A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.

Events, Exhibitions, Open Calls, Festivals and Conferences

Art was only a substitute for the Internet | The Wrong Biennial, has been dedicated exclusively to online art and that alone makes it very relevant. For this fifth edition, Andres Manniste has invited artists who he felt were convinced that the Internet and what it provides is an art and for whom networks are critical for the development of their thinking and their work. For many the Internet is a daily routine of checking social media, listening to podcasts or music and researching material. Every living artist aware of the unlimited resources provided by communications networks is influenced by the internet. Many have associated a major part of their art process with the internet. This exhibition is a place where art can be playful and challenging – https://bit.ly/3nMIZKJ

Angels & Discounts | Exhibition by Iris Pokovec | 3 – 26 November 2021 | Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana | Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists. Angels & Discounts is an ode to consumerism and an elegy to unfulfilled dreams and lost ideals. It talks about the love-hate attitude to consumerist and popular culture and glorifies its charm and its power of hypnotising the masses, while at the same time offering a reflection on the transience of society’s collective stream of thought. It is a narrative about the search for free choice in the numb somnolence of supermarket aisles and shelves with tinned peas and preserved compotes – https://bit.ly/2ZQlSHf

NFT Culture Proof | Launches 9 am 9 Nov 2021 | Nathaniel Stern, Scott Kildall and others | A participatory performance on the Blockchain – a completely on-chain collaborative text – a collective artwork and crypto-native NFT series. NFT Culture Proof is a 32-day Blockchain performance, where every participant continuously adds to a collaborative stream of live but immutable text, which will be permanently placed on-chain. Each day, there are “writing prompts” from artists, thinkers, and writers in the cryptoverse, which will both focus and drive the texts we produce. It is the first large-scale Blockchain work of its kind, making the public ledger an active stage for collective creativity. Every text block submitted generates a unique NFT for the participant. These will also live completely on-chain, as crypto-native SVGs  – https://bit.ly/3bBLfyy

Lecture 5: The City: Laurie Anderson: Spending the War Without You | 10 Nov 2021 | Exploring the challenges we face as artists and citizens as we reinvent our culture with ambiguity and beauty. Laurie Anderson presents Spending the War Without You: Virtual Backgrounds. The City is the fifth in a series of six lectures, looking at the challenges we face as artists and citizens as we reinvent our culture with ambiguity and beauty. This talk will consider teachers, activism and politics. Presented by Laurie Anderson, one of America’s most renowned – and daring – creative pioneers. Known primarily for her multimedia presentations, she has cast herself in roles as varied as a visual artist, composer, poet, photographer, filmmaker, electronics whiz, vocalist, and instrumentalist. Event by Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard | Free event book at Eventbrite – https://bit.ly/3BvV9wd

Glitch: Aesthetic of the Pixels | Platform 101 – Vol.03 | Tehran, Iran | 5 – 12 Nov 2021 | Platform 101 is holding its third international group exhibition entitled “Glitch: Aesthetic of the Pixels”. After the great success of Vol.2, Platform 101, a nonprofit and independent art institution, is continuing the Glitch Video Art Group Exhibition in Tehran, Iran Vol.03, entitled “Glitch: Aesthetic of the Pixels”, curated by Mohammad Ali Famori, featuring 27 international glitch artists at Pejman Foundation: Kandovan – https://bit.ly/3pX2pPK

IAM Weekend | Barcelona Nov 11-13 2021 and Planet Earth: November 11-18, 2021 | Join the 7th annual gathering for mindful designers, researchers, strategists, artists, technologists, journalists and creative professionals looking to collectively envision sustainable futures for the internet(s). A week-long programme of live and pre-recorded sessions. The Planet Earth edition will feature live and pre-recorded sessions, available 24 hours across timezones, during 8 days, including the social live stream of Forum Day sessions of the Barcelona edition programme. Get access to the Planet Earth edition programme with a Week-long Pass or any Barcelona edition ticket. More info – https://bit.ly/3nVQwqr

Furtherfield at the Planet Earth Session at IAM Weekend | Nov 18th 2021  Watch live or on-demand the following pre-recorded videos: The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 – Interspecies Assembly (The one about biodiversity habitats) by Furtherfield + The New Design Congress + CreaTures. The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 – Ruth Catlow & Cade Diehm in conversation with Dr. Lara Houston. Get access to the Planet Earth edition programme with a Week-long Pass or any Barcelona edition ticket. More info – https://bit.ly/3nVQwqr

Call for Participation – Rendering Research | Deadline for submissions 14th Nov 2021 | We are seeking proposals to address how research is made public, and in this sense also to the infrastructures of research and its various systems of publishing. Organised by Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, in collaboration with Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, London South Bank University, Saint Luc École de recherche graphique in Brussels, and Transmediale festival for digital art & culture. APRJA is published by Aarhus University in partnership with Transmediale and hosted by the Royal Danish Library – https://bit.ly/3q0Na8w

People Like Us: Gone, Gone Beyond | Event by Barbican Centre | The Pit | 10 – 13 Nov 2021 | Watch and listen as unexpected narratives expand and unravel all at once around you. Inside this immersive, 360-degree cinematic installation, you’ll get to look far beyond the frame. Fragments of familiar and experimental films interact with song and audio clips in ever-changing, kaleidoscopic and kinetic collages. As time and space become elastic, viewers are opened to multiple meanings and perspectives by this seamless visual and surround-sound experience, with its playful and unsettling observations on popular culture. Under her artist name, People Like Us, Vicki Bennett has been evolving the field of audiovisual collage since the early 1990s, cutting up and layering found footage and archives | Tickets – https://bit.ly/3EqJX62

Tactical Entanglements: Creative AI Lab in conversation with Martin Zeilinger | 15 Nov 2021 6 pm FREE | Serpentine | TwitchOnline | A discussion panel on my book, “Tactical Entanglements: AI Art, Creative Agency, and the Limits of Intellectual Property” (meson press 2021). The event is put on by the Creative AI Lab and will be live-streamed on Twitch. Exploring issues around critical approaches to AI, digital art, and posthumanism with Mercedes Bunz and Daniel Chavez Heras (both Kings College London) and Eva Jäger (Serpentine Galleries). You can grab a free copy of Zeilinger’s book on the Meson Press publisher’s website, and a free e-reader with some additional relevant readings will be available on the Serpentine Galleries website – https://bit.ly/2Yqn6bk and https://meson.press/books/tactical-entanglements/

AI4FUTURE: OPEN CALL FOR RESIDENCIES | Deadline 15 NOV 2021 | AI4future is searching for 4 artists to work at an AI-based artwork in collaboration with young European activists to foster new urban community awareness. In recent years, Artificial Intelligence has been implemented in a number of fields functional to daily life: from those that simulate the cognitive abilities of the human being (image recognition, language automation, etc.) to the management of civil and social life (home automation, banking, self-driving vehicles, etc.) up to the economic and political organization (remote surveillance, privacy, impact on the world of work 4.0, health management, disinformation techniques, control over fundamental rights, etc.) – https://bit.ly/3bEeXTu

(re)programming: Strategies for Self-Renewal | With Eyal Weizman | 15 Nov 2021 7 pm | Aksioma | We have found ourselves at the crossroads of an existential decision: do we bring the mistakes of the enlightenment to their biological conclusion or do we develop a magical capacity to self-renew? For the 10th anniversary of Tactics & Practice, Aksioma presents (re)programming: Strategies for Self-Renewal “festival of conversations” with world-class thinkers debating key issues, from infrastructure and energy to community and AI, curated and conducted by writer and journalist Marta Peirano. The festival consists of 8 streaming events taking place every third Monday of the month throughout the year – https://bit.ly/3EDTA1n

Lorenzo Ravano: The Global South and the History of Political Thought | Online | 18 Nov 2021, 6 – 8 pm | The Critical Perspectives on Democratic Anti-Colonialism project invites you to our next Fall 2021 workshop. The program brings together faculty and students from across The New School interested in exploring the theoretical foundations and political manifestations of radical democratic and anti-colonial traditions. Ravano, Postdoctoral Fellow at Université Paris Nanterre, will be presenting his work, “The Global South and the History of Political Thought”. Anthony Bogues, Asa Messer Professor of Humanities and Critical Theory, Professor of Africana Studies and Director of the Center of the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University, will be commenting – https://bit.ly/3ECPVku

WhistleblowingForChange: Exposing Systems of Power & Injustice | The 25th Conference of the Disruption Network Lab | Conference and book launch | 26 – 28 Nov 2021. At Kunstquartier Bethanien – Berlin. The courageous acts of whistleblowing that inspired the world over the past few years have changed our perception of surveillance and control in today’s information society. But what are the wider effects of whistleblowing as an act of dissent on politics, society, and the arts? How does it contribute to new courses of action, digital tools, and content? This urgent intervention based on the work of Berlin’s Disruption Network Lab examines this growing phenomenon, offering interdisciplinary pathways to empower the public by investigating whistleblowing as a developing political practice that has the ability to provoke change from within | Facebook link – https://bit.ly/3o1ibXj

Unravelling Women’s Art | 25 November 6 pm – 7:30 pm | £5 | ONLINE EVENT | Join author PL Henderson and a trio of artists for an insightful discussion into what links female textile artists and the arts they produce, revealing a global and historic patchwork of assorted roles, identities and representations. Henderson’s new book, Unravelling Women’s Art: Creators, Rebels, & Innovators in Textile Arts (Aurora Metro Books) offers a unique overview of female-centric textile art production including embroidery, weaving, soft sculpture and more. Including over 20 interviews with contemporary textile artists, the books invites us into their practices, themes and personal motivation – https://bit.ly/3wxeqwr

Two Postdoc Positions in Critical Environmental Data Studies | Deadline 30 Nov 2021, Expected start 1 Mar 2022 | The Department of Digital Design and Information Studies within the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University (Denmark) invites applications for two postdoctoral positions in Critical Environmental Data Studies. The postdoc positions are affiliated with the research project Design and Aesthetics for Environmental Data funded by the Aarhus University Research Foundation (AUFF). The postdoc positions are full-time, two-year fixed-term positions. Design and Aesthetics for Environmental Data focus on historical and current practices of seeing, knowing, and designing the environment and the planet as data: as patterns, visualizations, projections, models, simulations, and other aesthetic objects with epistemic value. The working language of the project is English – https://bit.ly/3GGfu5P

Call for Book Chapters | Feminist Futures: From Witches to Maids to Robots and Beyond | Proposal submission deadline 15 Dec 2021 | Feminist Futures is a book all about bridges and connections! It aspires to take a look at the future, it wants to tell the story of witches, how neo-feudalism relates to the present monsters, how postcolonialism and post cold war politics brought us here when it comes to women’s rights. It is about automation and the constant repetition of the need for care without really doing it. It wants to bring these stories at the centre stage to talk about the future, to shed light on research that can lead us to what unites us and not to what divides us – https://bit.ly/3nSUsZ4

Books, Papers & Publications

Artistic Research – Dead on Arrival? Research practices of self-organized collectives versus managerial visions of artistic research | By Florian Cramer. (First published in Henk Slager [ed.], The Postresearch Condition, Utrecht: Metropolis M Books, 2021, p. 19-25). Since at least the early 20th century, artists groups have called their work “research”. Canonized examples include the “Bureau des recherches surréalistes” (“Bureau of Surrealist Research”) founded in Paris by André Breton and fellow Surrealists in 1925 and the Situationist International which, from 1957 to 1972, operated under the moniker of a research group and whose periodical had the form of a research journal. […] Today, transdisciplinary art/research collectives seem to be more common as a contemporary art practice in non-Western regions than in Western countries where art systems are more institutionalized – https://bit.ly/2ZNpjy1

Machines We Trust: Perspectives on Dependable AI | Edited by Marcello Pelillo and Teresa Scantamburlo | Experts from disciplines that range from computer science to philosophy consider the challenges of building AI systems that humans can trust. Artificial intelligence-based algorithms now marshal an astonishing range of our daily activities, from driving a car (“turn left in 400 yards”) to making a purchase (“products recommended for you”). How can we design AI technologies that humans can trust, especially in such areas of application as law enforcement and the recruitment and hiring process? In this volume, experts from a range of disciplines discuss the ethical and social implications of the proliferation of AI systems, considering bias, transparency, and other issues – https://bit.ly/3AMedWR

The Art of Activism: Your all-purpose guide to Making the Impossible Possible | By Steve Duncombe and Steve Lambert | It brings together the authors’ extensive practical knowledge—gleaned from over a decade’s experience training activists around the world—with theoretical insights from fields as far-ranging as cultural studies and cognitive science. From the United Farm Workers’ boycott movement in sixties’ California to a canal-side beach in present-day Saint Petersburg, these pages are packed with contemporary and historical case studies that have been shown to work in practice. The accompanying workbook contains fifty expertly crafted exercises to help you flex your creative imagination and hone your political tactics, taking you step-by-step toward becoming the most persuasive and impactful artistic activist you can possibly be – https://bit.ly/3CcKCr9

Whistleblowing for Change: Exposing Systems of Power & Injustice | Editor Tatiana Bazzichelli | Out 27 Nov 2021 | The courageous acts of whistleblowing that inspired the world over the past few years have changed our perception of surveillance and control in today’s information society. But what are the wider effects of whistleblowing as an act of dissent on politics, society, and the arts? How does it contribute to new courses of action, digital tools, and contexts? This urgent intervention based on the work of Berlin’s Disruption Network Lab examines this growing phenomenon, offering interdisciplinary pathways to empower the public by investigating whistleblowing as a developing political practice that has the ability to provoke change from within – https://bit.ly/3nTyZiP

Proof of Work: Blockchain Provocations 2011–2021 | By Rhea Myers | Art Editions, Forthcoming Jun 2022 | DAO? BTC? NFT? ETH? ART? WTF? HODL as OG crypto artist, writer, and hacker Rhea Myers searches for faces in cryptographic hashes, follows a day in the life of a young shibe in the year 2032, and patiently explains why all art should be destructively uploaded to the blockchain. Now an acknowledged pioneer whose work has graced the auction room at Sotheby’s, Myers embarked on her first art projects focusing on blockchain tech in 2011, making her one of the first artists to engage in creative, speculative and conceptual engagements with ‘the new internet’. This anthology brings together annotated presentations of Myers’s blockchain artworks along with her essays, critiques, reviews, and fictions—a sustained critical encounter between the cultures and histories of the art world and crypto-utopianism, technically accomplished but always generously demystifying and often mischievous – https://bit.ly/3nSpmki

Critical Theory and New Materialisms | Edited By Hartmut Rosa, Christoph Henning, Arthur Bueno | Published by Routledge, 15 June 2021 | Bringing together authors from two intellectual traditions that have, so far, generally developed independently of one another – critical theory and new materialism – this book addresses the fundamental differences and potential connections that exist between these two schools of thought. With a focus on some of the most pressing questions of contemporary philosophy and social theory – in particular, those concerning the status of long-standing and contested separations between matter and life, the biological and the symbolic, passivity and agency, affectivity and rationality – it shows that recent developments in both traditions point to important convergences between them and thus prepare the ground for a more direct confrontation and cross-fertilization – https://bit.ly/3BHvIrv

Articles, Interviews, Blogs, Presentations, Videos

The Chaos of Eros: in conversation with the programmers of Erotic Awakenings | Maria Isabel Martinez | Erotic life is a treasure we hold close until we believe its delight might multiply in the hands, eyes, ears, or mouth of another. One such place for sharing is “Erotic Awakenings,” an archive primarily containing writings hosted on the website of Toronto artist-run gallery Hearth Garage. The project is a collaboration between the gallery’s programmers Benjamin de Boer, Philip Ocampo, Rowan Lynch, and Sameen Mahboubi and writer and facilitator Fan Wu. Each piece of writing is singular in form and content, reflective of our varied erotic experiences. In an erotic moment, we might become unfastened from a solid sense of our identity, or further reminded of the body we can’t escape – https://bit.ly/3GPuONB

Artgames and interspecies LARPS with Marc and Ruth of Furtherfield | Podcast | The ReImagining Value Action Lab | “We talked about art, games, LARPs and other subversive high jinks on the latest episode of our Conspiracies and  Countergames podcast.” Furtherfield disrupts and democratises art and technology through exhibitions, labs & debates, for deep exploration, open tools & free-thinking and is London’s longest-running (de)centre for art and technology whose mission is to disrupt and democratise through deep exploration, open tools and free-thinking. The ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL) is a research and creativity workshop for the radical imagination active around the world and locally in Thunder Bay, Canada – https://bit.ly/3k815pn

The Digital Art Conundrum – how to evaluate digital art? | Computational Aesthetics | By Josephine Bosma | Digital devices have been part of developments in culture and society for decades, the arts included. They influenced, inspired, or even ‘co-produced’ the work of artists in performance, sculpture, robotics, sound art, and more. […] Though accurate and precise, it is not easily understandable and is a quite theoretical approach. To simplify their proposal: computational aesthetics offers a much-needed alternative to ‘traditional’ definitions of digital art as a purely technological or visual art form. It offers a broader perspective on the field – https://bit.ly/3BEKSy3

London’s ‘Square Mile’ Is One Big Monument To Slavery | By Stewart Home | ArtReview | When it comes to addressing what to do with artworks and memorials connected to historic racism and attendant issues relating to colonialism, some talk up their commitment to change, but their lack of action exposes a preference for the status quo. The City of London Corporation is the local authority that covers the capital’s international financial district. Not only does the Corporation pack more problematic memorials into its famous ‘Square Mile’ than almost any other council in the UK (or, for that matter, the world), it is simultaneously a major patron of the arts.” – https://bit.ly/3nJBm7y

