Thematic-On Narrative
Timetable for Three-Day Thematic on Narrative
Piet Zwart, March 2016
Kate Pullinger
DAY ONE: Monday 14 March
10:00 – 11:15 opening lecture – Kate Pullinger: What is a Book? What is a Story? What is Narrative?: From Book to Browser to Smartphone
11:15 – 11:30 break
11:30 – 13:00 student idea presentations to group and discussion: students will be asked to describe/present/discuss their favourite story. The story can be from any medium or tradition, from film to novel to children’s book to fairytale to videogame narrative to song to memoir to painting. The student will need to discuss why this story has meaning for them, and how it might influence their own work.
13:00 – 14:00 lunch
14:00 – 15:30 guest lecture: Duncan Speakman: Structured compositions for an improvised world, or the narrative of experience
15:30 – 15:45 break
15:30 – 17:30 guest lecture: Frans-Willem Korsten: On Narrative: Prof Korsten will be looking at how the study of narrative has developed since the seventies, how concepts from narrative theory have travelled through different media and arts, including examples from both the domain of law and of urban studies.
DAY TWO: Tuesday 15 March
10:00 – 11:30 guest lecture: Renee Turner: Materiality and Constraints
11:45 – 13:00 1-1 sessions – an opportunity to discuss ideas and questions with Kate
13:00 – 14:00 lunch
14:00 – 15:15 1-1 sessions continue
15:30 – 17:30 guest lecture and discussion: Florian Cramer: Non-Narrative: "Non-narrative" is often used to describe avant-garde/experimental film where the focus is on visuals rather than classical storytelling. In his talk, Cramer will investigate to which degree non-narrativity is actually possible if one takes the term literally and not just as a sloppy antithesis to conventional (Aristotelian/Hollywood three-act) storytelling.
DAY THREE: Wednesday 16 March
10:00 – 11:00 Do You Want to Tell a Story – Kate Pullinger: open discussion
11:00 – 11:15 break
11:15 – 13:00 guest lecture: Neal Hoskins: Connecting Narrative in the Children’s Book World: a smorgasbord of snippets and snacks on who and what is shaping the world of picture books and early years non-fiction content on paper and onscreen.
13:00 – 14:00 lunch
14:00 – 15:30 student presentations to group and discussion with Neal
15:30 – 15:45 break
15:45 – 17:00 follow-up tutorials with Kate
Preparation and Reading:
1. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, Jenkins, Ford, Green: http://spreadablemedia.org/
2. Chimamanda Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story
https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en
3. Margaret Atwood: A State of Wonder
4. pdf: Korsten Reading 9. White: ‘The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory’ by Hayden White
5. Ofcom Report: Children’s Media Lives:
6. Google Research: Announcing the Internet of Things:
http://googleresearch.blogspot.be/2016/02/announcing-google-internet-of-things.html
Speaker Biographies:
Kate Pullinger
Kate Pullinger’s new novel Landing Gear, was published in the UK and Canada and the US in 2014. Landing Gear takes the story first developed in Kate’s work of digital multimedia, Flight Paths: A Networked Novel, and explores what happens to Harriet and Yacub after he lands on her car in a supermarket car park. Her novel The Mistress of Nothing, won the 2009 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. In 2014 with co-creator Neil Bartlett, she created the digital war memorial Letter to an Unknown Soldier. Her digital fiction project Inanimate Alice has also won numerous prizes, reaching online audiences around the world, with new episodes in 2014 and forthcoming in 2016. She is Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media at Bath Spa University.
Duncan Speakman
Duncan Speakman is a composer and director of the artists collective ‘Circumstance’. Circumstance attempt to create cinematic experiences in uncontrolled environments. These experiences take many forms, from mass participation performances and intimate in-ear stories, to books, installations and soundwalks. They take melancholy and romance and wrap it up in the politics of mobile audio technology and public space.
Duncan originally trained as a sound engineer at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts but since 1999 he has been developing artworks and performances that both use and question digital communication systems. Since 2005 he has focused on mobile audio works and locative media, developing pieces where the line between audience and performer becomes continually questioned. From 2007 − 2010 he was a senior lecturer in Media Practice at the University of the West of England and more recently taught on the ArtScience programme at the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague.
Frans-Willem Korsten
Research topics: baroque, theatricality, rhetoric, semiotics, literature-art and politics, literature-art and law, pedagogy
1. Biography and Qualifications
Frans-Willem Korsten holds the endowed chair 'Literature and society' at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication, is associate professor at the department Film- en Literary Studies at LUCAS: the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, and at the Willem the Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, specifically the Piet Zwart Institute.
He was chair of the section Letters of the Dutch Council of Culture and was member of advisory committees in the Netherlands and Norway. He was responsible for the NWO internationalization program ‘Precarity and Post-Autonomia: The Global Heritage’, working together with Joost de Bloois (University of Amsterdam) and Monica Jansen (UU). In cooperation with colleagues from the Free University Amsterdam, Gent University and the Free University of Brussels he got an FWO-NWO program under the acronym ITEMP: Imagineering Techniques in the Early Modern Period. Together with Yasco Horsman (University Leiden) and a number of PhD-students he is currently working on the role of literature and art at the limits of the law. He also makes music, with Zimihc, and loves to work with artists whom he came to know in the last years: Edward Clydesdale Thomson, Sjoerd Westbroek and Katarina Zdjelar.
