Esther Leslie at Summer School as School 2022
August 9, 2022, 20:00
Venue: Boxing Club

Tears, Gas, Turbulent Times Gas
Discussant: Ty Cary

Tears, Gas, Turbulent Times Gas, made in the factories of conglomerates IG Farben (Germany) and Imperial Chemical Industries (Britain), diffused from the battlefields of the First World War and seeped into dreams and thought. In Walter Benjamin’s concept, this gas of modern life is a re-synthesis of the photographic gaseous haze.,or aura, – which, he interprets as a deposit of economic structure, political fantasy, a damp fog of imperial history became a killing atmosphere on the Front.It persisted, permeated and poisoned the after-war, shaping production for the next hundred years. What gasses and deadly historical fogs surround people today in turbulent days of war and competition, of street control and protection of private property? What protections might a human adopt and adapt to see into and through the opaque atmospheric screens? Are new gases needed to neutralise the old ones or is the climate too much corrupted?

Biography:
Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her books include various studies and translations  of Walter Benjamin, as well as Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (Verso, 2002); Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion, 2005); Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage (Unkant, 2014), Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (Reaktion, 2016) and Deeper in the Pyramid (with Melanie Jackson: Banner Repeater, 2018). Future work includes research for an exhibition at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art on the chemical industries of the North East of England and the poetic and political significance of butter in Ireland for the Limerick Biennale 2020.