Tag Archives: News

Creative Events Graduate revisits the Dockyard to meet students and see our new facilities

Creative Events graduate Charlotte Lam recently returned to Kent to see the new developments and talk to staff and students about her experiences and successes and how she put her learning into practice.

Charlotte Lam (left) talks to students about her career experiences
Charlotte Lam (left) talks to students about her career experiences

Graduating in 2010 with her degree in Creative Events, Charlotte then returned to her home in Hong Kong to undertake an internship with Katemagg and was shortly snapped up by EC Square PR and Events where she was PR and Events Executive. This exciting experience gave her confidence to set up an events company called AHHA Events & Projects, where she now project manages brand launches, provides media marketing campaigns and organises products launches.

During Charlotte’s recent visit to the UK, she took some time out from her busy schedule to come and talk to students about the experiences of her studies, internship and her recent business start-up. She reflected upon working some exhausting 14-hour days during her time with EC Square PR and Events, as well as producing events for clients such as Louis Vuitton with a group of current 3rd year students.

Charlotte also told students about AHHA Events & Projects recent work in designing and producing the Junghans Store opening in Macau, as well as the 60th Anniversary celebrations for Max Factor in Hong Kong, and how she has been able to apply her education into the real world.  “One of the main parts of my job is pitching ideas to my clients. I regularly put into practice my learning from my 3rd Year Project Pitch module, but I do find I have to be a bit sharper on the costs and budgets now!” said Charlotte during an informal chat with staff and students who enjoyed her candid reflections.

Director of Studies of Creative Events, Peter Hatton said “it was fascinating to hear how Charlotte now knows every venue in Hong Kong and its suitability for client events, as well as how she has had to become a tough negotiator with suppliers and contractors. The staff here are extremely proud of her achievements”.

During her visit she was treated to a guided tour of the School’s new facilities, where she was both surprised and impressed by all the additions since her graduation in 4 years ago. The tour encompassed the new Engineering Workshop and the Smithery studios, the audio studios and the workshop as well as the Hub and the new café, all of which was new to Charlotte, as the Galvanising Shop was the only creative space when she studied here.

The changes are phenomenal and it is exciting to see so many students together here in the workshop, they have such great facilities at their fingertips” said Charlotte, “I want to come back and study here all over again!

 

 

Claudia Molitor sound installation and composition premiere performance at Bristol New Music Weekend.

School of Music and FineArt Lecturer in Music, Dr Claudia Molitor attended Colston Hall last weekend to help launch the first ever Bristol New Music Weekend during 21st-23 February.

Claudia-Molitor_Colston Hall

Claudia’s sound commission ‘I dwell in sound and sound dwells in me’ was installed and a composition was given a world premiere by string quartet  Quatuor Bozzini on Saturday, 22 February.

Bristol New Music Weekend 2014 was the inaugural event to celebrate and showcase new and experimental music on an international art arena as well as working to create opportunities for emerging regional artists, organised by Colston Hall, Arnolfini, Spike Island, St George’s Bristol and the University of Bristol.

Claudia Molitor’s sound installation was designed to take its audience on a journey through the building. The installation ran throughout the space of Colston Hall, starting in the entrance foyer, leading visitors up through the new and down among the old buildings towards the final installation of the old ticket hall. ‘I dwell in sound and sound dwells in me’ is a playful look at the uncertainties and hesitancies involved in the creative act. Both ‘Listening’ and ‘Seeing’ are explored, in an experience that takes upon the musical experience as a multi-sensory encounter.

Additionally, on Saturday, 22nd February, the string quartet Quatuor Bozzini performed a premiere of one of Claudia’s compositions at St Georges Bristol as part of its Bristol New Music residency at the University of Bristol.

Claudia-Molitor_Colston Hall Flyer

 

Bristol New Music
Claudia at Colston Hall
Quatuor Bozzini

US Percussion Trio, ‘Line Upon Line’ visit and demonstration at Kent

As part of their UK Tour, the US percussion trio Line Upon Line will be visiting Kent and are coming to the School of Music and Fine Art.

Demonstrating contemporary techniques and a commissioned repertoire in a workshop open to all Music students, Line Upon Line will be providing an evening concert on Wednesday 5th March, 2014.

h1v9_imgres1_3

Line Upon Line Workshop
12-2pm
The Engineering Workshop

Evening Concert
6pm Concert,
Galvanising Shop

 

Formed in 2009, Line Upon Line percussion is committed to seeking new ways for percussion instruments to advance contemporary music. To date, the ensemble has commissioned and premiered a dozen new works for percussion.

