Conatus TV was an event featuring talks and a screening programme held at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop as part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2016, in connection with my artist residency at The Telfer Gallery in Glasgow. The event considered how subjective experiences of attention and desire are manifested through media technologies. I presented a talk on my research and a screening programme of related artist moving image works. I also invited the writer Isabel Taube to speak about her research on British TV.
Attention and desire have historically been defined as forces that enact change. Spinoza used the term conatus to describe the fundamental energy that inhabits bodies and sets them in motion, an innate desire to persist and pursue. Networked media acts upon the energy inherent within the viewer to excite and engage them, yet the exchange between users and network might also generate a collective conatus – born of the relations between users, producers and media technologies. Whilst media products are shaped, they are also a shaping force – a template or mould for our desires and sense of identity. Considering the power relations within this user-media dynamic, the screening event featured artworks that explore the peripheries of this relationship and reflect on the conditions of mediated subject hood and the networked body:
Lilith (1982) by Steina & Woody Vasulka.
Orbital Obsessions (1977) by Steina Vasulka.
30 Second Spots (1982-83) by Joan Logue.
And So On, End So Soon: Done 3 Times (1977) by Robert Fillion.
More Than Lovers More Than Friends (2016) by Barbara Kleinhamplova and Jan Broz.
Prefaces (1981) by Abigail Child.
(Works were loaned courtesy of the artists, Video Data Bank and Western Front Archive.)
Isabel Taube’s talk presented her research on Tyger Tyger, the first British TV programme devoted to exploring subjective experiences of poetry. The program featured school children who shared their experience of Blake’s poem, alongside commentary from the public thinkers Stuart Hall and R.D. Laing.
