Art + Cinema = Dark Energy

Ken McMullen is an artist and film director, and a research professor at University of the Arts London. As befits a university where experimentation in form is a natural quest, his Professorial Platform will not be a lecture in any known sense of that word. The event will centre on the UK premiere of a substantial motion picture installation, a piece of live cinema with a truly revolutionary narrative form. In this work, titled 'In Association', Ken McMullen outlines the scope and nature of poignant aspects of his practice, drawing on extensive interdisciplinary research. The 'performance' will be accompanied by live sound and music.

This work follows on from three performances that took place in the USA in 2007 titled 'Arrows of Time'. From a science point of view, after collaborating and engaging in cutting edge research in particle physics at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and Centre Europeen por la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN), these performances took us, the viewer, deep into the mysteries offered by new understandings of how the universe came into being, into the tiniest slivers of time, and the minutest particles of matter. Placing these sections up against work with leading contemporary philosophers and artists.

The timeline offered in 'In Association' will take us through a series of encounters with powerful artistic and intellectual 'phantoms', ghosts who haunt the cultural landscape in which we, as contemporary artists, have to search for new meanings, new forms and manifestations. Like tracks on an old vinyl LP record 'In Association' will present a series of short self-contained chapters using film to juxtapose radical experiments and departures in Artistic Practice with Philosophy, Particle Physics and Poetry. Unlike the vinyl record however, 'In Association' will draw upon all the potential of new media in a developing post digital world.

So.

French philosopher Jacques Derrida tells us why he believes in 'Ghosts' and re-interprets the word 'improvisation'. He tells us about a new cinema that will emerge in the 21st century free from the shackles of mechanical reproduction and digital vagary.

Physicists at CERN and SLAC tell us about a camera that can investigate the smallest slivers of time, shooting their subjects not at 24 frames per second but at 1,000,000,000,000,000 frames per second allowing us to peer into the deepest secrets of Nature.

German artist Joseph Beuys poses a confrontation between the written word and physical action.

Striking reconstructions of Milton, Borges and Pessoa's poems are spoken and acted by some of Europe's leading actors.

And the cutting edge of high-energy physics at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California becomes part of a crime story shot in LA in 1971 and revisited in 2007.

This free-flowing event will leave the spectator in a considerable position of power. Power to interpret and identify, in their own way, some of the key ideas underpinning contemporary thought.

As the University continues to maintain and develop its profile as a global leader in arts research, a series of Professorial Platform lectures was launched in 2008.

The Platforms are an opportunity for University colleagues and associates, as well as invited members of the public, to learn more about the research undertaken in the University. The Platforms enable Professors to highlight their field of interest and the University, in turn, to recognise and commemorate their successes to date.

• http://issuu.com/ualresearch/docs/kenmcm...
• https://youtu.be/Lacc_TZf0y8
• https://www.youtube.com/user/kenmcmullen...
• https://www.facebook.com/kenmcmullenfilm
• http://kenmcmullen.blogspot.co.uk/p/pres...