Friday 27 June 2008, 18.30–20.00
Saturday 28 June 2008, 10.30–17.45
Saturday 28 June 2008, 19.00–21.00

One of today's foremost media theorists, Friedrich Kittler has been hailed as the 'Derrida of the digital age'. This exciting event offers a rare opportunity to hear Professor Kittler in person, and brings together a range of major thinkers and practitioners in the fields of cultural theory, film and digital arts to explore our complex relationship with the technologies that surround us.

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
£32 (£24 concessions), booking required
Tickets for separate parts of the event available when booking by telephone

  

Keynote lecture and performance by Friedrich Kittler with Joulia Strauss and Martin Carlé: "Preparing the Arrival of the Gods"
Friday 27 June, 18.30-20.00  Starr Auditorium
£8 (£6 concessions) when booked separately

18:30 Welcome by Marko Daniel

18:35 Introduction by Steven Connor

18:45 Keynote lecture and performance by Friedrich Kittler with Joulia Strauss and Martin Carlé

20:20 Q & A - Chaired by Steven Connor

20:30 End

Speakers and Performers

Friedrich Kittler is Professor of Aesthetics and History of Media at the Humboldt-University, Berlin. In the course of a long and distinguished career, he has held visiting professorships at Columbia University, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley and others. His translated works include Discourse Networks 1800 / 1900 and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, texts which reflect on the nature, impact and history of technologies and which have been influential not only in the fields of literary and cultural studies but also film studies, social theory, digital art and the ‘open source’ movement. His most recent work on music and mathematics traces the historical development of notation systems from Ancient Greece to today. This lecture represents a rare opportunity to hear Kittler speak outside his native Germany.

Joulia Strauss is an artist based in Berlin. She studied in Georg Baselitz’ class at the University of Fine Arts Berlin. Her paintings, videos, performances and 3D-environments explore the imperative of beauty and have been exhibited in museums including Martin Gropius Bau, Deutsche Guggenheim, Pergamon Museum PK (Berlin), Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art (New York) and the Philadelphia Science Center. She is currently working on synthetic sculpture.

Martin Carlé is a media scientist, musicologist and philosopher lecturing at Humboldt-University Berlin. His research focuses on the epistemic ties between music technology, the temporality of simulation and media theory. Using programming and modeling as the basis of research in humanities, he has developed environments of sonification and introduced acoustic archaeology as a method for text critique. Recent publications include: Signalmusik MKII (Kadmos, 2006), Parasemantics and Enharmony: Coding and Decoding the Ancient Greek Sonosphere. (SIM PK, 2008).

Symposium: Media Matters, Friedrich Kittler and Technoculture
Saturday 28 June, 10.30-17.45  Starr Auditorium, Tate Modern
£24 (£18 concessions) when booked separately

The symposium is organised around three themes, following the structure of Kittler's Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Each session invites a pair of speakers to engage with the notion of sound, visual and writing technologies respectively. Kittler will then have the opportunity to respond and reflect on the day's events in a closing dialogue.

10:30 Welcome by Marko Daniel

10:35 Introduction by Stephen Sale

10:45 Gramophone: Aura Satz

10:50 Stephen Connor

11:20 John Durham Peters

11:50 Q & A – Chaired by Aura Satz

12:15 Lunch

13:30 Film: Kate Southworth

13:35 Caroline Bassett

14:05 Alexander Galloway

14:35 Q & A – Chaired by Kate Southworth

15:00 Refreshments - Tea and coffee served in the Starr Auditorium Foyer

15:30 Typewriter: Tim Armstrong

15:35 Mark Hansen

16:05 Pam Thurschwell

16:35 Q & A – Chaired by Tim Armstrong

17:00 Friedrich Kittler in conversation with Anthony Moore

17:50 Closing remarks

18:00 End

Speakers

Steven Connor is Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck, University of London, as well as Academic Director of the London Consortium. He has published prolifically and on diverse subjects, including air, flies and skin, but sound is one of his key areas of interest. His book, Dumbstruck (2000) is a cultural history of ventriloquism, and he has also broadcast a series of BBC programmes entitled Noise.

John Durham Peters is F. Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor of Media History and Social Theory, University of Iowa, where he researches and publishes on the history and theory of media. In particular he has focused on the voice and communication, publishing Speaking to the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication in 1999.

Caroline Bassett is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media and Film at the University of Sussex and is Director of the Centre for Material Digital Culture. Her research is focused on new media and she has published widely on gender and ICTs, narrative and new media, media innovation and the transformation of everyday life, with an emphasis on mobile and intimate media and globalization. Her new book is entitled The Arc and the Machine: Narrative and New Media.

Alexander R. Galloway is an author and programmer. He is a founding member of the software collective RSG and creator of the Carnivore and Kriegspiel projects. The New York Times recently described his work as ‘conceptually sharp, visually compelling and completely attuned to the political moment.’ Galloway is the author of Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (MIT, 2004), Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minnesota, 2006), and a new book coauthored with Eugene Thacker called The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minnesota, 2007). He teaches at New York University.

Mark Hansen is Professor of English and Cinema/Media Studies at the University of Chicago. His research ranges across a host of disciplines, including literary studies, film and media, philosophy, science studies, and cognitive neuroscience. Recent published works (New Philosophy for New Media and Bodies in Code) have focused on the way computers may be fundamentally altering the infrastructure of our lifeworld, and even changing what it means to be human.

Pam Thurschwell is Senior Lecturer in English at University of Sussex. She has worked on the intersection of psychoanalysis, the supernatural and new technologies at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. She is author of Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920. Another focus of research is writing and the figure of the secretary, and she has edited the collection Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture (2005)

Anthony Moore is a composer and Professor at the Academy of Arts and the Media, Cologne working on the theory and history of sound. Since 1969 he has composed a number of soundtracks for European experimental movies and from 1973 he worked in different European locations as a freelance composer, writing songs, film scores, and experimenting with sound. He has collaborated together with Pink Floyd and other musicians. Besides teaching, he continues to make music and sonic installations. Recent Publications include ‘Homage to Pink Floyd’ in a 2002 collection of essays edited by Kittler.

Stephen Sale is a PhD student at the London Consortium where he is researching the relationship between technology and culture, with a particular focus on German media theory. Additional research interests include contemporary trends in telecoms and media, specifically the phenomenon known as web 2.0. Stephen teaches at Birkbeck, University of London and Central St. Martins College of Art and Design.

Saturday 28 June 2008 – East Room

19:00 Gramophones, Films, Typewriters

Audio, video and text works curated by Seth Kim-Cohen

The issues at play in Kittler’s work and in the work of the speakers contributing to the symposium, have significant implications for contemporary artists. Whether it is the problem of specific media (or media-specificity), of recording and technology, or of the real versus the symbolic, artists straddle the media-missile like Slim Pickens in Dr Strangelove.

Curator and artist Seth Kim-Cohen has assembled works by eleven international artists responding in various ways to Kittler’s diagnoses and prognoses. Six of the works were made specifically for this exhibition.

Artists include: Jarrod Fowler: -ion as Rhythm (2008), Richard Mosse: Untitled (Ireland) (2007), John Lely: Precision Sonics (2005), Petrova Giberson: She Loves Everything (2008), Seth Kim-Cohen: Mise En Collision (2008), Julian Rosefeldt: Lonely Planet (2006), Aliza Shvarts: Epist (2008), Dexter Sinister: Blazon 4 Moholy-Nagy (2008), Lytle Shaw & Jimbo Blachly: At the Family Manor, The Chadwicks Demonstrate the Golden-Age Microbrewery with a Rendition of Jacob Cats (2008).

21:00 End