Special Screening of Perestroika: Reconstructed by Director Sarah Turner at the ICA, March 2nd

Sarah Turner has been invited to the ICA London for a special screening to launch the LUX DVD/BluRay of both films ‘Perestroika’ and ‘Perestroika : Reconstructed’, followed by a questions and answers session.

The screening is open to all, to be held this coming Sunday, 2nd March
at the ICA, London, Cinema 1. Hosted by Helen de Witt, British Film Institute,
Head of Cinemas. The DVD will be on sale for a special discount price of £15.

Perestroika: Reconstructed is a ghost story that combines the genres of documentary, essay film and film poem.  Part psychogeography, part dream and part environmental allegory, the film explores the process of memory: both what we forget and how we remember. Sequence one constitutes the 2009 version of the film, whilst the second sequence constructs a new framing narrative that reinterprets and reconfigures both the imagery and the experience of the first.

Limited to views from the window of the Trans-Siberian train, both sequences of Perestroika: Reconstructed conclude at Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest lake, contrasting experiences of terror and apocalypse with those of beauty and tranquillity, the one contaminating the other. In this uncanny return, the instability of the environment is twinned with the instability of memory.

P123_stiched_Perestroika

 

‘A ruined hotel. A lake as big as a sea. And a death, never explained but by now as momentous to us, and as engulfing, as a black hole. What begins as a travelogue with philosophical trimmings turns into a puzzle picture worthy of Resnais or Antonioni.’
Nigel Andrews, Financial Times

‘Elegantly photographed, sound- designed to precise and goose- bumping effect, this is a rare and haunting work of memory-gleaning.’
Sukdev Sandhu, The Telegraph

‘Conceived with intelligence and arresting intensity’
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

LUX Special Screening:
Sunday, 2nd March
13.30
Cinema 1, ICA London
£8-£10
LUX Publication Page
LUX Facebook Page

Book to attend the screening:
ICA, London

LUX DVD/BluRay Release:
2 Disc Dual Format DVD/Blu Ray
DVD 9 PAL Region 0/ BD 50 Region 0
Perestroika, 2009, 118 mins
Perestroika: Reconstructed 2013, 178 mins
Plus new essays by Elizabeth Cowie, Sophie Mayer, and Paul Newland
Published by LUX
Price £22 individuals / £60 institutions

Purchase the DVD/BluRay:
LUX, Artist’s Moving Image
turner-PK-Front

 

MAAST plays tribute to electroacoustic composer Bernard Parmegiani

The School of Music and Fine Art’s ‘Music and Audio Arts Sound Theatre’ (MAAST) system is set to diffuse a sequence of electroacoustic works by the legendary French composer Bernard Parmegiani as an tribute to his music, during a 3-day Festival in March 2014.

Bernard Parmegiani_MAAST Tribute Event

The School’s research-focused sound diffusion system, designed to explore spatial sound, is set to relive some of the works of the late great pioneer of electroacoustic music, Bernard Parmegiani, who passed away last November. Hosted by LCMF, the event will take over a former carpet factory, a magnificent 20,000 sq ft space in Brick Lane, London.

Parmegiani’s rich body of work, spanning nearly 50 years, stands among the most important in electroacoustic music, influencing generations of artists within the academy and beyond it.

Following the success of the School’s recent Symposium on Acoustic Ecology, the School’s MAAST innovative diffusion system, comprising more than 30 loudspeakers, will once again be showcased from Friday 21st to Sunday 23rd of March.

Curriculum Lead for Music and Audio Arts and Director of MAAST, Dr Aki Pasoulas, along with Ambrose Seddon and Diana Salazar will be diffusing Parmegiani’s music from the 1970s on Saturday 22 March.. The influential electroacoustic composers and scholars Denis Smalley and Jonty Harrison, along with Peiman Khosravi will be diffusing Parmegiani’s works on the first day of the festival, Friday 21 March; while on Sunday, the director of the renowned Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), Daniel Teruggi, will conclude the 3-day tribute festival.

We look forward to this event and encourage anyone interested in attending to book tickets online (http://lcmf.co.uk) as soon as possible, because they are selling fast We hope this gives our MAAST system another enthusiastic performance and platforms the developments we are making in spatial sound out to a wider audience.

Any SMFA students interested in volunteering for the event, please contact Dr Aki Pasoulas as soon as possible. This will be a work experience not to be missed, as you will be working alongside the most distinguished and influential composers and scholars of music and audio art today.

