A Sensation Never Yet Known: Symposium
Join Thinking Culture for this special event exploring Luke Fowler’s film portrait of Janet Beat.
School of Culture & Creative Arts | Glasgow International | College of Arts & Humanities
Date: Wednesday 17 June 2026
Time: 17:30 - 20:00
Venue: Hunterian Art Gallery Lecture Theatre
Category: Concerts and music, Films and theatre, Public lectures, Academic events, Student events
Join Thinking Culture for this special event exploring Luke Fowler’s film portrait of Janet Beat.
With contributions from:
– Prof Louise Harris (University of Glasgow)
– Dr Claire M. Holdsworth (University of Glasgow)
– Dr Frances Morgan (University of Huddersfield)
Through presentations, screenings and discussion, this event will consider the complex histories at stake in A Sensation Never Yet Known, including the role of women musicians in electronic music. Three of Luke Fowler’s previous films engaging with music and musicians will be shown, bringing composers such as Brunhild Meyer Ferrari and Christian Wolff, as well as fellow artist Sue Tompkins, into view, and connecting Beat’s work to resonant histories of practice:
– N’importe Quoi (for Brunhild), 2023. 9 minutes
– Country Grammar (with Sue Tompkins), 2017. 18 minutes
– For Christian, 2016. 6 minutes
Louise Harris is an electronic and audiovisual composer, and Professor of Audiovisual Composition at The University of Glasgow. She specialises in the creation and exploration of audiovisual relationships utilising electronic music, recorded sound and computer-generated visual environments. Louise’s work encompasses fixed media, live performance and large-scale installation pieces, with a recent research strand specifically addressing Expanded Audiovisual Formats (EAF). Her work has been performed and exhibited nationally and internationally, including recent commissions from Cryptic and The Lighthouse, Sanctuary and the Plenty? Festival. Harris’s book Composing Audiovisually, a monograph on audiovisual composition, was published by Routledge in July 2021.
Claire M. Holdsworth is a writer, archivist and audio-maker. Specialising in sound theory, artists’ moving image (1960s to late 1980s), and technology-based art, her research considers the voice, investigating narration, historiography, archives, and social collectives, with a focus on feminist and queer subjects. Claire was an Early Career Research Fellow at Kingston School of Art (Kingston University London) and prior to that completed an AHRC-funded PhD at Central Saint Martins (UAL) based in the British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection in the CSM Museum.
Frances Morgan is a writer and researcher with a focus on auditory culture, instrument studies and histories of electronic sound and music. Their writing on music, film and art has appeared in The Wire, Sight & Sound and the London Review of Books. Frances's PhD at the Royal College of Art, supported by the Science Museum, addressed the historiography of electronic music through a study of the EMS Synthi 100 synthesizer. They are the former chair of the Daphne Oram Trust, a charitable trust set up to preserve and promote the legacy of the British composer and inventor Daphne Oram. Frances is currently a Research Fellow at University of Huddersfield working on the Amplification Project, a major research project focusing on amplification technologies and amplified sound.