Large Objects Moving Air (LOMA)

J.R. Carpenter – Artist, writer and researcher

Laura Cannell - Musician, Specially Commissioned Bass Recorder Performance for LOMA

Chris Watson & Tony Myatt - BAFTA award winning sound recordist; Spatial audio producer and academic

James Dooley - Digital artist, awarded the LOMA 18 Artist Commission for Have you talked about the weather today?

Have you talked about the weather today? is a video and sound installation that uses live feeds from the International Space Station to ask questions about the way we engage with the weather.

The work invites the audience to take a virtual trip on the ISS —the ultimate indoors experience—and experience a sonic Baudrillardian simulacrum of ground level weather and atmospheric conditions relative to the ISS’s position above the Earth. By tracking the ISS and using the Dark Sky weather API service, data detailing current weather and atmospheric conditions at the ground point perpendicular to the position of ISS are collected via 'The Cloud'. Temperature, humidity, cloud cover and precipitation are sonified using noise-based synthesis techniques, with sound spatialisation controlled by wind speed and direction. Weather statistics and a live video stream looking out of the ISS are projected onto the wall of the installation space to further emphasise the removal of the audience from the direct experience of outdoors.

Have you talked about the weather today? questions our perception and experience of the weather in relation to our 'indoor' lives, the structures and systems we create to sustain our existence and protect us from the elements, the resources they consume and the reciprocal feedback this has on global weather patterns. Through technological mediation we can localise our global experience, but it comes at a global cost.

Image credit: Harvey from ISS Jack Fischer

Presenting papers at LOMA 2018:

Fari Bradley, Angus Carlyle, Robert Curgenven, Julian Day, Sasha Engelmann, Matthew Flintham, Michael Guida, Sebastiane Hegarty, Hanna Husberg, Tim Meacham, Christian Mieves, Daryl Palmer, Sharon Phelan, David Prior, Deanna Radford, David Strang, Julian Weaver and Anna Wolfe-Pauly.

Presenting artworks:

Rob Mullender and David Prior & Frances Crow (liminal)

A full schedule for the conference will be available shortly.

Large Objects Moving Air 2018 is a one day conference exploring the presence, agency and materiality of air from the microscale to macroscale, through both literal and figurative interpretations. Presentations will explore the materialities of air, vibration, politics and power from researchers, writers and artists within the sciences, humanities, arts and other creative disciplines.

What comes to mind when one thinks about air? Air is everywhere and nowhere. It is a carrier of frequencies, energies, vibrations, toxins, pollutants and blast waves. It supports life and is a site of communication. It is clouds and The Cloud. Who owns it? Can it be owned? Who or what are the agents in the transmission and circulation of air? How does it circulate and what circulates within it?

With the futures of people, animals, plants and microbial ecologies constantly up in the air, LOMA 2018 offers an opportunity for reflection about that which is all around us, its vitality but also its precarity and potential as carrier of threat and harm.

LOMA 2018 included presentations and artworks in different formats and deploying various strategies to animate the air in and around the conference setting of the London College of Communication in Elephant and Castle, South London. Through these multiple representations we hoped to foster the recalibration of our position within the local and planetary scale ecologies, of vectors of mass transit, and flux in the sky, on the surface and beyond.

The theme of the conference relates to works that reflect (but are not limited to) the following areas around the literal / metaphorical / abstracted examples of the movement of large bodies on a range of scales:

• Meteorology
• Acoustic ecology
• Nuclear culture and the military industrial complex
• Protest movements, propaganda and the voice
• Media Infrastructures
• Technocapitalism
• Bass and soundsystem culture
• Unsound / Infrasonics / Ultrasonics / EEG
• Atmospherics

Standard Fee - £10

Unwaged / Low waged / Students - £5

TECHNE Member - Free

For all enquiries please contact the organising team at largeobjectsmovingair@gmail.com

Jennifer Lucy Allan (CRiSAP, University of the Arts London)

Jennifer Lucy Allan is a writer and researcher currently working on a PhD at CRiSAP on the social and cultural history of the foghorn. She is also a music writer, specialising in experimental and underground music. She contributes regularly to The Guardian and The Wire, and is co-founder of record label Arc Light Editions. She teaches writing in London, and lives and works in Southend-On-Sea.   

Matt Parker (CRiSAP, University of the Arts London)

Matt Parker is an artist influenced by the sonosphere, unsound, ecology, the economy of noise, infrastructure studies and the internet. He is the co-director of media infrastructural investigative collective The People's Cloud.

Megan Archer (University of Brighton)

Megan is a PhD researcher in and organising member of the Critical Studies Research Group at the University of Brighton. Her PhD project attempts to write a critical history of modern logistics, touching on themes such as cybernetics, computing, extraction, and imperialism. Megan is also a co-editor of the CSRG journal, Critical Studies.

Benjamin Bland (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Benjamin Bland is a historian, whose research interests are centred around cultural and political extremism in Europe since 1945. He is currently completing a PhD on fascism and underground culture in Britain since the 1970s, and has forthcoming publications on the zine culture of industrial music and on neo-fascist discourses of Holocaust inversion.

Kate Fahey (London College of Communication)

Kate Fahey is a visual artist and practice-based AHRC PhD researcher at UAL.

Timothy Smith (CRiSAP, University of the Arts London)

Timothy Smith is a film-maker and practice-based AHRC PhD researcher at CRiSAP, LCC.