As the spirit of the conference is creative alliances, in partnership with our local creative industry there will be a day of free events to celebrate, highlight and discuss the precarity of local popular cultures and some of the challenges facing regional creative and cultural economies. We aim to bring the university (back) into popular spaces in an atmosphere of critical support, collaboration and fandom. With pizza, vinyl, conversation and live music.
A day of free talks and conversations in partnership with the Cornish Bank venue and arts organization. There will also be pizza for lunch.
10:30 - 11:30 | Adrian Utley in Conversation
Musician and producer Adrian Utley (Portishead) in a music-driven conversation with Falmouth University's Dr Johny Lamb and Sam Murray that will take on Bristol, guitar sounds, the wonders of synthesizers, and the benefits of doing things a bit oddly.
11:45 - 12:45 | Mark Jenkin in Conversation with Adrian Utley
Filmmaker and composer Mark Jenkin (Bait, Enys Men) and Adrian Utley talk about their formative British popular culture influences, the role of sound, and their relationship to it, in their work, and what they think of when they think of the sounds of British popular culture, as well as going wherever a conversation between two artists leads.
12:45 - 13:45 | Lunch Break
A film by conference keynote speaker Dr. Joy White (University of Bedfordshire) Like Lockdown Never Happened, that accompanies her recent book, an audio performance by Professor Jamie Dobson (UAL) and an audio-visual performance by Dr Simon Waite (Falmouth University).
Writer and Thinker Nathalie Olah (Steal As Much As You Can) closes the formal, scholarly part of the conference with a keynote lecture on British Popular Culture.
Separating 'pop' from 'the mass': is it possible?
Abstract:
The defence of pop culture often takes an uncritical view of the centralised media and conflates its output with the more organic expression of real communities. In the case of the latter, we are not consumers of culture, but participants. It is vitally important that we, as cultural critics and practitioners, remain conscious of this distinction, lest we become susceptible to the false characterisation of the 'working' or the 'normal' person, by which we are all then subsequently reduced to 'the mass'.
Culture — by which I mean, music, art, dance, theatre and literature — has the capacity to unite and galvanize us against the dehumanizing tendencies of capitalism, but only if it becomes detached from the forms that are born of the capitalist mode.
In this talk, I will apply the theories of writers such as Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, but also more recently, Sianne Ngai and Anna Kornbluh, to consider whether it is even possible to disentangle notions of 'pop' from mass-production; and if so, how?
Biography:
Nathalie Olah is the author of three works of cultural criticism, Steal as much as you can (Repeater 2019); Look Again: Class (Tate Publishing, 2021) and Bad Taste (Dialogue, 2023). She has previously taught at the Walter Benjamin Kolleg at the University of Bern, Switzerland and worked as a visiting lecturer at The Royal College of Art. She has written and co-produced radio documentaries for the BBC and her articles appear regularly in The Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, Art Review, Tate Etc. and Tribune.
A panel of programmers, venue owners and touring musicians discuss the realities, challenges and joys of maintaining a popular culture industry in Cornwall and further afield.
Horses on the Beach (Cornish Bank) - This event is ticketed and not included in the free day ticket
Dub in the Pub (Touc Inn) - Free
