Hosting 7: Presence - Manifesting Ghosts

GHost invites you to join us for:

Hostings 7: Presence – Manifesting Ghosts
 March 14th 6.30pm – 9.00pm
FREE

Still from Last Chance for a Slow Dance by Hollington & Kyprianou, 2007

An evening of interdisciplinary talks and presentations exploring the desire to materialise what is absent.

Venue: The Court Room, First Floor, Senate House South Block, University of London

(An apparition known as 'The Blue Lady' has been reported to haunt the adjoining Senate room)

Hollington & Kyprianou, “Technology & the Uncanny”

Jack Hunter, “Expressions of Spirithood”

John Sabol, “The Forgotten Soldier: Manifestations of the Continuing Presence of Colonel William Holmes (1862-2011)”

This is a free event but places are limited so please email: ghost.hostings@gmail.com to reserve your seats


And don't forget to also reserve seats for Hostings 6: Absence - Haunted Landscapes on February 29th. With Sharon Kivland, Mark Fisher and Andy Sharp, Laura Joyce and Hayley Lock.

Hostings 7 Programme

Hollington & Kyprianou -Technology & the Uncanny

Far from empirical science and technological progress dampening the enthusiasm for magical or spiritual readings, the use and improvement of technology trades on the same sense of awe and the uncanny previously provided by mystical phenomena. The symbiotic relationship between technology and the uncanny is not only one of a shared notion of the sublime, but also one of appropriation.

This paper will discuss the relationship between technology and the uncanny through historical and contemporary examples as well as referencing our own collaborative artist practice.

Hollington and Kyprianou are London based artists who have been collaborating for over ten years.

 Their work investigates how competing representations of science and politics shape the boundaries of debate and the locus of the rational. Their materials are drawn from archives of primary objects, scenarios from film and mainstream culture, oral history, interviews and hearsay to create new narrative spaces that are simultaneously funny and un-nerving. Their work as been shown widely in the UK including Tate Modern and ICA London and internationally at The 51st Venice Biennale, as well as in Europe, North and South America and Australia.

 Their latest project, a time travel murder mystery can be seen here:

http://www.electronicsunset.org/node/1813

Jack Hunter - Expressions of Spirithood

The body is the primary tool for the expression of personality. It is our interface with the physical world and our everyday means of communicating with each other, both verbally and non-verbally. The way in which we use our bodies, therefore, is of key importance to the way we are perceived as individual personalities. In trance mediumship, and spirit possession, practices the human body is used for the expression of multiple personalities and non-physical entities. This paper will explore the differing ways in which the human body is utilised as a means for the expression of spirits in a variety of different cultural contexts, from the ecstatic dancing of Afro-Brazilian Candomble mediums to the relatively static demonstrations of Euro-American trance mediums. It will explore the different methods employed by mediums to signify the presence of spirits and will examine the role of performance in making the spirit world tangible. These techniques will be contrasted with the methods of contemporary ghost hunters (i.e. the use of electronic equipment to infer the presence of spirits), and will address the similarities and differences in the ways in which the presence of spirits is recognised during trance demonstrations and modern ghost hunts. All of this will be presented with the aim of furthering our understanding of the nature of spirits and their culturally specified modes of expression in the physical world.

Jack Hunter is a PhD student in Social Anthropology at the University of Bristol, UK. His research looks at contemporary trance mediumship in Bristol, and focusses on themes of personhood, personality, altered states of consciousness and anomalous experience. He is the founder and editor of "Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal.” In 2010 he received the Eileen J. Garrett scholarship from the Parapsychology Foundation, and in 2011 was awarded the Gertrude Schmeidler award by the Parapsychological Association.

http://paranthropology.weebly.com/index.html

John Sabol - The Forgotten Soldier: Manifestations of the Continuing Presence of Colonel William Holmes (1862-2011)

What occurs at a location perceived to be haunted, who continues to manifest years, even centuries, after physical death and why? Avery Gordon, in her book Ghostly Matters (1996), states that the ghost is a social figure, and one who manifests as one form by which something lost or forgotten makes itself known. A haunting, according to Gordon, is a very particular way of knowing what has happened and what continues.. So much has already been lost, forgotten or destroyed in the accelerated pace of contemporary life and technological advancement. Yet, it is this same technology that may write that forgotten history and tell, with voices echoing from the past, individual ghost stories.

At the battle of Antietam, September 17, 1862, the single bloodiest day of combat in American History, Colonel William Holmes of the 2nd Georgia became the last soldier to die in combat at Burnside Bridge. He has become lost to history, his memory forgotten. His burial site near the bridge remained undiscovered until our “ghost excavations” there in 2010/2011. Through contextual scenarios, enacted by our female investigators and RT-EVP audio recordings, the postscript to his death emerges. This becomes not another ghost story, but rather auditory manifestations of a plea to “go home” to Georgia and be properly buried. His voiced responses, on numerous occasions, still haunts us today, 150 years after his remains were lost to history.