Atari-style Artwork Makes the ‘Guinness World Records 2022’ Book | Dartmouth Edu | Mary Flanagan shows how games can be collaborative through a giant Atari 2600 joystick. “Space Invaders.” “Asteroids.” “Pac-Man.” In the 1980s, the Atari 2600 revolutionized the video game industry as families revelled in the novelty of playing video games on the TV at home. When she was growing up, professor, game designer, and artist Mary Flanagan says the Atari 2600 was one of her most influential digital experiences. Years later, Flanagan’s tribute to that experience, [giantJoystick], made it into the Guinness World Records 2022 as the largest joystick in the world – https://bit.ly/3pYupSZ

AI Horror Movie Wins Lumen Gold | The Lumen Prize for Art and Technology awarded its coveted Gold Award with a cash prize of US$4,000 to UK artist Nye Thompson and UBERMORGEN for UNINVITED, the world’s first horror movie for and by machines. UNINVITED is a horror film for machine networks and human-machine organisms exploring the nature of perception and realism of the unknown and the terror of angst and exhaustion within emergent network consciousness. This generative work (2018–) is a self-evolving networked organism watching and generating a recursive ‘horror film’ scenario using mechatronic Monsters – digital flesh running machine learning algorithms. The work is described by the artists as a radically new creature looking at the world, hearing the universe through millions of hallucinogenic virally-abused sensors and creating a hybrid nervous system – https://bit.ly/3CzRI98

‘It’s a game-changer for us’: Artists welcome guaranteed basic income plan | Deirdre Falvey | Irish Times | The pilot for a new basic income guarantee scheme for artists and arts workers could see “around 2,000” creative workers drawing income from March 2022, or “the beginning of April, and no later than that”, said Minister for the Arts Catherine Martin. She gave details of the pilot project, which will be backed by €25 million funding in 2022, at Wednesday’s Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media budget briefing. A basic income guarantee was the top recommendation of the Arts and Culture Recovery Taskforce’s Life Worth Living report in November 2020, and the Minister said she intends to follow it “as closely as possible and to deliver a scheme that benefits artists and creative arts workers”. The three-year pilot will involve a weekly payment of €325 a week. The department later confirmed there will be no means test to take part in the scheme – https://bit.ly/2ZP73V6

Rhythm and Geometry: Constructivist Art in Britain since 1951 | Review by Bbronaċ Ferran | Studio International | An exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre captures something of the mood of the present, in its reflection on a balancing of constraint and liberation. Conceived by Tania Moore, the Joyce and Michael Morris chief curator, the exhibition draws closely on a “substantial bequest” in 2019 from husband and wife Joyce and Michael Morris, who developed a unique collection of British constructivist art from the 1950s on. As the couple were acquainted with many of the artists included, their collection was informed by their personal taste and sensibility. Its acquisition by the Sainsbury Centre opens up opportunities for new research from a historical perspective into a significantly under-studied domain of postwar practice – https://bit.ly/3q5huP3

These Companies Are Already Living in Zuckerberg’s Metaverse | By Megan Carnegie | Wired/Business | The Meta dream envisages whole companies operating in a virtual world. Many made the switch years ago—with mixed results. Facebook’s metaverse, or Meta’s metaverse, isn’t just being touted as a better version of the internet—it’s being hailed as a better version of reality. […] This space, Zuckerberg claims, won’t be created by one single company, but rather by a network of creators and developers. First problem: 91% of software developers are male. Second problem: You’ve been living in a version of metaverse for years—and, having taken over video games, it’s now coming for the world of work – https://bit.ly/3bwLNWn

Crofton Black – How does the world work? | Exposing the Invisible | Podcast | Crofton Black ended up as an investigator almost by chance. With a background in English Literature and Medieval and Renaissance philosophy, he took an unexpected turn into investigating secret prisons and extraordinary renditions. He is a writer and investigator. He is co-author of Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition and CIA Torture Unredacted, and works on technology and security topics for The Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London. Before this he was a history of philosophy academic, specialising in theories of knowledge and interpretation. He has a PhD from the Warburg Institute, London and was a Humboldt Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin – https://bit.ly/2ZIT1nO

Kirill Medvedev in prison (Moscow, Russia) | An international well known muscovite poet, translator, publicist, activist and community organizer, co-founder of Arkadiy Kots combat-folk band, a long term Free Home learner, has been arrested along with other activists. They were defending a courtyard adjacent to Sretenka street from oligarch Deripaska’s development of an unlawful construction, a luxury apartment hotel rising right on the site of historic buildings from the 18th century –  despite the protests of the local residents the activists were aggressively attacked by the police and kept in the police station for 24 hours awaiting the court hearing. As the excavation continues, they are imprisoned at spetspriyomnik nr-r. 1 and 2 already for 5 days. Since long Kirill is engaged in the defence of peoples land and territories defence, against extractivism, real estate development and criminal waste dumps – https://bit.ly/3mw3uvA

Image: Hydar Dewachi. Image Courtesy of Furtherfield. View from the People’s Park Plinth Voting Weekend (14 -15 August 2021), Furtherfield Gallery, Finsbury Park.

The FurtherList Archives
https://www.furtherfield.org/the-furtherlist-archives/

A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.

Events, Exhibitions, Open Calls, Festivals and Conferences

Trouble In Outer Heaven: Portable Ops Plus | Southwark Park Galleries | 15 Sep – 31 Oct 2021 | The exhibition focuses on the influence and fandom of Metal Gear Solid, one of the most popular video game franchises of all time. Larry Achiampong, Joseph Buckley, Kitty Clark, Sam Keogh, Hardeep Pandhal, Adam Sinclair and Jamie Sutcliffe. Curated by Jamie Sutcliffe.  Featuring The Diamond Dogs Educational Unit: Uma Breakdown, Petra Szemán, Zara Truss Giles. Exploring the unnerving possibilities of biogenetic cloning and military espionage; off-shore para-states and the formation of private task forces charged with seizing power from the world’s collapsing democracies, its once bizarre mythos feels disturbingly appropriate to the world in 2021 – https://bit.ly/3zS4spw

The 7th Athens Biennale ECLIPSE | 24 Sep – 28 Nov 2021 | Co-curated by Omsk Social Club and Larry Ossei-Mensah under the artistic direction of Poka-Yio. The exhibition features artists based in North and South America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe, many of whom will be exhibiting in Greece for the first time. The exhibition title highlights the obscured perspective of reality caused by the constant state of flux we are experiencing in our society now. ECLIPSE engages the social, political and spiritual changes of today’s global construct and in Athens itself, as a rising metropolis located at the intersection of Europe, Asia and Africa both physically and historically – https://bit.ly/3lViLVm

KIBLIX 2020–2021: Virtual Worlds Now, part II | KIBLA PORTAL | 1 Oct – 30 Nov 2021 | The group exhibition is rounded off with additional artistic works that experiment with digital and extended reality (XR) media. The exhibition will take you through a computer-generated video Delusional Mandala by Lu Yang, an artificially intelligent robot Amygdala with the Calyx installation by Marco Donnarumma, a digital fashion collection DEEP by Amber Jae Slooten and The Fabricant, a mixed-reality installation HyperBody Portal: Stratholme. Go Stop by Pete Jiadong Qiang, Spacemen R My Friended by Tony Oursler, a sensual experience of poetry and dance in virtual reality Nightsss by Weronika M. Lewandowska and Sandra Frydrysiak, an interactive intermedia installation Time of Flight by the Compiler Group, a video game What Is Your Truth? by Dorijan Šiško and Sara Bezovšek, a world in VR for platform Sansar MetaGarden: Sphere5 by Tanja Vujinović and the first-person point of view 3600 video Seeing I – The Other by Marko Farid. List of participating artists is in here –> https://bit.ly/3zT31Hh A post about it on IG: https://bit.ly/3ASjXPG

The Unmoving show | Ongoing | An open, interactive, partly performative show waiting for your contribution | Bjørn Magnhildøen | Digital exhibition with the subtitle “a psychogeographical drift in the matrix” is a critique of attention hacking and self-consumption. The exhibition is shaped as a continuous, unpredictable and erratic stream of orientation/awareness based on the works and their metadata/surroundings. The artistic content is based on invitation, open call, and open curation. The show is open for submissions of works before and during the exhibition. The scripted framework is also subject to change in the period; this adds to the performative aspects of the show. See it here – https://unmoving.show/ and at the One-Off Moving Image Festival (One second videos.) – https://noemata.net/one-off/ and, both are part of The Wrong biennale #5 – https://thewrong.org/

Liminal Territories | When AI and NFTs meet Art History | Pal Project | 5 Oct – 20 Nov 2021 | Group exhibition from Conceived by the curator Filippo Lorenzin. It brings together 15 international artists working on the interaction between art and new technologies. The exhibition proposes a new perspective on the current trends in digital art by addressing the broader historical and artistic contexts that allow us to look at GIFs and 3D scans as works of art. The exhibition is an opportunity to learn about the art practice of contemporary creatives who use cutting-edge technology such as 3D printing, AI-generative processes and digital modelling to explore reality in ways that, to various degrees, pay homage to art styles and movements of the past. By investigating the distinct creative approaches of a group of selected international artists, the exhibition offers a public used to enjoying traditional artworks a chance to learn about the most interesting contemporary trends in art. List of presented artists: Rosana Antolí, Robbie Barrat, Jim Campbell, Carla Gannis, Guildor, Auriea Harvey, Luna Ikuta, Jono, Sasha Katz, Yuma Kishi, Paul Pfeifferl, Jan Robert Leegte, Helena Sarin, Edgar Sarin, aurèce vettier – https://bit.ly/3AVwTV1

Critical Engineering Working Group EXHIBITION: Decoding Black Magic. Interventions in Infrastructure | Piksel Festival 2021, 15 November – 12 Dec 2021 | Featuring works by Bengt Sjölén, Danja Vasiliev & Julian Oliver. The Black Book of Wireless is intended to be a book of the dark magic that antennas and radios are with pages that are circuits and PCB trace antennas (copper traces on PCB material) and of which some examples are shown in this iteration. The more obscure parts of this are things that are not fully understood or even if you can model and simulate how you think they will behave you have to try them out to see how they actually behave – https://bit.ly/3kcSdOm

Open Screen 2021 | Arebyte | A yearly programme for artists working online that self-identify as disabled. Developed in partnership with Shape Arts, the open call welcomes artists who use digital tools to their advantage, overcome barriers, criticise matters of inclusivity within technology, or everything in between. Tilly Prentice-Middleton and Uma Breakdown are the two artists selected by the judging panel for 2021 out of the 53 proposals submitted to the open call. Over the span of two months, Tilly and Uma get curatorial support to develop online work that responds to Realities, arebyte’s 2021 theme to go live on arebyte on Screen at the end of September – https://bit.ly/3ianf9C

Packaged for pleasure | Brought to you by Terminal – Seekbeak | A virtual cabinet of curiosities that exists as both a single digital work and a collection of individual pieces, The Terminal: Human Shaped Whole is a mise-en-abysme of digital art turned inside out. The interactive installation gives an ironic sense of claustrophobia:  digital technology promises unlimited digital space and yet everything feels compressed as if the weight of virtual reality is collapsing on itself. The Terminal: Human Shaped Whole, Directed by Jason Isolini, featuring work by Bob Bicknell-Knight, Ian Bruner, Joshua Citarella, Jessica Evans, James Irwin, Claire Jervert, Kakia Konstantinaki, Angeline Meitzler, Erin Mitchell and Neale Willis, curated by Off-Site Project – https://bit.ly/39LLW7A

Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art | 16 Oct 2021 – Jan 16 2022. Albright-Knox Northland | Oppression is systemic—that is, built into the fabric of our society. Even our technologies are not neutral: as many scholars and activists have shown, they are shaped by the biases and agendas of their creators. New digital tools (including facial recognition systems, search algorithms, and databases) created by corporations and governments reflect prejudices based on our collective identities. These tools are then used in ways that contribute to existing inequalities. For example, biased programs may discriminate against disabled people in job interviews, suggest harsher sentences for Hispanic defendants, and deny medical care to Black patients. The earliest computers were called “difference engines,” as they were used to calculate the differences between numbers. Today, computers are machines used to encode the differences between us. This exhibition is organized by University at Buffalo Professor Paul Vanouse and Albright-Knox Assistant Curator Tina Rivers Ryan – https://bit.ly/2Y5uXuc

To Exhibit- · Not to Expose · To Expose · Not to Exhibit | 24 Sept 2021 – 1 Sept 2022 | Under the title To Exhibit – Not to Expose – To Expose – Not to Exhibit, we present the first cycle of programming of the new Santa Mònica. The exhibition orbits around a series of questions that derive from the very processes of deconstruction and reconstruction of an arts centre in the institutional, architectural and symbolic spheres. The first major exhibition of the new Santa Mònica reveals and questions exhibition mechanisms: the physical but invisible ones, and the immaterial ones that remain in the shadows by their very nature. The technology (high and low) that hides behind the works, the architectures behind the props, the spotlights… All are exposed – https://bit.ly/3zUYrZ6

Black Atlantic: Sensing the Planet | 29 – 31 October 2021 | Dartington, Devon, UK | A 3-day gathering at Dartington from 29-31 October, will see leading UK cultural institutions Serpentine, the Royal Court Theatre, UCL’s Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the study of racism and racialisation and Dartington Trust launch Black Atlantic, a new decolonial arts partnership that aims to strengthen the role of arts and culture in advancing social and climate justice. Sensing the Planet will highlight issues of race and environmental harm as well as the role played by the UK, and of the southwest of England in particular, in histories of slavery, empire and climate breakdown. It will also champion the role of interdisciplinary culture in imagining new futures built on principles of sustainability and justice, bringing together leading decolonial thinkers, artists and activists including headline speakers Paul Gilroy, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Philippe Sands QC – https://bit.ly/39Sgp40

Books, Papers & Publications

Museums and the Working Class | Edited By Adele Chynoweth | Routledge | Museums and the Working Class is the first book to take an intersectional and international approach to the issues of economic diversity and class within the field of museum studies. Bringing together 16 contributors from eight countries. As part of the push for museums to be more accessible and inclusive, museums have been challenged to critically examine their power relationships and how these are played out in what they collect, whose stories they exhibit and who is made to feel welcome in their halls. This volume will further this professional and academic debate through the discussion of class – https://bit.ly/3m1xzBR

Mixed Forms of Visual Culture: From the Cabinet of Curiosities to Digital Diversity | By Mary Anne Francis | Bloomsbury | The book celebrates and seeks to understand the overlooked appearances of hybrid forms in visual culture; artefacts and practices that meld or interweave incongruous elements in innovative ways. And with an emphasis on the material aspects of such entities, the book adopts the term ‘mixed form’ for them. Crucially, Mixed Forms of Visual Culture relates its phenomena to the emergence of the division of labour under capitalism and addresses the shifting relationships between art and life, when singularity and uniformity are variously valued and dismissed in the two arenas, and at different points in history – https://bit.ly/2XRzYXe

Media and Management | Authors: Rutvica Andrijasevic, Julie Yujie Chen, Melissa Gregg, and Marc Steinberg | An essential account of how the media devices we use today inherit the management practices governing factory labor. Drawing on rich historical and ethnographic case studies, this book approaches key instances of the industrial and service economy—the legacy of Toyotism in today’s software industry, labour mediators in electronics manufacturing in Central and Eastern Europe, and app-based food delivery platforms in China—to push media and management studies in new directions. Media and Management offers a provocative insight on the future of labour and media that inevitably cross geographical boundaries. Meson Press – https://bit.ly/3D1nbRk

Critical Meme Reader: Global Mutations of the Viral Image | Edited by Chloë Arkenbout, Jack Wilson and Daniel de Zeeuw | Beyond the so-called ‘Alt-right’ and its attendant milieus on 4chan and Reddit, memes have passed the post-digital threshold and entered new theoretical, practical, and geographical territories beyond the stereotypical young, white, male, western subject. As they metastasized from the digital periphery to the mainstream, memes have seethed with mutant energy. From now on, any historical event will be haunted by its memetic double. Our responses to memes in the new decade demand an analogous virtuality. This Critical Meme Reader features an array of researchers, activists, and artists who address the following questions. What is the current state of the meme producer? What are the semiotics of memes? Institute of Network Cultures – https://bit.ly/3CWaKq0

Gertrude Stein: The Complete Writings (2017) | Monoskop | This chronological list of her writings was revised and updated by Robert Bartlett Haas and Donald Clifford Gallup in 1941 (Yale University Library, New Haven), extended by Julian Sawyer in 1948 (Bulletin of Bibliography), and updated again by Richard Bridgman in 1970 (Gertrude Stein in Pieces, Oxford University Press), which, with some additions, forms the basis of this anthology. All texts have been formatted to resemble the original (and often quite idiosyncratic) layout as closely as possible – https://bit.ly/3zUrigp

Articles, Interviews, Blogs, Presentations, Videos

The Original Cryptoartist was also the Original Cryptoleftist | Interview with Rhea Myers | The Blockchain Socialist | An artist, hacker and writer originally from the UK now based in Vancouver. Her work with technology and culture produce new ways of seeing the world as it unfolds around us. She’s been involved in the blockchain art world probably for as long as it has existed and has had her art recently featured in Sotheby’s first NFT auction sale. “What I’ve found incredible about her work is how prescient it was around art and includes the first writings attempting to synthesize blockchain with left politics. She is one of the authors who contributed to the Artists Re: Thinking the Blockchain book published by Furtherfield”. – https://bit.ly/3ETJbiU

CLASSES | Libby Heaney, 2021 | A video essay exploring the entanglements between machine learning classification and social class(ification). The artwork takes place in a simulated model of a London council estate, where Heaney lives. Machine and human voices playfully narrate aspects of Heaney’s in-depth research into accented speech recognition, natural language processing* and public space surveillance, to understand how historical and cultural biases around social class are being translated into code and how this affects people’s material conditions – https://bit.ly/3zHCbSj

