Memefest/Swinburne International Symposium/ Workshops Intervention 21-28 November, 2016 Swinburne University

 

 

15.11. UPDATE: SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM PUBLISHED BELLOW

 

We are highly excited to announce that from November 21st to November 28th , Memefest will again hold our international extradisciplinary symposium, workshops and interventions, at Swinburne University, Melbourne.

Our aim is to connect students, academics and members of the community with refugee and asylum seeker networks and Aboriginal networks in order to research, learn and create socially transformative public interventions.

This year our focus is PLEASURE and, in particular, the three key pleasure matrixes through which we experience the world – hospitality/food, drugs and media. We are interested in processes where pleasure meets with conflict and especially in the ways that we can experience pleasure in our everyday lives, which can contribute to radical transformations towards social justice in terms of how we experience and act in the world. How can pleasure transform the way we live, laugh, listen, eat, create, think, imagine, dream, play, work and relate to each other?

We will host an incredibly exciting mix of people and work on beautiful things that matter. 

If you want to contact us with any questions or suggestions, if you want to participate write to us:

Lisa Gye lgye@swin.edu.au

Dr Oliver Vodeb oliver@memefest.org or ovodeb@swin.edu.au

 

Check here out 2014 event: http://tinyurl.com/jbsf8nr

 

REGISTER FOR THE EVENT HERE>

See the list of abstracts HERE>

 

LOCATION:

AD108

Swinburne University of Technology

Burwood Road

Hawthorn, Victoria 3122

 

Symposium Program:

FIRST DAY 21.11

Entree

12.30 Registration and Welcome to country

Welcome by Prof. Glen Bates

Oliver Vodeb welcome and excursion on what will we do

Lisa Gye on Abu Ward

Darren Tofts on Pleasure

Oliver Vodeb Memefest Pleasure outlines and putting things into perspective

Introduction of Participants

Short Break

 

  MAIN

 

2.30 George Petelin: Problems of Pleasure In Neoliberal Society

3.15 Vida V. Voncina: Soaking my feet in the stories of resistance: Pleasure, Language and Body in political becoming

4.00 Andrew Garton: Hospitality, the new world and cine-ethnography

4.45 Andrew Peters and Josie Arnold: Pleasure as Being

 

SECOND DAY 22.11

9.30 Lisa Gye: Avant-gardening and horticountercultural politics: how the pleasures of gardening can lead to social transformation

10.15 Andrew Gunstone: The Pleasure of Reconciliation

11.00 Break

11.30 Jafri Katagar: STOP RACISM NOW!

12.15 Linda Briskman: Reframing refugee: Perpetual victim or pleasure seeker

1.00 Lunch

1.45 Nina Kelabora: The Butterfly Effect

2.30 The Memefest/Swinburne award for Imaginative Critical Intervention awardees and special recomendation:

2.30 Janneke de Rooij: Propaganda by the People

3.15 Laura Ballantyne-Brodie: Pleasure, pain and dispossession (in the anthropocene)

4.00 Lea Piskiewicz: What Happened Today?

4.45. Alan Hill and Kelly Husey-Smith: Aura

5.30 Break

5.45 Jason Bainbridge: Satisfaction Deferred: The Pleasure of Television

 

THIRD DAY 23.11.

9.30 Darren Tofts: The pleasure of the Teste (with apologies to Roland Barthes)

10.15 Jasa Gabrian: When the laughs go out

11.00 Break

11.30 Kristy Lee Horswood: Plaisir to Pleasure; the manipulation of society through language.

12.15 Roderick Grant: Food and Communication Design: Teaching Hospitality

13.00 Lunch

13.45 Scott Townsend: Social Pleasure and Design and Social Innovation: Community Work in Greece 2015-2017

2.30 Kevin Lo: The Propaganda of Pantone: Colour and Subcultural Sublimation

3.15 Sam Burch: Traditional Ecstacies vs the Commodification of Pleasure

4.00 Steven Thorpe: My journey with food as an Aboriginal man

4.45 Oliver Vodeb: Pleasure Praxis

 

18.00 Evening at the Hawthorn Hotel

481 Burwood Rd
Hawthorn VIC 3122

 

24.- 28.11. Workshops (Starting at 9.30 on Thursday 24.11.)

 

MEMEFEST 2016 OUTLINES: PLEASURE

 

Pleasure is central to our lives and communication/design and art play a major role in our relationship to it. Pleasure is an episodic phenomenon. As we all learn early on it does never really last for very long, therefore we are constantly seeking for ways to get it.

While pleasure can be used to live life fully, as well as to render people into tools it seems we rarely think of it outside its immediate effects and certainly we think even less of pleasure as social practice and something we could relate to the world in transformative ways that challenge the status quo.

Memefest 2016 is interested in pleasure in what we see as its fundamental qualities.

Pleasure is designed through visual communication/media and technology and channels into our aspirations and lifestyles. Aren’t we supposed to have pleasure all the time and does not the promise of success in life promise us a life full of pleasure?  We can chose to do this, but in order to be successful we have to follow written and unwritten rules- but who makes the rules and who are the rules benefiting?

