Technecast

Jennifer Doveton is a postgraduate researcher in her second year at Brunel University. Her research is on middle-class subjectivity and moral value in British screen fantasy. At the moment she's looking at the Harry Potter film series and the His Dark Materials television series for markers of class in characterisation and narratives of upward mobility that reproduce neoliberal ideologies of individual aspiration. In this podcast Doveton takes a look at the role of the home in these portal fictions and how these spaces and places contribute to the interiority, class, individualism and ultimately the moral standing of their main characters. You can follow Jennifer on twitter here: @JDHDoveton and find her video essays on youtube under JDH Doveton: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqZMVlLA0y9FHBe4unzTbHwTechnecast:This episode is presented by Felix Clutson.The Technecast is funded by the Techne AHRC-DTP, and edited by Polly Hember, Julien Clin & Felix Clutson.Contact: technecaster@gmail.com / @technecast / @pollyhember / @ClinJulienRoyalty free music generously shared by Steve Oxen. FesliyanStudios.com

This is the second episode celebrating Beyond Human Symposium, which was organised by Rachel Holmes, Rachel Hopkin, Liz K. Miller, Jon Mason and Simon Aeppli. Beyond Human was a techne-funded symposium held at Royal Holloway, University of London on the 26th and 27th May 2022, with keynote speakers the writer and researcher, Gyrus, and the filmmaker and lecturer, Roz Mortimer.This episode features a conversation between Liz and Jon about the themes that the symposium engaged in, around landscape, the paranormal, and connecting with non-human or beyond human forms.More information about Beyond Human:www.facebook.com/BeyondHuman.Symposiumlizkmiller.wixsite.com/beyond-human*Liz K. Miller (b. 1983, Hexham) is an artist and researcher whose audio-visual practice spans diagramming, field recording, print and pigment making. She graduated from Edinburgh College of Art (BA), Camberwell College of Art (MA), and was a print fellow at the Royal Academy Schools (2013 to 2016). In 2018 she was awarded an AHRC Techné scholarship to undertake a practice-based PhD at the Royal College of Art. Her research considers how listening to the sounds made by trees can reconnect humans to the forest, and how the combination of audio and visual can be used to enhance that connection.Instagram: @liz_k_millerwww.lizkmiller.comwww.rca.ac.uk/students/liz-k-miller/Jon Mason is a professional storyteller with a longstanding focus on the folklore and history of place, and the role of myth in humanity’s understanding of life. He has a BA Hons in History with Archaeology from the University of Wales, Bangor, and an MA in Contemporary History from the University of Sussex. He is currently undertaking a Techne-funded PhD at the University of Brighton entitled “Re-storying the city: applying urban perspectives to eco-storytelling.”Twitter: @jonmaseFacebook: "Jon Mason Stories and Music"jonthestoryteller.com/research.brighton.ac.uk/en/persons/jon-mason*Image credit: Rachel HolmesThe Technecast: technecast.wixsite.com/listen/cfp / contact: technecaster@gmail.com / twitter: technecastThe Technecast is funded by the Techne AHRC-DTP, and edited by Julien Clin, Felix Clutson, Edwin Gilson & Polly Hember.Episode introduced and edited by Polly Hember / twitter: pollyhemberRoyalty free music generously shared by Steve Oxen. FesliyanStudios.com

This month we’re excited to celebrate the Beyond Human symposium, organised by Rachel Holmes, Rachel Hopkin, Liz K. Miller, Jon Mason and Simon Aeppli. Beyond Human was a techne-funded symposium held at Royal Holloway, University of London on the 26th and 27th May 2022.Leading us through the process of creating, organising and facilitating this symposium, Rachel Holmes and Rachel Hopkin reflect on how this project came together and offer their practical tips for organising events within academia. More information about Beyond Human: https://www.facebook.com/BeyondHuman.Symposiumhttps://lizkmiller.wixsite.com/beyond-human*Rachel Holmes is a Chinese/Irish artist, writer, and doctoral candidate, with research interests in “anthropology beyond the human”, ecstatic experience and anti-capitalist theory. She is influenced by forms of rejected knowledge including the occult as a feminist practice, dream theory, and animism. Her interests are informed by her academic background in philosophy, and practices with visual arts, performance and creative writing. Website here: https://linktr.ee/raholmesRachel Hopkin is a full-time TECHNĒ funded PhD in Screenwriting in the Media Arts Department at Royal Holloway. Her project explores screened representations of love between humans and robots within the context of the socio-ethical impact of Human Robot Interaction. Twitter: @rakishi*Image credit: Rachel HolmesThe Technecast:technecast.wixsite.com/listen/cfp / contact: technecaster@gmail.com / twitter: @technecastThe Technecast is funded by the Techne AHRC-DTP, and edited by Julien Clin, Felix Clutson, Edwin Gilson & Polly Hember.Episode introduced and edited by Polly Hember / twitter: @pollyhemberRoyalty free music generously shared by Steve Oxen. FesliyanStudios.com