The BLACK BOX EAST project | Berlin Gazette | Video presentations | As a starting point for a critical inquiry of “post-communist” spaces at large in East Germany, with a focus on black boxed processes of privatization and globalization. The project intends to look at these very processes from different international perspectives, rethinking “the East” from within, against, and beyond national borders. Participants from more than 30 countries are invited to embark upon an analogous exploration and to collectively create points of intersection. The overall aim is to generate common paths of transnational discourse and struggle by challenging the BLACK BOX EAST as a predatory capitalist system of excessive economic and political dispossession that can no longer be obscured or ignored – https://bit.ly/3ENFIlU

YouTube suspends filmmaker Oliver Ressler’s account without warning | Art-leaks.org | The YouTube account of the Austrian filmmaker and artist Oliver Ressler was suspended last Thursday for alleged “repeated violations”. YouTube issued Ressler with a message warning that “spams, scams or commercially deceptive material are not allowed on YouTube”. The artist says that no such material had been uploaded to his channel, that no prior warnings about such violations had been received and accuses the video-sharing platform of censoring his work – https://bit.ly/3lZmEZw

Beeple and Jordan Wolfson | Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast | Society & Culture | Apple Podcasts | When Mike Winkelmann, now widely known as the digital artist Beeple, sold an artwork at Christie’s for $69 million in March 2021, it shocked the art world—and created an escalating interest in and market for NFTs, digital art using blockchain technology that allows the work of digital artists like Beeple to be collected for the very first time. But the high-stakes prices also brought two parallel art worlds—the traditional one of galleries and museums, and the growing online community of digital artists—crashing into each other. In this provocative conversation, Beeple and Jordan Wolfson hash out the relationship between the two and ask: Where do we go from here? https://apple.co/3oaMs7G

Seeing Through The Debris | Jay Springett | “The basic idea of the ‘Breakaway Civilization’ is simply that you have a secret group, a classified group of people, with access to radically advanced technology, radically advanced science, and they just don’t share it with the rest of the world. One scientific breakthrough leads to another, and that leads to another and so on. So the next thing you know, you’ve got a separate group of humanity that is vastly far beyond the rest of the world.” https://bit.ly/39FO94v

Should We De-Extinct Woolly Mammoths? | By Alex Pearlman | Geneticist George Church broke my corner of the internet again last week when it was announced that his company Colossal, co-led by serial entrepreneur Ben Lamm, raised $15 million for a very controversial de-extinction project targeting the woolly mammoth. This news was another wonderful example of media sensationalism, and hundreds of explosive headlines made it seem like Jurassic Park: Siberia! is imminent. The thing is, that’s not accurate. It’s not a de-extinction project, it’s a hybridization project that could produce a cold-resistant Asian elephant. Can we say that the existence of one or two hybrid elephants is the same as resurrecting an extinct species? – https://bit.ly/2ZDh8nR

Image: DEEP by Amber Jae Slooten and The Fabricant. Digital-only fashion collection, video, 2018. Part of the KIBLIX 2020–2021: Virtual Worlds Now, part II, 1 Oct–30 Nov 2021.

The FurtherList Archives
https://www.furtherfield.org/the-furtherlist-archives/

A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.


Events, Exhibitions, Open Calls, Festivals and Conferences

UNDER THE VIRAL SHADOW: Networks in the Age of Technoscience and Infection | 28 August – 10 October 2021 | Anna Dumitriu, Alex May, Benjamin Bacon, Gene Kogan, Sarah Grant and Vivian Xu. Under the Viral Shadow explores various networks – biological, cybernetic, and social – as part of the COVID-19 pandemic. A group exhibition, symposium, performances, and workshops with artists whose research and media are either in the life or computer sciences. Artworks explore biological networks, digital networks, and social networks under the pressure of new technologies. Art Laboratory Berlin, Prinzenallee 34, 13359 Berlin – https://bit.ly/3jkG6Q0

Illiberal Arts | Exhibition at HKW | Sep 11 – Nov 21, 2021, | The liberal capitalist world order that prevailed after 1989 is today in a stage of advanced disintegration. The collapse of this order exposes the illiberal core of its freedoms and forms of ownership shaped by the market: the violent unfreedoms of the dispossessed as well as the willingness of the propertied to use violence. Art, too, reveals itself as the venue of these forces and their exclusions: Through the downfall of liberality, the modern institution of “veranstaltlichte Kunst” (“institutionalized art”, Arnold Hauser) and its social legitimacy are also increasingly called into question – https://bit.ly/3yjUg8n

Judith Butler and Mel Y. Chen on Gender Politics and Pandemic Time | 6:30pm in Pacific Time (US and Canada) Sep 20, 2021 | Free  · Online event | Judith Butler and Mel Y Chen extend their exhibition catalogue conversation Gender in Time to the evolving temporalities of the Covid-19 pandemic. They will discuss a range of concerns that the pandemic has highlighted, including shifting challenges for women and racialized queer, trans, and disabled communities; queer and crip time; differing valuations of productivity, and the transformations of regimes and cultures of care in the pandemic – https://bit.ly/3sKVFDS

Tales from Cyber Salon: a series of interdisciplinary technology and policy investigations through science-fiction writing | 6.30 pm BST September 20 2021 Zoom/Hybrid Event. Panel guests are: Lead: Rachael Armstrong, Edward Saperia and Yen Ooi, Chair Eva Pascoe (Cybersalon.org) | Spanning four events across the year, it features newly commissioned, speculative short stories written for the exploration of healthcare, the high street, digital communities and political representation. book here – https://bit.ly/3mA2zL9

Archive.org are celebrating ‘From Wayback to Way Forward: The Internet Archive at 25’ | 6pm PT (9pm ET) Thursday, October 21 | As the Internet Archive turns 25, we invite you on a journey from way back to the way forward, through the pivotal moments when knowledge became more accessible for all. Come celebrate with us, no matter where you are in the world. A virtual journey with the builders and dreamers who have reached for the stars. – https://bit.ly/3zeRUZP

Articles, Interviews, Blogs, Presentations, Videos

Podcast: News From Where We Are # 5 – The Radical Friendship Podcast Series | Filippo Florenzin interviews Angela Washko and Rosa Menkman. Marc Garrett interviews Cornelia Sollfrank. Music includes AGF (poem producer), and other audio delights. Washko is an artist who creates new forums for discussions about feminism in spaces frequently hostile toward women, femmes, and non-binary people. Menkman’s work focuses on noise artefacts that result from accidents in both analogue and digital media (such as glitch and encoding and feedback artefacts). Sollfrank is currently working as an associate researcher in the project “Creating Commons.”- https://buff.ly/3fK5iO2

Site-Specific Software: A Conversation with Sarah Friend | SPEAKERS: Sarah Friend and Charlie Robin Jones | The crypto world is awash in protocols that have for better and worse given us many new forms to make sense of. Friend’s body of work is a sustained critique of these new typologies and lays bare how these new mechanics of generating wealth and ascribing value work. Rather than take this new vernacular—mining, minting, owning—for granted, we need to interrogate these new ways of relating and interacting – https://bit.ly/3ydUQol

Reality in the Real | Photographer Gilbert Hage speaks to Lebanese artists in the aftermath of the explosion in the Port of Beirut. A living archive of individual human experience in the face of a large-scale tragic event. In the series of videos presented—the first moving image work executed by celebrated Lebanese photographer Gilbert Hage—Lebanese artists relate their private encounters with the explosion in the port of Beirut on August 4th, 2020. This archive sees the many signifying processes that are involved in an event that escapes any simple definition—an occurrence of what Lacan defines as ‘the Real’. https://bit.ly/3zoanmW

An Artificial Intelligence Helped Write This Play. It May Contain Racism | Article by Billy Perrigo | AUGUST 23, 2021 | In a rehearsal room at London’s Young Vic theatre last week, three dramatists were arguing with artificial intelligence about how to write a play. Tang is the director of AI, the world’s first play written and performed live with artificial intelligence, according to the theatre. The play opens on Monday for a three-night run. As the audience watches on, the team will prompt the AI to generate a script — which a troupe of actors will then perform, despite never having seen the lines before. The theatre describes the play as a “unique hybrid of research and performance.” – https://bit.ly/3jk9QfT

GOING AWAY.TV LIVE – JUDGEMENT DAY | Performance curated by Marc Blazel, with performances from Gal Go Grey, Skye Chai, Dank Collective, and Adam Paroussos. Hosted by Meg Jenkins & Marc Blazel. Part of arebyte Net Works, 2021 programme Realities, it invites and commissions artists, curators and international galleries working in digital arts to develop projects to be presented on AOS. Artists, Independent curators and galleries are encouraged to experiment with the platform and how they present their projects in relation to the yearly theme of the gallery – https://bit.ly/3jibHly

Lynn Hershman Leeson: ‘I had to wait 30 years for the millennials to be born’ | In Conversation with Vivian Chui, Ocula magazine | While virtual reality, augmented reality, and NFTs have edged contemporary art towards new technologies in recent years, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s practice has relished in the digital frontiers for over five decades. The San Francisco-based artist’s wide array of installations, performances, videos, sculptures, photographs, and works on paper have addressed the complicated relationship between humans and their inventions, as well as the constraints and biases that women are forced to contend with in modern society – https://bit.ly/2Wkcj0Y

“A Veil Was Broken”: Afrofuturist Ytasha L. Womack on the Work of Science Fiction in the 2020s | By Ytasha Womack | The Afrofuturism movement within sci-fi may be equal to this moment, in part because it grows out of a history of displacement, atrocity, and instability. One task of science fiction is to knock us off-kilter — to transport us to altered times and places, the better to question our own world. But sci-fi has renewed competition in that department from reality itself. The quickening storm of events in America in the last half-decade, culminating in 2020 in the Covid-19 pandemic and the uprisings against systemic racism, has unmoored us from old norms and expectations with a suddenness that societies witness perhaps once or twice per century – https://bit.ly/3kxcgHw

Podcast: Men, war, capitalism and conspiracy – with Jack Bratich (CGCG10) | The ReImagining Value Action Lab | We are caught between two wars of restoration: the far-right, seeking to return us to a fabled past and a liberal capitalist “centre” demanding more business as usual. Between these two, dark new “conspiracy theories” breed, especially among men, which reinforce the worst of patriarchy, with deadly effect. Jack Bratich is a professor of Journalism and Media Studies at the Rutgers School of Communications and Information. His research focuses on themes including the interface of political culture and popular culture, conspiracy panics, surveillance, journalism, activism, and the production of truth. He is the author of Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture (2008) | Soundcloud – https://bit.ly/3ktrCga

Are privacy and antitrust on a collision course? Harmful dominance, democratic privacy controls, interop and illegitimate greatness | Cory Doctorow | In “The New Antitrust/Data Privacy Law Interface,” Temple Law’s Erika M Douglas presents a fascinating look at the tensions between privacy and competition. It’s only fitting that Douglas published her paper in the Yale Law Journal, as that’s the same journal that kickstarted the modern antitrust revolution when it published Lina Khan’s “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” while she was a law student – https://bit.ly/2WfTIDP

How AI-powered tech landed man in jail with scant evidence | Williams was jailed last August, accused of killing a young man […] But the key evidence against Williams didn’t come from an eyewitness or an informant; it came from a clip of a noiseless security video showing a car driving through an intersection, and a loud bang picked up by a network of surveillance microphones. Prosecutors said technology powered by a secret algorithm that analyzed noises detected by the sensors indicated Williams shot and killed the man | By Garnace Burke, Martha Mendoza, Juliet Linderman and Micheal Tarm | August 20, 2021 – https://bit.ly/3sLzkWD

Books, Papers & Publications

Earth and Beyond in Tumultuous Times: A Critical Atlas of the Anthropocene | Edited by Réka Patrícia Gál and Petra Löffler | A critical exploration of the Anthropocene concept. It addresses the urgent geopolitical and environmental questions raised by the new geological epoch. How are we to rethink landscapes, such as river deltas, oceans, or outer space? How can we create spaces for resistance and utopic dreaming? This volume confronts these questions by charting how space and place are constructed, deconstructed, and negotiated by humans and non-humans under conditions of globally entangled consumption, movement, and contamination. The essays in this volume are complemented by artistic interventions that offer a poetics for a harmed planet and the numerous worlds it contains | Meson Press – https://bit.ly/3zGeVVE

The Landscape of Utopia: Writings on Everyday Life, Taste, Democracy, and Design | By Tim Waterman | February 21, 2022, Forthcoming by Routledge | A collection of short interludes, think pieces, and critical essays on landscape, utopia, philosophy, culture, and food, all written in a highly original and engaging style by academic and theorist Tim Waterman. Exploring power and democracy, and their shaping of public space and public life; taste, etiquette, belief and ritual, and foodways in community and civic life, the book provides a much-needed critical approach to landscape imaginaries. It discusses landscape in its broadest sense, as a descriptor of the relationship between people and place that occurs everywhere on land, from cities to countryside, suburb to the wilderness – https://bit.ly/3gUCGSF

Distant Early Warning: Marshall McLuhan and the Transformation of the Avant-Garde | By Alex Kitnick | Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) is best known as a media theorist—many consider him the founder of media studies—but he was also an important theorist of art. Though a near-household name for decades due to magazine interviews and TV specials, McLuhan remains an underappreciated yet fascinating figure in art history. His connections with the art of his own time were largely unexplored, until now. In Distant Early Warning, art historian Alex Kitnick delves into these rich connections and argues both that McLuhan was influenced by art and artists and, more surprisingly, that McLuhan’s work directly influenced the art and artists of his time – https://bit.ly/3DqdCfK

Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge | An ambitious research project based on the premise that performance art can be conserved. The project reviews and systematises emerging approaches to the newly established subfield of the conservation of performance-based artworks. It also explores new methods for conserving performance-based works through (a) forms of documentation and archives, (b) material residues, and (c) the transmission of knowledge. The project reflects on conservation as a knowledge-generating activity and tests its potential contribution to broader discourses in performance studies, anthropology, art history and aesthetics. Bern University of the Arts, Institute Materiality in Arts and Culture – https://bit.ly/3zwCtw0

Explorations in Digital Cultures | by Mary Shnayien, Marcus Burkhardt and Katja Grashöfer | Digital media are transformative: they (re)shape the ways of communicating, relating, doing, knowing, and living as much as they are themselves subject to continuous transformation. The contributions in this volume explore these contemporary shifts in and of digital cultures by analyzing a wide range of topics: from data, infrastructures, algorithms, logistics, economies, politics, identities, collectives to modes of critique and digital practices. Drawing from and contributing to ongoing debates in media culture studies, all contributions share a sensitivity for the multilayered histories of digital media technologies as well as their own discourses – https://bit.ly/3ta1uer

All Art Is Ecological: Penguin Green Ideas | By Timothy Morton | Provocative and playful, All Art is Ecological explores the strangeness of living in an age of mass extinction and shows us that emotions and experience are the basis for a deep philosophical engagement with ecology. According to the reviews of dermrefine, this face treatment is one of the most popular in the UK. Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement. Together, these books show the richness of environmental thought and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world – https://amzn.to/38hLBsB

Living in Data: A Citizen’s Guide to a Better Information Future | By Jer Thorp | Jer Thorp’s analysis of the word “data” in 10,325 New York Times stories written between 1984 and 2018 shows a distinct trend: among the words most closely associated with “data,” we find not only its classic companions “information” and “digital,” but also a variety of new neighbours from “scandal” and “misinformation” to “ethics,” “friends,” and “play.” Punctuated with Thorp’s original and informative illustrations, Living in Data not only redefines what data is but reimagines who gets to speak its language and how to use its power to create a more just and democratic future. Timely and inspiring, Living in Data gives us a much-needed path forward – https://bit.ly/3gCTbCx

Image: Constantina Zavitsanos. Tests for Visa Dove Pan, 2021. Courtesy of the artist. Illiberal Arts. HKW. 2021, Sep 11, Sat — 2021, Nov 21, Sun.

The FurtherList Archives – https://www.furtherfield.org/the-furtherlist-archives/

A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.

