The Performance Research Group at King’s College London presents The Anomalous, Meeting, a seminar series bridging the Arts and Humanities and the Social Sciences. Curated by Penny Newell, the series brings together scholars from various disciplines hoping to begin conversations around and about anomalies, in theory and in practice.

For info on the full series, see: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/english/research/rescentres/perf.aspx

Monday 16th March (7-8.30pm): The Anomaly in Art and Modes of Existence: Penny Newell (KCL) and Philip Conway (Bristol)

This session interrogates the anomalies at stake in contemporary art and philosophy. Penny Newell will ask how art produces meaning through that which exceeds beyond the operational terms of an artistic mode of production. Philip Conway will critically reflect on his role as a co-inquirer on the politics [POL] research team of Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence (AIME), thinking about the ontology of problems, and theorising anomalousness in terms of the concept of diplomacy, modes of existence, radical empiricism and cosmopolitics.

Penny Newell is a poet and PhD researcher based in the Department of English at King’s College London, and convenor of The Anomalous, Meeting seminar series. Her work positions clouds as anomalous events in the relation between thinking and being, examining historical and contemporary materials in literature, science, theatre and performance, and in visual, digital and installation arts. She has published in Platform: Postgraduate Journal of Theatre Arts (Royal Holloway), Boundaries (Sussex University), and Performance Research (Routledge, Taylor and Francis).

Philip Conway is an independent writer and blogger, a contributor and co-inquirer on Bruno Latour’s ongoing experiment in Digital Humanities (AIME), and Research Assistant in the School of Social and Community Medicine at the University of Bristol. Conway rigourously critiques actor-network theory, Science and Technology Studies and the philosophies of Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, William James, Alfred North Whitehead and Peter Sloterdijk. In bringing these ideas and theorists into the discourses of international relations and geopolitics, Conway forces us to question: 'What is the geo in geopolitics? And what, for that matter, is the politics?’