Film as Philosophy / Philosophy as Film – Andrew ConioTuesday 27th November, 17:00, Bridge Wardens’ College room 102, Medway
The defining feature of art is that the artist can work on many registers at once, yet few work across, and challenge the borders and thresholds between, as many as Eija-Liisa Ahtila. Ahtila’s work famously explores subjectivity; language, discourses, narratives and politics and she does this whilst critiquing film theory and form. Out of these multiple layers of experience, Ahtila composes precise artworks that Mieke Bal, might call ‘theoretical objects’.
Andrew argues that Ahtila’s films and installations provide a compelling example of how art and philosophy can reflect, transform and express each other. In Ahtila’s work these entanglements take place not only through form and images but also through affect, sensation and the embodied experience of the installation.
Andrew Conio is a writer and scriptwriter, he has published on a range of subjects including philosophy, architecture, artist’s film, creativity and painting and is currently editing the volume, Deleuze and Guattari and Occupy.
Research. For Andrew Subjectivity is likened to a flow, territory, clearing or trap. Language is expressive, dynamic, yielding and estranging. The subject becomes through agency and authenticity yet also through becoming-other in the world. The voice expresses all, yet is forged by the codes and axiomatics of capital and the body is the purported site for ‘self’ yet is folded in the ontogenetic and phylogenetic processes that compose worlds and discourses are written on the body. These questions constitute the ‘politics that precede Being’ that motivates Andrew’s practice and writing.
Andrews practice takes the form of videos, installation and the production of hypnotism tapes for people who wish to replace the search for self-expression with emersion in the collective. His 2005 film (co-directed with Judy Price) Refining Memory was selected as a critics’ choice by London’s Time Out magazine and he recently organised Deleuze and Guattari and Occupy and The Corporate Occupation of the Arts at the Bank and School of Ideas OccupyLSX.
Andrew took his first degree in Cultural Studies East London Polytechnic, followed by an MA at Goldsmiths College an MPhill at the Royal College of Art and PhD Wimbledon College of Art. Andrew has taught at a range of UK universities, in Norway and Palestine and is currently Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Wolverhampton, Associate Lecturer MA Art and Theory at Chelsea School of Art and is an active member of the Occupy London Economics Working Group as well as DRUGG (Diagrammatics research, use and generation group).