Events, Exhibitions, Open Calls, Festivals and Conferences

SOUL KALEIDOSCOPE | A 2-day course about the I Ching | Maria Lusitano | Soul Artist, Healer, Teacher | Sat & Sun 10 to 1 pm 11th, 12th, July 2021 | This workshop will explore the I Ching through drawing. The I Ching, or the Book of Changes, is an ancient Chinese Text that has served for thousands of years as a philosophical taxonomy of the universe. Each hexagram is composed of 2 trigrams that represent respectively, heaven, a lake, fire, thunder, wind, water, a mountain, and earth. These are the building blocks of the cosmos and through their interaction, all aspects of civilization and human behaviour are developed – https://bit.ly/3xkgF5G

SENSITIVES STREAM | Arts Catalyst presents an online project by Matterlurgy that highlights the importance of river-dwelling organisms | Tue 18 May 2021 – Tue 31 August 2021 | How do water organisms register and reveal complex meaning in relation to river health? How can environmental data be both sensible and sensuous? What fieldwork is required when you cannot access, see or hold that which is being studied? Sensitives Stream is an online project by Matterlurgy (Helena Hunter and Mark Peter Wright) that shares research and practice from their residency with Arts Catalyst as part of Test Sites. The project highlights the importance of river-dwelling organisms and how their presence or absence indicates broader stories in relation to ecosystems, environmental stress and human activity – https://bit.ly/3jwG882

The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 | Furtherfield and The New Design Congress, supported by CreaTures Creative Practices for Transformational Futures | August 2021. “Catapulted several years into the future where all the species of the park have risen up to demand equal rights with humans. A new invention – The Sentience Dial – allows humans to tune into all the flora and fauna of Finsbury Park.” This series of immersive games played from more-than-human perspectives depicts the story of the dawning of interspecies democracy – a new era of equal rights for all living beings. All species come together to organise and shape the environments and cultures they inhabit for bountiful biodiversity in Finsbury Park, urban green spaces across the UK, the world, and beyond. The Interspecies Assemblies Need YOU! https://www.furtherfield.org/the-treaty-of-finsbury-park-2025/

Secrets of Soil | By Henry Driver | An interactive journey that explores the hidden world of soil and its role in combating climate change. Your journey will take you to a microscopic world, witnessing the essential life forms that live there. It is freely available as a 360-degree video accessible on most devices, as well as on Steam as a fully interactive experience. Henry Driver’s new interactive journey, Secrets of Soil, was inspired by his family’s attempts to make their farming practices carbon negative. He presents a visually striking view of the world beneath our feet and explores his thoughts around how it would be possible to better care for and preserve it. The project was commissioned by BBC Arts and ACE as part of New Creatives. Steam Page – https://bit.ly/3qBsmT0 360-degree video direct link – https://bit.ly/3xkk3NW

Based on a Tree Story | Hervisions x Ayesha Tan Jones | Live in June and August 2021 | As part of Peoples Park Plinth at Furtherfield Gallery | A sonic augmented reality encounter with a digital tree sprite. Dubbed the Trunk Triplets Tree, situated in Finsbury Park and the soils from which they grew, this tree is part of the now-extinct ancient woodland, Hornsey Woods. From the medieval history to sci-fi futures, their stories are told through an augmented reality and audio experience, giving viewers an insight into the past, while arming them with inspiration and knowledge to help protect the trees into the future. The project activates a digital tree sprite that shares a fable crafted through local research, site visits and discussion with Ricard Zanoli, the Park Ranger. For this first iteration of the artwork for the People’s Park Plinth revealed in June, we are sharing the stories of the London Plane tree. If this work is selected in a public vote in August 2021, the audience will be invited to follow a magical trail of clues to find other tree sprites and experience their stories. – https://peoplesparkplinth.org/

Moment 48 > Now&Here = Everywhere | Event by Iceberg Fernandez and Quantum Filmmaking | Online event | Free for anyone on or off Facebook | 10th July 2021 at 6 pm BST for international video art collaboration | A Quantum Filmmaking project which entangles people internationally into co-creation through the camera-phones For the Arts’ Sake. In the video art project, we co-create and re-create simultaneous moments happening in different points of Planet Earth while celebrating and inter-connecting cultural diversity. To participate make a 30-second film with your mobile phone of the situation, a detail or the place you are at that precise date and time, and send it as soon as you can, along with the name of the city – https://bit.ly/2TkvzdC

Black| White ::: Online Dance/Music Performance Workshop | Free  · Online event | 15 July 2021 | Third Space Network (3SN) and the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company present Black|White, an online dance/music performance workshop on Thursday, July 15th, 6 pm EDT. The workshop showcases Los Angeles tenor and performance artist Charles Lane, along with dancer/choreographer Daniel Charon, artistic director of the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company in Salt Lake City. The two artists, performing live from their home studios, will be united live & online in the Deep Third Space Performance Lab. Register & Save Your Spot – https://www.crowdcast.io/e/black-white

Tuned Circuits, the 2021 edition of Oscillation Festival | It borrows its title from Daphne Oram, the early electronic composer and instrument inventor. Oscillation — Tuned Circuits takes place over 4 days as a live broad­cast from MILL, Brussels and addi­tion­al loca­tions. The fes­ti­val will mix talks, per­for­mances and works for radio. Each day focuss­es on a sub-the­mat­ic: attun­ing, as a move­ment of con­ver­gence; feed­back, as a cir­cu­lar move­ment which ampli­fies itself; detun­ing, as a move­ment of unlearn­ing and a con­di­tion for regen­er­a­tion. The open­ing evening we ded­i­cate to Daphne Oram, whose research the­mat­ic we take as our own: ​“to fol­low curiosi­ties with­out flinching”. For dates – http://www.q-o2.be/en/

Artists Talk: Caroline Sinders with Tamiko Thiel | Photographers Gallery | 6:30 pm, 20th July 2021 – 8:00 pm | To mark Caroline Sinders new Media Wall commission, hear her in conversation with artist Tamiko Thiel. Caroline Sinders Racialised Disinformation | Using performance, design, activist-based research and machine-learning, artist Caroline Sinders looks at digital human rights and the technical infrastructure that perpetuates hate speech and violent misinformation. In this new talk with artist Tamiko Thiel, we will look at the intersections of their two practices to investigate the deceptive terms and conditions of platforms like YouTube — at the responsibility they have for the content they host and the influential role they have in shaping public opinion – https://bit.ly/3qy0AHe

Overground Resistance | Q21 exhibition space in the Museums Quartier in Vienna | Curator: Oliver Ressler | 2021-06-29 | Extreme weather conditions have become the global norm. Forests are burning, permafrost soils are thawing, polar ice and glaciers melt, drought strikes once-fertile regions, plant and animal species are becoming extinct on a massive scale. Yet even as the impact of climate breakdown comes to be felt everywhere, government climate policy worldwide is woefully inadequate to the urgency of the crisis. On one day, states declare a climate emergency; the next day they still sponsor fossil-fueled energy, building freeways, airports and gas pipelines, enclosing territory on whatever scale the projects demand. „Overground Resistance“ brings together artists who produce their works in dialogue with the climate justice movements in which they consider themselves participants – https://bit.ly/3y8rUyl

Books, Papers & Publications

Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover | Authors: Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, with Jennie Klein | The story of the artistic collaboration between the originators of the ecosex movement, their diverse communities, and the Earth. In 2008, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens married the Earth, which set them on the path to explore the realms of ecosexuality. Assuming the Ecosexual Position describes how the two came together as lovers and collaborators, how they took a stand against homophobia and xenophobia, and how this union led to the miraculous conception of the Love Art Laboratory | 29 Jun. 2021 – https://bit.ly/2U6ZXIo

Dark Academia: How Universities Die | By Peter Fleming | There is a strong link between the neoliberalisation of higher education over the last 20 years and the psychological hell now endured by its staff and students. While academia was once thought of as the best job in the world – one that fosters autonomy, craft, intrinsic job satisfaction and vocational zeal – you would be hard-pressed to find a lecturer who believes that now. Fleming delves into this new metrics-obsessed, overly hierarchical world to bring out the hidden underbelly of the neoliberal university. He examines commercialisation, mental illness and self-harm, the rise of managerialism, students as consumers and evaluators, and the competitive individualism which casts a dark sheen of alienation over departments | Pluto press – https://bit.ly/3x6NbbG

Tactical Entanglements: AI Art, Creative Agency, and the Limits of Intellectual Property | By Martin Zeilinger | How do artistic experiments with artificial intelligence problematize human-centered notions of creative agency, authorship, and ownership? Offering a wide-ranging discussion of contemporary digital art practices, philosophical and technical considerations of AI, posthumanist thought, and emerging issues of intellectual property and the commons, this book is firmly positioned against the anthropomorphic spectacle of “creative AI.” It proposes instead the concept of the posthumanist agential assemblage, and invites readers to consider what new types of creative practice, what reconfigurations of the author function, and what critical interventions become possible when AI art provokes tactical entanglements between aesthetics, law, and capital. Published by meson press – https://bit.ly/3jKPNZ0

The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World | By Benjamin Bratton | The future of politics after the pandemic. COVID-19 exposed the pre-existing conditions of the current global crisis. The Revenge of the Real envisions new positive biopolitics that recognizes that governance is literally a matter of life and death. We are grappling with multiple interconnected dilemmas—climate change, pandemics, the tensions between the individual and society—all of which have to be addressed on a planetary scale. Even when separated, we are still enmeshed. Can the world govern itself differently? What models and philosophies are needed? Bratton argues that instead of thinking of biotechnologies as something imposed on society, we must see them as essential to a politics of infrastructure, knowledge, and direct intervention. In this way, we can build a society based on new rationality of inclusion, care, and prevention – https://bit.ly/3qDavLO

Prologue to the Sky River | Elise Misao Hunchuck, Marco Ferrari & Jingru (Cyan) Cheng | The Avery Review | The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is often called the water tower of the world. As the source of most of Asia’s significant rivers—the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong, Yangtze, and Yellow Rivers—the plateau provides water for more than two billion people downstream. In the Yellow River’s catchment, traditional—if extraordinary—water management techniques are reaching their upper limits. Severe stress on available water in the North China Plain, nearly half of which comes from Qinghai-Tibet, is tied to burgeoning consumption, water-intensive agricultural production, and industrial activities. Fears over its future scarcity due to climate change and the depletion of glacial reserves in the Himalayas have led the Chinese government to implement water precipitation enhancement technologies at a dramatically increasing scale – https://bit.ly/3A9ujL7

The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value | By Seb Franklin. Locates the deep history of digitality in the development of racial capitalism Seb Franklin shows how the promises of boundless connection, flexibility, and prosperity that are often associated with digital technologies are grounded in racialized histories of dispossession and exploitation. Vital and far-reaching, The Digitally Disposed reshapes such fundamental concepts as cybernetics, informatics, and digitality. Ultimately, The Digitally Disposed questions the universalizing assumptions that are maintained, remade, and intensified by today’s dominant digital technologies. Vital and far-reaching, The Digitally Disposed reshapes such fundamental concepts as cybernetics, informatics, and digitality. University Of Minnesota Press, 22 Jun. 2021 – https://bit.ly/3d9yHzV

Would you like to share your daily walk? | 25th July 2021 | Australian artist Anita Bacic is looking for contributors for artwork based on hundreds of ‘described walks’. Every day she/her/ will add text versions of the walks received on her blog and on social media. Bacic explores media old and new, with a focus on interactive experiences. Bacic is fascinated with the construction of stories, images and experiences and how we as individuals can actively contribute and interact in these processes. She continues to explore works that encourage curiosity, participation, personal connections and self-reflection that in turn can potentially challenge our perceptions and how we see and interpret the world around us – anyone can take part – https://bit.ly/3x9gevd

Articles, Interviews, Blogs, Presentations, Videos

In Conversation with Casey Reas | One of the most influential figures of modern generative art, and co-founder of Processing and the Processing Foundation, as well as the online gallery Feral File. Casey is both an artist and an educator, teaching at UCLA and working out of his studio in Inglewood. I had the honour of speaking with Casey in advance of his upcoming Art Blocks project CENTURY. https://beta.cent.co/artblocks/+z8kf0r 

with/in languages – a pretty pathetic | An artist talk by Annie Abrahams | Hybrid – Journal of arts and Human Mediations | This article is the “archive” of a performance reading presented by Annie Abrahams at the Languages ​​INTER Networks conference at Lancaster University on June 21, 2019. It talks about languages, people, identities, words and silence, through languages, images, sounds and movements. Annie Abrahams is a Dutch performer specializing in performance-based video and internet installations, often using collaborative and interactive writing techniques. Her performances address the question of the limits and possibilities of communication between Internet users through new media such as cyberformance – https://bit.ly/3h7RMF2

Photographing Thatcher’s Britain | By Ravi Ghosh | Tribune | 17.06.2021 | In the 1980s, documentary photographer Paul Graham used his camera to capture the bleakness of Social Security and Unemployment Offices, painting a stark image of life under neoliberalism. Graham had received several public grants for his work, but had, like roughly three million others in the UK at the time, been classified as unemployed for extended periods. He came to prominence in 1983 with the publication of his first photobook, A1: The Great North Road, a survey of transit and transience from the City of London to Edinburgh. Months after Margaret Thatcher won her second parliamentary term and with the Miners’ Strike looming, Graham was again given free rein to document the nation – https://bit.ly/2TKidHz

Polish Politicians Sue Artist-Activists for Mapping “Atlas of Hate” | Six local governments sued four artist-activists who created the Atlas of Hate, an interactive map charting the country’s anti-gay zones | Hakim Bishara |Hyperallergic | A group of local governments in Poland that had declared themselves as “free from LGBT ideology” are waging a battle in court against four artist-activists who created the Atlas of Hate, an interactive map charting the country’s anti-gay zones. If convicted, they would stand liable for at least 165,000 PLN (~$43,500) – https://bit.ly/3jnTYJY

How Chinese Food Fueled the Rise of California Punk | Words by Madeline Leung Coleman | In the late 1970s, Chinatown restaurants started booking some unlikely dinner entertainment: the rowdy young bands of the nascent West Coast punk scene. It was 1979, and LA was struggling. The entire country had plunged into a deep recession just a few years prior, and now Chinatown and the city’s downtown areas were falling into disrepair. More recent Chinese immigrants had started moving to suburban enclaves like the San Gabriel Valley, bypassing Chinatown and its businesses completely; the non-Chinese customers who used to flock to the neighbourhood for exotic chow mein dinners were now avoiding downtown altogether – https://bit.ly/3qzBQOK

Bad Apples or a Rotten Tree? How Britain Brought its Colonial Policing Home | Hardeep Matharu and Peter Jukes | Byline Times | As the Metropolitan Police is judged to be institutionally corrupt, Hardeep Matharu and Peter Jukes explore how some of the biggest problems still plaguing British policing are embedded in the soil of British colonialism. According to Alastair’s partner, Kirsteen Knight, who has spent the past 25 years joining his campaign for justice, the sense of British – or English – exceptionalism is key to the cover-up, and the failures of the authorities to dig deeper into the allegations of police corruption around the murder. Obsessed with a grandiose, but fragile, sense of national greatness, the British state is very bad at reflecting accurately on itself – https://bit.ly/3dr7PLE

V&A insists it has a responsibility to tell truth about collections | Museum responds to government letter urging alignment with its stance on ‘contested heritage’ | Ben Quinn | 28th June 2021 | The Victoria and Albert Museum has responded to government pressure to align with its stance on “contested heritage” by insisting that it has a responsibility to accurately explain the nature of its collections, including items it said were looted by British forces. The V&A was responding to a controversial letter from the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, in which he suggested that bodies could lose government funding if they fail to toe the line and warned against “actions motivated by activism or politics” – https://bit.ly/3w7HicE

E53: The Gwangju uprising, 1980 | Working Class History | Podcast | WCH have just released a new podcast episode about the May 18 uprising in Gwangju, South Korea, in 1980 against the US-backed military dictatorship of Chun Doo Hwan. We speak with participants in the events as well as researcher Kap Su Seol. Part 1 out now for early listening for Patreon supporters. Sign up today to listen! Part 1: Background, and the beginning of the revolt – currently available for early listening for Patreon supporters. Parts 2 onwards: coming soon – E51: Jeon Tae-il and Lee So-sun – Episode about two important South Korean labour organisers, which contains background information to the political situation in the country in the run-up to the Gwangju uprising. Gwangju Diary: Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age – Lee Jae-eui – The best history of the Gwangju uprising, translated by Kap Su Seol. 29th June 2021 – https://bit.ly/363qjOo

How the Banning of Joyce’s Ulysses Led to “The grandest Obscenity Case in the History of Law and Literature” | By Barbara Barbas | 22nd June 2021 | Morris Ernst knew he could win the case to “liberate” Joyce’s famously banned novel. So he found a publisher, took a cut of the royalties and had a copy sent by boat to America. In the early 1930s, James Joyce’s Ulysses was the most notorious banned book in the United States. Using a stream-of-consciousness style to describe twenty-four hours in the life of a lower-middle-class Dubliner named Leopold Bloom, Joyce’s classic, published in 1922, was brilliant, dense, convoluted, complex, and legally obscene. Ulysses was the “only volume of literary importance still under a ban” in the country, Morris Ernst declared. He set out to “liberate” it, and the celebrated case, resolved by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 1934, was not only a landmark in the law of literary censorship but also a turning point in Ernst’s career – https://bit.ly/3xb1Nqn

Image from: Moment 48 > Now&Here = Everywhere. Event by Iceberg Fernandez and Quantum Filmmaking. Online event. 10th July 2021 – https://bit.ly/2TkvzdC

The FurtherList Archives – https://www.furtherfield.org/the-furtherlist-archives/

A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.

