of their chosen discipline.


The Thursday Club brings together people from diverse fields and degrees of expertise, aiming to initiate discussion and debates among postgraduate students, researchers, academics, artists, theorists, and other cultural practitioners.


Since it focuses on interdisciplinary practices, the Club is interested to experiment with innovative formats of presentation that are appropriate to the nature of the subject. We particularly welcome the proposal of round table discussions, panels, screenings, 'hearings', live gigs and performance lectures as well as more traditional presentations. We are also interested to platform experimental work-in-progress, of both practical and theoretical nature.

Submission Materials

1. An A4 size page with your proposal (about 500 words); any relevant links; 1-2 pictures if relevant.

2. A 200 words CV

3. Your contact details: name, address, email and telephone number

4. Selected additional audiovisual information (e.g. audio and video files) preferably as a link.


Please send any submissions by email to Maria X at writing 'Thursday Club Submission' as a Subject.


The deadline for the submission of proposals is 29 JULY 2007. The submissions will be reviewed by the Thursday Club Board.


THURSDAY CLUB BOARD

Miguel Andres-Clavera
PhD Candidate Goldsmiths Digital Studios; Member of Social Technology and Cultural Interfaces Research Group.

Maria Chatzichristodoulou [aka Maria X], Thursday Club Coordinator
PhD Candidate Goldsmiths Digital Studios; Sessional Lecturer Birkbeck FCE; Curator.

Bronac Ferran
Director of boundaryobject.org; Member of DCMS Research and KT taskgroup; Director of Interdisciplinary Arts at Arts Council England until March 2007.

Prof. Janis Jefferies, Thursday Club Convener
Professor of Visual Arts, Department of Computing, Goldsmiths;
Co-director Goldsmiths Digital Studios; Director Constance Howard Resource and Research Centre in Textiles; Curator; Artist.

Dr Sarah Kember
Reader in New Technologies of Communication, Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths College; Writer.

Michela Magas
PhD Candidate Goldsmiths Digital Studios; Co-director Stromatolite Design Studio.

Prof. Carrie Paechter
Professor of Educational Studies, Goldsmiths College; Dean of the Goldsmiths Graduate School.

Prof. Robert Zimmer
Professor of Computing, Goldsmiths College; Co-director Goldsmiths Digital Studios.

Writing Purposefully in Art and Design

Writing PAD Project (Writing Purposefully in Art and Design) led by Goldsmiths University of London with over 40 other UK A&D institutions. The project is now developing an international following with the launch of the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, published by Intellect.

Writing PAD offers UK art and design institutions an arena in which to explore and develop the notion of ‘thinking through writing’ as a parallel to visual discourse in art and design practice. Writing PAD has not only brought together tutors from across the disciplines, but also from across roles: i.e. studio staff, theory staff, learning support, and learning and teaching (L&T) coordinators.

Check out: www.writing-pad.ac.uk and www.writing-pad.org

Learning from Experience

Required reading for forthcoming workshop on practice-based research:

"Learning from Experience: approaches to the experiential component of
practice-based research" by Michael A R Biggs

Available here:

http://www.herts.ac.uk/artdes1/research/tvad/mb/2004a.pdf

Rhetoric resources

Virtual Salt: A Handbook of Rhetorical Devices
http://www.virtualsalt.com/rhetoric.htm

Rhetoric and composition
http://rhetoric.eserver.org/

Silva rhetoricae
http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/silva.htm

Course reading list

Reading list:


i) Highly recommended
Hill, Jonathan & Rendell, Jane Critical Architecture (London: Routledge, 2007)
Laurel, Brenda (ed.): Design Research: Methods and Perspectives (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003)
Nelson, Robert S. and Shiff, Richard (eds.) Critical Terms for Art History, Second Edition (1996, 2003).
Sullivan, Graeme: Art Practice as Research. Inquiry in the Visual Arts. London: Sage, 2005
Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Philosophical Investigations tr. by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995)
Zwicky, Jan Wisdom and Metaphor (Kentville: Gaspereau Press, 2003)

