TALKS / CONVERSATIONS
Creative Captioning in the Archive (with Hannah Wallis), Animating Archives Project, 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, Brixton, 25 June 2022
This workshop, organised by Beth Bramich and Hatty Nestor and led by Hannah Wallis and Sarah Hayden, aimed to introduce PhD researchers and others to a range of creative approaches to captioning, exploring what this can bring to working with art and activist archives. Our presentation was followed by an in-person workshop at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, during which we led the participants in a series of activities looking at material from the Women’s Art Library collections, including a selection of ephemera from artists’ projects, audio tapes of interviews and talks, an artist’s film on DVD, and posters advertising various events and activities.
Reading the watched voice: Liza Sylvestre’s unsounding unvoiceover, Re-Visions – Configurations of the Visual in Literature and Culture, University of Hamburg, 19 July 2022.
Ok, goats closer, University of Durham and on zoom (with CART captions), 18 May 2022.
Unregarded: Forms of ‘Outside’ in Art Writing: a series organised by Natalie Ferris at Durham and Sam Buchan at Newcastle University’s School of Art and Cultures. Screening of Charlotte Prodger’s SaF05, courtesy of the artist and LUX.
This is not a talk about a lion. It is about what is outside of the frame, parallel to the postscript and on the edge of vocality in Charlotte Prodger’s SaF05 (2019). By logging drones, blurs and avoidances of intimacy, I will locate Prodger’s film at an angle to the history of remote trespass upon other-than-human territories. Tracking what happens when vision is prefigured by voice, I will propose SaF05 as retort to the reproductive normativity of nature documentary. Giving megafauna-as-metaphor a(n appropriately) wide berth, I will read SaF05 as reparative queering of the wildlife quest. Veering inevitably voice-ward, this talk will weigh the off-script against the off-transcript.
Access as Ethos via The Art of Captioning, British Art Network Research Group Leads Workshop, (online) 9 March 2022.
Short presentation delivered with Hannah Wallis to the leads of all of the current British Art Network Research Groups.
Starting to think about Access and the Moving Image, aemi Online: 'Opportunities for Film Artists: Funding and Access' with Arts Council Ireland, 21 January 2022
What does it mean, and what does it take, to make moving image more accessible? What purposes do captioning and audio description serve, and what possibilities do they open? Video recording with captions (glitching, unfortunately) and transcript
Watching along with a voice made visible, UEA (University of East Anglia) School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, Twentieth Century Research Seminar, 10 November 2021
This is a talk about writing in art. It asks: what happens when functions typically assigned to a sonorous voiceover are taken up instead by soundless “unvoiceover”? What are the aesthetic and affective affordances of text that variously streams across or is “popped” on and off the screen? In Liza Sylvestre’s Captioned series (2017—) and Tony Cokes’ The Book of Love (1992), writing interjects across found moving image footage that is, thereby, reframed. Via the interventions of a legible, inaudible artist’s voice, distinctions between text and paratext are made to dissolve and moving-image figure becomes the ground to transient words. This paper explores how the unvoiceover deploys a fugacity it borrows from sound to undermine objectivity, compromise legibility and foreclose the luxury of redundancy. Through formal analysis of fugitive commentary, I will first argue that Cokes’ unvoiceover undermines the status of the document and the ethics of mining family history. Then, by close-reading Sylvestre’s emphatically embodied and situated unvoiceover as an articulation of Deaf Gain, I will show how the Captioned series’ hijacked caption-tracks train reader-receivers in the politics of media access.
On Audio Description: In Conversation with Elaine Lillian Joseph
To mark the beginning of a new collaboration exploring audio description, LUX invited me to interview Elaine Lillian Joseph about her practice as a professional audio describer in a video-recorded discussion with captions.
Artificial Ignorance Workshop and Roundtable, Society for SLSA2021 "ENERGY": 34TH Annual Meeting of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts
Friday October 1st and Saturday October 2nd 2021. Artificial ignorance—an analytic tool for assessing AI—deploys ignorance, non-knowing, and strategic confusions. It reveals that at a technical level human and machinic faculties, material histories, and ways of knowing are inextricably entangled in AI. Chaired by Katherine Behar
In Conversation with Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Whitechapel Gallery
I’ll be in conversation with Ailbhe Ní Bhriain and composer, Susan Stenger, at a screening of the Ní Bhriain’s 'Inscriptions of an Immense Theatre' and selected films at the Whitechapel Gallery on Thursday 5 March 2020, 7–9pm. This event is curated by Gareth Evans, as part of the Whitechapel’s 2020 Artists Film International programme, and coincides with Ní Bhriain’s solo slow at Domo Baal. Audio Recording
Teacher Voice Treatment
I’ve been invited to perform an expanded lecture poem, ‘Teacher Voice Treatment’, for the Sound/Text seminar series in the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard on 26th February 2020. The series is curated by Sophie Seita and Alex Rehding.
Un/voiced
Tuning Speculation 7: NON, Array Space, Toronto (15-17 November 2019)
Voiceover Takeover
In Pursuit of Sound: A Two-Day Symposium, University of Cambridge (1st-2nd October 2019)
Keynote: ‘The words keep tumbling out because I want to hear them’: self-present, self-pleasuring modernist art writing
Modernist Art Writing/ Writing Modernist Art, University of Nottingham (24th-26th June 2019)
Liquid citizenship, liquid voice and sensorial sovereignty
Truth, Fiction, Illusion: Worlds and Experience, Theory Culture & Society Literature & Philosophy Conference, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt (29th May-2nd June 2019).