[ecrea] Space/Place/Culture seminar, Manchester Met, Thurs 12 Dec. 2013

Space/Place/Culture Public Seminar #2. All welcome.

Thursday 12th December, 5.15pm-7.00pm (approx end time)
Room 315, MMU Business School, All Saints Campus (access via the North 
Atrium lifts/stairs)
Dr Tracey Potts, Department of Culture, Film and Media, The University 
of Nottingham
'The Matter Work of the Heidelberg Project'
Taking a lead from Alan Liu's exploration of the status of critical 
creativity in the post-industrial, information age, this paper will 
comprise a tour of Tyree Guyson's Heidelberg Project in Detroit. With 
its particular treatment of materials, artefacts, space and place not to 
mention its sustained engagement with the materiality of redundancy, 
Heidelberg offers, I will argue, a compelling example of what Liu 
determines as 'strong art', i.e. art that is capable of presenting 
steadfast resistance in the era of 'advanced creative destruction'. 
Above all, by making an explicit connection between people and things, 
the various assemblages of the Project can be seen to stand as material 
witnesses to the enforced obsolescence that forms the wake of capitalist 
dreams of progress and innovation.

About the Space/Place/Culture Public Seminar Programme:
The 'spatial turn' has opened up dynamic synergies -- and occasional 
tensions - between the work of cultural geographers and researchers 
working in a range of fields across the humanities. As Douglas 
Richardson explains, 'ideas, terminology, and concepts such as space, 
place, scale, landscape, geography, and mapping' now permeate 
interdisciplinary academic research as 'conceptual frameworks, 
methodologies, and core metaphors'. Saliently, Richardson -- Executive 
Director of the Association of American Geographers - also points out 
that such tropes have become increasingly prominent within public life 
as evidenced, in this country, by a collective preoccupation with 
edgelands, psychogeography, liminal spaces, cultural cartography and so 
on. Moreover, the proliferation of digital geographical technologies -- 
including Sat Navs and Google Earth - has revolutionised the practice of 
everyday life. Researchers at MMU have recognised the shared emphasis on 
geographic themes as a focus for both internal cross-disciplinary 
collaboration and as a means to engage wider publics with academic 
research; the Space/Place/Culture Public Seminar Programme is a forum 
where such research can be discussed, and is open to anyone.

Next seminar:

Thursday 16th January - Simon Faulkner (Art History, MMU)
The politics of here and there: Visual representations of spatial 
difference in Israel/Palestine

For further enquiries: (g.macdonald /at/ mmu.ac.uk) <mailto:(g.macdonald /at/ mmu.ac.uk)>
Travel info and a map of All Saints Campus: 
http://www2.mmu.ac.uk/travel/allsaints/

--
Dr Gavin MacDonald | Senior Lecturer, New Media Theory | BA (Hons) Film 
& Media Studies  | Manchester School of Art | Manchester Metropolitan 
University | Chatham Building | Cavendish St. | M15 6BR
0161 247 1258

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