As a human experience pleasure can be an illness or a cure and many times it can be both at the same time. It can bring people together, connect them and decrease human suffering. But it can also set them apart and cause harm.

Pleasure is connected with substances- anything from food to drugs, anything we take into our bodies to experience pleasure. If you think of it- in this way we experience pleasure many times a day. But how does this make us relate to the world?

We are interested in processes where pleasure meets with conflict and especially in ways we can experience pleasure in our everyday life, which can contribute to its radical transformation towards social justice. How can pleasure transform the way we live, laugh, listen, eat, create, think, imagine, dream, work, play and relate to each other?

But let us explain more.

 

THE PLEASURE OF MEDIA

 

A spectacle is a social relation mediated by the image. But exposure through social media brings pleasure- it can make us feel good. And as pleasure never really lasts for long, we tend to look for ways to enhance it: not only more exposure of ourselves, but more exposure of ourselves through pleasurable content where pleasure becomes image. Pleasure connects with other pleasure: food selfies for example are some of the most popular images on the Internet. Because of pleasure they have very strong communicative potential.  What else can pleasure media be used for? Can pleasure media become a medium for social change?

 

THE PLEASURE OF HOSPITALITY (and being human)

 

Currently Millions of refugees are trying to save their lives and find a better future risking their lives on their way. Families, children without parents are traveling alone and under extremely dangerous conditions, people leaving behind everything they had.

In Slovenia, a small county in the heart of Europe, 24 high school teachers have recently signed a protest letter against six refugees from Syria – aged 10-14-who lost their parents and were fleeing a brutal war zone. The refugees have being offered accommodation in the high school dormitory, but educators were against it.  The majority of parents of the Slovenian kids attending the high school signed the letter too.  The pleasure of giving hospitality was abandoned for the pleasure of submitting to fear.

The French TV program, Zone Interdite showed a documentary where refugees from Afghanistan on their two year long way to Europe described Paris as a warm place, where helicopters were spraying perfume all over the city.

What can we do?

The German project Refugees Welcome is a network of people offering home to refugees. In exchange homeowners experience the pleasure of sharing and learn about another culture through new human relations in their every day life.

German artist Thomas Kilpper’s, “Lighthouse for Lampedusa,” was created to provide essential orientation at sea and help to navigate refugee boats into safety when approaching this south Italian Island. It should house a museum and cultural center, the only one on the island. The Lighthouse is conceived as a tower and a landmark building, capable of hosting a diverse and trans-national programs of communication, negotiation, exhibitions, concerts and other cultural events on its ground floor. It would serve as a place that attracts not only new visitors to the island but also local people—making Lampedusa not just a location to talk about, but also a place to learn from and listen to the ideas of others. The tower was partially composed with stranded migrant rubber boats from Lampedusa.

 

 

THE PLEASURE OF DRUGS

 

In February 2016 Australia experienced an incredible drug bust: 1.2 BN worth of liquid methamphetamine, used to produce ICE/Crystal Meth found in silicon bra inserts and art supplies.

 

 

Such a huge find of such a harmful drug? Each human is a product of her time. In the end ICE is known to make people fearless. Is it a coincidence that the word “anxiety” and “anxiety symptoms” is searched for on Google mostly by Australians? 

What is the reaction on the mayor ICE bust? We have seen many calls for more control, but we haven’t heard anyone asking what are the reasons of anxiety in times of radical uncertainty in a capitalist society.

Drugs as pleasure have always played a fundamental part of our lives. Some drugs are prohibited, some are made legal and with it pleasure is regulated. This does not mean that the prohibition is successful; the war on drugs has failed a long time ago, because it renders pleasure into a tool of capitalist dominance. Capitalisms business models are based on addiction. New clothes, new technology, permanently new and innovative strategies in institutions, new cars, new mobile phones new this and that, are what we can see everyday. And our addictions rising- just think of our addiction from screens and social media and the internet- the perfect complementary drug to the pharmaceuticals- the legal drug of choice- creating an atmosphere, but never demanding, or even destroying – focus or attention.  While “expanding horizons”,  “exploring consciousness” and "hedonism" used to be a quality of drugs, pharmaceuticals are correctives, ironing out inappropriate behavior. No wonder the drugged masses like to do the “right thing”. Little pleasure the pharmaceuticals give us, we must add as well.

 

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Many times people who change the world for the better would never think of themselves as activists. They live a life of love, solidarity, friendship …and pleasure and change things through their practice of everyday life. Many times, people who “are doing good” seem to achieve the opposite. And many times it’s even hard to say how much good and how much harm we are doing, all at once, stuck in contradictory positions. Pleasure can teach us a lot about these relations.

 

We are interested in processes where pleasure meets with conflict and especially in ways we can experience pleasure in our everyday life, which can contribute to its radical transformation. How can pleasure transform the way we live, laugh, listen, eat, create, think, imagine, dream, work, play and relate to each other?