This post was contributed by Noah Angell, co-director of the upcoming film Lux Imperium. A work in progress of the film will be introduced at the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) Amateur Cinema Night on Saturday 18 June. Book your free place here.
Lux Imperiumis a new film and research project by Noah Angell and Francis Gooding. This afternoon session will introduce the project, before expanding its scope to look at amateur film in relation to cinema and examine some contemporary vernacular films drawn from online sources.
The home movie camera first became available to the public in the same decades that saw the unraveling of the British Empire. While using this technology to record their private lives, amateur filmmakers throughout the British colonies were also unwittingly capturing the biggest empire in history in free fall. Composed from hundreds of home movies and privately edited amateur films made during the dissolution of the British Empire, Lux Imperium reanimates these documents of late colonial vision and imperial collapse, showing the last days of the Empire from an intimate and wholly unseen perspective.
The ubiquity of privately-made moving images in the era of smart phones, Youtube, and mobile broadband makes the history of vernacular film a pressing contemporary issue that this work will imaginatively and critically explore.
For the session held at BIMI on the 18th of June, Francis Gooding will give his paper, ‘The Visual Vernacular: 6 note on amateur film’, which provides a formal framework for distinguishing amateur film as a cinematic language that is distinct from other modes of cinematic production.
This will be followed by a screening and discussion of in-progress edits of Lux Imperium and its source reels – private films from the colonies, recording the British colonial classes’ vision of events and daily minutiae, with subject matter ranging from anti-Imperial uprisings to colonial gardening.
To conclude the session, Angell and Gooding will speak about contemporary amateur film, showcasing and analyzing vernacular film practice taken from Youtube, Vine and Instagram. Moving images are now an everyday mode of processing and preserving experience, and homemade films are now a critical tool in the constitution and cohesion of online communities who are geographically dispersed or otherwise isolated. Online spaces which traffic in moving images are frequently used to publicly document, present and define both political events and the private self, and also as a space of play.
Lux Imperium is based on material uncovered and first digitized as part of the BFI-hosted Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire project (www.colonialfilm.org.uk). By recognizing the importance of home movies within the visual history of colonialism, Lux Imperium will further develop the ideas and research of the original Colonial Film project.
A work in progress of Lux Imperium will be hosted by BIMI at the Birkbeck Cinema (43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD) on Saturday 18 June 2016 at 2pm. Book your free place here.
This post was contributed by Kojo Koram, PhD student in the School of Law. Kojo attended the Focus on the Funk event in May 2016.
On the 20th-23rd of May 2016, a community of academics, activists and artists met at Birkbeck School of Law under an invitation to ‘Focus on the Funk.’ Over three days, the likes of Gayatri Spivak, Alicia Garza, Nina Power and Lewis Gordon all took up the task of trying to think through ‘the funk’.
Law and funk
We felt fortunate to have attracted such a cast of speakers, considering how unappealing the prospect of joining a law school threatening to ‘get funky’ must have appeared upon first reading. ‘Law’ and ‘Funk’ are understandably imagined as diametric opposites; the transgression implicit in bringing them together being what initially excited us as organisers. Funk most immediately invokes a genre of music, yet the notion of ‘the funk’ transcends this particular expression, its musical form being just one manifestation of the condition of the ‘funk’.
Etymologically, the word ‘funk’ derives, in part, from the obsolete Flemish word fonck meaning ‘disturbance’ or ‘agitation’ (citation from Oxford Dictionaries). This understanding of ‘funk’ synthesised with another definition – as ‘a strong smell’ – to become the common shorthand for the atmosphere of the jazz clubs of the early twentieth century. In these clubs, the funk denoted not just the musical corruption of classical European melodies occurring on stage but a particular orientation to life that could be found everywhere in these clubs. Here, one could encounter ‘the funk’ of life. When a particularly agitated form of rhythm and blues music emerged in the 1970’s, it was christened as ‘funk’ but it hadn’t invented the idea, rather fully realised it in musical form.