Welcome back to the technecast! Today’s episode features a conversation between Beth Palmer, Robert Shaughnessy and Alicia Barnes reflecting on a series of seminars and workshops called ‘Imaginative Confrontations with Shakespeare: Truth, Reconciliation, Justice’. The series tackles questions such as how do we forgive the unforgivable, and who gets to say whether we should or not? They take one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays”, ‘Measure for Measure’ to think through these issues and how they intersect with our contemporary moment, exploring the literary and cultural canon in order to address the injustices that it has excused or obscured. In addition to Beth, Rob and Alicia’s fascinating conversation, you’ll hear scenes read from ‘Measure for Measure’ and a scene written in a workshop led by Chinoyerem Odimba. *Beth Palmer is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Surrey  and Director of Postgraduate Studies for the School of Literature and Languages. She has published widely on Victorian literature and culture and on the ways in which contemporary culture mediates the nineteenth century.Robert Shaughnessy is Professor of Theatre at the University of Surrey and Director of Research of Guildford School of Acting. He has published on Shakespeare and early modern drama on stage and screen, and his current work focuses on the intersections between Shakespeare, applied and socially engaged performance, and cultural diversity.Alicia Barnes is a PhD Candidate in English Literature, funded by the Doctoral College Studentship Award. Her current research focuses on nineteenth-century British Railway Literature and its intersections with Empire and national identity. During her MA in Nineteenth Century Studies at the University of Sheffield, Alicia was awarded the Horace Walpole prize for her research on the Gothic. She has presented at multiple conferences, including the International Student Byron Conference in Messolonghi, Greece, covering a range of topics that span the long nineteenth century. Alicia is also an organising member of SAHRG. Twitter: @aliciarbarnesMore info about Chinoyerem Odimba’s work: http://theagency.co.uk/the-clients/chino-odimba/ / Twitter: @Chino100percentMany thanks to the voice actors who took part in the recording for this episode: Mariana: Svea Brain Jangen / Insta: @sveabrainjangen / Twitter: @sveabrainjangen Isabella: Emily Prosser-Davies / Twitter: @emprosserdaviesJuliet: Rebecca Helen / Twitter: @rebeccahelenj / Insta: @rebeccahelenjDuke: Dr Darren Tunstall / Head of Theatre Studies at University of Surrey Barnardine: Aaron Hodgetts / Insta: @aaronhodgettsacting / Spotlight: https://www.spotlight.com/2254-6724-4453*The Technecast:technecast.wixsite.com/listen/cfp / contact: technecaster@gmail.com / twitter: @technecastThe Technecast is funded by the Techne AHRC-DTP, and edited by Julien Clin, Felix Clutson, Edwin Gilson & Polly Hember.Episode coordinated by Polly Hember / twitter: @pollyhemberRoyalty free music generously shared by Steve Oxen. FesliyanStudios.com

This second of two episodes produced by Outside/rs 2022, themed around Vision, Perception and Outside/rs looks gets stuck in the watery fenlands of the East Midlands, travels through time and speculates on queer futures.Can art, and particular use of media, be a speculative mode of engaging with utopian models of queer reproduction and community? In supernatural literature and folklore there are clear themes of coded queer relationships, identity and the manifestation of spectral beings. In Lincolnshire Fenland folklore, the Tiddy Mun, for example reclaim(ed) the land and waterways for displaced people, and can be interpreted as queer. James Chantry shares their creative practice, which involves video, sound, performance, drawing, animation and sculpture, each a mode of queer reproduction. Through this work they challenge gender expectations and inner colonialism, as well as propose theories of queer reproductive and social futurity.*Contributors: James Chantry (he/they) is an artist and PhD researcher at De Montfort University, Leicester, in Fine Art by practice. Their research explores the links between the supernatural and queer identity, in specific liminal geographic locations, such as the fens, marsh and edgelands. www.jameschantry.co.uk *Outside/rs 2022: https://outsiders2022.wordpress.com/outsiders2022@gmail.com@outsiders2022*The Technecast:technecast.wixsite.com/listen - technecaster@gmail.com - @technecastThe Technecast is funded by the Techne AHRC-DTP.Episode presented and edited by Joe Jukes. @jsdjukes Cover Image: Still, taken from Darklins, James Chantry, 2021.Royalty free music generously shared by Steve Oxen. FesliyanStudios.com

