Fresh from his Derek Jarman Serpentine show, Isaac Julien has invited a group of pre-eminent artists and curators to discuss the intersection of visual arts and performance in a series of three talks, at Siobhan Davies Studios. They will share ideas, experiences and theories, the evolution of and connections between art, movement and performance. For the first talk (13/06), Christine Van Assche from the Pompidou Centre and Mark Nash from the Royal College of Art join Julien to discuss Bruce Nauman's use of acting, movement and performance and his invented method called "PheNAUMANology". Before the talk you will have the chance to watch Nauman's Walking In An Exaggerated Manner Around The Perimeter Of A Square. These talks are a unique opportunity to look at the work of acclaimed artists and join in the discussions between some of the most erudite minds in the field of visual art and performance. Possibly a very smart and fun way to impress a date!

NB: this event takes place on 13/06 (Christine Van Assche + Mark Nash and Isaac Julien), 04/07 (Helena Baker, Pablo Bronstein and Isaac Julien) and 25/07 (Mark Nash, Yvonne Rainer and Catherine Wood).

For those that have attended countless conferences and presentations over the years, talk itself can turn into babble, burble, banter and ballyhoo, immersed into meandering moments of declamation, dissention, dialogue and dualogue. Don't talk unless you can improve the silence Borges suggested, and for this interactive, trans-disciplinary ideas laboratory about sound and architecture, in connection with The Hayward's Psycho Buildings exploratory show (runs till 25/08), digital architects Rubedo (Laurent-Paul Robert and Vesna Petresin Robert) and KF's very own Scanner will use prepared statements to touch upon issues of theory and practice but without uttering a word. Using laptops loaded with sound loops, 3D animations and statements the digital interface will replace the voice, riffing on the idea that architecture is a social act and part of the material theatre of human activity. Given that public debate has remained firmly rooted in the 19th century model of salons and soirees, then perhaps a conversation without words is a possible future. John Cage would be most amused.

NB: after the talk head to The Hayward's Concrete Bar for a DJ set by Simon Fisher Turner (8 - 10pm).

Joseph E Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-winning economist, former Chief Economist of the World Bank and Economic Advisor to Bill Clinton during the '90s, has turned his hand to writing books. His latest effort, The Three Trillion Dollar War, voices his big passion: the Iraq War. In it, he analyses the true cost of the war -- monetary, military, medical and mortal -- against the conservative estimate given by the Bush administration. Perhaps the most startling fact is that the only war in our history that cost more money is WWII. "Assuming we stay in Iraq another 24 months", he says, "the direct military costs alone, calculated in comparable dollars, are likely to be 50 per cent higher than those of the Vietnam War, twice those of the Korean War, and four times those of WWI." The other elephant in the room is that Bush refuses to acknowledge, according to Stiglitz, the increase in the price of oil, which he blames, in part, on the war in Iraq. Join him and Stephanie Flanders, the BBC's Economic Editor, at the Frontline Club for a ballsy discussion on the ever-expanding cost of the war that just won't go away.

It'll be a riotous affair, the battle for attention at Fabric on unlucky Friday 13th. The spooked superstitious will find no solace in reassuring sounds here -- expect to be dodging between Modeselektor's surrealist blend of tech-hop and general avant gardism (you don't win Thom Yorke as a fan by being mundane) and some unrelenting electro darkness from Boys Noize. So it's yet another example of the recent German domination of the electronic scene, especially given support from Hamburg-sprung D.I.M., who gives the visceral glitch-tronica a bit of a techno twist. If you think Justice sounds hackneyed, you'll be running for cover. Before Modeselektor take things in unexpected directions, it might be better to find yourself checking out a live set from Londoners The Count And Sinden. In spite of attracting the ire of more than a few London travellers by penning "Beeper" (a mobile phone speaker anthem if ever there was one) they're constantly transmogrifying pop tunes in cheeky and inventive ways. Even Mark Ronson approaches bearable under their heavy hands. It'll be tough to have the energy for all that as well as former Soulwax favourite Riton and chaotic house stalwart Duke Dumont.