Bernard Parmegiani (1927-2013)
 Parmegiani initially trained as a mime, a practice he often drew on when describing his music. It was Pierre Schaeffer who, in 1961, convinced him to start composing. In Schaeffer’s musique concrète, the building blocks of composition were not notes and rests, but recordings. Pieces were created through collage and the transformation of acoustic sounds on tape. It was this technique that Parmegiani developed so expansively from the 1960s onwards.

While Parmegiani found himself at the centre of Schaeffer’s GRM, he also led a parallel career, composing for film, television, and even for Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport.

 

 

Back for the 3rd year… the award-winning Skills Enhancement Week

skillsenhanceweek

Skills Enhancement Week Spring Term
Running in Week 18
24th-28th February 2014

Skills Enhancement Week 2014 (pdf)

Back for the third year running, the Student Skills Enhancement Week , which won a Barabara Morris Teaching Prize for Learning Support last year, is set to be another fun and packed week of employability-based events, training sessions, talks, lectures, workshops and to close the week with a bang, the University Concert and Big Bands: Bolero! concert at the Colyer-Fergusson Building in Canterbury.

Replacing what used to be known as ‘Reading Week’, students can come along and earn ’employability points’ to help enhance skills that could lead to futher employability.

Once again, we have been very fortunate in getting some exciting and industry recognised guest speakers to give talks along with our usual mix of study skills and employability- related workshops.

  • Monday 24th February 2014 – Day 1

09:00-17:00
Pro Tools 101 (day 1)
(Bridge Wardens’ College – BWC204)

10:00-14:00
Programme  & Module Information Fair
(Engineering  Workshop – Studio 1)

13.00-14:00

Introduction  to the 51Zero Film, Video and Digital Arts Festival
(Bridge  Wardens’ College – BWC203) 


13:00-14:30

Paraphrasing  Workshop
(Drill Hall  Library – DAO15)

  • Tuesday 25th February 2014 – Day 2

09:00-17:00 Pro Tools  101 (day 2)
(Bridge  Wardens’ College – BWC204)

12:00-13:30 Mock  Assessment Centre
(Pilkington  Building – PK017)

14:00-15:00 The  Challenge Network
(Keynes  College – KLT5 – Canterbury)

  • Wednesday 26th February 2014 – Day 3

09:00-17:00 Pro Tools  110 (day 1)
(Bridge  Wardens’ College – BWC204)

13:00-14:00 Writing Well  Workshop
(Drill Hall  Library – DAO15)

14:00-17:00 Local Arts  Professional Development Workshop
(Engineering  Workshop – Studio 1)

18:30-21:00 The Annual  Stirling Lecture
(Keynes  College – KLT1 – Canterbury)

  • Thursday 27th February 2014 – Day 4

09:00-17:00 Pro Tools  110 (day 2)
(Bridge  Wardens’ College – BWC204)

13:00-14:00 Choosing a  Career
(Keynes  College – KLT5 – Canterbury)

19:00-21:00 The Annual  Bob Friend Memorial Lecture
(Pilkington  Building)

  • Friday 28th February 2014 – Day 5

09:00-17:00
Pro Tools  110 (day 3)
(Bridge  Wardens’ College – BWC204)

10:00-12:00
Programme  & Module Follow-up Surgery
(Bridge  Wardens’ College – Student Hub)

13:30-15:00
Setting Up a  Creative Business
( Engineering Workshop – Studio 1)

19:30-22:00
University  Concert and Big Bands: Bolero!
(Colyer-Fergusson  Building – Canterbury)

To book a slot email: MFAReception@kent.ac.uk or call in at Reception, The Old Surgery
Call: 01634 888 980

Pro Tools Training Events

Also running are Pro-Tools 101 and Pro-Tools 110 Certified Training Courses.

 

24th – 25th February 2014
09:00-17:00 Pro Tools 101
(Bridge Wardens’ College – BWC204) 

Pro Tools 101 is a 2 day course delivering an introduction into Avid Pro Tools 10 Digital Audio Workstation software, with hands on projects and exercises to complete. Along with teaching you are also supplied with a certified textbook to keep. At the end of the 2 days there is an optional test to take, if passed, you will receive certification as proof for completing an industry recognised course.
There is a £50 fee for this course payable via  the online store (https://store.kent.ac.uk)

26th-28th February 2014
09:00-17:00 Pro Tools  110
(Bridge  Wardens’ College – BWC204)

Pro Tools 110 is a 3 day course delivering a more detailed look at the production techniques used in Avid Pro Tools 10 Digital Audio Workstation software, with hands on projects and exercises to complete. Along with teaching you are also supplied with a certified textbook to keep. At the end of the 3 days there is an optional test to take, if passed, you will receive certification as proof for completing an industry recognised course.
There is a £75 fee for this course  payable via the online store (
https://store.kent.ac.uk)

All Music and Audio Arts Year Group students are welcome to attend

Max of 16 people for the Pro-Tools 101 and 10-12 people for Pro -Tools 110 First come, first serve basis

To book a slot email F.Walker@kent.ac.uk

Visiting Artist Talk – Benjamin Jenner

School of Music and Fine Art welcome Benjamin Jenner for a Visiting Artist Talk on 20th Feb.

