Workshop 2: Experiment as Event in the Arts and Sciences
Date
Location
Description
In this workshop we focused on experimental practice in the arts and sciences. Hans-Jorg Rheinberger has described experimental systems as operating with a logic of ‘differential reproduction’, in that they are systems for organising the interrogation of the world in a way that is always open to the generation of surprise and novelty. In the workshop we explored different ways in which this logic operates in the sciences and in different forms of art. Our aim was to find both contrasts and continuities between their practices - and thus to further illuminate the fundamentally evental characteristic of the experimental.
The workshop started at 13.45 on 19 November and ended at 17.00 on 20 November, and included an evening performance of piano improvisation by Stephen Grew, as well as a viewing of the exhibition 'Looking Aside: Eventhood and the documentation of performance'. For the original programme, click here.
Thursday 19 November
13.45 – 14.00 Introduction
Michael Krätke (IAS, Lancaster University) - Welcome
Bronislaw Szerszynski (Sociology, Lancaster University)
Charlie Gere (Department of Media, Film & Cultural Studies, Lancaster University)
14.00 – 15.00 Keynote address
Wolfgang Ernst (Media Studies Department, Humboldt University) ‘Experimenting media‐temporality (Pythagoras, Hertz, Turing)’
15.30 – 17.00 Improvisation as experiment
Nicholas Gebhardt ( Department of Media, Film & Cultural Studies, Lancaster University) ‘After the event: listening to Miles Davis’s “My Funny Valentine”’
Antti Saario (Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University) ‘Free Improvisation: The Recording Perspective’
Karen Juers‐Munby (Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University) ‘Events between Script and Freedom: Improvising with text in contemporary performances’
Friday 20 November
09.30 – 11.00 Art as experiment
Charlie Gere (Department of Media, Film & Cultural Studies, Lancaster University) ‘A History of Art as Experiment’
Adam Sutherland (Director, Grizedale Arts) ‘Not an exact experiment’
11.30 – 13.00 Experiment as Event
Henning Schmidgen (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin) ‘The Interval as Event: Helmholtz's Physiological Time Experiments’.
Jussi Parikka (Department of English, Communication, Film & Media, Anglia Ruskin University) ‘Media Ecologies and Imaginary Media: Transversal Expansions, Contractions, and Foldings’
14.00 – 15.30 Performative science
Richard Haley (Physics, Lancaster University) ‘Experimenting with Extreme Cold’
Jonathan Bird (Informatics, University of Sussex) ‘Open‐ended Research in the Wild’
15.45 – 17.00 Round table discussion
