21 February, 12 - 7pm

The over-arching theme of our artistic programme during 2015 is The Multiverse; a theory that proposes the potential for a set of multiple universes.

This event was broadcast live on thisistomorrow at thisistomorrow.info/broadcasts. Click on the video above to watch the recording of the talks element of the broadcast (without the film screenings).

Click here to view a gallery of images from the event on our Flickr page.

Image at beginning of film: Lis Rhodes, Light Music (1975), installed Wysing Arts Centre. Courtesy LUX.

We will be launching The Mulitverse with a day-long event that explores the theory from a number of positions; fictive, philosophical, artistic and scientific.

Programme:

RECEPTION Lunch 12noon-12.45pm

RECEPTION Durational 12noon-7pm
Joey Holder pèrəzóʊə (2015), a physical work with permeations through to an online presence, with streams, trails and links to different realms. It allows the user to navigate in several dimensions: linearly along axes, transversally across different species, and chronologically along evolutionary time.

GALLERY Durational 12noon-7pm
Lis Rhodes' Light Music (1975), installed in the gallery as a fully immersive work. Light Music is an innovative work presented originally as a performance that experiments with celluloid and sound to push the formal, spatial and performative boundaries of cinema. An iconic work of expanded cinema, it creates a more central and participatory role for the viewer within a dynamic, immersive environment.

OPEN STUDIO
12.45pm Welcome by Wysing Director Donna Lynas and Curator Lotte Juul Petersen.

1-2pm Presentation Art Practice as Fictioning (or, Myth-Science) by Dr Simon O’Sullivan, Reader in Art Theory and Practice in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, London. 15 min Q&A.

2-2.15pm Screening of Maya Deren’s  At Land (1944) in which a woman, played by Deren, is washed up on a beach and goes on a strange journey encountering other people and other versions of herself.  Composer John Cage and the poet and film critic Parker Tyler were involved in the making of the film and appear in it.

2.15-2.45pm Irene Revell reads a piece made in-conversation with Beatrice Gibson followed by a screening of Beatrice Gibson’s film F for Fibonacci (2014)

RECEPTION
2.45-3.00pm Break with tea and coffee.

OPEN STUDIO
3-3.30pm Reading by writer Mark von Schlegell from his short story Pinktoes/Earth of the Books (2015).

3.30-4.30pm Presentation The Accelerating Universe - the evolution of the Universe from the earliest time to the present by Anne-Christine Davis, Professor of theoretical physics and cosmology at the University of Cambridge. 15 min Q&A.

4.30-4.45pm Screening of Maya Deren’s The Very Eye of the Night (1958) in which a shimmering constellation of stars establishes the background for negative images of figures resembling Greek Gods superimposed on and magically transported along the Milky Way.

RECEPTION
4.45-5pm Break with tea and coffee.

OPEN STUDIO
5-5.15pm Reading by writer & curator Tom Morton from his novel-in-progress Doggerland.

5.15-6.15pm Presentation From Mars to the Multiverse -- how our cosmic horizons have expanded by Martin Rees, Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge. 15 min Q&A.

6.15-7pm Roundtable discussion with Simon O’Sullivan, Irene Revell, Mark von Schlegell, Martin Rees and Anne-Christine Davis and Tom Morton. 

7pm Ends

Contributor Biographies:

Professor Anne-Christine Davis is a theoretical physicist and professor of cosmology at the University of Cambridge. Her recent research is in Particle Cosmology. Her current work is on modified gravity theories, such as the chameleon model and related scalar-tensor theories of gravity. She has also worked on inflation and extra-dimensional theories.

Maya Deren was one of the most important American experimental filmmakers and entrepreneurial promoters of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer and photographer. She combined her interests in dance, voodoo and subjective psychology in a series of surreal, perceptual, black and white short films.

Beatrice Gibson’s recent solo exhibitions include, A Tale of Two Cities, The Highline, Channel 14, New York, (2014), Beatrice Gibson, Wilfried Lenz, (2014) CAC Bretigny (2013), Index, The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm; The Showroom, London (2012); Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart (2010), The Serpentine Gallery (Sackler Center) (2010). She has twice won the Rotterdam International Film Festival Tiger Award for short film, was nominated for the 2013 Jarman Award and shortlisted for the 2013-15 Max Mara Art Prize for Women. 

Joey Holder was a recent finalist for the Converse/Dazed Emerging Artist Award; included in Vestige: The Future is Here, Design Museum, London and Multinatural Histories, Harvard Museum of Natural History, Massachusetts, USA (all 2013). She has exhibited widely with projects including Hypersalon at Miami Basel and HYDROZOAN a solo exhibition and part of the Liverpool Biennial program at The Royal Standard (both 2014). Upcoming projects include Eco-Currencies a group show at The Composing Rooms, Berlin and a solo project BioSTAT at Project Native Informant, London.

Tom Morton is a writer, curator, and Contributing Editor for frieze magazine. His recent exhibitions include British British Polish Polish at the CSW Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, and Panda Sex at State of Concept, Athens. In 2014, he gave readings of his fiction at BALTIC, Gateshead, and Tate Britain, London. He is working on his first novel.

Martin Rees, is a Fellow of Trinity College and Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge. He holds the honorary title of Astronomer Royal and holds several visiting professorships. His main current research interests are high energy astrophysics, especially gamma ray bursts, galactic nuclei, black hole formation and radiative processes (including gravitational waves) and cosmic structure formation, especially the early generation of stars and galaxies that formed at high redshifts at the end of the cosmic 'dark age'.

Irene Revell is Director of Electra Productions. Working across sound, moving image, performance and the visual arts recent projects include: Charming for the Revolution (The Tanks at Tate Modern, 2013); Toxic Play in Two Acts: Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz (South London Gallery, 2012); Her Noise: Feminisms and the Sonic (Tate Modern, 2012); From Below, as a Neighbour (Drugo More, Croatia, 2012); Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Toxic (Les Laboratoires D'Aubervilliers and Palais de Tokyo, Paris 2012).

Lis Rhodes has since the 1970s been making radical and experimental films that challenge the viewer to reconsider film as a medium of communication and presentation of image, language, and sound. Her works were recently shown in the solo exhibition, Dissonance and Disturbance at the ICA and the performance installation Light Music (1975) was recreated for the Tanks at Tate Modern in 2012. 

Mark von Schlegell is a science fiction writer and cultural critic. His novels include Venusia (2005), which was honor-listed for the 2007 James M. Tiptree Jr. Prize, Mercury Station (2009) and recently Sundogz (2015), all published by Semiotext(e), MIT Press. Mark von Schlegell's stories and essays appear regularly in underground newspapers, zines, art books and he is also a regular contributor to Art Forum, Frieze and Mousse.

Dr Simon O’Sullivan is Reader in Art Theory and Practice in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has published two monographs with Palgrave, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (2005) and On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite-Infinite Relation (2012), and is the editor, with Stephen Zepke, of both Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New (Continuum, 2008) and Deleuze and Contemporary Art (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). He also makes art, with David Burrows, under the name Plastique Fantastique.