In the first of two guest episodes, curated by the Outside/rs 2022 conference, we’re exploring the unseen, emotional and sometimes smelly aspects of museum collection work. In recent years, an increasing number of institutions in the heritage sector have begun to recognise their significant role in including queer history and in battling the LGBTQ+ community’s invisibility. Historically, queer perspectives have been excluded from museum collecting and object interpretation. Acquired objects that are not explicitly connected to LGBTQ+ life have generally been read as ‘straight’, disregarding any queer significance they might hold. A single object, however, has the potential to tell a range of different stories. Every time an object is interpreted, an active choice is made about which one to tell. At the Science Museum, historic cataloguing practices have led to difficulties in finding queer stories – but this does not mean that they are not there. Unearthing them is a necessity for the museum’s mission to inspire futures and to engage audiences in STEM.*Contributors: Laura Büllesbach (she/her) and Dr. Rebecca Mellor (she/her) are Assistant Curators for the Science Museum Group’s One Collection project. Follow their work on Twitter @laurabullesbach and @rjimellor.Science Museum Group Collections Online: https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/*Outside/rs 2022: https://outsiders2022.wordpress.com/outsiders2022@gmail.com@outsiders2022*The Technecast:technecast.wixsite.com/listen - technecaster@gmail.com - @technecastThe Technecast is funded by the Techne AHRC-DTP.Episode presented and edited by Joe Jukes. @jsdjukes Cover Image: Object no. 1997-181/5 "Bag of blue 2 x 4 Lego bricks", The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum.Royalty free music generously shared by Steve Oxen. FesliyanStudios.com

Today we hear from Christina Heflin for the final episode on surrealism.Eileen Agar’s wearable sculpture, The Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse , has a peculiar story that has never been acknowledged by scholars. In each of its images – from either archives, catalogs, publications or film footage – the hat appears to be a different object. Did Agar make an entire series of these hats like the myriad series of objects she created over the years? It would appear so, but since neither the artists nor prior scholarship address this issue, it is hard to determine the truth. This paper aims to establish The Hat ’s narrative and to explain that the hat was a singular, evolving work of art rather than a series. This is not only for the sake of knowing the scope of Agar’s oeuvre , but also to understand the way this important British Surrealist artist worked. The images of The Hat have a range of dates spanning from the late 1930s to 1995, when it arrived in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s permanent collection following Agar’s death. The hat’s life, very much like that of the artist’s, changed and developed over time. I argue that even though this colorful inverted cork basket adorned with both natural and manmade décor features different elements in each photograph, it remains the same work of art. It thereby retains what is essential, what Benjamin calls its aura . Its identity and authority remain indelible despite these changes.Contributor bio:Christina Heflin recently completed her PhD at Royal Holloway University of London where she worked on Surrealism, materialism and marine life. Her thesis is titled Submerged Surrealism: Science in the Service of Subversion . She is currently a lecturer at Parsons Paris and is the author of the book chapter on “Surrealism in England” for the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Surrealism as well as the article “Jean Painlevé’s Surrealism, Marine Life & Non-Ocular Modes of Sensing” for the Cross-Cultural Studies Review (2020) and “Eileen Agar’s Science” for The Modernist Review (2019). You can find her on Twitter - @christy_heflin.Technecast: This episode is presented by Felix Clutson.The Technecast is funded by the Techne AHRC-DTP, and edited by Polly Hember, Julien Clin & Felix Clutson.Contact: technecaster@gmail.com / @technecast / @pollyhember / @ClinJulienRoyalty free music generously shared by Steve Oxen. FesliyanStudios.com