Events, Exhibitions, Open Calls and Conferences

Breadcrumbs: Art in the Age of NFTism | Curated by Kenny Schachter | Galerie Nagel Draxler,  Cologne | 12/05/2021 – 21/08/2021 | A “breadcrumb” or “breadcrumb trail” is a secondary navigation scheme that reveals the user’s location in a website or Web application. The term comes from the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale in which the children drop breadcrumbs to form a trail back to their home. The intent of the exhibit is to embrace and showcase a diverse and eclectic group of early and recent adapters employing NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain to create and disseminate digital art via a gallery context and into the wider stream of commerce. The show will put to rest two demonstrably false assumptions widely held by today’s art industry: that this is a fad, and/or not art. With works by: Kevin Abosch, Olive Allen, Rhea Myers, Darren Bader, DotPigeon, Anna Ridler and more – https://nagel-draxler.de/exhibition/breadcrumbs/

A Memorial Tribute to Gene Youngblood | The Unfinished Communications Revolution | Tuesday, June 15th, 4:00 PM EDT | Moderated by Randall Packer & Kit Galloway | Media visionary and activist Gene Youngblood, author of the seminal 1970 book Expanded Cinema that predicted the future of the media arts as a communications revolution, died on April 6, 2021, at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. On Tuesday, June 15, 4 pm EDT, the Third Space Network (3SN) is presenting A Memorial Tribute to Gene Youngblood: The Unfinished Communications Revolution, in association with CURRENTS New Media, and under the auspices of Telematic LASER: Leonardo Society for Arts & Sciences and the University of Brighton School of Art/Centre for Digital Media Cultures. The tribute showcases artists, curators, and media scholars who will speak about Gene Youngblood’s colourful life and historic contribution to the arts, whose work catalyzed emerging forms of experimental film, video, and communications art during the latter part of the 20th century – register – https://bit.ly/34KNxrG

The Para-Real: Finding the Future in Unexpected Places | Presented by New Design Congress and Reclaim Futures. A live stream series about subcultures building livelihoods in spite of platform exploitation. Over 12 episodes streamed weekly, we meet filmmakers who have never met their actors, artists building their own networks of value, documentarians exploring digital identity, and members of resilient subcultures. All of these people share a commonality: they have an innate understanding of the Para-Real and have seized upon it to better their surroundings. Between the digital realm and our physical world, The Para-Real is a third space, equally material but poorly understood. The Para-Real is where class politics, economics and the outcomes of hardware and infrastructure design collide – https://stream.undersco.re/

The Bardo: Unpacking the Real | Curated by Julie Walsh | Featured Artists: Sophie Kahn, Matthew D. Gantt, Carla Gannis, Nancy Baker Cahill, Auriea Harvey, Claudia Hart, Martina Menegon | Feral File is a home for the new media community, where we’re experimenting with exhibiting and collecting file-based artwork. Led by artist Casey Reas in partnership with Bitmark, a company working to restore trust in the Internet, Feral File is an “optimistic undertaking”. “We believe that by partnering with artists and curators to establish transparent protocols for exhibiting and collecting file-based art, we can see a more expansive view of what’s possible—and start bringing it to life” – https://bit.ly/3vSdyBq

MoneyLab #12 4 + 5 June 2021 | On 4 and 5 June 2021 | Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington will host the 12th edition of the international MoneyLab conference series in collaboration with the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam, NL) and the MoneyLab community. It consists of a day CONFERENCE in the first Aotearoa New Zealand edition of the international MoneyLab conference series, in collaboration with Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam) and the School of Design Innovation at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, and EXHIBITION ‘Crypto Art’ in the broadest sense with p0.nz/i gallery, including a first-of-its-kind NFT-virus, rogue mining rigs, a Dogecoin synth, a performative whitepaper pitch/launch, a CryptoVoxels VJ-ing parcel, Vaporwave with ‘Class War on the Dance Floor’ and several other presentations, and COMMUNITY – A call-in session for local and international visitors across time zones, as well as several networking and presentation opportunities for your own projects and collaborations. Connect with us on-site or via one of the common video conferencing options – http://moneylab-wellington.nz/

Pixelache Helsinki Festival 2021: #BURN____ presents All Sources are Broken – A Post-digital Reading Group | Tuesday, 8 June 2021 from 15:00 UTC+01-17:00 UTC+01 | Where does the networking purpose of hyperlinks actually start in offline texts? What happens to the text when we decide to explore the hyperlinks and the online media resources which are referenced there? We all use the Internet every day to retrieve tons of information, without paying too much attention to the sources. In this workshop, we will try to radically connect web-search with reading strategies. All Sources Are Broken is an internet-based project developed by Labor Neunzehn: an artistic experiment and a collaborative re-archival practice, which presents itself as an open access WCMS for the investigation of the hypertext space in post-digital books. Sign up here – https://bit.ly/2STEkeg

STRP Scenario #14: Collectivize! | Online event Sunday, 6 June 2021 from 18:30 UTC+01-21:30 UTC+01 | Anyone on or off Facebook | Collaborating is what saved us, humans, as a species, time and time again. In times of global crises, from pandemics to polarization to climate disasters, it’s time to re-connect the collective. While each speaker contributes their expertise, you as the audience gets to vote. With your votes, the headlines of speculative near-future newsflashes will be auto-generated. During this interactive debate, we shed light on today’s strategies for bringing about change. We take lessons from recent actions in activism, put institutional frameworks to the test and discuss how to make digital spaces work for us as citizens, not users. The Moderator of the evening is Michelle Kasprzak. Co-creator Cream on Chrome. Tickets – https://bit.ly/3vIr6zi

From a huge Janus to a giant worm: seven site-specific sculptures spring up along the English coast | By Jose Da Silva | The Waterfronts commissions, by artists such as Michael Rakowitz and Katrina Palmer, have been created in collaboration with organisations like Turner Contemporary and the Folkestone Triennial. A giant worm, a plaster Roman god, a seawall made of soft seating and a giant chalk hairpin have all appeared along the southeast coast of England. The four works of art by Holly Hendry, Pilar Quinteros, Andreas Angelidakis and Mariana Castillo Deball, are part of Waterfronts, a new initiative organised by England’s Creative Coast organisation – https://bit.ly/3cdN7yd

The Battle for Britain: The People Vs The Government 1984 to 1994 | Free  · Online event by History Indoors | Wednesday, 9 June 2021 from 14:00 UTC+01-15:00 UTC+01 | History Indoors presents ‘The Battle for Britain: The People Vs The Government 1984 to 1994’ with our historian, Chris Walklett. This talk will examine events between ’84 and ’94, during which time the government / the establishment seemingly pitted itself against the British people, particularly the youth. It will cover events including Orgreave, the Greenham Women, the free festivals, acid house & the so-called Summer of Love and others that culminated in the Criminal Justice Act ‘94 | Free via Eventbrite – https://historyindoors.co.uk/upcoming-talks/

Open Call – Excavations: Governance Archaeology for the Future of the Internet: A multimodal conversation | Colorado Medi lab | As a contribution to current digital policy conversations, this project invites artists, tinkerers, and technologists to bring explorations of human governance practices, from ancient civilizations to contemporary social movements, from the slums of emerging megacities to Indigenous communities—all into dialogue with the governance of the Internet. In comparison to present and historical democratic institutions offline, online communities have an impoverished set of tools available for democratic governance (Schneider 2020). Excavations: Governance Archaeology for the Future of the Internet is interested in what might be learned from pre-digital mechanisms across diverse societies and cultural practice. Ancient Athens’ system of lotteries for public offices, for instance, could help us better regulate algorithms today. This project aims to open the spaces between the visible and the layered, nuanced particularities of specific communities and platforms, through a collaborative excavation of what it means to make and be a community on the Internet today – https://bit.ly/3iduNsV

Gender, Place and Race: Intersections in the Art of Elsa James | Free online event by Metal Southend and Estuary Festival | Join Jon Blackwood for an in-conversation event with artist Elsa James to celebrate the publication of his new publication. Join Jon Blackwood for an in-conversation event with artist, Elsa James to celebrate the publication of his new publication, Gender, Place and Race: Intersections in the art of Elsa James. This new text is the result of an ongoing conversation on the artist’s studio practice since 2019 and takes an in-depth look at three works. The publication has been supported by Arts Council England, Firstsite Gallery and Metal. It will be available to download as an e-book and can be purchased from the Firstsite Gallery shop. Book your tickets HERE – https://bit.ly/3g6wGoq

SOLO SHOW is a presentation of artworks installed in artists homes, studios, and other offsite environments | It began during the 2020 quarantines, sharing work created in isolation. It continues as a dedicated off-site exhibition platform, presenting nuanced and experimental works in responsive settings. SOLO SHOW is organized by Underground Flower and has invited the collaboration of partners and guest curators such as Rhizome Parking Garage, Harlesden High Street, Alyssa Davis Gallery, OhNo Galeria, Bog Magazine, and over 500 artists from around the world – https://www.instagram.com/solo___show/

Songs for Work | Glasgow G1 | 11 Jun — 27 Jun 2021 | Songs for Work brings together sound installation and sculpture, poetry and performance by three Glasgow-based artists – Aideen Doran, Beth Dynowski and Susannah Stark – to examine the effects of work on subjectivity, community and wider social, political and ethical imaginaries. Being about work, the exhibition is also necessarily about time – the absence or abundance of it – and about the spaces between violence and reverie. The project looks at both the individual and collective body at work and the cultural practices, strategies and meaning-making which undermine, reinvent and transcend work as world-making. It pays attention to how we shape and are shaped by what we do for a living in all senses – physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually and politically. Performed by Christopher Scanlan | Supported by Glasgow International – https://bit.ly/2RlLiZ0

Moment 47 > Now&Here = Everywhere | Free  · Online event by Iceberg Fernandez and Quantum Filmmaking | Saturday, 12 June 2021 from 13:00 UTC+01-13:01 UTC+01 | You are cordially invited to participate in the video-art project NOW&HERE = EVERYWHERE, which is the shortest international art collaboration in the History of Humanity, lasting just for 30 seconds. NOW&HERE = EVERYWHERE is a Quantum Filmmaking project which entangles people internationally into co-creation through the camera-phones For the Arts’ Sake. In the video art project, we co-create and re-create simultaneous moments happening in different points of Planet Earth, while celebrating and inter-connecting cultural diversity – http://www.now-here-everywhere.org.uk

Data Coops: Breaking Down the Walled Garden | Friday, June 18, 2021, 13:00 – 15:00 BST | This free workshop is for everyone interested in exploring the dynamics of the data economy | This free workshop, organized jointly by Platform Cooperatives Germany and polypoly , is for everyone interested in exploring the dynamics of the data economy and especially for people who seek more privacy and control over their data. Together with our participants, we will engage in a deep dive into data governance: How to build data pools that allow members to create open data and determine who gets access to their personal information? What are the cornerstones of the concept of data autonomy? What makes data security an essential part of both our personal and professional lives? – https://bit.ly/2SNoLEH

Books, Papers & Publications

Automating Vision: The Social Impact of the New Camera Consciousness| By Anthony McCosker, Rowan Wilken | Automating Vision explores the rise of seeing machines through four case studies: facial recognition, drone vision, mobile and locative media and driverless cars. Proposing a conceptual lens of camera consciousness, which is drawn from the early visual anthropology of Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Automating Vision accounts for the growing power and value of camera technologies and digital image processing – https://bit.ly/3vOssIL

Pollution Is Colonialism | By Max Liboiron | Liboiron presents a framework for understanding scientific research methods as practices that can align with or against colonialism. They point out that even when researchers are working toward benevolent goals, environmental science and activism are often premised on a colonial worldview and access to land. Focusing on plastic pollution, the book models an anticolonial scientific practice aligned with Indigenous, particularly Métis, concepts of land, ethics, and relations. Liboiron draws on their work in the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR)—an anticolonial science laboratory in Newfoundland, Canada—to illuminate how pollution is not a symptom of capitalism but a violent enactment of colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land. Duke University Press – https://bit.ly/3peLeqg

Pirate Philosophy: For a Digital Posthumanities | By Gary Hall | Publisher: MIT Press | Series: Leonardo Book Series | Originally 2016, now downloaded for Mobile and as EPUB and PDF. In Pirate Philosophy, Gary Hall considers whether the fight against the neoliberal corporatization of higher education in fact requires scholars to transform their own lives and labour. Is there a way for philosophers and theorists to act not just for or with the antiausterity and student protestors — “graduates without a future” — but in terms of their political struggles? Drawing on such phenomena as peer-to-peer file sharing and anticopyright/pro-piracy movements, Hall explores how those in academia can move beyond finding new ways of thinking about the world to find instead new ways of being theorists and philosophers in the world. The memory of the World – https://bit.ly/34G1WWn

Selected Writings on Race and Difference | Stuart Hall | Editors, Paul Gilroy, Ruth Wilson Gilmore | More than twenty essays by Stuart Hall that highlights his extensive and groundbreaking engagement with race, representation, identity, difference, and diaspora. Spanning the whole of his career, this collection includes classic theoretical essays such as “The Whites of Their Eyes” (1981) and “Race, the Floating Signifier” (1997). It also features public lectures, political articles, and popular pieces circulated in periodicals and newspapers, which demonstrate the breadth and depth of Hall’s contribution to public discourses of race. Duke University Press – https://bit.ly/34IZqPa

Defiant Pose | Stewart Home | Penny-Ante Editions is proud to announce a reissue of Stewart Home’s classic political satire, Defiant Pose, newly introduced by McKenzie Wark with an afterword by Home. Named 1991’s “Book of the Year” by The Face and Gay Times out of the United Kingdom, Defiant Pose: 25th Anniversary Edition ushers an out-of-print “assault on culture” into the 21st century to meet its relevance in today’s torrid times. Employing pastiche and détournement, Richard Allen’s skinhead novels get a perverse makeover, going head to head with Hegel, Hobbes, and the heretical tracts of Abiezer Coppe in the wild ride where no subject is taboo. From fashionable pseudo politics, knucklehead neo-Nazis, middle-class masculinity, the art world, and literature’s so-called “outlaws,” Home’s targets are mercilessly skewered – https://bit.ly/34HZPRN

Dr Smartphones: an ethnography of mobile phone repair shops | by Nicolas Nova and Anaïs Boch | Humanities and Social Sciences/Social Anthropology and ethnology | It’s the conclusion of the Mobile Repair Cultures project that was conducted between 2016 and 2019 at the Geneva University of Art and Design, funded by the Swiss National Research Fund. The book can be bought at IDP Publishing or found here as a free/open access pdf at this URL. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial – ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Published at IDP. Pdf download – https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03106034

Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data | Edited by Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Daniela Agostinho, Annie Ring, Catherine D’Ignazio and Kristin Veel | Scholars from a range of disciplines interrogate terms relevant to critical studies of big data, from abuse and aggregate to visualization and vulnerability. This groundbreaking work offers an interdisciplinary perspective on big data and the archives they accrue, interrogating key terms. Scholars from a range of disciplines analyze concepts relevant to critical studies of big data, arranged glossary style—from abuse and aggregate to visualization and vulnerability. They not only challenge conventional usage of such familiar terms as prediction and objectivity but also introduce such unfamiliar ones as overfitting and copynorm. The contributors include a broad range of leading and agenda-setting scholars, including as N. Katherine Hayles, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Johanna Drucker, Lisa Gitelman, Safiya Noble, Sarah T. Roberts and Nicole Starosielski – https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/uncertain-archives

System Of A Takedown | By Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak | Publisher: Meson Press | Series: In Search of Media | Year: 2019 | The takedown of the book-sharing site Library.nu in early 2012 gave rise to anxiety that the equalizing effect that its piracy had created—the fact that access to the most recent and relevant scholarship was no longer a privilege of rich academic institutions in a few countries of the world (or, for that matter, the exclusive preserve of academia to begin with)—would simply disappear into thin air. While alternatives within these peripheries quickly filled the gap, it was only through an unlikely set of circumstances that they were able to do so, let alone continue to exist in light of the legal persecution they now also face. The starting point for the Public Library/Memory of the World project was a simple consideration: the public library is the institutional form that societies have devised in order to make knowledge and culture accessible to all their members regardless of social or economic status. The memory of the World –  https://bit.ly/3uMVnf1

Articles, Interviews, Blogs, Presentations, Videos

GreenNFTs Hackathon Brings New Ideas, Awareness, And Solutions | By Jason Bailey | June 3, 2021, | Historically, making a living as an artist has been extremely challenging. For many artists and their families, the digital art economy built around NFTs has saved them financially, particularly during COVID with its uncertain economy and the poor job market. However, minting NFTs on some blockchains has been found to be very energy inefficient and damaging to the environment. This created an unhealthy division and friction among creatives that reached a fever pitch in early 2021 when the mainstream media related the news more widely. While it was initially important to draw attention to the issue of the environmental impact of NFTs, I was eager to see the human energy that was being wasted on finger-pointing and shaming artists redirected towards something more productive – https://bit.ly/2SPb2NI

Narrative, games and other conspiracies Podcast – Interview with Wu Ming 1, part 2 | In the first of our two-part interview, Wu Ming collective member 1 discusses his new book La Q di Qomplotto (The Q in Qonspiracy: How Conspiracy Fantasies Defend the System). Wu Ming 1 is an original and ongoing member of the Wu Ming collective, which was founded in Bologna in 2000 and has, since that time, published several collaboratively written novels including 54, Manituana, Altai, The Army of Sleepwalkers, and The Invisible Everywhere, which have been translated into many languages. Wu Ming evolved out of the experimental collective project Luther Blisset whose famous 1999 novel Q focused on conspiracies of liberation and of repression during the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. Conspiracy Games and Countergames is a podcast exploring the rise of conspiratorial thinking in a gamified, capitalist world hosted by Max Haiven, A.T. Kingsmith and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou. For more information, visit conspiracy.games – https://bit.ly/2SYsEXC

Entries for Cyberfemnism on Monoskop Updated | A resource on the art and cultural movements associated with cyberfeminism, technofeminism, xenofeminism and digital feminism. It includes: Virginia Barratt, Diann Bauer, Mez Breeze, Shu Lea Cheang, Constant, Linda Dement, Marthe Van Dessel, Valie Djordjevic, Julianne Pierce, Sadie Plant, Purple Noise, Patricia Reed, Francesca da Rimini, Anne Roth, Cornelia Sollfrank, Genderchangers, Eclectic Tech Carnival, faces, VNS Matrix and more – https://monoskop.org/Cyberfeminism

Inside Brazil’s DIY, eco-friendly NFT art marketplace | By Claire L. Evans | A rapidly growing Brazilian NFT market is offering creators a sustainable way to make a living. Hic et Nunc (the name is Latin for “here and now”) is the black sheep of the crypto-art world, as it is an open-source, bare-bones platform being built collaboratively by a community of volunteer developers. It has no invite system and no gatekeepers—only a constant flow of images, interactive objects, audio experiments, and PDFs. Tezos consumes a fraction of the energy of its rival blockchains — minting a Tezos NFT consumes about as much energy as sending a Tweet — which makes Hic et Nunc an ethical alternative for artists and collectors alarmed by crypto-art’s much-publicized ecological footprint – https://bit.ly/3uLTnng

Why Civil Society Organisers Need a Data Policy | By Dr Amber Macintyre | Civil society organisers rely on personal data and data-driven tactics to support individuals and groups to take part in civil society and informal politics. Advice for anyone working with personal data is limited for the most part to legal advice from policies such as GDPR and technical advice from those already skilled at working with databases. This may be helpful from the perspective of protecting the bare minimum of data, but it does not help with making decisions on what data to collect, what can be done with it or what impact the data-driven methods might have on the systems and society that civil society organisers are contributing to – https://bit.ly/2TEW4KN

