CHASE

Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England

Sensible Cinema

 

Sensible Cinema

A CHASE Advanced Research Craft Workshop Session
Friday 19 & Saturday 20 January 2018 | Goldsmiths, University of London & Birkbeck, University of London

This two-day advanced training workshop brings key practitioners in film, video, and sound together with CHASE PhD students and staff to explore new research methods for creating moving-image works organised around an ecological sensibility; one that is attuned to both human and non-human modes of perception.

The notion of “sensible cinema” around which the workshop and its training sessions are conceptualised might be characterised as advancing a geo-aesthetic approach to filmmaking; tapping into an expanded acoustic frequency range and exploring the limit conditions of the electromagnetic spectrum.

CHASE PhD students will workshop their research ideas and current projects alongside that of our guest practitioners and staff in a series of four closed sessions followed by two public events comprised of screenings and discussions to be held at both Goldsmiths and Birkbeck.

Training sessions will combine the presentation of practical work and technical insights with theoretical reflections upon these engagements and will thus require certain preliminary preparation on the part of students in the form of a reading package with links to projects, clips and new technologies.

All materials generated by the workshops will be professionally documented and form part of an online resource with a dedicated website hosted by the Centre for Research Architecture & Birkbeck to ensure that students at other CHASE institutions also have access to these materials, ideas, and discussions.

Friday Goldsmiths

09.30 – 10.00 Room TBC Reception

10.0-13.00 Workshop I: Ciné Geographies

  • Filmmaker & writer/producer Philip Scheffner & Merle Kröger (workshop facilitators)
  • CHASE Student participants

13.00-14.00 Lunch

14.00-.17.00 Workshop II: Sonic Geographies

  • Sound Artist & Sound Designer Philippe Ciompi (workshop facilitator)
  • CHASE Student participants:

17.00-18.30 Screening

  • Havarie, Philip Scheffner & Merle Kröger, 2016, 1h:33. Location: TBC Goldsmiths

Saturday Birkbeck, University of London

09.30 – 10.00  Reception

10.00-13.00 Workshop III: Mediatised Natures

  • Filmmaker Joshua Bonnetta (workshop facilitator)
  • CHASE Student participants:

13.00-14.00  Lunch

14.00-17.00 Workshop IV: Performative Ecologies

  • Artist, Writer & Filmmaker Mariam Ghani (workshop facilitator)
  • CHASE Student participants

17.00-17.30 Performance

  • Musician Alison Blunt scores and performs the image track of several film clips

17.30-19.00 Screening

  • El Mar la Mar. dir. Joshua Bonnetta & J.P. Sniadecki, 2017 1h:34. Location: TBC Birkbeck

Host Institutions

Goldsmiths and Birkbeck / University of London

Dr. Susan Schuppli
Reader & Director, Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London
s.schuppli@gold.ac.uk

Daniel Mann, PhD Candidate, Media & Communications & Centre for Research Architecture,
Goldsmiths University of London
cop01dm@gold.ac.uk

Dr. Joel McKim, Director of the Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology,
Co-director of the BA Media and Culture and MA Digital Media Programmes, Birkbeck University of London

Professor Esther Leslie, Professor in Political Aesthetics & Co-Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London
e.leslie@bbk.ac.uk

Biographies

Alison Blunt is an artist and musician whose fascination with sound, motion and space has led her into solo and collaborative projects nationally and internationally, exploring the boundaries between art forms and genres and creating, performing and recording new work. She works internationally with a diverse array of improvising artists, performing regularly with London and Berlin Improvisers Orchestras, Barrel, Barcode Quartet, Hanam Quintet, Burning Wood, Lode, Pieretten Ensemble and many ‘ad hoc’ improvising ensembles. Other collaborators include: with Apocryphal Theatre, Apartment House, Renee Baker, John Bisset, Adam Bohman, Javier Carmona, Lawrence Casserley, Viv Corringham, Guy Dartnell, John Edwards, Sue Ferrar, Pete Flood, Flow Motion, Fluxx Theatre Company etc. Recent releases include You’re It with Barcode Quartet (released with SLAM Productions, 2012), Gratuitous Abuse with Barrel (released with EMANEM, 2011), Quartet Improvisations with Tony Marsh, Hannah Marshall and Neil Metcalfe (released with psi records, 2011).

Joshua Bonnetta is an artist working with film, video and sound in various modes of theatrical exhibition, performance and installation. His work has shown at the Berlinale, Toronto International Film Festival, European Media Arts Festival, Images Festival, Mutek International Festival of Electronic Music, Rotterdam International Film Festival and at various other festivals and venues through out Europe, U.K., Russia, North & South America. He is the two time winner of the Deluxe Cinematic Vision Award for excellence and visual innovation (2010, 2012) and the 2009 winner of the National Film Board of Canada Award to the Best Emerging or Mid-career Canadian Film or Video Maker from the Images Festival. Bonnetta received a BFA with Honors in Film & Video Production from York University and an MFA in Studio Arts (Film Production) from Concordia University.

Philippe Ciompi is active as a film sound designer and dubbing mixer, also as picture editor, sound artist and sound composer. Trained in Switzerland, Berlin & London in music studies, film sound design and mixing. Developed a working relationship with many film directors, in the UK as well as internationally in France, Switzerland, Germany etc. Visiting tutor for sound design at the Royal College of Art London and HEAD Geneva

Mariam Ghani is an artist whose work looks at places and moments where social, political, and cultural structures take on visible forms. Solo exhibitions include the Queens Museum of Art, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Rogaland Kunstsenter, and the Gatchina Museum. Notable group exhibitions and screenings include the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Liverpool Biennial, the Sharjah Biennial, the Dhaka Art Summit, dOCUMENTA 13, the National Gallery in DC, the Secession in Vienna, the CCCB in Barcelona, and the Met Breuer, MoMA and the Guggenheim in New York. Ghani has collaborated with artist Chitra Ganesh since 2004 as Index of the Disappeared, an experimental archive of post-9/11 detentions, deportations, renditions and redactions; with choreographer Erin Kelly and composer Qasim Naqvi since 2006 on the video series Performed Places; and with media archive collective Pad.ma since 2012 on the digitization and dissemination of the Afghan Films archive. Ghani holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature from NYU and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, and has received a number of awards, grants and fellowships, most recently from Creative Capital. She teaches at Queens College, CUNY, and Cooper Union.

Philip Scheffner & Merle Kröger founded pong in 2013. Both had gathered film production experience during 9 years of participation in the video group dogfilm. pong stands for the production of creative documentaries on the border to the arts – films in which the filmmakers’ aesthetic and / or political positions are formed and expressed. Merle Kröger is a producer, scriptwriter and novelist. She is producer and co-author the award-winning documentary films by Philip Scheffner and Dorothee Wenner. Furthermore, she has written numerous screenplays (e.g. with Indian filmmaker Onir) and has published three novels in the prestigious series of ariadne / argument publisher since 2003. A fourth novel was released in May 2015. Since 2007 she works for the Berlinale Talent Campus (DOK and Script Station). Since 2011 she is co-director, mentor and lecturer for script development at the Professional Media Master Class for Documentary Film in Halle (Saale), Germany, which is funded by MDM and ESF. Philip Scheffner has been working as a visual artist since 1985. His feature length creative documentaries The Halfmoon Files, Day of the Sparrow and Revision won numerous awards and were positively perceived and acknowledged by international critics. Furthermore, he composes and produces electronic music. As part of pong he also produces films, his focus being, among other things, the editing.