Visiting Practitioners Series: John Kannenberg and Timothy Smith
26 April, 2pm
London College of Communication, Lecture Theatre B
This event is free and open to all. If you do not have a UAL student or staff ID card please email j.wynne@lcc.arts.ac.uk to book a place.
John Kannenberg is a multimedia artist, experimental curator, writer, and researcher whose work investigates sounds as cultural objects, the frontiers and borders of digital heritage, the multisensory geography of museums, the psychology of collection, and the human experience of time. His art practice emphasises process, creating and breaking rules for the work’s realisation in ways that blur the boundaries between intention and accident. As Director and Chief Curator of The Museum of Portable Sound, John researches the collection, curation, and display of sound as a museological object while critiquing conventional museum practices and music industry-imposed limitations on the digital distribution of sound. John’s talk will introduce his Museum of Portable Sound project, as well as his ideas about sounds as objects of culture via listening to several objects from the Museum’s Permanent Collection. The talk will also include a screening of the Museum’s latest temporary exhibition, Portable Sound in Cinema 1979-2000, a critical look at the depiction of portable sound technology in late 20th Century film.
Timothy Smith is an artist-filmmaker whose artwork questions the validity of historical and mythological narratives and attempts to amplify marginalised voices. His research examines the ways in which sound, memory and embodied listening practices can encourage affective engagement with audiovisual artwork. Film theorists dealing with the notion of cinematic embodiment have mostly focused on the image and the sense of touch. This presentation will highlight the importance of sound and the other senses and argue that recent work around ‘affect’ should be included when considering the development of a phenomenology of film experience. Tim will also show some of the audio-visual experiments that he has made as part of his practice-based research degree at UAL.