Thursday 20th February, 2014   6-8pm
BridgeWardens College Lecture Theatre
Open to: All Students and Staff.

Benjamin Jenner

Benjamin’s work investigates the fabrication and construction of geometric environments. The practice outputs offer proposals or diagrammatic descriptions via drawing and painting, of a traversable space rather than one fully realized. A sophisticated play with color and surface/ground illicit ideas of the monumental and prompt a navigation through space that incorporates a range of scales, often spilling over from 2D into accompanying maquette and model.

Benjamin Jenner lives and works in London. He studied BA Fine Art at Wimbledon College of Art, University of the Arts London and received MFA Fine Art from the Slade. Jenner won the Red Mansion Art Prize in 2008.

Recent exhibitions include Creekside Open 2013, selected by Paul Noble, APT, London (2003), Signs of the City, UBM HQ in collaboration with Drawing Room, London (2013), Translate/Transcribe, Central House of Artist, Moscow (2011), The Invention of Painting, The Centre for Recent Drawing, London (2011).

www.benjaminjenner.co.uk

View our Visting Artist Talks web page

Visiting Artist Talk – Karen Mirza

We are delighted to welcome Karen Mirza in the next session of our Fine Art Visiting Artist Talks at the School of Music and Fine Art.

Thursday 6th February, 2014  6-8pm
BridgeWardens College Lecture Theatre
Open to: All Students and Staff.

karen mirzaKaren Mirza is a key figure in artist film and video, known both for her work and her curatorial practice. Her practice started within a background in painting from Camberwell College of Art and continued through her MA in film and video at the Royal college of Art. After graduating from the RCA in 1997 she has created site specific and site conditioned works for galleries, public spaces and the cinema that foreground the sculptural qualities of projection and the architectonics of film and video. Karen is currently working on solo and collaborative work that utilises printmaking, photography and film to explore themes of ‘the imagination and the everyday’, ‘the psychoanalytical and the political’.

Karen has collaborated with Brad Butler since 1998, developing a layered practice which consists of film, installation, performance, publishing and curating. Their work challenges terms such as participation, collaboration and the traditional roles of the artist as producer and the audience as recipient.

Since 2009 Mirza and Butler have been developing a body of work entitled The Museum of Non Participation. The term “non participation” is a device for questioning and challenging current conditions of political involvement and resistance. The Museum of Non Participation embeds its institutional critique in its very title, yet it releases itself from being an actual museum. Instead it travels as a place, a slogan, a banner, a performance, a newspaper, a film, an intervention, an occupation: situations that enable this museum to “act.”

In 2004, Mirza and Butler formed no.w.here, an artist-run organization that combines film production with critical dialogue about contemporary image making. It supports the production of artist works, runs workshops and critical discussions and actively curates performances, screenings, residencies, publications, events and exhibitions.

Mirza and Butler are shortlisted for the sixth Artes Mundi Prize. The UK’s biggest contemporary art prize

http://www.mirza-butler.net/
http://waterside-contemporary.com/artists/mirza-butler/
http://www.artesmundi.org/pr/new-director-of-artes-mundi-reveals-shortlist-for-the-uks-biggest-contemporary-art-prize

View our Visting Artist Talks web page

Research Seminar – Andrea Luka Zimmerman Presents

Fine Art Research Events Spring Term 2013

Tuesday 5 February
5-7pm, BWC 102

Andrea  Luka Zimmerman presents Estate: a reverie, an  artist’s film, song cycle and installation to be created and performed by the  disappearing community of the Haggerston Estate, East London.  It is the final and most ambitious project in  a trilogy of collaborative works on the estate led by artist resident Andrea  Luka Zimmerman, working closely with architectural researcher and writer David  Roberts, following the public art/photo-installation i am here (with Lasse  Johansson and Tristan Fenell) and the artists’ book Estate (Myrdle Court Press,  with Lasse Johansson, Paul Hallam, Cristina Cerully, Victor Buchli), both of  which have gained international acclaim.