So while our reference to ‘the funk’ did not only mean music, we did attempt take the music seriously. We were concerned with what law sounds like, starting not with the harmony or even silence of law within lives that rarely encounter its force but with the crescendo that greets subjectivities over-determined by law. (For further on the relationship between law and music, and the role of sound in law, see James E. K. Parker, Acoustic Jurisprudence: Listening to the Trial of Simon Bikindi.(Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015)).
In response we turned to funk, which, as a music genre, de-emphasised the melodic in favour of bringing forward that which was buried underneath, the hypnotic bassline and the interrupting, staccato drumbeat. Funk music begins with the background mess of song and then, crucially, stays with it, sustaining the failure of the soothing melody to emerge and, instead, forcing artists to express themselves from inside the groove. The result is often vocalised through a scream.
Funk as a prism
To employ ‘the funk’ as a prism to examine questions of politics and philosophy offered a challenge particularly apt for our turbulent times. We were awed at the vigour with which this challenge taken up by our guests. After an introduction by the organisers, in which we performed our manifesto outlining future plans for a different way of philosophising about law, Gail Lewis and Nina Power began with a dialogue illustrating how law’s claim to public order is haunted by ungrievable lives such as Sarah Reed’s. (See Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?(London: Verso 2009)). Their talk exposed the sacrificial piling of bodies upon bodies that guarantees received notions of law and order.
Then we welcomed an activist roundtable as Rupinder Pahar from the London Campaign Against State and Police Violence, Adam Elliott-Cooper from #RhodesMustFallOxford and Alicia Garza from #Blacklivesmatter illustrated the interconnection between epistemological and state violence across the Black Atlantic. (See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1993))
Next Kerem Nisancioglu, Brenna Bhander and Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman dismissed any myopic suspicions that thinking through the funk was to indulge in particularism. Rather than avoid ‘universal’ topics, this panel confronted them, compelling the audience to re-read received notions of sovereignty, property and reason. Doyens of modernity like Thomas Hobbes and Francis Galton were immersed into the funk, re-emerging as figures other than what they were, now finding the funk to be stuck to them.
Friday closed with Sarah Keenan, Stephanie Bailey, Taylor Le Meel and Karen Mirza generously talking us through the Art System from the perspective of the ‘Wretched of the Screen.’ Sarah Keenan sported a Vernon Ah Kee designed t-shirt with the words “Australia drive it like you stole it”, as she spoke about a recent unsanctioned installation which saw the projection onto the walls of Australia House of faces of refugees killed in Australian offshore detention. Both evenings were filled with wonderful cinematic and visual art exhibitions offered by our collaborators from the Serpentine Gallery, which continued into Sunday.
#BlackLivesMatter
The auditorium was at its most full on Saturday morning, perhaps evidence of Friday’s success, but more plausibly the result of Gayatri Spivak joining us to converse with Oscar Guardiola-Rivera on ‘The Politics of Deconstruction.’ Spivak guided the audience in revisiting her engagement with Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, whilst tying her comments into the wider themes of the conference, advocating a way of reading described as ‘funky, not straight…an on-beat, off-beat, back-beat structure.’
We returned from lunch to celebrate the 70th Birthday of Paget Henry, with Lewis Gordon, Julia Suárez Krabbe and Nadine El-Enany honouring Henry by engaging with topics of such as race, rights and stunted moments of rebellion.
Later Alicia Garza, the co-founder of #BlackLivesMatter, returned to the stage to take up the task of explaining what law sounds likes when you must affirm your very existence through opposition to it? What does law sound like when its ordering is predicated on your arbitrary execution? And, perhaps more importantly, what response is available to you to make yourself audible over the violence of such a law? Alicia implored the audience to respond with a fearless and furious love. Alicia’s herstory of #BlackLivesMatter reminded us that the hash-tag that captured a movement, that captured a moment, initially began life as a love-letter. #Blacklivesmatter was the sound of black love and to a world producing harmony through the negation of that love: it sounded like a scream.