Web resources:
Course blogs:
Art and Design Research Methodologies: http://adrm.blogspot.com/
The End of Me (useful for discussions on ‘originality’): http://endofmeblog.blogspot.com/
Experience Design: http://www.interdisciplinaryresearch.blogspot.com/
Experience Design: www.designtime.se

Other:
Centre for Research into Practice (Faculty of Art and Design , University of Hertfordshire , UK):
http://www.herts.ac.uk/artdes1/research/cr2p/index.htm
AKAD (Academy for Practice-Based Research in Architecture and Design): http://www.akad.se/

ii) Recommended
Butler, Judith, ‘Giving an account of oneself’, Diacritics, Winter 2001, 31, 4, 22-40.
Diderot, Denis: Rameau’s Nephew (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books)
Dolar, Mladen: A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, UK: MIT Press, 2006).
Frayling, Christopher. Research in art and design. Royal College of Art Research Papers. Vol.1. No.1. London: Royal College of Art, 1993.
Grillner, Katja et al (eds) 01.AKAD - Experimental research in architecture and design – Beginnings. (Stockholm: AKAD/AXL Books, 2005).
Göranzon, Bo, Hammarén, Maria and Ennals, Richard (eds) Dialogue, Skill and Tacit Knowledge (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 2006)
Hughes, Francesca (ed.) The Architect Reconstructing Her Practice (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1998)
Hughes, Rolf and Monk, Jon (eds). Hybrid Thought (Milton Keynes: Department of Telematics, Faculty of Technology, Open University, 2003)
Klein, Julie Thompson Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, Practice (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990).
Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark Metaphors We Live By (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
Lyotard, Jean-Francois: The Postmodern Condition: a Report of Knowledge. Minneapolis 1993.
Margolin, Victor (ed.) Design Discourse: History, Theory, Criticism (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
Nordenstam, Tore Exemplets makt (Stockholm: Dialoger, 2005). In Swedish only.
Schön, Donald The Reflective Practitioner (NY: Basic Books, 1983)
Tillberg, Peter (ed): Dialoger: om yrkeskunnande och teknologi (Stockholm: Dialoger, 2002). In Swedish only.
Wilde, Oscar: The Critic as Artist (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2006)
Wittgenstein, Ludwig: On Certainty tr. by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979).
Zwicky, Jan Wisdom and Metaphor (Kentville: Gaspereau Press, 2003)

Research skills and writing essays in art and design

Monash University has useful and extensive online resources for researching and, especially, essay writing in art and design:

http://www.monash.edu.au/lls/llonline/writing/artdesign/index.xml

Challenges for Design Research

Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between these amounts of time might well be startling. Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields, by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an examination calculated to show how much of the previous month's efforts could be produced on call. Mendel's concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential.

The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.

But there are signs of a change as new and powerful instrumentalities come into use...

Vannevar Bush, As we May Think (1945)

As We May Think

gatescherrywolmark web site

"...as the boundries between practices and processes begin to break down, the work increasingly finds itself in an unfamiliar 'elsewhere' a 'placeless place' that is appropriately hybrid, plural and impure..."

gatescherrywolmark

San Francisco Art Institute

An interdisciplinary and transnational approach to education in art and culture, students at SFAI are taught based on the fundamental understanding that the contexts in which we live, create, and work are intrinsically global and therefore inextricably linked.

SFAI

Minds, Bodies, Machines

Call for Papers: Minds, Bodies, Machines

This interdisciplinary conference, convened by Birkbeck’s Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, University of London, in partnership with the Department of English, University of Melbourne, and software developers Constraint Technologies International (CTI), will take place on 6-7 July 2007 at Birkbeck College, Malet Street, Bloomsbury.