NB: on Saturday, also at Fabric, for disco revivalists and fans of dubby psychedelia make sure you check out Rub N Tug in Room 3 (and for technoheads Steve Bug along with Guido Schneider in Room 1).

Jesper Just makes poetic films, which are richly atmospheric yet bizarre evocations of human experience, bringing to mind the surrealism of David Lynch and the graceful intelligence of Ingmar Bergman. A Vicious Undertow features acclaimed Danish actress Benedikte Hansen sitting in an empty bar whistling the haunting melody of "Nights In White Satin" with a younger man and woman, as though to meditate on the awkwardness of relationships. In Some Draughty Window, an old man floats above a bathroom to the accompaniment of some rustling leaves. Hansen stars as the protagonist in a trilogy, A Voyage In Dwelling, A Room Of One's Own and A Question Of Silence, which maps the sexual desires of a middle aged woman to a soundtrack by theremin composer Dorit Chrysler and American transgender singer/songwriter Baby Dee. Though a pun on Virginia Woolf's feminist essay, A Room... is a pleasant sexual fantasy that makes its main character smile. A Voyage... transports her to a remote, idyllic island and A Question... gives her the surprising power to make her leg fall off. This is strange, beautiful stuff.

NB: runs till 14/06.

This week Brief Encounter, that staple of "Best Films Of the Twentieth Century/Ever" lists, will be screened as part of a David Lean retrospective at the BFI, honouring the director on what would be his 100th birthday year. Brief Encounter was one of a series of films Lean made with playwright Noel Coward. Set in a resolutely middle class suburb before the WWII, it charts the affair of Laura and Alec, already both married with children, from the moment they accidentally meet in a train station to the moment they say goodbye. The station is a fitting metaphor for, and constant reminder of, the ephemerality of their love; it also frames their relationship within a no-man's land of being on the cusp of, but never actually going, anywhere. Compared with the epic sweep of Lean's Lawrence Of Arabia, Brief Encounter presents a suffocating domesticity. Often interpreted as a veil for Coward's closeted homosexuality, Brief Encounter -- with its solid middle-class values and return, at the end of the affair, to the status quo -- is a film of its time but nevertheless a powerful and enduring study of love and guilt.

NB: Brief Encounter screens at the BFI Southbank on 14/06, 18/06, 23/06 and 24/06. The BFI's two-part David Lean Centenary season runs from 04/06 till 03/07 and 01/07 till 31/07. Also of note is the Powell and Pressburger directorspective at the Barbican which runs till 13/07.

He named The Velvet Underground, he made people ill with his seminal film The Flicker and he created teeth-grinding music with the Dream Syndicate . Only the boundary-defying Tony Conrad could have such items on his CV. Since the '60s, he has been known as a musician, a performance artist and a filmmaker with an unprecedented disregard for conventions. You can see for yourself if time has softened his renegade approach by attending a three-day extravaganza dedicated to his unique brand of conceptualism at Tate Modern. The climax of the weekend will certainly be on Saturday night with Unprojectable: Projection And Perspective, a new live work conceived for the intimidating scale and baffling acoustics of the Turbine Hall (10 - 11:30pm). If you want to see Conrad in person, make sure you catch him in conversation with Branden W Joseph on Sunday (3pm). You can of course also see his films with screenings of The Flicker on Friday (7pm) -- at your own risk, though, as it's been known to induce seizures -- and of his video works on Saturday (7pm).

NB: runs from 13/06 till 15/03.

