Roberts G08 Sir David Davies Lecture Theatre [campus map]

Sponsored by The Film Studies Space: The Centre for the Cultural History of the Moving Image

This event is free and open to all.

Responding to recent work in cultural history, spatial studies, and ‘thing theory,’ this stuy day reflects on the ends of objects, raising questions of modernity, obsolescence, memory, collecting and recording. How can critical theorists and cultural historians participate in the reflexion on the ends of objects—from their physical finitude to the very projects for their disposal, the latter increasingly of concern with the multiplication of things that do not gently decompose into their own night?

This study day on ‘Yesterday’s Objects’ will investigate the everyday objects—the fridges, typewriters, and jukeboxes—that have irrevocably changed our lives. Invited papers will explore how these objects have refashioned and reimagined our work, home, and leisure spaces.

Friday, 4 June 2010

9 a.m. Coffee and Welcome

9:30-10:45, Session One, Chair, TBA
Keeping Yesterday’s Objects: Museums and Collections

–“Video Game Culture- Making the Same Mistakes With a New Medium”
Mark Carnall, Curator, Grant Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy, UCL

–“Status Anxiety, or Missing the Pictures: Film Performativity in the Museum Space”
Jenny Chamarette, Department of French/Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge

11:00-12:30, Session Two, Chair, Jann Matlock, UCL
Lost Objects/Objects at Risk

–“Mourning in the Age of the Digital: Memory, Loss, and Materialist Filmmaking”
Martine Beugnet, Film Studies, University of Edinburgh

–“Slide Tape: An Abandoned Technology”
Mo White, Fine Art, Loughborough University

–“Documents of Barbarism: Saving the Comic Book as Symbolic Object”
Ernesto Priego, Department of Information Studies, UCL

12:30-1:30 Lunch Break

1:30-2:45, Session Three, Chair, TBA
Filmic Afterlives

–“The Brave Little Toaster from Print to Film: Obsolescent Appliances and Capitalist Allegories”
Margaret D. Stetz, Women’s Studies and Humanities, University of Delaware

–“Godard’s Dictations: The Histoire(s) du cinéma and the Erasure of Memory”
Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, Film Studies, University of Edinburgh

3:00-4:30, Session Four, Chair, Lucia Vodanovic, Media and Communications, Goldsmiths
Dead Object Crises and Telling Things

–“The Temporality of Waste”
Will Viney, Humanities and Cultural Studies, The London Consortium

–“Vinyl Farewells?”
Richard Osborne, Popular Music, Middlesex University

–“Tales of Things: Memories, Stories and Archives of Everything”
Andrew Hudson-Smith, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), UCL

4:30-5:45, Round Table: Yesterday’s Objects
The Autopsies Research Group in Discussion

6-7 p.m. Drinks Reception, Location TBA