Machine Unlearning | Erin Gee, Digital Media, Embodied Media/Performance/Scores, Portfolio, Sound Art | Vision calibration from Machine Unlearning. In Machine Unlearning, the artist offers a neural conditioning treatment by whispering the unravelling outputs of an LSTM algorithm trained on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as the algorithm “forgets.” The combination of machine learning and ASMR draws parallels between autonomous algorithms and the autonomous functions of the human body.  Just as ASMRtists use specific sounds and visual patterns in their videos to “trigger” physical reactions in the user using stimuli, acting on the unconscious sensory processing of the listener as they watch the video, the algorithm also unconsciously responds to patterns perceived by its limited senses in order to develop its learning (and unlearning) processes – https://eringee.net/machine-unlearning/

Old Women | By Jillian Steinhauer | The believer | The best way to succeed as a woman artist is to be old. Not necessarily dead yet, but with the spectre of death hanging over you. You’ve got to be past seventy, at least. […] This way, you arrive with a body of work intact: you’ve already found your voice and honed your craft. Your art is visionary—which means valuable—and you’ve resisted the odds, outlasted the forces of sexism, racism, and any other exclusionary isms that apply. You’re a safe bet at the same time as you’re a discovery. The artist Pat Steir explains this dynamic in Veronica Gonzalez Peña’s documentary about her life and work, Pat Steir: Artist, which came out in 2020, the year she turned eighty. She’s now “an honorary man,” she says, because of her age. “The art world, it’s easier on older women because they feel like, you have the artwork they’ve never seen—because they’ve ignored it,” Steir said – https://believermag.com/old-women/

The Material Evolution of Digital Currency and Crypto (Part 1) | Blockchain Socialist | This is Part 1 of The Material Evolution of Digital Currency to Crypto series. Whenever I speak to crypto-curious people, I like to give a little bit of the history and context that bitcoin was birthed from because I think it helps in understanding the big picture (and because I’m a dirty Marxist and I like my history materialistic). However, our story doesn’t actually start at the creation of bitcoin but actually long ago in the “before times”. That’s right, our story starts in the 19th century in the good ol’ US of A – https://bit.ly/3wRRDu6

Review: Lesley Blume’s “Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World” | By Lawrence Wittner. History News network | Blume reveals that, at the time of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Hersey felt a sense of despair—not for the bombing’s victims, but for the future of the world. In this crisply written, well-researched book, Lesley Blume, a journalist and biographer, tells the fascinating story of the background to John Hersey’s pathbreaking article “Hiroshima,” and of its extraordinary impact upon the world. In 1945, although only 30 years of age, Hersey was a very prominent war correspondent for Time magazine—a key part of publisher Henry Luce’s magazine empire—and living in the fast lane. That year, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, A Bell for Adano, which had already been adapted into a movie and a Broadway play – https://bit.ly/3ieXA0a

Image from: “BREADCRUMBS: Art in the age of NTFism” Curated by Kenny Schachter Exhibition view Galerie Nagel Draxler, Cologne 2021 Photo: Simon Vogel.

The FurtherList Archives – https://www.furtherfield.org/the-furtherlist-archives/

A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology, and social change.

Events, Exhibitions, Open Calls, Festivals and Conferences

Auriea Harvey, Year Zero | March 6–April 17 2021 | Opening Reception: Saturday, March 6 | bitforms is pleased to announce Year Zero, Auriea Harvey’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Through a diverse mixed-media practice, Harvey creates sculpture, video games, drawing, and mixed reality works steeped in character creation and mythology. Year Zero introduces a new body of work nested within the legacy of Harvey’s solo and collaborative career. Working online from the beginning of net art’s history, the artist expertly combines her experience in video game and software development with a three-dimensional practice. Year Zero is a continuation of this coalescence, presenting early sketchbooks, webcam broadcasts, and multiplayer games alongside Harvey’s latest sculptural installations and drawing. https://bit.ly/3bb8Nep

IPERCUBO presents an Online Exclusive Viewing Room dedicated to Axel Straschnoy’s The Permian Projects | 9–23 March 2021 | The Viewing Room is a preview of The Permian Projects, as well as a presentation of the recently published catalogue. The Permian Projects are two research projects by Axel Straschnoy on the natural history collection at the Perm Regional Museum, Perm Kray, Russia. The backdrop of the projects is the End-Permian Extinction (the biggest extinction ever to take place on Earth). The projects reflect on the Museum of Natural History and on the ongoing extinction process. The Dioramas of the Perm Regional Museum is a series of three-dimensional (lenticular) photographs presenting some of the stuffed animals in the collection in storage. https://bit.ly/2NOPeQ8

New Art City Festival: 2021 | A community celebration of Internet Art: March 15–26 2021 | March 26, 2021, is the one-year anniversary of New Art City’s domain registration. d0n.xyz chose the URL the way he always does for his art projects: by searching keywords and picking the coolest free one. A prototype grew into a tool, and a tool grew into a community. Since then, more than 30,000 people in 120 countries have visited galleries in New Art City. As an organization, we are proud to display artists who show in museums on the same level as art students and to show digital art in its native format alongside traditional media – https://bit.ly/2MG8ZJb

THE Q IN QONSPIRACY: QAnon as a Paradigm for Future Social-media-driven Conspiracism | Disruptive Fridays #19 | March 12 2021 |LIVE: Friday 5 pm | Berlin | Roberto Bui/Wu Ming 1 and Florian Cramer, moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli | In this conversation between Wu Ming 1 and Florian Cramer, QAnon is discussed as a template for contemporary social-media-driven conspiracy fantasies that work simultaneously as games and a new kind of cults. By focusing on the mutation of conspiracy myths from countercultural phenomena to contemporary meme and influencer culture, they will focus on three conspiracy narratives: “The Great Replacement” (from Renaud Camus to Charlottesville), QAnon (from Pizzagate to the Capitol storming), and “The Great Reset” (as a set of pandemic-inspired variations on the old New World Order trope). The conversation is centered around Wu Ming 1’s forthcoming book La Q di Qomplotto [The Q in qonspiracy], to be published end of March by Edizioni Alegre, which describes how conspiracy fantasies help legitimize systems of control. https://bit.ly/2OcAoTx

Bread and Roses: Gender and Class Under Capitalism, with Andrea D’Atri | Free  · Online event | Wednesday March 17 2021 7:00 pm–8:30 pm GMT| Is it possible to develop a radical socialist feminism that fights for the emancipation of women and of all humankind? Housmans is proud to welcome Andrea D’Atri to discuss her new publication with Pluto Press, Bread and Roses: Gender and Class Under Capitalism. Join us for a passionate journey through the history of feminism. Using the concrete struggles of women, Andrea traces the history of the women’s and workers’ movement from the French Revolution to queer theory. She analyses the divergent paths feminists have woven for their liberation from oppression and uncovers where they have hit dead ends. https://bit.ly/3uHW6zA

(re)programming: Infrastructure | With Benjamin Bratton | Event by Aksioma, Kino Šiška and KonS | Online with Facebook Live | Monday 15 March 2021 at 6pm UTC | For the 10th anniversary of Tactics & Practice, Aksioma presents (re)programming – strategies for self-renewal a “festival of conversations” with world-class thinkers debating key issues, from infrastructure and energy to community and AI, curated and conducted by writer and journalist Marta Peirano. The festival consists of 8 streaming events taking place every third Monday of the month throughout the year. https://bit.ly/3b0Hu6l

The DAOWO Sessions: Artworld Prototypes | A new set of experimental projects to reinvent the future of arts with blockchain | A partnership between Goethe-Institut, DECAL@Furtherfield, and Serpentine Galleries. The DAOWO Sessions: Artworld Prototypes series of online events ran 28 January – 4 March 2021. The series explores the possibilities for the future of the art world with blockchain by investigating what can be learned from DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations) working with Others (-WO). Each recorded session is an eye-opening presentation and conversation around active experimentation that aims to hack, deconstruct and reinvent the arts in the emerging crypto space in response to people and their local contexts. This is a unique opportunity for cultural practitioners, representatives of arts, technology organisations, communities, and anyone interested in blockchain’s potential to come together and question the future of art and society. https://bit.ly/37YllUg

Virtual Reality Residency | Program OPEN CALL until March 29 | Museums Without Walls is seeking proposals for its virtual reality residency program. Residencies will take place through April and May in different versions of the Espírito Santo Art Museum – MAES hosted in the Mozilla Hubs plataform. Four participants will be selected to occupy and recreate this environment based on their artistic and/or curatorial visions. The selected proposals will receive specialized mentorship and a development fee of CAD $ 600. The residency outcomes will be presented in the Museum Without Walls program in late May. https://bit.ly/3qbGMru

Pick Me Up (& hold me tight) | Compass festival | 19–28 March 2021 | An invitation for collective listening, experienced through public pay-phones across Leeds. Through an invitation to answer a public payphone, Pick Me Up (& hold me tight) is a mass act of contemplation about the relationship between mental health and modern life. Created by award-winning theatre and digital art company ZU-UK in response to rising suicide rates across the country, Pick Me Up (& hold me tight) is an audio event where every phone box in Leeds rings at the same time. Pick up the phone to participate in a gentle but thought-provoking audio experience that explores contemporary loneliness, and exposes the edges of our humanness. It’s an invitation to pause, take stock, and explore what kind of listeners we are. https://bit.ly/3kAcLAj

MoneyLab Berlin: Disaster Capitalism | From 26–28 March 2021| MoneyLab Berlin will shine a light on emerging communities that are starting to organize themselves around sustainable finance, inclusive tech, community-based currencies, and progressive monetary systems. Now for the first time in Berlin, the 11th edition of MoneyLab aims at creating space for utopias, experiments, and radical ideas around an economy for the people and for the planet. Over the course of this event we will present creative coping strategies, answers to the problems of data capitalism, platform monopolies and online surveillance, and modes of resistance. Free – online event. https://bit.ly/3dTaPkZ

Ecology and the Anthropocene Art-Game Commission | Phoenix Art-Game Commission Opportunity | LocationEast Midlands | We are seeking to commission an artist, group or studio to create an art-game exploring ecology and the Anthropocene, responding to the Daisyworld Simulation. We are open to proposals that use gaming as a medium in its widest sense, however, it is important to consider how the work could be exhibited in a gallery setting and published online, using platforms such as Steam and Itch. £4000 Commission fee to cover the production of work. Development support during the production of the work. Deadline – midnight on Sunday 28th March. Shortlisted applicants will be contacted by Monday 5th April – https://bit.ly/2MAnLBb

Center and Periphery: Marxism and Postcolonial Theory | Instructor: Nara Roberta Silva | Online event and Course Schedule 6–27 April 2021 | Brooklyn Institute for Social Research | £229.61 Registration Open | Marxism and anti-colonialism were once deeply intertwined in national liberation and other movements, from Vietnam to Angola to Algeria and beyond. However, by the end of the 20th century, Marxist and other socialist thought often seemed dated in a world with a waning Soviet bloc and an emerging neoliberal consensus. Postcolonial theory, itself often in conversation with Marxist thought, offered new understandings of liberation and emancipation. https://bit.ly/3b2JATe

Radical Kinship: Solidarity & Political Belonging | Free  · Online event | Apr 22, 2021 12:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada) | By Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at NYU and Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU | a panel discussion with Lisa Duggan, Che Gossett, Shellyne Rodriguez, & Helga Tawil Souri, & moderated by Layal Ftouni | This panel explores contemporary debates on solidarity and coalitional politics that are instrumental to conceptualizing political subjectivity, collectivity and belonging in our current political conjuncture. Engaging with questions of intersectionality, afro-pessimism, and Marxism, this session invites speakers to address the urgency of political affinities (comradeship, radical kinship) that can activate new socio-political imaginaries and envision alternative foundations and horizons for coalitional politics. Register for this free Zoom webinar. https://bit.ly/3swngY2

Computer Mouse Conference | Presented by CultureHub | 29 & 30 April 5pm EDT | Through lectures, live performances, discussions, and more, conference participants explore the question: what does the computer mouse see? The Computer Mouse Conference 2021 will take place on a website. Organized and moderated by Emma Rae Bruml & Ashley Jane Lewis. With support from The Processing Foundation, The Media Archaeology Lab, and The Coding Train. All ticket sales directly support CultureHub and the conference participants. https://bit.ly/3rdGvWe

Call for Proposals: Digital Matters: Designing/Performing Agency for the Anthropocene. 25th annual conference of the DRHA (Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts), Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany, 5-7.09.2021. Taking place from September 5-7, 2021 in Berlin, the 25th Digital Research in Humanities and Arts conference invites contributions and interventions that focus on such transfers and interactions between digital and natural environments. Digital Matters takes on the challenge to explore new material and multi-species agencies, forms of embodiment, and interactions between the performing arts, the humanities, and the natural sciences that engage the sense of relationality and expanded scale that the Anthropocene affords. http://www.drha.uk/2021/call-for-paper/

Books, Papers & Publications

Aesthetics of the Commons | By Shusha Niederberger , Cornelia Sollfrank and Felix Stalder | What do a feminist server, an art space located in a public park in North London, a ‘pirate’ library of high cultural value yet dubious legal status, and an art school that emphasizes collectivity have in common? They all demonstrate that art can play an important role in imagining and producing a real quite different from what is currently hegemonic; that art has the possibility to not only envision or proclaim ideas in theory, but also to realize them materially. They are art in the sense that they place themselves in relation to (Western) cultural and art systems, developing discursive and aesthetic positions, but, at the same time, they are ‘operational’ in that they create recursive environments and freely available resources whose uses exceed these systems | Published by Diaphnes. https://bit.ly/3r4OFjr

Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies | By Winnie Soon and Geoff Cox | Aesthetic Programming explores the technical as well as cultural imaginaries of programming from its insides. It follows the principle that the growing importance of software requires a new kind of cultural thinking — and curriculum — that can account for, and with which to better understand the politics and aesthetics of algorithmic procedures, data processing and abstraction. It takes a particular interest in power relations that are relatively under-acknowledged in technical subjects, concerning class and capitalism, gender and sexuality, as well as race and the legacies of colonialism. Open Humanities Press. https://bit.ly/2ZYduBV

Some Ways of Making Nothing: Apophatic Apparatuses in Contemporary Art | By Curt Cloninger | What if all works of art were better understood as functioning apparatuses, entangling their human audiences in experiences of becoming? What if certain works of art were even able to throw the brakes on becoming altogether, making nothings rather than somethings? What would be the ethical value of making nothing, of stalling becoming; and how might such nothings even be made? Punctum Books. https://bit.ly/3b3tDMN

The Routledge Guidebook to Paine’s Rights of Man | By Frances A Chiu | Upon publication in 1791-92, the two parts of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man proved to be both immensely popular and highly controversial. An immediate bestseller, it not only defended the French revolution but also challenged current laws, customs, and government. The Routledge Guidebook to Paine’s Rights of Man provides the first comprehensive and fully contextualized introduction to this foundational text in the history of modern political thought, addressing its central themes, reception, and influence. Routledge. https://bit.ly/3b2Bees

Anthropocene islands: There are only islands after the end of the world | By David Chandler and Jonathan Pugh | Dialogues in Human Geography | Published March 1, 2021 | Many Anthropocene scholars provide us with the key take-home message that they are writing ‘after the end of the world’. Not because they are writing about the apocalypse, but because they are engaging the Anthropocene after the profound crisis of faith in Western modernity which has swept across academia in recent decades. […] In this article, we examine how the figure of the island as a liminal and transgressive space has facilitated Anthropocene thinking, working with and upon island forms and imaginations to develop alternatives to hegemonic, modern, ‘mainland’, or ‘one world’ thinking. Thus, whilst islands, under modern frameworks of reasoning, were reductively understood as isolated, backward, dependent, vulnerable, and in need of saving by others, the island is being productively re-thought in and for more recent Anthropocene thinking. Sage. https://bit.ly/3rb36mb

Gut Feelings: The Microbiome and Our Health | By Alessio Fasano and Susie Flaherty | Why the microbiome—our rich inner ecosystem of microorganisms—may hold the keys to human health. We are at the dawn of a new scientific revolution. Our understanding of how to treat and prevent diseases has been transformed by the knowledge of the microbiome—the rich ecosystem of microorganisms in and on every human. These microbial hitchhikers may hold the keys to human health. In Gut Feelings, Alessio Fasano and Susie Flaherty show why we must go beyond the older, myopic view of microorganisms as our enemies to a broader understanding of the microbiome as a parallel civilization that we need to understand, respect, and engage with for the benefit of our own health. MIT Press. https://bit.ly/3kH8bjL

Reading ′Black Mirror′ – Insights into Technology and the Post–Media Condition (Media Studies (COL)) | By German Duarte and Justin Michael Battin | Very few contemporary television programs provoke spirited responses quite like the dystopian series Black Mirror. This provocative program, infamous for its myriad apocalyptic portrayals of humankind’s relationship with an array of electronic and digital technologies, has proven quite adept at offering insightful commentary on a number of issues contemporary society is facing. This timely collection draws on innovative and interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks to provide unique perspectives about how confrontations with such issues should be considered and understood through the contemporary post-media condition that drives technology use. https://bit.ly/3sDUEMB

The Politics of Dating Apps: Gender, Sexuality, and Emergent Publics in Urban China | By Lik Sam Chan | An examination of dating app culture in China, across user demographics—straight women, straight men, queer women, and queer men. The open-access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing. In this exploration of dating app culture in China, Lik Sam Chan argues that these popular mobile apps are not merely a platform for personal relationships but also an emerging arena for gender and queer politics. Chan examines the opportunities dating apps present for women’s empowerment and men’s performances of masculinity, and he links experiences of queer dating app users with their vulnerable position as sexual minorities. He finds that dating apps are both portals to an exciting virtual world of relational possibilities and sites of power dynamics that reflect the heteronormativity and patriarchy of Chinese society. MIT Press. https://bit.ly/2MK3R6R

AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams | By Joanna Zylinska | Can computers be creative? Is algorithmic art just a form of Candy Crush? Cutting through the smoke and mirrors surrounding computation, robotics and artificial intelligence, Joanna Zylinska argues that, to understand the promise of AI for the creative fields, we must not confine ourselves solely to the realm of aesthetics. Instead, we need to address the role and position of the human in the current technical setup – including the associated issues of labour, robotisation and, last but not least, extinction. Offering a critique of the socio-political underpinnings of AI, AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams raises poignant questions about the conditions of art making and creativity today. Open Humanities Press. https://bit.ly/3kyNg29

Articles, Interviews, Blogs, Presentations, videos

Beeple Brings Crypto to Christie’s | The artist’s brash riffs on the news have whipped up a frenzy of interest within the cryptocurrency scene | By Josie Thaddeus-Johns | Mike Winkelmann never used to call himself an artist. But that was before he made $3.5 million in a single weekend from selling his artworks. In December, he auctioned off multiple editions of three digital artworks, each priced at $969, and 21 unique works, most of which sold for about $100,000 each. It was only the second time he had put his art on sale. The digital artist, who goes by Beeple, has created a drawing every single day for the last 13 years. He started with pen and paper but now mostly uses computer software such as the program Cinema 4D. A two-week-long online auction of a composite of the first 5,000 days of the project at Christie’s, is the auction house’s first sale of solely digital artwork. It will also be the first time that Christie’s will accept payment in the cryptocurrency Ether – https://nyti.ms/300t4gj

On Language, Technology, and Power: Jennifer Chan in Conversation With Hiba Ali | New media artists Hiba Ali and Jennifer Chan discuss absurd performance, making artwork about work, and diasporic afterlives | Hyperallergic | They both talk about absurd performance, making artwork about work, and the challenges w/in diasporic communities in openly discussing the nuances of privilege and oppression. “Ali and I recently reconnected — we met six years ago while teaching sessionally at SAIC in Chicago, and stayed in touch — to discuss the motivations around absurd performance, making artwork about work, and the difficulties people of color face with openly discussing specific privileges and oppressions.” https://bit.ly/3rioCp4

Reimagining Black Art and Criminology: A New Criminological Imagination | By Martin Glynn | It is time to disrupt current criminological discourses which still exclude the perspectives of black scholars. Through the lens of black art, Martin Glynn explores the relevance black artistic contributions have for understanding crime and justice. Through art forms including black crime fiction, black theatre, and black music, this book brings much-needed attention to marginalized perspectives within mainstream criminology. Refining academic and professional understandings of race, racialization, and intersectional aspects of crime, this text provides a platform for the contributions to criminology which are currently rendered invisible. Bristol University Press. https://bit.ly/2Pez1nC

Episode IV. Arcadian Dreams: AI-Generated Worlds from the Sublime to the Beautiful | By Filippo Lorenzin | “The Uncanny Valley” is Flash Art’s new digital column offering a window on the developing field of artificial intelligence and its relationship to contemporary art. When artists ask an AI to build an entirely digital world, implicit is the demand that it be appreciable to a human public. In the process, the AI discards variables that are unsuitable — elements that won’t be detectable to human senses or that don’t fulfil the narrative demands of its makers. Landscapes generated by AI are thus affected by the requirement for public enjoyment and cannot entirely recapture nature’s unpredictability. https://bit.ly/3uKjsEm

Reset or rewild: perspectives on future arts infrastructures | By Dr. Susan Jones | Pandemic conditions have shaken the foundations and functions of the art infrastructure to the core, illustrating the baked-in flaws while exposing the polar perspectives on conditions for a healthy, productive arts ecology in future. There was little emergency funding or practical support for individual freelance artists, and an apparent failure to acknowledge their dire situation after being hit by a dual economic and emotional tsunami. Although ensuring equality in the workforce is a beacon principle for the funded arts, staffers in art institutions were able to benefit from furlough while compounding the precarity of freelance artists was somehow socially acceptable to funders and most arts funded institutions. https://bit.ly/2O702ca

The model of an “inverted tree” for researching subcultures | By Frederick Lawrence. Expert with over 40 years of experience in investigating subcultures. Subcultures as a phenomenon are not unvarying, subcultures have changed and retransformed in fluctuating environments; some of them disappeared, but new forms arose or became a synthesis of pre-existing ones. Any study of social development requires a particular model first, that could guide the researcher in his work by acting as a “navigation system” in the course of his intellectual work. https://bit.ly/3r3P1Hg

Podcast – News From Where We Are # 3 – The Radical Friendship Series | In 2021 Furtherfield celebrates 25 years of radical friendship. We revisit and open up conversations with some of the fascinating and radical people with whom we have worked and collaborated through the years from the Internet to post-digital contexts. They are changing culture, their lives, and the lives of their communities. Filippo Florenzin interviews artist and independent, Mexican Curator, Doreen Rios. Ruth Catlow reads her foreword for the DisCO manifesto publication, edited by Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel. Marc Garrett interviews artist Kate Southworth about her work with Art and Witchcraft. Stewart Home reads from his recent book edited by Home – Denizen of the Dead published by Cripplegate Books. Experimental, Avant-Folk by artists Alan Sondheim & Azure Carter, from their latest, excellent album Plaguesong. And more… http://bit.ly/3tuCIp6

Poly Styrene documentary: Celeste Bell on her mother’s incredible, complex legacy | The daughter of multi-layered punk icon Poly Styrene hopes her new film will give her mum the respect she deserves. As Bell says in a new, extraordinary documentary about her mother’s life and work, “it took an incredible amount of strength for my mum to walk away from X-Ray Spex,” a band at “the height of their success”. But as Bell adds: “Poly Styrene had to die so that Marianne Elliott could survive.” How she got to that point, and the various rebirths that followed, is all unpacked in the film, narrated by Bell, who co-directed it alongside Paul Sng. The Evening Standard. https://bit.ly/2ZZo1gc

The Secret Life of a Coronavirus | An oily, 100-nanometer-wide bubble of genes has killed more than two million people and reshaped the world. Scientists don’t quite know what to make of it | By Carl Zimmer | At the same time, the pandemic etched a scar across humanity that will endure for decades. More than 2.4 million people have died so far from Covid-19, and millions more have suffered a severe illness. In the United States, life expectancy fell by a full year in the first six months of 2020; for Black Americans, the drop was 2.7 years. The International Monetary Fund predicts that the global economy will lose over $22 trillion between 2020 and 2025. UNICEF is warning that the pandemic could produce a “lost generation.” At the center of these vast shocks is an oily bubble of genes just about 100 nanometers in diameter. Coronaviruses are so small that 10 trillion of them weigh less than a raindrop. https://nyti.ms/2NIXktI

‘Ari Up just kicked the door down’ | Neneh Cherry and others reflect on the legacy of the Slits and New Age Steppers singer as previously unheard songs are released | By Helen Barrett | I’ll never forget the first time I saw Ari Up,” says singer-songwriter Neneh Cherry. “She had her locks tied up, this huge pillar on her head, and she was wearing a tutu and walking on ballet pointe shoes. I was barely 15, really impressionable, and it was instant love.” Less well-known is the music Up recorded alongside and afterward — early cross-cultural experiments in sound and genre, collaborations with reggae artists, and immersion in Jamaican music that would take her from south London to Kingston and the jungles of Indonesia and Belize. Financial Times. February – https://on.ft.com/3dSv56e

Main image by Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow 2020.

The FurtherList Archives

https://www.furtherfield.org/the-furtherlist-archives/

A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology, and social change.

Exhibitions, Open Calls, Courses and Conferences

RGBFAQ by Alan Warburton | For 2021 arebyte Gallery has extended the online exhibition until 13 February 2021. Book your slot online today | “My process is like a comedian developing a set, but without the laughs,” says Warburton, “a cross between a software tutorial and a ghost train ride that channels an episode of late 80s Tomorrow’s World.” RGBFAQ comprises a research-led experiential exhibition in which the audience navigates a “black-box” set populated by gigantic geometric sculptures. Warburton’s ambitious new video essay will be projection-mapped onto this sculptural background, expanding the form of his popular video essays (Goodbye Uncanny Valley, Fairytales of Motion) into an immersive 3D space, with a soundtrack by David Kamp – http://bit.ly/2XeZJgB

MediaFutures OPEN CALL | Closing 28th of January. We are looking for artists and start-ups from the media field, who work with data and want to develop artworks or products (or both) to reshape the media value chain. This is the first of three open calls and includes four challenges focusing on the coronavirus infodemic, as well as an open challenge for other topics. Successful applicants will join a dedicated support program, and receive up to 80,000€ of funding, both over the course of six months. More information and details on how to apply are available on our website – https://mediafutures.eu/opencall/

Who cares for the caregivers? | New Hologram course! | Online, for six consecutive Tuesdays: February 2nd to March 9th 2021, from 6-9 PM GMT | Applications are open for people who do care work and who need help organizing their own care. This course will help us answer the question “who cares for the caregivers?” and will be aimed at – though not exclusively for – people who identify as caregivers. We know from our first two courses that many people who provide the most care find it difficult to organize care for themselves. We hope that we can offer a space and time for people who do support work to develop long term support systems for themselves and their pals for now and into the future . The Hologram is developing with the ongoing support of Furtherfield, CreaTures (Creative Practices for Transformational Futures) and many other people and organisations. http://thehologram.xyz/course/

Protest and Resist: Stories of Uprising and Resistance with Maxine Peake | Event by Housmans Radical Booksellers and Comma Press | Wednesday, February 10, 2021 at 7 PM GMT – Free | Housmans Bookshop and Comma Press are delighted to host two online events with renowned British actors Christopher Eccleston and Maxine Peake reading from protest-inspired stories published in Comma’s History-into-Fiction series, Protest and Resist. The two events will take place on two consecutive dates, with Christopher reading on the 9th of February and Maxine on the 10th. Both readings will be followed by a conversation between authors and historians discussing the events depicted in the stories read by Christopher and Maxine – Tickets available here>> https://housmans.com/events/

Bridges for Communities | The Path Leads to Bristol | 4 Dec 2020 – 28 Feb 2021 | Arnolfini Gallery approached Bridges for Communities to create a local response to Hassan Hajjaj’s exhibition The Path, and Bridges, in turn, invited a number of people involved in their work to take part in a photoshoot exploring themes of culture, identity, and story. These images were captured by Bridges volunteers and graphic designers Safia and Samira Belhaj, sisters whose own journey has included life in Libya, the United States, and now Bristol – http://bit.ly/3bbGInI

Conference alert! ‘(In)Visibility and the Medical Humanities’ | Call for Papers: NNMHR 4th Annual Congress, 21st-23rd April 2021, online | Open to scholars, health professionals, and creative practitioners at all career stages. “The global and local health inequalities revealed and perpetuated by the Covid-19 pandemic require us to reflect upon how we do medical humanities research. We ask participants to consider the ways in which our work renders some aspects of health and illness visible while leaving others out of sight. We hope to think more carefully about what sort of experiences the medical humanities has become adept at bringing to light, whilst reflecting on the ways in which theoretical methodologies, research priorities and funding structures have left other voices unheard. Durham University – http://bit.ly/2LpskNv

Books, Papers & Publications

Aesthetics of the Commons | Editors, Cornelia Sollfrank, Felix Stalder, Shusha Niederberger.  What do a feminist server, an art space located in a public park in North London, a so-called pirate library of high cultural value yet dubious legal status, and an art school that emphasizes collectivity have in common? They all demonstrate that art plays an important role in imagining and producing a reality quite different from what is currently hegemonic and that art has the possibility to not only envision or proclaim ideas in theory but also to realize them materially. In Aesthetics of the Commons, the commons are understood not as a fixed set of principles that need to be adhered to in order to fit a definition, but instead as a thinking tool–in other words, the book’s interest lies in what can be made visible by applying the framework of the commons as a heuristic device | Diaphanes AG (20 Mar. 2021) – https://amzn.to/3rSkxsp

Groove is in the Heart: The DiSCO Elements | A friendly and carefully planned approach for organizations that want to create and share value in ways that are cooperative, commons-oriented and rooted in feminist economics. A DisCO (Distributed Cooperative Organisation) is an organisational model for cooperative groups that combines ideas and practices from cooperativism, the commons, P2P and feminist economics. It aims to prototype new and radical forms of ownership, governance, entrepreneurship, and value accounting meant to counteract pervasive economic inequality, and offers an alternative to the aims and outcomes of DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations) – https://elements.disco.coop/

SHADOW WOLF CYBERZINE issue#9 | I N T E R N E T ‘ S  U N D E R G R O U N D  C Y B E R Z I N E | ‘slaughtering your dystopian future’ | Lots of interviews, ASCII art, DIY articles, studio tips, a DJ Psychology test & also for the 1st time a COVER TAPE comp with artists from the ShadowWolf Cyberzine-o-sphere! “It was supposed to come out earlier in the summer but yeah things don’t go as planned, I had a lot of stuff to do so we have, like every year, the new issue at Christmas! I will spare you the corona covid ‘oh-what-did-we-have-a-though-year-talk’ because that is for most of you pretty obvious, you might not want to be reminded I reckon.” – http://bit.ly/3oiqsF9

The Oxford Handbook of Algorithmic Music | Edited by Alex McLean, and Roger T. Dean. With the ongoing development of algorithmic composition programmes and communities of practice expanding, algorithmic music faces a turning point. Joining dozens of emerging and established scholars alongside leading practitioners in the field, chapters in this Handbook both describe the state of algorithmic composition and also set the agenda for critical research on and analysis of algorithmic music. Organized into four sections, chapters explore the music’s history, utility, community, politics, and potential for mass consumption. Contributors address such issues as the role of algorithms as co-performers, live coding practices, and discussions of the algorithmic culture as it currently exists and what it can potentially contribute to society, education, and e-commerce – http://bit.ly/38bPlwt

Subvertising: on the Life and Death of Advertising Power | By Thomas Dekeyser | Get in-depth insight into the motivations and politics of subvertising with this 300-page doctoral study. It features some of the world’s key subvertisers, and shows how subvertisers can avoid getting co-opted by advertisers. Pdf – https://bit.ly/390WPlk

Technocrats of the Imagination: Art, Technology, and the Military-Industrial Avant-Garde | John Beck, Ryan Bishop | Art and Visual Culture > Art History, Cultural Studies, Media Studies | In Technocrats of the Imagination John Beck and Ryan Bishop explore the collaborations between the American avant-garde art world and the military-industrial complex during the 1960s, in which artists worked with scientists and engineers in universities, private labs, and museums. For artists, designers, and educators working with the likes of Bell Labs, the RAND Corporation, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, experiments in art and technology presaged not only a new aesthetic but a new utopian social order based on collective experimentation | Duke University Press – http://bit.ly/3ot9IuE

Articles, Interviews, Blogs, Presentations, Videos

The Hologram: You can’t cut THIS: without multiplying it | Video | Organized in partnership with Pluto Press, artists Cassie Thornton (Eyebeam Rapid Response Phase 1 Fellow) and Tina Zavitsanos on shared attention around holograms, debt, and care and Thornton’s recently published pamphlet, The Hologram: Peer to Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future, included in the Vagabonds series, edited by Max Haiven. Both artists consider Thornton’s central question, “In an era when capitalism leaves so many to suffer and to die, with neoliberal ‘self-care’ offering little more than a bandaid, how can we take health and care back into our hands?” | Recorded session moderated by Ruth Catlow from FurtherField – https://bit.ly/393XXV3

Ambivalence, part 3: the necessary dialogue between art and environmental sciences | Article| Regine Debatty | 3rd and final part of my report from the conference AMBIVALENCES #1 which took place in early October in Rennes in the framework of the Maintenant digital art festival. Part 1 outlined Bénédicte Ramade’s overview of the History of Ecological Art. Part 2 highlighted key moments from the round table “Digital Arts and Environmental Awareness” that discussed the ambivalent relationship between digital artists and the environmental crisis – http://bit.ly/2LjXFBm

What if care is the organizing principle of our society? | Blog post | By JM Wong | The South Seattle Emerald | What if care was the organizing principle of our society? Not profit, not white supremacist garbage masked as liberal paternalism in the form of “diversity” that would hire cops of color to continue to target Black and Brown folks on the street just living their lives. What if care was my people who are here finding home as guests on Turtle Island, shredding up the myths of american empire force-fed to us through aid packages and free trade agreements, with jobs that colonize our psyches and rob us of our life forces? http://bit.ly/3s2EeOf

Adversarial.io, subverting image recognition | Francis Hunger & Flupke | Neural.it | There is growing criticism of the widespread application of machine-based recognition and data processing, especially those involving visual technologies. The inaccuracy, tolerated as a minority, is second only to the political consequences of the applied criteria. Hunger & Flupke have developed a product that successfully implements this criticism at a technical level. Their “Adversarial.io”, is a webapp that alters images in order to make them machine-unreadable, while leaving them visually almost indistinguishable from the original. […] The declared mission of the duo is to “fighting mass image recognition” – http://bit.ly/3oio94K

David Graeber: A Celebration & Discussion of Ideas w/ Tony Vogt & Shane Capra | Laborwave Radio | Podcast & Full transcript | David Graeber was an anthropologist, proponent of anarchism, and participant in many movement struggles of the past two decades including the Alter-Globalization movement and Occupy Wall Street. Among his popular authored books includes Debt: The First 5,000 Years, The Utopia of Rules, Bullshit Jobs, and Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. He passed on September 2, 2020. “We discuss his ideas and celebrate his memory in this conversation with comrades Tony Vogt, member of the IWW and co-founder of the Anarres Project for Alternative Futures, and Shane Capra, an organizer and participant in the Institute for Advanced Troublemaking and member of the IWW” – http://bit.ly/3ncjekt

Amazon Capitalism | Podcast | Listen to an interview with Jake Alimahomed-Wilson & Ellen Reese LaborwaveRadio where they discuss their book about Amazon capitalism and workers’ resistance. With cutting-edge analysis, they discuss the many facets of the corporation, including automation, surveillance, tech work, workers’ struggle, algorithmic challenges, the disruption of local democracy, and much more – http://bit.ly/2X93N26

FoAM in 02020, on Flickr | This album weaves together FoAM’s trajectories through the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of 02020. Many thanks to all of you who accompanied us during the year as collaborators, supporters, followers and friends. We wish you a vigorous 2021! FoAM 02020, in a rearview mirror – https://bit.ly/3nkbPzI

ODI Fridays: How live action role play could fix real-world social problems | Presentation | Furtherfield’s Artistic Director Ruth Catlow talks about how participation in scenarios in live action role play (LARP) leads to powerful group-driven discovery, rich research data, and potential real-world answers. Digital media devices, platforms and services are designed for individual consumers, in competitive markets rather than for healthy societies. The increased transparency offered by DLTs and blockchain technologies promise to increase accountability in supply chains for instance. But how can we assess technical systems that are both invisible and hard to explain to everyday users? – https://bit.ly/38mahAT

Main image: Monopoly mix by Ricky Leong. New York. (February 2011). Originally used as the cover image for the article ‘Survival of the richest’ by Douglas Rushkoff 23 July 2020, via Guerilla Translation. https://bit.ly/3s0T4VL

The FurtherList Archives
https://www.furtherfield.org/the-furtherlist-archives/

A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.

