[Air-L] Event: Harun Farocki and the Question of Cognitive Labour

[Westminster Institute for Advanced Studies]

Harun Farocki and the Question of Cognitive Labour

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/harun-farocki-and-the-question-of-cognitive-labour-tickets-28250822972?aff=erelpanelorg


https://www.westminster.ac.uk/events/harun-farocki-and-the-question-of-cognitive-labour


Fri 18 November 2016

18:30 – 21:00


University of Westminster

309 Regent Street

1st Floor Boardroom

London

W1B 2HW


Marking the 120-year anniversary of the first screening of Lumière Brothers'
 *Workers Leaving the Factory* at the University of Westminster’s Regent
Street campus, the Westminster Institute for Advanced Studies hosts an
evening featuring short films by Harun Farocki and comments by two
distinguished experts.

In 1896, the Royal Polytechnic Institution – today the University of
Westminster – hosted the first ever screening of moving images to a British
audience: A set of ten short films by the Lumière Brothers. One of these was
 *Workers Leaving the Factory*.

In 1995, German filmmaker Harun Farocki produced a film of the same title,
exploring the relation between the cinema and the factory. Farocki asked: W
hy have the factory and industrial labour been systematically hidden
and disregarded
in the history of cinema? Through the montage of similar scenes from the
history of film, Farocki depicts the factory gate as a site of social
struggle. The gate functions as a metaphor for the gradual eviction of the
industrial worker from the factory and the emergence of new forms of
cognitive labour. In other words, *Workers Leaving the Factory* marks the
exit of the mass worker from industrial capitalism and into what is called the
social factory in Italian autonomous theory.

Farocki’s films prompt us to ask pressing questions in relation to what
today is called cognitive/informational/cultural labour. The event aims to
show how contemporary theories of labour allow us to read and
interpret the work
of one of the key figures in contemporary German cinema and how cinema can
inform critical social theory.

On this evening, Dr Claudio Celis Bueno (Westminster Institute for Advanced
Studies) and Dr Michael Cowan (University of S. Andrews) will be exploring the
internal relation between the audio-visual work of Farocki and new
theoretical reflections on labour in contemporary society.

Drawing lines backwards into film history, the event takes place in the
historical building where the Lumière Brothers’ film was first shown to a
British public. We will be just next door to the Regent Street Cinema,
which was re-opened by University of Westminster in 2015.