Once the audience finished giving Alicia an extended standing ovation, Lewis Gordon lived up to his reputation as ‘the closer’ with a keynote that executed a nuanced synthesis of the themes that had emerged over the conference. Lewis tied together issues of challenging legal violence, decolonising the curriculum and shifting the geography of reason whilst also transforming the stage into a makeshift drum-kit. His masterful musicianship and critique offered an embodiment of relationship between a political and philosophical commitment to ‘the funk’ and its musical manifestation.
Taking legal theory into a funky atmosphere
Ultimately, we spent a remarkable three days trying to extend Beckett’s embrace of the ‘mess’ of life towards a philosophical understanding of life’s ‘funk’. We took theory to school with the musicians, a move that appears curious in our age of fetishized disciplines. Modern European philosophy emerged interwoven with music, the Kantian imperative towards autonomous, universal human subjectivity finding expression through the overtures of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. (For further on the relationship between European classical music and philosophy, see Andrew Bowie, Music, Philosophy and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007))
Conversely, the African-American musical tradition, beginning from an understanding of modernity as catastrophe, would mutate these classical musical phrasings in the atmosphere of the jazz club. What would it mean to take legal theory into that funky atmosphere? To make law answerable to a tradition that responds to legalised structural violence with song; to enslavement with a call to ‘wade in the water’, to an unfair criminal justice system with a defiant cry that ‘we gon’ be alright’?
Our meeting was the beginnings of an exploration such questions. However, to begin with a ‘focus on the funk’ is to begin with failure and, in that sense, we met knowing that our collective ambitions had always, already failed. Yet in the embrace of that failure, we will persist in building our intellectual community, both inside and outside the academy. And we will try to fail better, each time we meet.
Birkbeck welcomed the British Society for the History of Mathematics (BSHM) to its campus on Saturday 21stMay, for a conference looking to trace the fascinating, and often surprising, history of number theory.
The event, ‘The History of Number Theory’ had been organised by BSHM with support from theDepartment of Economics, Mathematics and Statisticsand saw speakers trace a history stretching from antiquity to the 21stCentury, from thinkers such as Euclid to Fermat and Gang Tian.
Speaking after the event, Professor Sarah Hart said “It brought together a wide array of people; there were many students and academics, but also those with just an interest in the subject. Having such a diverse audience truly enriched the conversation.”
In the second iteration of what both Birkbeck and the Society anticipate to be a continuing annual fixture, the conference welcomed speakers eager to bring to life theories that have engaged mathematicians for centuries (and some, for millennia).
Almost 100 attendees arrived at Birkbeck for the conference, a place where Louis Joel Mordell, responsible for the Mordell Equation, took a lecturer post in 1913. Ben Fairbairn, Senior Lecturer in Mathematics at Birkbeck, discussed Mordell‘s impact, saying “Mordell’s time at Birkbeck saw him solve two conjectures posed by Srinivasa Ramanujan, the hugely influential Indian mathematician. Of the three conjectures posited in ‘On Arithmetical Functions’, Mordell solved two at Birkbeck, with the third only being closed as recently as 1974!”
The conference also saw Simon Singh discuss the making of his hugely successful ‘Fermat’s Last Theorem’ documentary, produced for the BBC’s Horizon series and chronicling the esteemed mathematician’s problematic last theorem. Those wishing to get a flavour of the event can still find the documentary onBBC iPlayer.
With the conference covering millennia of fierce debate around Number Theory, an anecdote shared on the day by Ben Fairbairn and about Louis Joel Mordell best summarises the human side of the field: “He travelled by a certain train which should have got him to Birkbeck in time. But frequently the train arrived late. He pointed out the discrepancy between promise and performance to the Railway Company, who said that they would do something about it. And so they did: they adjusted the advertised time of arrival and, in consequence, the train now always arrived as advertised, but always too late for him.”
This post was contributed by Birkbeck student, Anja Lanin. Anja attended Professor Hilary Downes’ lecture, ‘Lost Planetary Worlds’ during Birkbeck Science Week 2016.
Professor Hilary Downes has been a research scientist in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Birkbeck for 30 years. Insights from her own and other workers’ research have left her with a strong interest in the evolution of the Solar System. As it turns out, the orderly Solar System we observe today in fact started out as everything but quiet and orderly. In its early days it was a place of violent collisions between planetary bodies. Many of these have been almost completely lost. Almost! We have evidence of their existence, ranging from the macroscopic to the elemental, and this was the subject of Professor Downes’ enthusiastic talk ‘Lost Worlds of the Solar System.’
