Futurism

Here is the running order for the final presentations on Friday, 12th December. If all goes to plan, we should be finished by 1pm, but later groups should be prepared to run beyond that time (and up to 3pm).

1. Elektronikus Palacsinta
2. Equality, Brotherhood and Simon Cowell
3. Marinetti’s Antipasti
4. Mechanical Mistake
5. Information Children’s of War
6. Simon Jones Performing Arts Society
7. Uomini Matti del Futuro
8. Syncroappolcoalypticifisation

Here are your performance groups, together with your chosen manifesto and any other themes you have told us you’re working on. Please do provide us with any updates, and share your information freely. If you haven’t already constructed a blog, you’re strongly advised to do so (and let us know where it is!).

Information Children’s of War

People: Alison Quinn, Helen Jones, Emily Turner,
Emily Budd, David Chapman, Bart Klimaszewski

Manifesto: Futurist Manifesto of Lust

Themes: War

Website: Information Children’s of War

Elektronikus Palacsinta

People: Matt East, Phil Perren, Krisztian Hofstadler,
Laszlo Kiss, Josie Merry, Barrie Manning

Manifesto: La Radia

Themes: EEG (Brainwave) sonification

Website: http://epalacsinta.wordpress.com/

Equality, Brotherhood and Simon Cowell

People: Ciaran Moriarty, Dan Firman, Alex Rodgers,
Karl Laeufer, Drew Piercey, Dafydd Westacott

Manifesto: Manifesto of Futurist Musicians

Themes: Challenge the stereotype; unmasking the incompetence of juries; the reign of the singer must end

Website: to be confirmed

Simon Jones Performing Arts Society

People: James Dingle, Hind Schubber,
Joanna Billingham, Simon Lowes, Colin Chipchase

Manifesto: The Futurist Cinema

Themes: Surveillance

Website: http://artmusicperformancegroup.blogspot.com/

Uomini Matti del Futuro

People: Joe Ward, Dan Buddle, Stevie Lewis,
Daisy Archer, Beau Pirie, Jacob Spencer

Manifesto: Futurist Manifesto of Lust

Themes:

1. The victor always turns to rape in the conquered land!
2. Sentiment is a creature of fashion, lust is eternal!
3. Physical modesty, has only the value of social virtue!
4. We must stop despising desire!

Website: http://delfuturo.edublogs.org/

Marinetti’s Antipasti

People: Tim Woods, Elena Fitiou, Kimberley Townsend,
Luxy Cunningham, Will Olney, Sam Gorniot

Manifesto: Futurist Manifesto of Cooking

Themes: Obesity

Website: http://marinettisantipasti.blogspot.com

Syncroappolcoalypticifisation

People: Selina Collins, Georgie Smit, Alistair Bunclark,
Adam McSweeney, Louise Turner

Manifesto: Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature

Themes: Religion versus Science; Large Hadron Collider;
Creation and the Big Bang

Website: to be confirmed

Mechanical Mistake

People: Adara Kabara, Ben Anderson, Emma Rossiter,
David Quilty, Jonathan Kay, Richard Carrigan

Manifesto: Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe

Themes: Artificial Intelligence, Errors in the Machine

Website: to be confirmed

Well done to everyone for Friday’s class on Sound Poetry. The group sound poems were great! Fun, detailed and impressive work.

As next week’s class explores contemporary manifestations of Futurism, you might like to explore the work of the experimental poet, Christian Bök (pronounced ‘book’). His book, Eunoia (meaning ‘beautiful thought’), in which each chapter uses only one vowel, was recently featured on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. You can hear Bök talking about his book here, and a further information page here. Ubuweb has recordings of the complete book, together with other examples of Bök’s work (including a version of Schwitter’s Ursonate as if read by Marinetti!). The book can also be viewed online at the publisher’s web site here.

If you’re getting a little confused about the sequence of events at the beginning of the twentieth century, you might find this chronology of the avant garde, produced by the British Library, useful.

• Chronology of the European Avant Garde, 1900-1937
  

All a bit out of date now (but I suppose the Futurists are as well), the Futurist Programmers published the Manifesto of Futurist Programmers in 1991, together with additional Futurist Programming Notes. You can decide whether this might be useful to your work…

Well done to everyone for last Friday’s class, and for coming up with interesting sonic snippets in such a short space of time. As we generate more material over the coming weeks, it’d be good to post examples of work on this site, so could the people in charge of recording last week send me (compressed) versions of their group’s work, please?

• Tim, Adam, Alister, Luxy, Elena, Georgie, Louise, Sam and Selina

Tim’s Group

• Alison, Emily, Dan, Emily, Helen, Ben, Joe, Richard, Ciaran

Alison’s Group

• László, Kim, Jose, Josie, Krisztián

Krisztián’s Group

• Barrie, Karl, Daffyd

Barrie’s Group

• Bart,Jake, Diasy and Co,

Bart’s Group

One more from the Estorick! On Saturday 1st November, at 3pm, Przemyslaw Strozek, of the Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences, will be giving a talk titled: ‘Italian Futurist Photography: From Bragaglia´s fotodinamismo futurista to adopting the technique of photomontage‘.

As previously reported, the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, in Islington, is currently mounting an exhibition of European Photomontage 1920-1945, which features works by Cubist, Futurist and Dadaist artists. The exhibition runs until 21 December, 2008, and would be well worth a visit.

Whilst it runs after this module has finished, the Estorick’s exhibition, Futurism 100! is also worth noting. Expect this to be the first of several events celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of Futurism during 2009.

Futurismo
20 February – 24 May, 2009
Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome

To mark the 100th anniversary of the Manifesto – published by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in Paris daily Le Figaro on 20 February 1909 – the Scuderie del Quirinale, in conjunction with the Musée National d’Art Moderne / Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and with the Tate Modern in London, is planning to devote a major exhibition to Futurism to celebrate the movement’s historical and international role. The exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale will be bringing together a remarkable number of works from the early Futurist period, weaving a path around a central core consisting of a careful and accurate reconstruction of the famous Futurist exhibition held at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris in February 1912. That spectacular exhibition caused quite a stir in its day, particularly on account of the striking contrast between the works on display there and everything else going on in the art world at the time. Indeed, it was only a matter of time before the notions of ‘speed’ and ‘dynamism’ spread to other countries and other continents, helping to reformulate the vocabulary of art and pegging it to a resolutely modern vision.

The Scuderie exhibition will also be shining the spotlight on the extraordinary cultural ties and the close formal relationship between Cubism and Futurism, with a wide selection of Cubist paintings bearing witness to the complex game of similarities and differences between the two artistic movements, right up to and including their formal cross-contamination and the development of Russian Cubo-Futurism and British Vorticism.

The coordinator for the Italian exhibition is Ester Coen, while Didier Ottinger will be coordinating the exhibition in Paris (October 2008 – January 2009) and Matthew Gale will be coordinating the event in London (June – September 2009). This unprecedented example of close cooperation among cultural institutes of such immense prestige and tradition is designed to underscore the thoroughly European cultural importance of this celebration. The Scuderie del Quirinale exhibition will be opened by the President of the Republic on 20 February 2009, thus marking in appropriately grand style the anniversary of the Futurist Manifesto 100 years after its first publication.