CounterpointStimulating debate with the British Council

With an air of inevitablity, Nick Griffin today posted a statement to the British National Party's website saying that he was planning to step down... in 2013.

There's no doubt that the BNP leader was under pressure to leave: the party had a disastrous showing at the General Election. This is infact contrary to the mainland European experience where increased immigration and recession has led to more support for the far-right.

After Counterpoint's screening of Jaak Kilmi and Kiur Aarma's Disco & Atomic War at the Curzon Soho, Jaak fielded questions about the film from Ivo Gormley and the inquisitive audience. Read a transcript of the open conversation that resulted here. Notable subjects touched on include: competing personal realities; the non-existence of Leonid Brezhnev; Knightrider; culture as an epidemic; history, fiction and documentary; Emanuelle.

Access to culture opens you up to the possibility of internal transformations, of knowing your mind, of changing your mind--and the possibility of changing your self as a result. This is what makes it precious and revolutionary. Crucial and, for some, at times, as Jaak Kilmi’s film reminds us, threatening.

Last night we hosted a screening of Jaak Kilmi’s fantastic film ‘Disco and Atomic War’. We hired one of the Curzon screens, sent out invites and hoped that people would be as intrigued as we’d been by the title..

On Wednesday 19 May Counterpoint screened Disco & Atomic War (Dir. Jaak Kilmi) at the Curzon Soho. An insightful, nuanced, and satirical take on Cold War soft power politics, Disco unfolds a strong argument for the power of cultural relations. A fascinating Q&A with the director revealed his personal experiences of “the power of soft power”, and of living in a state of happy cultural schizophrenia.

Counterpoint collaborated with Prospect magazine to produce a special supplement in the March 2010 issue of Prospect dedicated to investigating how advances in neuroscience are changing how we think about ourselves and our relationships with others. It is increasingly clear that neuroscience is providing radical new interpretations of how we learn to be, to play, to relate, and to learn. At the same time we need to get past the hardwired vs softwired binary to realise that productive future work will come through a combination of neuroscience's research, and cultural study.

Ivan Sigal is Executive Director of Global Voices, an important and innovative news organisation in the blogosphere. Produced by a community of some 200 bloggers who aggregate and curate the best of online citizen media from across the world, Global Voices emphasises voices that are generally not heard in the mainstream media, and in doing so aims to "amplify the global conversation online". Catherine Fieschi, Director of Counterpoint, asked Ivan his views on Cloud Culture and the future of the internet. Aptly they corresponded by email, and this is the result.

Tzvetan Todorov gave the keynote address at Counterpoint's The Inner Lives of Cultures conference in Brussels, 25 February 2010. This is a complete recording of the address, entitled Unity of civilization, plurality of cultures.