Warp seem to have acquired a taste for organising rave-ups in car parks of late. Following Autechre's showing earlier this year the label return to the Hearn Street car park in Shoreditch to celebrate the launch of the new Flying Lotus album. Quite a party it should be, too, as they've assembled a veritable who's who of the current high-ranking dubstep/crunkstep/electro-blip-hop scenesters, with the much hyped likes of Hudson Mohawke and Rustie, being joined by some veritable grandpops of the scene such as Kode9, Danny Breaks, Benji B and The Gaslamp Killer. All eyes though should be on Flying Lotus whose debut LP, Los Angeles, further blurs the already smeared lines between soul, hip-hop and electronica and who has been busy smashing up dancefloors on his previous few visits to our shores. Now as long as the weather stays mild and we avoid the arctic-like conditions that marred the the Autechre show, this could be a defining night for the electronica scene.

Having started life as an irreverent tag line for an unpretentious ad-hoc club night, Greco-Roman has journeyed right through the eye of the edgier-than-thou and emerged the other side as a record label. As the brainchild of bleep-pop inspirationalist Joe Hot Chip, you'd expect the releases to have elements of the avant garde nestling alongside party-focused energy. Portuguese funk wild-children Buraka Som Sistema certainly have stacks of the latter. You could be forgiven for equating their loose-tongued Portuguese with recent baile funk enthusiasts like Bonde Do Role or even CSS, but Buraka's influences are slightly wider and swap choppy samples for African-influenced rhythms. They're launching their new single "Kalembe (Wegue Wegue)" at this latest Greco-Roman bash, which promises to be a thoroughly rhythmic affair, thanks to tropically influenced techno outfit Drums Of Death. The flipside is a bit of jerky soul from Hot Chip ex-drummer Rob Smoughton performing as Grosvenor and South London funk spinner Ross Allen.

The term "trip-hop" was a bit of a lazy tag used to hype a scene and sell a few music papers/magazines in the '90s. It's a term that Massive Attack will probably always be associated with but it does a disservice to the depth and breadth of their musical roots. Their position as curators of this year's Meltdown festival should help offset this.

One of the highlights of their nine-day programme is a show from Yellow Magic Orchestra (15/06, 7:45pm) -- their first in the UK since 1980. The three-piece are these days lauded alongside Kraftwerk for their contribution to the development of electronic music in the late '70s, but like their German counterparts, their work is essentially a mechanised interpretation of pop music and is extremely melodic. Pioneers, then -- but probably dwarfed in these terms by George Clinton & Parliament / Funkadelic, who also make an appearance this year (21/06, 8pm). We think it's safe to say that when The Mothership lands, the RFH won't have seen anything like it before.

The night before this (20/06, 8pm) sees a tidy double-header night with Gang Of Four and Tom Tom Club -- two bands that may sound quite different to each other, but whose individual styles were both crafted from a variety of influences -- not unlike Massive Attack themselves. Meltdown's not all old school, though -- one of the earlier shows (18/06, 7:30pm) features The Shortwave Set -- who've been enjoying a fair bit of high profile name-checking of late -- alongside label mate Martina Topley-Bird, currently forging a solo career, but whose own "trip-hop" credentials were secured long ago with her work with Tricky.

NB: Meltdown runs till 24/06. Also of note is UVA's Volume which is on display on the Southbank Centre's Riverside Terrace (13/06 till 22/06), the special Q&A screening of Taxi To The Dark Side (15/06, 6:30pm) and all the Silent Disco nights (14/06 to 21/06).

A sparkly black mechanical bull gyrates round a fixed point in the gallery space; humming a steady rhythm, it squeaks as though every movement is a struggle. Empty Hessian bags are strewn on the floor, acting as an unappealing crash matt should you fall off. This is Toby Ziegler's new piece for his collaborative show with painter Caragh Thuring. Thurling's large paintings are executed on a muted canvas with vibrant use of colour, and contain a mixture of images from architecture and geomtery to natural landscape. In the other space, Zeigler presents stacked perspex display cases that contain paper sculptures, including a maquette of the Sphinx, a beetle with hair coming out of it and the bust of a man with part of his head caving in. Each object is constructed out of small triangles, the attention to detail enhanced by the simple choice of medium. The sounds from the bull's oscillations resonate throughout the two gallery spaces, offsetting the harsh lines in Thurling's paintings reinforcing notions of engineering and man made construction.

