Thu 24 Oct 2024
6:30-8:00pm
Peste Bar and Bookshop
FREE
a promise and a nice time is a performative film-essay with two speakers and a musician created by Dr David Jackson and Lois Macdonald from the School of Digital Arts (SODA), featured at this year’s Festival of Social Science.
The film essay features additional sounds, images, and words about different things – like love letters, cruel optimism, city streets, Kathleen Stewart, objects of desire, encounters with strangers, the ordinary, letting go, the word ‘affect’, broken promises, Lauren Berlant, walking barefoot in the rain, questions of geography, circuits and flows, and experiments in academic writing. The ideas are not linked and are mostly ‘wrong’.
The live performance and screening will be followed by a 30 minute discussion about how filmmaking might be a useful collaborative tool for academic research into the social world. The audience will be invited to not only immerse themselves within the experience but also to share their reflections and thoughts.
Dr David Jackson is Programme Leader for Filmmaking at SODA and an award winning filmmaker and academic. This Is Not My House, a documentary portrait of his father, was winner of the 2014 Hot Shoe Photofusion Award. Winterlong, his debut feature film, premiered at the 2018 Edinburgh Film Festival and received a nomination for the Michael Powell Award for Best British Film. David’s current research mixes writing, photography, and film to explore the politics of urban space.
Lois Macdonald is a multidisciplinary artist and musician with over a decade of experience working in the music industry. She plays guitar/synths in the Manchester group PINS and is a vocalist/guitarist in art punk project Grave Goods. She has recorded around the world and toured extensively with different projects. Lois is a lecturer in Music and Sound Design at SODA. Her current research is on AI use in music composition. Her most recent project PATIENCE is an ongoing enquiry into the human voice, new technology and extended human expression.
Open to everyone with a curious mind and of particular interest to young people who are looking for more visual ways to express their ideas and experiences.
No need to book a ticket – please just turn up at the venue.