We start a new theme this episode with Shakespeare, presented by Dr Kate O'Leary. Surrealism and Shakespeare are rarely connected in contemporary discourse, despite André Breton’ s admiring references to the Bard and interest in his plays shown by Leonora Carrington and others. This is a pity, as they are more closely linked than is often suspected. Whether he likes it or not, Shakespeare is the god-father of Romanticism and Gothic, both of which were acknowledged by the Surrealists as ancestral to their own movement. Both Shakespeare and Surrealism lend themselves readily (and in the case of Surrealism, knowingly) to rich and fruitful dialogue with Freudian psychoanalytic theory. Moreover, across the world, people labouring under oppression or colonial rule, whether in Eastern Europe under Communism, or in the Third World under imperial governance, have drawn on Shakespeare and Surrealism as the most effective weapons in cultural resistance and liberation from the alienation and thought control oppressive regimes impose. Shakespeare and Surrealism both interrogate power, explore the depths of the human psyche, celebrate love and Eros, and pursue the wondrous and the uncanny, and both deploy Alchemy as a dynamic of transformation to attain the Marvellous. In this podcast I propose to discuss how Shakespeare, in his later plays, the so-called ‘Romances’ (of which The Tempest is the best known), uses Alchemy both as a symbolic language in the plays themselves, and to turn the theatre itself into an alembic to cast an Alchemical spell on the audience, creating for them a vision of the marvellous they can carry with them out of the theatre into the connecting vessel of the world out - side. As the Dadaist Hugo Ball put it, “ Only the theatre is capable of creating the new society ”. Dr Kate O’ Leary has a PhD in Shakespeare and John Donne and currently works at the University of Liverpool. She is a founder member of Surrealerpool Collage of Alchymical, Flâneurial and ‘ Pataphysical Studies (website: www.surrealerpool.online), and is a regular contributor to the Collage’s journal ‘Patastophe!David Rice is a lecturer and writer with a background in psychology. Like Kate, he currently works at the University of Liverpool, is a founder member of Surrealerpool and writes for 'Patastrophe!-----The Technecast:technecast.wixsite.com/listen/cfp - technecaster@gmail.com - @technecastThe Technecast is funded by the Techne AHRC-DTP, and edited by Polly Hember, Julien Clin & Felix Clutson.Episode presented by Felix ClutsonRoyalty free music generously shared by Steve Oxen. FesliyanStudios.com

We're delighted to be starting our March theme of Surrealism off with a talk by Daniela Georgieva on the writer and artist Leonora Carrington.A sophisticated game of table tennis in which Hummingbirds take the role of the ball, preparing a meal with vegetables that throw themselves into a cauldron filled with boiling water, a dinner table rich with wine, fruit, and caterpillars transforming into butterflies, a half-human, half-beast girl flying towards the moon with feathers shining like snow in the sun. These are a few of the fantastical scenes seen in the art and writing of Leonora Carrington. Outlandish and as charming as they are bizarre, Carrington’s characters are presented as myth and satire. The figures on her canvases come to life through comedy and tragedy, their entrance provokes eyebrow-raises and their departure leaves a bitter-sweet taste. Carrington’s art is deeply personal, often intertwining with her own life and experience and no such symbol displays this as Carrington’s animals. From a white stallion to a feral hyena, to animal-human hybrids, to understanding Carrington’s life and art one needs to look no further than the animals dancing across her canvases. Exploring the way they transform throughout the years and the different ways in which they are represented, while still carrying deep personal meaning, Carrington’s animals present the true soul behind the artist, sometimes even more so than her self-portraits. Daniela Georgieva is a PhD student at Royal Holloway University of London with a focus on Surrealism. She has obtained a Master’s Degree in Art History and a Bachelor’s in film. Her studies focus on the art and writing of Leonora Carrington, folklore, the fantastical, and the Occult. She is a painter herself and often applies her knowledge of painting and the arts to her research.The Technecast is funded by the Techne AHRC-DTP, and edited by Polly Hember, Julien Clin & Felix Clutson.Contact: technecaster@gmail.com / @technecast / @pollyhember / @ClinJulienRoyalty free music generously shared by Steve Oxen. FesliyanStudios.comImage: 'Self Portrait' by Leonora Carrington

“Where is home for you?” The question can be laden with hidden meanings and, often, with assumptions about identity. In this episode, writer and doctoral researcher Julien Clin reflects on place as a source of community. Dismantling both identity and the nation as imagined, probing the concepts’ discourse-theoretical limitations, giving up identity in favour of embraced alterity, Julien seeks to move from backward-looking nostalgia to Being in place. From a topological point of view fed by sense-affect, he attempts to reimagine the concept of roots as a rhizomatic engagement that, ultimately, makes and constantly remakes the Home.Julien Clin is working on a creative nonfiction book as a topo-poiesis of Heimat in the gentrifying, global city (specifically London). The accompanying critical research, which he undertakes with Techne-AHRC funding at Kingston University, focuses on ‘writing the home’. His first degree was a Magister Artium in American and Romance Philology from the University of Tübingen (Germany), with a dissertation on “The Art of Montage in John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer.” This explored the implicit political message conveyed by the technique and how it contributes to the representation of the city.After several years in broadcast journalism, during which Julien worked as a producer and foreign correspondent, he obtained a Master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford (Somerville College). He continues to be interested in long-form radio and travel writing, as well as urbanism more widely. He tweets very infrequently @ClinJulien.The Technecast is funded by the Techne AHRC-DTP, and edited by Polly Hember, Julien Clin & Felix Clutson.Contact: technecaster@gmail.com / @technecast / @pollyhember / @ClinJulien Royalty free music generously shared by Steve Oxen. FesliyanStudios.com