3PM
Vic Bar
This seminar jointly taught by Professor Carl Lavery and Dr Tim Barker from the School of Culture and Creative Arts at the University of Glasgow will explore what they call the ‘toxic performative’ in contemporary performance and installation practices. The aim is to investigate and evaluate the ways in which cultural work today can resist the pollution of the world that the French thinker Michel Serres draws attention to in his book Malfeasance. For Serres, pollution is double, something that is both ‘hard’ (the poisoning of lands and bodies) and ‘soft’ (the excessive proliferation of ads, posters, images, sounds, texts, phone calls, etc). As such, it is not enough to argue, simply, for environmental justice; rather, pollution in the aesthetic sphere must also be tackled. But how do we do this? And what are the consequences for ethics, politics and subjectivity? How for instance, can we work against toxicity without returning to the immunity that normative and reactionary models of identity so often fall back on? The seminar will run for two hours and participants are encouraged to interrupt at any time and/or they feel the need. The onus, in other words, is on dialogue and feedback. There will be readings, broadcasts, and showings as catalysts for thinking together.

Timothy Barker is Senior Lecturer in Digital Media in the School of Culture and Creative Arts, University of Glasgow. His research expertise is in media philosophy, focussing on questions of time and media, new media art and eco-media. He is the author of two books, Time and the Digital (Dartmouth Press, 2012) and Against Transmission (Bloomsbury, forthcoming), along with a number of essay on media philosophy, the most recent being ‘Media Ecology in Michel Serres Philosophy of Communication’ (Techné) and ‘Unearthing Techno-Ecology’ (Digital Culture and Society).

Carl Lavery is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Glasgow. His recent publications include Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd: Ecology, Environment and the Greening of the Modern Stage (2015), a special edition of Performance Research on ‘Ruins and Ruination’ (2015), and a special edition of the journal Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism ‘What Can Theatre Do? (2016). In addition to these, he has published numerous other books and articles on contemporary theatre and performance, and works creatively as an artistic researcher and writer.