Theory: Computer models
Starting her talk by showing a real image of a planet-forming region around stars, as observed by telescope, as well as computer models which together may suggest the organised formation of planets within an accretionary disk, Professor Downes moved on to theoretical considerations of a very different-looking chaotic early Solar System.
Computer simulations of Jupiter’s growth, for example, indicate that many planetary embryos were sent onto wildly eccentric orbits. Other models show planets such as Jupiter and Saturn moving repeatedly closer and then away from the sun causing gravitational chaos in the inner Solar System before the system became more settled.
Evidence from our Solar System planets – shaken and stirred!
The audience were then presented with some very odd and interesting facts about our planets. For one thing, they do not orbit the sun in the original plane (the location of the previous accretionary disk) of the Solar System. Some seem to defy the laws of physics by floating above and some below. Furthermore, some of the planets’ axial tilts have gone ‘wonky.’
While Jupiter and Mercury spin textbook-style perpendicular to the plane, all other planets have been knocked around to the extreme that Uranus has been completely knocked over and is now spinning parallel to the plane. Venus is even more special – it is rotating in the opposite direction to all other planets! These characteristics, according to Professor Downes, strongly suggest violent collisions of the planets with other planetary material.
‘Tangible’ evidence: meteorites within meteorites
So what happened to the impactors? We can actually study collisional space debris which comes to us in the form of meteorites. For many of these meteorites the parent body, for example a planet or an asteroid, is known, but, as Professor Downes emphasises, there are many parentless ungrouped meteorites. Perhaps the most interesting of these are brecciated meteorites which contain fragments of other meteorites. What do we learn from these fragments?
Real science reveals real mysteries….
As indicated in the talk, planetary science students at Birkbeck are actively accessing technology (e.g. electron microprobe) that allows them to study the mineralogy and basic chemical make-up of meteorites. This is one way that allows them to determine whether or not meteoritic material comes from a classified or unclassified parent body.
Something that cannot be analysed at Birkbeck yet!, but also yields very important clues, are oxygen isotope ratios. Each known planetary body has a unique oxygen fingerprint, so that previously unregistered ratios hint at lost parent bodies. Professor Downes, relating to her own group’s research, points out a particularly interesting brecciated meteorite fragment, which, surprisingly, turned out to be granitic, i.e. it is mineralogically and texturally similar to granites found on Earth (some of us recognise the rock from kitchen counter tops!).
However! – its oxygen chemistry indicates that it comes neither from Earth nor is it related to the other meteoritic material in which it was included as a fragment. It is therefore not related to the asteroid from which the rest of the meteorite is derived. In addition, a strange associated glass is high in sulfur (S) and chlorine (Cl), and no planet in the Solar System except Mars contains sulfur and chlorine. But the oxygen chemistry again suggests it is not from Mars. Thus, this glass may represent another lost planetary body or planet possibly disintegrated during the early collisional chaos!
There are many examples of odd, unexplained finds in meteorites. Even opal, which we recognise as a semi-precious stone, has been found by Profesor Downes and her colleagues, although its extraterrestrial origin is still unclear. Perhaps a water or ice-rich meteorite crashed into an asteroid and all that is left of this ice or water world is this little piece of opal?
To conclude the session, Angell and Gooding will speak about contemporary amateur film, showcasing and analyzing vernacular film practice taken from Youtube, Vine and Instagram. Moving images are now an everyday mode of processing and preserving experience, and homemade films are now a critical tool in the constitution and cohesion of online communities who are geographically dispersed or otherwise isolated. Online spaces which traffic in moving images are frequently used to publicly document, present and define both political events and the private self, and also as a space of play.
Birkbeck welcomed the 
Almost 100 attendees arrived at Birkbeck for the conference, a place where Louis Joel Mordell, responsible for the Mordell Equation, took a lecturer post in 1913. 