John Sabol is an archaeologist, cultural anthropologist, actor, and “ghost excavator”. He has a M.A. in Anthropology/archaeology (University of Tennessee), and a B.A. in Sociology/Anthropology (Bloomsburg University). As an archaeologist, he has worked on excavations and site surveys in England, Mexico, and at various sites in the United States. His anthropological fieldwork includes the studies of “ghosts” and native religious beliefs in the afterlife among various groups in Mexico . His acting career includes “ghosting” performances of various characters and scenarios in more than 35 movies, TV shows, and documentaries. He has conducted “ghost excavations” (an archaeological-ethnographic-theatrical approach embodied in the P.O.P. Theory) in the USA and Europe. He has appeared in the A&E TV series, Paranormal State as an investigative consultant. He has published 13 books including: Ghost Excavator (2007), Ghost Culture (2007), Digging Up Ghosts (2011), and the Haunted Theatre (2011).

www.ghostexcavation.com

Call for papers/ presentations/ performance: Hostings 6 & 7

Hosting 6: “Absence –  Haunted Landscapes”

Hosting 7: “Presence – Manifesting Ghosts”  

We invite proposals for papers, presentations, or performances of 30 minutes exploring the desire and attempt to materialise what is absent via the medium of haunted landscapes or through the manifestation of a ghost. We would like to hear from researchers within the fields of anthropology, art history, cultural studies, film studies, history, law, literary studies, parapsychology, psychology, philosophy etc. as well as practising artists.

The Hostings will take place in the Court Room, University of London, Senate House between 6.30 – 9.00pm on the 29th February and 14th March.

Please send a (working) title and an abstract of approximately 300 words. lnclude which Hosting you are submitting to and, if applicable, one or two pictures. 

Send these to Sarah Sparkes at: ghost.hostings@gmail.com 

Deadline for submissions of proposals: 13th January 2012

Hostings 6:  Absence – Haunted Landscapes  

The Key Of Solomon, a medieval grimoire instructs magicians to seek out “places that lie concealed, distant and removed from the haunts of men. Wherefore desolate and uninhabited regions are most appropriate, such as the borders of lakes, forests, dark and obscure places, old and deserted houses, whither rarely and scarce ever men do come, mountains, caves, caverns, grottos, gardens, orchards...”

Could it be that this instruction suggests a common topography of the haunted landscape that such venues operate as amplifiers for achieving rapport with the dead? Perhaps it is the absence of life and the nature of our own loneliness that in fact haunts the landscape? Are places of tragedy imbued with spirits of their victims or is this just a romantic engagement, an imaginative association with a past event?   Is it possible to use a particular landscapes to facilitate the experience of paranormal phenomena – in this respect can landscape serve like the séance room for the natural channelling of the spirit of place, or the dead souls of its past? Moreover, have artists and writers intuitively apprehended these landscapes to manifest a haunted aesthetic?

GHost invites submissions exploring these or other ideas associated with the Haunted Landscape.

Hostings 7:  Presence – Manifesting Ghosts

 

“Ghost Seance has the potential to summon spirits at any given location and time although 3:00 a.m. usually produces the best results.” (Taken from a website advertising a séance app. for smart phones)

Writers, psychical investigators, mediums, parapsychologists, illusionists, artists all have manifested ghosts in their own way. The writers mind conjures up ghostly apparitions, pinning down their fleeting forms with words. In the darkened séance room both psychical investigator and audience witness phenomena produced by the medium. Whether witnessed by believer or sceptic, the spirit announces itself, with a common ghostly language: wraps, moving furniture, unexplained scents, temperature changes, phosphorescent lights etc. In more recent times visual and auditory ephemera has been described and captured by paranormal investigators, with the help of technological devices.  This new language of the ghostly reappears in the haunted aesthetics of films such as Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape  and in the work of contemporary artists such as Susan Hiller. When attempting to document ghosts, is it us or the ghosts who are controlling the means by which we describe and measure their presence?

GHost invites submissions exploring ghost-makers:  their means , methods and their reasons for manifesting ghosts.

 About GHost

 GHost is a visual arts and creative research project which explores the various roles ghosts play in contemporary culture by bringing artists, writers, curators, researchers and others together. In homage to Duchamp’s wordplay “A guest + a host = a ghost”, we take on and explore the various roles of ghosts, guests and hosts in our activities. The project has been running since 2008 and we have organised exhibitions, performance nights and so-called Hostings, seminar-style workshops which serve as a forum for exchange between thinkers and makers, audience and practitioners.  As a research project, GHost blurs the boundaries between the diverse research groups and audiences that exist for the paranormal and hosts events in which these groups can explore their various beliefs.  As a visual arts project, GHost explores the illusionary power of art and artists to create what could be seen as a ‘haunted aesthetic’. Visual art exhibitions have been hosted by a John Soane church in East London, at the London Art Fair and the Folkestone Triennial Fringe while the Hostings have been held at Senate House, University of London.

 GHost has been organising Hostings in association with the IGRS, School of Advanced Study, University of London since 2009.