Andrea Luka Zimmerman has been making films  since 1998, originally as part of a film collective called Vision Machine,  which worked predominately in Indonesia exploring the impact of Globalisation  and working directly with plantation workers. Her non fiction feature essay Prisoner of War, investigates US  militarism and foreign policy through a character study of one of its most  enduring rogue agents. She has just completed Taskafa: stories from the streets, a film about resistance and  co-existence told through the lives of street dogs in Istanbul. Estate, a reverie, is an essay film made  in collaboration with the residents of the about to be demolished housing  estate in Haggerston, Hackney, where she also lives.

Andrea is Associate Lecturer at Central St. Martins  College of Art and Design, and Wimbeldon College of Art [University of the Arts  London]. She teaches cinematography on the MA Documentary Practice at Brunel  University.

Fugitive Images: Fugitive  Images are Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Lasse Johansson and David  Roberts. Fugitive  Images platform grew out of a desire to capture the peculiar  moment of the place where they live and work immediately prior to it being  demolished. Haggerston Estate is suspended somewhere between it first being  occupied in the 1930’s and imminent demolition in 2009 (second phase of  demoloition is in 2013), a place in transformation, in wait.

View our Research Seminar webpage
View the Events Calendar

Research Seminar – Memory, Identity, Performance and Neuroscience: Part 1

Jointly hosted event between CKP and The Centre for Research into Sound, Image and Space (SISRC)

Friday March 1st, 5-6:30pm,

Medway Campus, Chatham Historic Dockyard

Bridge Warden’s College Lecture Theatre

Shona Illingworth (Fine Art lecturer and artist, School of Arts, Medway) discusses her collaboration with neuropsychologist, Catherine Loveday.

Their current project, in collaboration with cognitive neuropsychologist Martin A. Conway, is supported by the Wellcome Trust. Claire is a woman who has dense retrograde and anterograde amnesia. The project explores new biomedical insight into Claire’s condition, gained through research into her use of new sensory operated camera technology to unlock previously inaccessible memories. In parallel, the historical lesions in the physical and cultural landscape of St Kilda, an extraordinary archipelago located off the west coast of Scotland, provide a physical and metaphorical context within which to explore the self-experience of broken memory and dense cultural retrograde amnesia. Illingworth and Loveday will discuss how, by creating a multi-layered interplay between Claire and St Kilda, this project sets out to explore powerful synergies between the complex space of the mind, and that of the outside world, and in turn, examine the profound implications amnesia and cultural erasure have on the individual, social and cultural topologies that inform contemporary constructions of identity, place and location.

The second part of Memory, Identity, Performance and Neuroscience will take place in Autumn 2013. It will feature Anna Furse (Head of Theatre & Performance at Goldsmiths and Director of Athletes of the Heart),and Cambridge neuroscientist Nicky Clayton, in dialogue with Sian Stevenson and Jayne Thompson (StevensonThompson, Gulbenkian Theatre and School of Arts) on their ‘Moving Memory’ dance based projects.

Shona Illingworth

Shona Illingworth is an artist and Fine Art Lecturer in The School Arts, Medway, University of Kent. She works across sound, film, video, photography, drawing and painting. Major works using moving image and/or sound, take the form of gallery based and site specific installation. She has worked closely with scientists to explore individual and collective memory and the mapping of mental space onto external terrain, themes which are explored in the Film and Video Umbrella monograph on her work: The Watch Man – Balnakiel, Shona Illingworth (2011).
Her work has been exhibited widely, including at the Museum of Modern Art, Bologna, the Wellcome Collection, London, the National Museum, Tirana and Interaccess Electronic Media Arts Centre, Toronto and she has received high profile commissions from Film and Video Umbrella, the Hayward Gallery, London and Channel 4 Television.

Dr Catherine Loveday

Dr Catherine Loveday is a Principal Lecturer in Cognitive Science at the University of Westminster, London. She completed her PhD in 1996, investigating the neuropsychological basis of normal age-related memory loss.  Since this, she has continued to research the cognitive and biological changes that occur in ageing, particularly in relation to memory, but she has also extended her expertise to various clinical populations, for example traumatic brain injury, dementia, amnesia and hydrocephalus. This has included a significant amount of clinical work at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London and Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge.
Her current research projects include the cognitive neuroscience of amnesia (with Prof Martin A. Conway); the psychobiology of adolescence (with the PSRG); the neurobiology of anorexia nervosa; neuropsychological implications in congenital hydrocephalus (with Joanna Iddon, Prof John Pickard and Richard Morgan); the cognitive psychology of music (with Ludovico Minati).
She plays an active role in the British Psychological Society contributing significantly to the organisation of annual conference as well as being a member of the Research Board and Psychologist Policy committee. She has also appeared as an expert psychologist in a number of television and radio programmes.

View our Research Seminar webpage
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