Programme
Below are links to the programme for each day of the Congress. Please choose as many or as few sessions as you would like to attend.
With the exception of the drinks reception, all the sessions will be held on Zoom. To register for a Zoom session, please click on the registration link and enter your details. The confirmation email will include a link to join the Zoom meeting on the day.
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If you have any questions or need any help with registration please email techne@rhul.ac.uk.
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Techne Student-led Audio Contributions
If you want to make some off-screen time during the Congress, make sure you take a listen to these two audio recordings from Techne students (click links for more info):
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Technecast Podcast Special Congress Episode
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15.00 to 17.00
Congress Launch: keynote lecture on Zoom followed by virtual drinks reception on Gather
The Lures and Horrors of Enchantment - Naomi Waltham-Smith
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Drawing on the reflections of feminist thinkers Anne Dufourmantelle and Hélène Cixous on both the power and also the suspicion of enchantment, the lecture teases out the role of the musical, the sung, or the rhythmical in three political moments of enduring contemporary significance. Naomi Waltham-Smith is Reader in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick. Click here for more information.
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We had originally planned for this Friday afternoon lecture to take place in person, at Kingston University's campus. Due to rising Covid-19 case numbers and the government's advice to work from home where possible, we felt it was the best decision to run this 'Congress launch' lecture online instead. We were excited to finally be welcoming Techne students to an in-person Congress event for the first time in two years, but we now look forward to seeing you all at the summer Congress instead. We hope you enjoy this lecture in online format instead, and that you can join us for a virtual drinks reception afterwards.
Technecast Podcast Special Congress Episode
Technecast is our Techne student podcast. There will be a special Congress episode which will be released on the morning of 10th January - we encourage you to take a screen break and listen to it in the morning or during one of the conference breaks.
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Dancer Rosalind Holgate-Smith (Kingston) says “I am listening and attuning with the land, as a means of co-becoming, a means of letting others speak through my flesh, a means of embracing and dancing through enchantment.” She explores touch as an encounter with Otherness. Meanwhile, storyteller Jon Mason (Brighton) asks the question “What if it’s not true?” and draws lessons from balancing enchantment and empiricism in storytelling practice.
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You can listen to Technecast here.
Edges of a Close/d Screening (2019)
Edges of a Close/d Screening (2019) - An evolution of a Techne funded student-led event, resonances in the research journey. Edges of a Close Reading (Holly Antrum, Edward Dorrian, Keira Greene, Anna Lucas and Mónica Rivas Velásquez).
Audio layer and expanded film soundtrack, 23 minutes digital audio
Recorded at Visconti Studio Kingston University, and Jerwood Space, London
First presented at Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston-upon-Thames, November 2019
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Exchanging film and audio recording tools, the group’s practice led-research constellated as a film installation, an audio piece and a performative reading hosted/exhibited at Stanley Picker Gallery in November 2019. The questions of the collaborative research process are articulated at the start of the recording.
The subsequent transcript of an in-person 2019 ‘Edges’ reading group session with Norwegian artist and filmmaker Ane Hjort Guttu, became the generative discussion we kept returning to. Her essay ‘Nature / Exhibition’ (2013) on a domestic exhibition developed in collaboration with her son, who was by now a teenager when our discussion took place, spoke to group care and creativity dynamics over time. The ethics and revisions - to power imbalances so consistently encountered in the social realm and intersecting art practices - echoed on into each subsequent meeting we held. Reflecting on power, equality, failure and collaboration, reading and re-reading this text and the transcript of our discussion with the artist, became a fertile ground for Edges of a Close Reading to ask questions, explore corners and perform expansions of what a shared reading can/could become.
Edges of a Close Reading have selected to revisit this audio to consider the themes of care and collaboration in our onward circumstances, and that of audiences considering similar questions of their own. We are struck by the sonics of being in-discussion pre-pandemic, the investment we could give to the physical spaces we gathered in, inherently channelling wider information of the spatial environment and activity around each of us as field recordings, and how online meetings have changed our sense of shared presence, equality, and conversation.
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