Material Legacies - in the Landscape of the Lost

28th February – 24th March 2017

Register for Private View Tuesday 28th February 

Wednesday 15th March 

Designing Death: Aesthetics and Challenges for the 21st Century – Panel Discussion - Register Here

Location 

Stephen Lawrence Gallery,
11 Stockwell Street,
London
SE10 9BD

This exhibition invites the public to experience how artistic making can provide momentary glimpses of relationships unfolding stories of love and loss.

Material Legacies is the culmination of a four-year research collaboration with The Hospice of St Francis, a palliative care charity. This collaboration explores how artistic making supports the bereaved to negotiate their own approach to translating and finding a place for the dead in their lives. Within this process, biography is distilled into three distinct experiences, which collect a range of materials capturing the essence of the deceased's archive. This deep interaction advocates how a material approach to loss can expand our personal and aesthetic relationships with the dead.

These experiences provide momentary glimpses of relationships - through material and technological composition - that unfold unique stories of love and loss. Visitors are invited to connect with these experiences on a visceral level. The materials used become a language that is refined through the iterative process of making, as stories of the dead are told through the bereaved's physical engagement with materials and their collaborations with creative practitioners. Together the works speak of loss and self-discovery: hundreds of pin pricks turn memory to matter; clay fuses with video constructing the ‘Trainman’; and fingertips massage a message of textured paint leaving their imprint on hand and canvas.

The exhibition as a whole expresses a new materiality of death that blends narrative, craft and archives. This promotes an approach to thinking through making that supports the co-creation of loved one's physical and digital legacies. We are looking forward to present the processes and surprising conclusions to the public.

This exhibition would be of special interest to those working within the boundaries of art and public engagement, co-design and art therapy through artistic practice.

Credits: Material Legacies was created for the Stephen Laurence Gallery by Stacey Pitsillides as an outcome of her PhD in Design. This research is in association with the University of Greenwich (Creative Professions and Digital Art) and has been supported by The Hospice of St Francis and Goldsmiths, University of London. The works exhibited have been produced by Freda Earl, Sam Durant and Anne Marshall in collaboration with Elwin Harewood and Stacey Pitsillides - technical and design development from Aiden Finden and Giulia Brancati. With thanks to Greenwich Bright for the filmed interviews.

2nd International Death Online Research Symposium

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Kingston University London
Monday, 17 August 2015 at 09:00 - Tuesday, 18 August 2015 at 18:00 (BST) Kingston upon Thames, United Kingdom

Symposium Information

Digital technologies of communication constitute increasingly omnipresent technologies of life as well as death that structure contemporary forms of sociability, flows of affect and meaning-making.

Following the successful first Death Online Research Symposium at the University of Durham, the second two-day symposium will be held at Kingston University London in August 17th-18th 2015. It will consolidate the links between existing and new members of the network and provide opportunities for the discussion of ongoing and new orientations in the interdisciplinary field of death online.

The meeting will explore how we invest death-related practices with meaning in digital convergent media, social media artifacts and networks with a focus on familiar, reconfigured and emergent types of content, contexts, new (mass media) audiences, usage patterns, and embodied forms of experience and expression.

To Attend this event CLICK HERE

Material Environments: Sensing Time and Matter in Digital and Visual Culture

Call for Papers

July 24th-25th 2015 University of Greenwich, London

This conference seeks to explore the points of intersection at which the material and the digital, matter and the virtual, and embodiment and posthumanism push against each other in visual media. Through encounters with cinema, artist’s film and video, installations, and online archives, the aim of the conference is to conceive of new relationships between temporality, materiality and affectivity, tracing the ways in which matter becomes meaningful, or comes to resist meaning, in the digital age. We hope to illuminate the new ways in which digital experiences allow us to think and sense matter and materiality, while reassessing the role of non-digital media in this equation. The conference will trace the implications of the posthuman turn in the humanities, understood as encompassing a variety of non-anthropocentric approaches, on our understanding of matter and affect in visual culture.


The Conference particularly welcomes papers that explore the following:


• the relationship between image and environment, the materiality of filmed nature, and the ‘ecological turn’ in theory and philosophy


• non-anthropocentric and posthuman approaches to visual media, particularly as they affect our understanding of materiality, mortality, and ethics


• the relationship between posthumanism, materiality and embodiment


• the ways in which the digital has reconfigured our understanding of temporality, spatiality, memory and archiving


• the impact of the digital on engagements with non-linear storytelling and locative narratives.


Confirmed keynote speakers:


Professor Joanna Zylinska, Goldsmiths, University of London http://www.joannazylinska.net/

Professor David Martin-Jones, University of Glasgowhttp://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/cca/staff/davidmartin-jones/

Dr Felicity Colman, Manchester School of Art http://www.art.mmu.ac.uk/profile/fcolman


Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words by 18th April 2015 to calls[AT]timadi.org with ‘Material Environments’ in the subject line.

This Conference is sponsored by the ‘Time, Materiality and the Digital’ (TiMaDi) research group at the University of Greenwich, and organised by Matilda Mroz, Isil Onol, Stacey Pitsillides, and Rosamund Davies.

2nd International Death Online Research Symposium

Call for papers

Digital technologies of communication constitute increasingly omnipresent technologies of life as well as death that structure contemporary forms of sociability, flows of affect and meaning-making.

Following the successful first Death Online Research Symposium at the University of Durham, which marked the formation of the network, the second two-day symposium to be held at Kingston University London in August 17^th-18^th 2015 will consolidate the links between existing and new members of the network and provide opportunities for the discussion of ongoing and new orientations in the interdisciplinary field of death online.

The meeting will explore how we invest death-related practices with meaning in digital convergent media, social media artifacts and networks with a focus on familiar, reconfigured and emergent types of content, contexts, new (mass media) audiences, usage patterns, and embodied forms of experience and expression.

We invite abstracts for oral presentations of recent or ongoing research addressing any of the following themes:

-       digitally mediated dying and narrative

-       digitally mediated grieving and memorialising

-       digitally mediated mourning and flows of affect

-       death online and embodied experience

-       digital afterlife, post-mortem identity and digital legacy

-       technological developments in the death care industry

In addition, we welcome expressions of interest for the screening of short films or the performance of creative pieces related to the themes of the symposium. All submissions will be peer-reviewed, and we envisage publication of selected full papers in a special issue of an academic journal in the field as well as a collection of writing from the symposium in an open-access online platform.

Important information

Submission format:  300 word abstract

Submission deadline:   March 20^th, 2015

Submission feedback:  April 20^th, 2015

All submissions and enquiries should be submitted to: deathonline2@gmail.com

marked “Death Online Symposium Submission” in the subject field. Please include full contact info (author name, university affiliation and email address) in the submission. Submissions will be anonymised by the organisers before review.

Review Committee

Dr Korina Giaxoglou, Kingston University, London

Stacey Pitsillides, University of Greenwich, London

Associate Professor Lisbeth Klastrup, IT-University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Associate Professor Stine Gotved, IT-University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Associate Professor Dorthe Refslund Christensen, University of Aarhus, Denmark