In 2015 he won the prize of being the best supervisor of PhD theses in the Netherlands
2. Learning and Teaching Interests
I have been teaching at ba-, ma-, research master- and graduate level. I am much interested in teaching first year students the fundamentals of the relation between literature and politics, for instance, or to make them aware that there is no such thing as ‘the history of’; one should always speak of ‘the histories of…’ I have served on the board of Boom publishers that published a set of introductions in the philosophy of different disciplines. On ma- and graduate levels I have been giving courses on literature and law, didactic literature, and winter- or summer schools on art-literature and law. I am much involved throughout the Netherlands but especially in The Hague of late, with attempts to think through what high school-education could become in the contemporary situation. At the Piet Zwart Institute I teach Critical Pedagogies within the Master of Education in Arts.
3. Research Outputs and Interests
I have edited several journal issues and volumes that ranged from the situation in Dutch literary studies to Deleuzian aesthetics, or to, most recently, an issue of Law & Literature on the theme of ‘legal bodies’. I published a general introduction in the history of, approaches to and analysis of European literature, entitled Lessen in Literatuur (Lessons in Literature, 3rd edition 2009). Then I worked on the baroque and theatricality with Vondel belicht (2006), which I rewrote for an international audience with Sovereignty as Inviolability (2009) In this context I also was the co-editor of a ground breaking volume entitled Joost van den Vondel: Dutch Playwright in the Golden Age (2012). In this line of research I am currently finishing a manuscript entitled Dutch Republican Baroque – Theatricality, Dramatization, Moment and Event. With my inaugural lecture, published as All inclusive (2007), I opened a new line of research focusing on the relation between art-literature, capitalism and justice. In the context of justice I am much interested in history, and this explains why I am also working on a manuscript called What was history. In terms of articles I am mostly exploring at the moment what an ‘ethics of becoming’ could mean.
Renee Turner
After receiving my MFA from the University of Arizona, I came to the Netherlands where I was an artist resident at the Rijksakademie. This was followed by two years as a researcher in the Theory Department at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. In 2007, I was fortunate to receive a scholarship from the Institute of Creative Technology to pursue a second Master’s degree in Creative Writing and New Media from De Montfort University (Leicester, GB).
Since 1996, I have collaborated with Riek Sijbring and Femke Snelting under the name De Geuzen: a foundation for multi-visual research. Next to national and international exhibitions, our projects have been featured in Rhizome, Mute, and Thames and Hudson’s Internet Art. Parallel to my collective practice, I have also produced text-driven pieces for the web that engage in the idiosyncrasies of networked culture. Whether working individually or collaboratively, my projects often employ tactical media to explore female identity, narratives of the archive, and online media ecologies.
Next to my own practice, art education is another passion. Over the past years I have taught art, design and theory at the BA and MA level at different institutions such as the Bergen National Academy of the Arts (Bergen, NO) and St. Joost Academy (Breda, NL). For several years I have worked at the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning, Hogeschool Rotterdam. I was a Core Tutor in the MFA programme and later became the Course Director of the Master Media Design and Communication Course. From 2011-2015, I served as the Director of the Piet Zwart Institute, and currently hold the post of Research Lecturer at the Willem de Kooning Academy, where I spearhead research across the bachelors and masters.
Since 2014, I am a part of the ‘Workgroup on Competencies for Master Programmes’, which was commissioned by the OBK (the nationwide Dutch organization of art academies). We are researching and developing the national profile and competencies for master studies within art and design education in the Netherlands.
All of these experiences both inside and outside of education, have given me the opportunity to think about the nature of an art school in its most fundamental sense, reflect upon what it means to educate students in the ever-changing fields of art and design, and most of all cherish the importance interdisciplinary exchange, and the ways in which the arts playfully and critically explore the social, political, psychological and poetic dimensions of our world.
Florian Cramer
Florian Cramer is an applied research professor and director of Creating 010, the research center affiliated to Willem de Kooning Academy and Piet Zwart Institute at the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands. He also works for WORM, a Rotterdam-based venue for DIY avant-garde culture.
In his own words (in 2014): "My personal background is a mix of comparative literature and art history combined with post-punk and post-Fluxus DIY culture, technical-critical obsessions with 'radical' media such as the Unix command line and analog filmmaking, and a research interest in both structural poetics and politics of the arts. In the last couple of years, I have moved on from cultural studies of computational poetics (such as in my English essay Words Made Flesh, written in 2004 in Rotterdam, and in my German book Exe.cut[up]able Statements published in 2011) to practice-oriented research, with a renewed interest in non-institutional arts practices outside old/new media, analog/digital and fine art-vs.-applied art dichotomies. Some of this is reflected in my last book Anti-Media (a collection of essays and ephemera published in 2013 by NAi010) and my essay What is post-digital?"
He collaborated in various small publishing projects including http://www.runme.org/ Software Art repository, the Unstable Digest of code poetry, and the WORM Parallel University Press.
Neal Hoskins
Neal Hoskins runs wingedchariot, a digital content agency working with content clients such as the European Commission and Bologna children’s book fair digital media hall. www.wingedchariot.com
On twitter: @utzy