“Atrocity Exhibition”: A symposium on Joy Division

Atrocity Exhibition - Joy Division Symposium

“Atrocity Exhibition” was a two-day symposium on Joy Division held at the University of Limerick on November 25th and 26th, 2015.  Following on from previous successful international symposia on The Smiths, Morrissey, Riot Grrrl, David Bowie, and Songs of Social Protest, the research cluster ‘Popular Music and Popular Culture’, at the University of Limerick convened the symposium to examine the significant contribution of Joy Division to popular music and culture.

Keynote talks included “Like It Never Happened: Faux Nostalgia and the Branding of Joy Division” by Dr. Jennifer Otter Bickerdike.
Dr. Jennifer Otter Bickerdike is a media and music academic, specialising in fan culture, the cult of dead celebrity, pop culture and music.  She has written and presented extensively on fandom and media, using her experience as a former American music industry and Silicon Valley executive to explore a range of societal issues and behaviours.   She is currently a Senior Lecturer and Program Leader in Music and Branding at Buckinghamshire New University.

Additional talks included :

Day One :

  • “Missions of Dead Souls: A Hauntology of the Industrial, Modernism, and Esotericism in Joy Division and Industrial Music” – Dr. Michael Goddard (Reader in Media at the University of Salford).
  • Literary Influences on Joy Division: J. G. Ballard, Franz Kafka, Dostoevski” – Sara Martínez (PhD, Lancaster University)
  • Crack/clatter in the shadows of Unknown Pleasures” – Professor Paul Hegarty (Visual and Audio Culture, University College Cork).
  • Remediating transcultural memories of postpunk Manchester: homosocial nostalgia and contemporary city branding” – Dagmar Brunow (Film Studies at Linnaeus University in Växjö and Gender Studies at Södertörn University (both Sweden).
  • Factory Flicks – Joy Division on film and the Factory Video Unit” – Nick Cope (presenting via Skype)
    Former programme director of video and new media production at Sunderland University, Nick has been a practicing film, video and digital media artist since 1982, and completed a PhD in October 2012.
  • Mining For Counterculture In The Twenty-first Century” – Colin Malcolm (Senior Technical Coordinator and Tutor in Product Design Prototyping. Member of Edinburgh Napier’s Centre for Design Practice and Research)
  • Incubation” – Johnathan Lindley. Having worked with international artists Drumcorps, Enter Shikari, Rolo Tomassi and Lightning Bolt, Jonathan is now teaching at the University of Huddersfield and running Sunbird Records, an independent DIY label.
  • Atrocity, Isolation and Pleasures: The Legacy of Joy Division among contemporary Iranian musicians” – Gay Jennifer Breyley (Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow in the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music at Monash University, researching aspects of Iranian popular music history).
  • Playing The Offbeat With a Good Deal of Vigor: The Modernism of Martin Hannett in the production of the Joy Division Sound” – Dr. John Samuel Greenwood & Paul Tarpey.
    Dr. John Samuel Greenwood (AKA the artist Raw Nerve Noise) is a composer, performer, media artist, researcher and educator practicing in Limerick Ireland. He is a founding member of ISSTA (Irish Sound Science Technology Association), SpADE (Spatial Auditory Design Environment) at University Limerick and former Chairman of PLAN (Professional Limerick Artists Network).
    Paul Tarpey is a senior lecturer in the Limerick School of Art, programme leader of the Photography and Lens Based course and a former joint course leader of the LSAD postgraduate programme in Social practice and the Creative Environment.
  • Transits and transmissions: Joy Division in space” – Robin Parmar.
    Robin Parmar’s practice includes electroacoustic composition, non-ideomatic improvisation, field recording, poetry, photography, and experimental film. He lectures in acoustics, psychoacoustics, and modalities of listening at the University of Limerick.
  • THINGS THAT AREN’T THERE: Spectral Presences in Musical Absences: The Transition from Joy Division to New Order” – Kieran Cashell (lecturer, Limerick School of Art and Design, PhD in the Philosophy of Art).

Day Two :

  • Transmissions: On Difference and Construction in Joy Division” – Dr. Eirik Askerøi (presenting via Skype).
    Dr. Askerøi  is an associate professor at Hedmark University College, Hamar (Norway), holds a PhD in popular music performance and teaches popular musicology and studio production as a senior lecturer at the University of Oslo.
  • A musical analysis of Disorder” – Tomoko Takahashi (Ph.D. Musicology, Tokyo National University of Arts. Assistant Professor at Center for Music Creativity and Advanced Research of Tokyo National University of the Arts
  • Closer: the aesthetics of a revealed absurd” – Pedro Miguel Remédios Gomes Arrifano (presenting via Skype) (Master in Philosophy of Education at the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais Humanas de Lisboa and PhD in Art History in Contemporary History at the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais Humanas de Lisboa).
  • Days Without Me: How Joy Division Impacted on Society’s Understanding of Mental Illness” – Walter Cullen (Professor of Urban General Practice at UCD, Dublin)
  • Waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand. Finding and losing Ian Curtis” – Aidan McNamara (musician and Clinical Director of Heartlands and Solihull NHS Trust A&E services, UK)
  • Does the New Dawn REALLY Fade? Speculations on Ian Curtis’ likely experience of a Twenty first century mental health service” – David Meagher (Foundation Chair of Psychiatry at the University of Limerick Graduate entry Medical School.)
  • Trying to find a clue, trying to find a way to get out! Joy Division and Europe” – Giacomo Botta (adjunct professor in urban studies at the University of Helsinki)
  • Closer and the Birth of Cyberspace: Manchester Postpunk, Cyberpunk, and the Legacies of the Sixties” – Andrew Green Hannon (Doctoral Candidate in the American Studies program at Yale University)
  • Joy Division’s Bloody Contract: The Poetics of Empty Re-enactment” – Dan Jacobson and Ian Jeffery.
    Dan Jacobson is currently a PhD candidate at the University of the City of New York Graduate Center in English Literature.
  • Communication Breakdown: Inarticulacy and the Significance of ‘Transmission’” – J. Rubén Valdés Miyares (senior lecturer in English at the University of Oviedo, Spain.  His main research area is cultural myths and the interpretation of history.
  • Late Style Too Soon: The Voice of Sickness and Suicide in the Music of Joy Division” – Tiffany Naiman.
    Tiffany Naiman is a Ph.D. student in UCLA’s Department of Musicology, the Experimental Critical Theory, and Digital Humanities graduate certificate programs. She is a DJ, electronic music composer, and documentary film producer.

Unfortunately, owing to unforeseen circumstances, the planned Q&A with Peter Hook and the concert by Peter Hook & the Light were unable to take place.

 

University of Limerick Popular Music and Popular Culture research cluster

The Popular Music and Popular Culture research cluster engages with all facets of popular culture, from sonic and visual texts and their artists/creators/performers in their manifold performance contexts, to questions that arise around technological mediations in relation to the production, (re)circulation and reception of all things popular.

They draw on a diverse array of theoretical perspectives, from critical and cultural theory to sociological, anthropological and ethno-musicological understandings of popular expressions and their meaning(s).  They have a particular interest in the social organisation of musical and cultural lives across the globe.  The cluster does not privilege British/American/Western cultural expression, though this currently accounts for much of its research output to date.

For more information on the Popular Music and Popular Culture research cluster at the University of Limerick :
http://www.ul.ie/pmpc/