Former SOAS tutor Matti Pohjonen has just finished developing a short film set in one of India’s most enigmatic cities.

THURSDAY CLUB OPEN CALL ** THURSDAY CLUB OPEN CALL ** THURSDAY CLUB
OPEN CALL FOR PROJECTS & PROPOSALS

The Thursday Club is an open forum discussion group for anyone interested in the theories and practices of cross-disciplinarity, interactivity, technologies and philosophies of the state-of-the-art in today’s (and tomorrow’s) cultural landscape(s). The Club is supported by the Goldsmiths Digital Studios (GDS) and the Goldsmiths Graduate School.

In 2006, the Paris-based cooperative Société Réaliste has launched Transitioners, a trend design agency, specialized in political transitions. Transposing the principles of prospective design, generally used by professionals in the field of fashion, to the field of politics, the project questions the revolution (transition?) as a central category for contemporary Western society. How can a “democratic transition” be produced? What is the role of design in the permanent conversion of political flux into mythology? How can the effect of an event on citizens be transformed into a controlled affect?

A friend of mine Edwin Mak has just recently launched a Unspoken: a Journal for contemplative cinema. Some of you might know Ed from some of the discussions we had in our reading group where we had a two-hour dialogue of how to understand Deleuze, Badiou and the complexities of the philosophy of the object, set theory and so on. Or something like that. In any case, Ed is doing really interesting work for those cinephiles out there so do have a look. Their online journal is described the following way:

I’m adding some of the photos here taken from the G20 protests. The FLICKR gallery will be updated as soon as I get some more done – these are now the first experiments done today to be thrown into the Carousel! mix. A theoretico-visual style I am developing that eventually (when there is time) I shall develop into a series of mixed media paintings. One day, I shall hopefully also write a more thought-out piece on what goes on behind the screen to get these photos (or mixules as I call them) done. But until then, enjoy! And as always, comments / criticism / songs of praise welcome (the FLICKR gallery can be seen full screen for better viewing).

.. and i realise that initially i did not… i have trained myself to expect a message soon after it starts moving and like the monkeys in the experiments, it makes me feel happy when it moves… read on !

I recently attended a charity dance show organised by Queen Mary’s – one of the universities of London. I have been too many similar shows during my time as an undergraduate at King’s College London. However, this has been the first time I have seen traditional Kathak being performed to beat boxing. I am so used to seeing “western” dance moves being choreographed to Indian (Hindi) music; this may be due in part to the fact that lyrics incorporating English are becoming frequently used in both Bollywood songs and commercial released songs. So to see the reverse was a bit if a shock!

So due to popular request, I embedded Twitter to the site for people to experiment and play around with. Some people may wonder, what the hell is the point in sending 160 character messages? Is that not a complete waste of time? ! Perhaps. However, what is interesting about Twitter – that is, if you want to seriously study contemporary digital media – is that it has now pretty much replaced blogs as the new lovechild of the tech-savvy media practitioners.

So why might this be relevant to us mortals trying to spin our head around the carousel that is global media today? Well, for one, Twitter was the the most commented on and analyzed mode of communication during the two recent crises that the global media covered extensively: the attack on Mumbai, India, last year and the more recent attack on Gaza. BBC, Al-Jazeera and other major news organizations extensively relied on Twitter for up-to-date information about what is going.

Tweet
So its official now: I am currently working on a book for Routledge India with my collaborators Soumyadeep Paul and Angad Chowdhry.  We will write a chapter about some of the more experimental work we …