The two-day conference will explore the relationship between minds, bodies and machines in the long nineteenth century. Recent research on the Enlightenment’s frontier technologies has established that era’s preoccupation with developing machinery that could simulate the cognitive and physiological processes of human beings. According to some critics, however, these Promethean ambitions were shelved during the nineteenth century, when the android as artefact was relocated to the realm of the imagination, where it became a threatening figure. According to this reading, the android as scientific project and a figure of possibility only re-emerges in our own era. The aim of this conference is to test this claim by exploring the continuities and discontinuities in the imagining of the human/machine interface in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries.

The conference organisers – Hilary Fraser (Birkbeck), Deirdre Coleman (Melbourne) and Paul Hyland (CTI) – invite proposals for papers that examine the intersection of minds, bodies and machines during the long nineteenth century. Topics include: the virtual and the real; technologies of the sublime; evolution and machines; techniques of communication; technologies of travel; medical technology; miniaturisation; self-reproduction; and spiritualism.

The conference programme will include plenary addresses, seminars and workshops. Confirmed speakers include: Dr Caroline Arscott, Professor Jay Clayton, Professor Steven Connor, Professor Iain McCalman, Professor Peter Otto, Professor Kevin Warwick and Dr Elizabeth Wilson.

A selection of papers arising from this conference will be published in the online journal 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century.

Abstracts for papers of 20 minutes, as well as details of expected audio-visual needs, should be submitted no later than 28 FEBRUARY 2007. Please send proposals by email to submissions@mindsbodiesmachines.org.

http://www.mindsbodiesmachines.org/conferences.html

Design Inquiries

Nordic Design Research (NORDES) Call For Papers!
Deadline for submissions: 1 February 2007

Design Inquiries

How can we understand the impact of design for people, companies and society?
How can we provide design practice with appropriate and inspiring knowledge?
How can we use critical design thinking to create new possibilities for the future?

The Nordic Design Research Conference 2007, Design Inquiries, invites contributions that present new critical, empirical and constructive knowledge about design processes and artefacts in use.

Design is understood as a family of practices creating new products, systems and environments. The family resemblance is based on the skilful handling of complex demands, restrictions and technologies to fit different cultural contexts by use of intuitive and heuristic methods as stepping-stones to innovative solutions.

The conference welcomes contributions from different kinds of inquiries as both papers and project presentations. The range includes, but is not restricted to:

Inquiries about Design - studies of design processes, artefacts and design as phenomena utilizing theories and methods from disciplines such as Sociology, History, Philosophy and Management.
Inquiries for Design - studies from within design for a more profound theoretical understanding of the processes, a better integration of different kinds of knowledge, more sophisticated evaluation methods and improved artistic means.
Inquiries by Design - studies that use design thinking and critical and creative methods to explore and develop potentials and possibilities in real-life situations to enhance considerations about the future.

Design Inquiries

“Criticality” and Its Discontents

[...]

Today “criticality” is under attack, seen by its critics as obsolete, as irrelevant, and/or as inhibiting design creativity. What is more, the criticisms that are increasingly frequently being made come from an interesting diversity of sources. To start to make sense of this emergent situation, we might try to locate the beginnings of the evident shift of opinion against this once-so-dominant theoretical discourse in architecture. One interesting precursor of current comment was an outburst by Rem Koolhaas at one of the series of conferences organized by ANY magazine, this one at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in 1994: “The problem with the prevailing discourse of architectural criticism,” complained Koolhaas, “is [the] inability to recognize there is in the deepest motivations of architecture something that cannot be critical.”(2) But if Koolhaas' complaint was a harbinger of things to come, probably the first frontal challenge to criticality was a text published by Michael Speaks, the Director of Graduate Studies at Southern California Institute of Architecture, in the American magazine Architectural Record in 2002.(3) In a startlingly revisionist text, Speaks explicitly abandoned the “resistance” that he had learned from his own teacher, Fredric Jameson, in favor of a model of a new, alternative, and efficaciously integrated architecture that would take its cues from contemporary business management practices.

from “Criticality” and Its Discontents by George Baird

Available here.