NB: runs till 15/06.

The pavilion is by nature a pleasurable structure, from the humble garden gazebo right through to the Royal Pavilion. So it is with great pleasure, no doubt, that UP Projects bring Portavilion to London's greener pastures. This portable public art project has invited four artists to each create their own pavilion, to be positioned in London's finer parks over the summer. The first one is Dan Graham's Triangular Pavilion With Circular Cut-Out Variation H, located near to the Dutch Garden in Holland Park. This triangular structure is at once optically confusing and intriguing, as each face and circular cut-out is made from transparent glass or mirror, creating a chaos of reflections. On one side, the cut-out is left open, allowing you to step inside (watch your head as you enter) and experience the extreme self-consciousness of someone stuck inside a goldfish bowl, watched by nearby spectators in the surrounding park. Graham's intention is to produce "a sense of uneasiness and psychological alienation through a constant play between feelings of inclusion and exclusion". While this all sounds like a bit of a headache, Graham's work is in fact a pleasing example of conceptual art and a fascinating study in reflection, perception and exhibitionism.

NB: Dan Graham's pavilion is on view in Holland Park till 28/09. The remaining three pavilions include Annika Eriksson's The Smallest Cinema In The World -- For The Wealthy And The Good in Regent's Park (21/06 till 28/09), Toby Paterson's Powder Blue Orthoganal Pavilion in Potters Fields Park (05/07 till 28/09) and finally, Monika Sosnowska's The Wind House on Primrose Hill (26/07 till 19/10).

If the abstract expressionists had been into chrome, organic architecture and optical illusions, they may have conspired to produce a body of work that compares to the latest exhibition of Gary Webb's sculptures. His wall-based reliefs are dazzling and incongruous mixing colour and light between angled and contoured chromed surfaces. While his sculptures demonstrate his trademark approach of combining whimsical forms with razor-sharp geometric precision, they seem painterly somehow in their presentation. Even the exhibition's title Revolution In Oil seems to bear reference to an exploration of the medium of painting without endorsing its conventions. The exhibition seems to work as one whole piece, each component contributing to the ambiance of the installation, however disjunctively to the overall look, but many of the works as individual pieces are somewhat lifeless, and if you were to remove them from the space, the ruthless geometric approach to their making might surpass their playful appearance. The wall pieces bear a striking resemblance to commercial architecture, and rely heavily on the fluidity of the forms nearer the middle of the room. The exhibition is an interesting crossover of ideas and styles, even if in places it seems a bit flat.

NB: runs till 05/07.

If you are the kind of person who lacks the patience to ice the cake you have just made before eating it, or whose concept of baking is wrapped up in a Betty Crocker packet, then you may know a few things about the art of cutting corners. You may shudder at the premise of Richard Sennett's new book The Craftsman which meditates on that age old saying: "if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well". Sennett believes that there is an innate perfectionist streak in all of us. When we absorb ourselves in a given task, whether it be cooking a meal, or making music, pleasure comes from the inevitable slow-down of making, pertaining to the distinct rhythms of our chosen craft, and subconsciously applying the highest of standards to our work. Sennett explores the history of this craftsmanship, from its self conscious re-enactment in the 19th century Arts And Craft Movement, to its deeper moral implications through Diderot and the Enlightenment Era. In a society that priviledges the cognitive processes, this history explores the art of craft's close relationship with the material aspects of life, and the physical and sometimes life-long pursuit of making and doing. Sennett is joined in conversation with Jonathan Ree, free-lace philosopher, writer and historian.

Mali Morris has been making wonderfully understated paintings for decades that centre on the delicate moment between abstraction and the figure in the dynamics of the painting process. In this show of recent work, playful spot motifs provide the surface anchors to her expansive painterly worlds. To those who might believe that the language of abstraction has been exhausted, or has become definitively over-referential, Morris' work testifies on the contrary to its limitless, and timeless, powers of suggestion -- a quality that, one could argue, has perhaps been better exhausted by other contemporary art forms. Morris is a proficient painter, in the sense that every gesture she makes and every colour she selects bears the entire weight of painting's history. She is an articulate painter in the sense that she has perfected the process of making painterly sensations intelligible enough to evoke ideas. Such painting as hers has the rare ability to make space for history to re-operate within the contemporary, cracking the latter's icy surface to reveal a possibility for poetry.

NB: runs till 21/06.

Feminist, French philosopher Luce Irigaray is known for her assertion that culture is essentially phallocentric. Though no longer a mind-shattering statement, back in the days of gender bifurcation, when a woman was supposed to be happily chained to her stove, Irigaray kicked up a storm with her renowned text Speculum Of The Other Woman. She even got herself fired from her academic post, thereby proving her theory in the process, that there is no room for female subjectivity in a culture that worshiped the male phallus. Starting out in the '30s under the umbrella of Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, she became part of a wave of post structuralist feminist thinkers, alongside Helene Cixous and Julia Kristeva, who challenged the role of "woman" in linguistics and cultural systems. Irigaray has been busy pondering the finer points of language differentiation between the sexes for the last few years. In the first of two planned lectures, Irigaray comes to the ICA to speak about her new book Sharing The World. Here, she turns from gender politics to the wider state of the human condition, tackling in a multicultural era what it means to live with one another.

NB: Her second lecture will be at the ICA on 09/09. Also catch Luce Irigaray at the Queen Mary University Of London on 19/06 (5:45pm).

It all started with a portrait of George Bush created from collaged porn magazines, using parts of the anatomy that would suggest that all that pours out of the mouth of the US president is a stream of verbal diarrhea. Jonathan Yeo's Blue Period show is a new direction for an artist best known for the more traditional oeuvre of portrait painting. Yeo's sensitive realism has effortlessly captured the personalities of stellar sitters as Dennis Hopper, Prince Philip and Tony Blair. Ornately framed collages hang on flock wallpaper in dimly lit rooms, creating the feeling of a 19th century salon crossed with a lap-dancing club -- rather fitting since the Lazarides gallery is situated in the middle of Soho's pulsating streets. Despite using porn as a medium, each piece has a classical symmetry and painterly quality. Yeo rifled through hundreds of "adult" magazines in search of suitable skin tones. Yeo pays homage to some artistic greats including Freud, Uglow and Picasso. Each subject benefits from Yeo's appreciation of the human form, art historical references and a generous pinch of irony. His playful portrait of Hugh Hefner should certainly amuse the daddy of porn.

NB: runs till 11/07.

To gaze at one of Shirazeh Houshiary's paintings is to step into a quiet space in time, removed from the bustle of the city. Created with subtle colours they evoke a palpable sense of stillness. On moving closer, they begin to pulsate and their veil-like fabric emerges: tiny building blocks drawn in delicate pencil, modelled on Arabic words (which remain hidden). They evidence a vast pool of patience -- the artist is known for her slow working practice -- and a deeper galaxy of meaning. They allude to the Turner-nominated artist's recent foray into spiritual places, particularly in her design for the East window of St Martin-in-the-Fields. In total, seven new large-scale paintings hang along the walls, including monochromes. Also on display is a body of towers made in collaboration with the architect Pip Horne. In the outdoor sculpture area rests Undoing The Knot, a blue aluminium tower reaching more than six metres high reminiscent of an ancient totemic sculpture, and mirroring the artist's site-specific installation Bloom in Tokyo. Lastly, there are some outstanding animated films such as Shroud, which exude a nascent calm that will draw you into a contemplative space, all in a matter of moments.

NB: runs till 26/07.

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