Events, Exhibitions, Festivals and Conferences

Data Dating | Exhibition Wednesday 15 January – Sunday 1 March 2020 | What does it mean to love in the Internet age? How are digital interfaces reshaping our personal relationships? What do new technologies imply for the future of the romantic sphere? How do screens affect our sexual intimacy? Are the new means of connection shifting the old paradigms of adult life? The advent of the Internet and smartphones has brought about a split in the romantic lives of millions of people, who now inhabit both the real world and their very own “phone world” | Artists: Addie Wagenknecht & Pablo Garcia, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Ashley Madison, Angels at Work in London, VR Hug, Tom Galle, Moises Sanabria, John Yuyi, Antoine Schmitt, Olga Fedorova, Adam Basanta, Jeroen Van Loon, Thomas Israel | Watermans Art Centre, London – https://bit.ly/2unO6ZX

Querying the Archive | Hosted by MayDay Rooms | Thursday, 13 February 2020 | London | An on-going series of workshops around our archival platform leftove.rs, which will look at the different ways we can open up this online collection material and the technical processes between it. We want to think through that kind of strategies, queries and categories will help us navigate something that is both an database and resource of radical history. The first session we will be learning about the platform and mapping the collection by pooling our knowledge of radical histories of dissent to help us think about how we search, input and categories this large collection of material. https://leftove.rs

The Habitat of Time | Curated by Julie Louise Bacon | Arts Catalyst | Thu 20 February 2020 – Sat 14 March 2020 | The project focuses on the way that time as a medium shapes our perception of life, the structure of societies, and the vastness of the physical world. The artworks featured in the exhibition propose a rescaling of human time and expose its deep interrelations with the diversity of the more-than-human realm, moving through the geological, technological, biological and cosmic. In the 21st century, the instability of globalisation, the speed of digital technologies, and the transformation of knowledge are generating rapid shifts in time | Featuring: Eva Nolan, Thomson & Craighead, Robert Andrew, Lucy Bleach, James Geurts, Josh Wodak – https://bit.ly/2uo2Sjv

Pre-histories and Futures of Machine Vision | Friday, 28 February 2020 | V&A, London | How do machines see? From autonomous vehicles to deep fakes, machine vision is changing contemporary life. Join curators, artists and scholars to discuss the impact of AI technologies on the past, present and future of art. Explore early moments in the development of computer art and machine vision, from the mid-1960s onwards in the home of the UK’s most important historic computer art collection. Join contemporary artists, designers and curators considering the aesthetic and political implications of contemporary computer vision and machine learning technologies. Speakers include digital scholars Zabet Patterson (Stony Brook) and Joel McKim (Birkbeck), V&A curators Douglas Dodds and Natalie Kane, and contemporary artists Anna Ridler and Alan Warburton | 10.30 – 17.00 | Hochhauser Auditorium, V&A South Kensington – https://bit.ly/371PYVM

QUANTUM: IN SEARCH OF THE INVISIBLE | From March 5 until May 31, 2020 | An international art exhibition exploring the world of quantum physics, through works created by artists resulting from their encounters with researchers at CERN, Geneva | Featuring ten commissioned artworks by internationally renowned artists, which rethink scientific research and facts to explore states of being and the very possibilities of reality. These works question how much we really know about the world around us, and how we may begin to discover new aspects by taking a different perspective | Brussels, Belgium – https://www.imal.org/en

Three Acres And A Cow | Hosted by Three Acres And A Cow and 3 others | ‘Three Acres And A Cow’ connects the Norman Conquest and Peasants’ Revolt with current issues like Brexit, fracking, the housing crisis and food sovereignty movement via the Enclosures, English Civil War, Irish Land League and Industrial Revolution, drawing a compelling narrative through the radical people’s history of England in folk song, stories and poems. Part TED talk, part history lecture, part folk club sing-a-long, part poetry slam, part storytelling session… Come and share in these tales as they have been shared for generations. Featuring Robin Grey and Rachel Rose Reid | 12 March 2020 – http://threeacresandacow.co.uk

Workshop: Subvertising for the right to housing | March 26, 2020 @ SUPERMARKT BERLIN | With Steal This Poster (Subvertising Collective IT/UK) and others. These workshops show us how subvertising offers a creative way to rewrite the narrative about the housing market in the streets where gentrification operates. Outdoor advertising is the most emblematic form of consumerist propaganda. It privatises sections of public spaces with the purpose to conditioning mass behaviours imposing specific narratives. How can we untangle those narrations? And how can we take over those spaces subtracted from the public realm for private interests? | registrations open soon | sign up for the newsletter – https://bit.ly/2OqppD2

EVICTED BY GREED: Global Finance, Housing & Resistance | Uncovering how ghostly shell companies and real estate speculation evict real people from their homes – and what to do about it | Investigations on how how speculative finance drives the global and local housing crisis, and gathers experts & activists from around the world to share and find  counter-strategies | The Conference, March 27-28, 2020, Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien | Disruption Network Lab – https://bit.ly/2S2SEya

Books, Open Calls, Papers & Publications

Open Call – Science Gallery London | Inviting expressions of interest for projects to become part of the forthcoming AI & Ethics season. Whether your application is art, scientific inquiry, or a combination of these, we are looking to work with individuals and groups who are critically exploring ethical issues around the development and implementation of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly (though not exclusively) within the context of healthcare | Open from 31st January 2020 to 23rd February 2020 – https://bit.ly/2Ut377q

Open Call – URgh! zine #1 on Alternative Art Education | DEADLINE Friday, 21 Feb 2020 | Submissions are open for the first issue of URgh! We welcome contributions that explore and document alternative art education within self-organised, DIY, peer-led art schools and collectives, to extend the existing research and amplify the movement. A new zine on precarious labour dreaming up alternative economies at the coalface of the art educational creative industrial complex. The first issue will be launched on Saturday, 21 March 2020 at the Festival of Alternative Art Education 2020 at  Conway Hall. https://videomole.tv/urgh-zine/

Art Meets Radical Openness 2020 – OPEN CALL: Of Whirlpools and Tornadoes | 20th – 23rd of May 2020 | Deadline: Monday 24.02.2020 | AMRO is a biennial community festival in Linz that explores and discusses new challenges between digital culture, art, everyday life, education, politics and activism. The 2020 edition of the AMRO festival is characterized by reflections upon the “centripetal” and “centrifugal” dynamics of acceleration visible in contemporary society and the ways artistic practice, activism and radical thinking can engage with it – http://radical-openness.org/en

Technological Sovereignty: Democratising Technology and Innovation Green Paper | Within DiEM25, by crowdsourcing collective knowledge have identified three key ways to achieve Technological Sovereignty. They try to define the issues, and provide short, medium and long term solutions, based on two processes: Regulation and Renewal. And we need to establish the conditions for social innovation and democratic societal transformation – https://internal.diem25.org/en/vote/205/public

Culture, Technology and the Image: Techniques of Engaging with Visual Culture | Edited by Jeremy Pilcher | Culture, Technology and the Image explores the technologies deployed when images are archived, accessed and distributed. The chapters discuss the ways in which habits and techniques used in learning and communicating knowledge about images are affected by technological developments. The volume discusses a wide range of issues, including access and participation; research, pedagogy and teaching; curation and documentation; circulation and re-use; and conservation and preservation | Intellectbooks – https://bit.ly/2v9CFoF

Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures | By Christina Dunbar-Hester | Hacking, as a mode of technical and cultural production, is commonly celebrated for its extraordinary freedoms of creation and circulation. Yet surprisingly few women participate in it: rates of involvement by technologically skilled women are drastically lower in hacking communities than in industry and academia. Hacking Diversity investigates the activists engaged in free and open-source software to understand why, despite their efforts, they fail to achieve the diversity that their ideals support | Prince University Press – https://bit.ly/2SlvCBl

Call for Papers – Media Theory, Media Fiction, and Infrastructures Beyond the Earth | Today, established space agencies are struggling with national funding, and numerous countries are starting ambitious space programs, and private companies and individuals are building innovative space plans and technologies. The current socio-political configuration offers thinkers and practitioners new opportunities by which to intervene in how we envision and inhabit the cosmos. Media Theory, Media Fiction, and Infrastructures Beyond the Earth is a two-day workshop May 7-8, 2020 at University of Toronto, Mississauga that will investigate space exploration and inhabitation from the point of view of media studies | University of Toronto Mississauga, USA – https://bit.ly/383z623

Call for proposals – (Infra)Structures | 4 – 5 June 2020 | Centre for Postdigital Cultures annual conference | Coventry University, UK | Proposals for its 3rd annual conference on infrastructures | This conference takes interest in infrastructures as an invisible system of meaning-making and a mode of structuring people and knowledge, in the institutional contexts and conditions of this structuring, as well as in possible models of intervening in these very structures. By doing so, we hope to interrogate the potential of making infrastructure visible – remarkable – as a means of speaking to power. We are interested in exploring what new ways of understanding, developing, reconfiguring or hacking infrastructures might be possible if we focus on their radical potential – https://bit.ly/31rd1rC

Articles, Interviews, Presentations, videos

Poetry v. the Body Politic: writing a political movement | Excerpts from a dialogue on the relationship between poetry and politics in Iran today, between Poetry International Archives Iran editor Abol Froushan and Ali Abdolrezaei, a major Iranian poet and leader of a grassroots political movement that has been spreading in Iran since the uprising of January 2018, when the multimedia Colleges of Persian Poetry and of Fiction became a political movement. What incubated as a literary movement calling for democracy of the text and literary styles transformed into a movement for democracy and freedom from the Islamic Republic and its political and economic stranglehold on Iranians – https://bit.ly/2Sn6bPJ

Interview with Helen Knowles by Regine Debatty | Trickle Down, A New Vertical Sovereignty | A prison in Liverpool, an Ethereal Summit in New York city, a prestigious Russian art auction at Sotheby’s, a market in North Manchester. These places and the communities that spend time there have little in common. What is more, they sit at opposite ends of the spectrum of financial power. That’s exactly what appealed to Helen Knowles. Helen Knowles is currently exhibiting the result of this long research at Arebyte Gallery in London – https://bit.ly/2S16mkR

Rowland Atkinson reviews Thomas Piketty’s eagerly awaited new book Capital and ideology in the city | “In all nations and at all times societies require some system or series of defences of the disparities that exist within them. Different kinds of societies have achieved this in their own distinctive ways and in fact much of this more than 1,000 page work delves into the long history of such arrangements. Piketty calls these narratives and systems of thinking inequality regimes. There is power at work in the narratives, ideas and legitimising frameworks deployed by elites and which are shared more broadly within society as a whole.” https://bit.ly/2UtAE1j

OBIETTIVO BOLOGNA REPORTAGE BY ARIANNA FORTE | The itinerant tour of the project DATAPOIESIS runs into Bologna, historically one of the most active and aware Italian cities in urban policies. Datapoiesis in the city, took place from the 24 to 26 of January 2020, coordinated by Singlossa with local partner MaisonVentidue. Obiettivo, was the first datapoietic artwork, and trigger for reflecting on a new kind of processes capable of bringing awareness and social activation using public data in a conscious way and to face complex global phenomena such as poverty from different points of view – https://datapoiesis.com/home/?p=2348

Image from: Data Dating, Exhibition. Wednesday 15 January – Sunday 1 March 2020 at Watermans Art Centre, London.

The FurtherList Archives
https://www.furtherfield.org/the-furtherlist-archives/

A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.

Events, Exhibitions, Festivals and Conferences

Panel Discussion: My Mind, Your Weapon | Hosted by arebyte | Sat 11 Jan 2020 | Join artist Sarah Selby in a discussion around the impact of behavioural targeting on democracy, diversity and autonomy with panelists: Ves Popov, Laurie Love, Kadine James and Rod Dickenson. The panel will focus on fostering curiosity, facilitating discussion and provoking critical thinking around often inaccessible issues surrounding the processes and applications of big data – particularly with regards to data bias, the Internet of Things and Smart Cities – https://bit.ly/2tlGoyU

WILDBIYOO 2020 Artist Residency in the jungle, Goa, India | The tribe goa | 13 Jan 2020 – 2 Feb 2020 | Wildbiyoo is dedicating January 2020 to the arts to summon the world’s most progressive thinkers and creatives to join us in reckoning with the greatest existential crisis of our times. The mission of the month is to investigate how creatives can facilitate new dialogue, inspire social and political transformations and reimagine our relationship to nature in response to climate breakdown | More details on FB – https://bit.ly/2Qh4pA1

Afterall Journal Reading Group: Disobedient Video | Hosted by Arts Catalyst and Afterall | Wednesday, 22 January 2020 | Arts Catalyst hosts the second session in a new series of collaborative reading groups presented by Afterall, for which curator Lauren Houlton will lead a discussion of Afterall Journal article ‘Disobedient Video in France in the 1970s: Video Production by Women’s Collectives’. To mark each new issue of the journal, Afterall is inviting a UK-based reading group to identify a text from the current issue and pair it with external readings and films | FB link – http://tiny.cc/s3ghhz

Trickle Down, A New Vertical Sovereignty – Helen Knowles | Hosted by arebyte and FutureEverything | Thurs 23 Jan 2020, 18:00-21:00 | New Vertical Sovereignty, a new body of work by UK based artist Helen Knowles, is a tokenised four-screen video installation and generative soundscape attached to the blockchain, which explores value systems and wealth disparity. The artwork is composed of auction scenes, performances and choral interludes by different communities such as prisoners, blockchain technology employees, market sellers, and Sotheby’s auction bidders, looking to re-imagine our vertically stacked digital ecosystem to horizontally distribute wealth – https://bit.ly/2F7ThPt

Sonic Electronics with Fixateur Externe/Bubble People/Onin | Hosted by Laura Netz | Sat 25 Jan 2020 | Sonic Electronics is an experimental event | We propose an anti-techno-capitalist approach to music genres like ambient, drone, techno, experimental, electronics, acousmatic, live coding, noise, vaporwave, glitch, dark, new wave, postpunk,….. | Artists: Fixateur Externe  / Bubble People (Per Jas) / Onin (James L Malone and Joe Wright) / Medial Ages (Laura Netz) | FB link – http://tiny.cc/n8ghhz

Soft Power 04: an exhibition in a spreadsheet | Hosted by Micheál O’Connell, Andrea Slater and Daniella Norton | Fri 31 Jan 2020, 18:30-23:59 | A fourth exhibition by the Soft Power people, this time in a spreadsheet. Look at it at home, or on your device, or wherever. Drink some wine and chat to friends about what you witness. The link will be supplied with those ‘GOING’ on the date (Thursday 31st October) at 7pm. “We will be limiting numbers Going to this (file) Opening event to a maximum of 60.” For updates sign up to Mocksim’s mailing list http://www.mocksim.org/contact.htm

Queer techno rave INFERNO take over the ICA’s Theatre, Bar and Cinema with an all-night programme of music, queer porn and performance art. Brought to you by performance artist and DJ Lewis G. Burton and producer and musician Sebastian Bartz under their DJ alter-ego Venice Calypso, INFERNO marries the camp with the underground, pop with techno, and the very good with the very bad | Fri, 31 Jan 2020 – https://bit.ly/2S0ntDT

Copy That? Surplus Data in an Age of Repetitive Duplication | Private view of the 2020 art exhibition from the Open Data Institute (ODI), Copy That? Surplus Data in an Age of Repetitive Duplication. The exhibition will be unveiled in the company’s Shoreditch offices on Tuesday 4 February 2020. Artists are Mr Gee, Alistair Gentry and Ben Neale, Edie Jo Murray & Harmeet Chagger-Khan

The evening kicks off with an in-conversation to celebrate the publication of Art Hack Practice: Critical Intersections of Art, Innovation and the Maker Movement, edited by Victoria Bradbury and Suzy O’Hara, which features a chapter on Data as Culture. The panel will be facilitated by Dr. Suzy O’ Hara. Participants are: Hannah Redler-Hawes (ODI), Marc Garett (Furtherfield), Inini Papadimitriou (FutureEverything) – https://bit.ly/39xkk4C

Books, Open Calls, Papers & Publications

Beyond Hashtags: Racial Politics and Black Digital Networks | Critical Cultural Communication | By Sarah Florini | Beyond Hashtags explores these everyday practices and their relationship to larger social issues through an in-depth analysis of a trans-platform network of black American digital and social media users and content creators. In the crucial years leading up to the emergence of the Movement for Black Lives, black Americans used digital networks not only to cope with day-to-day experiences of racism, but also as an incubator for the debates that have since exploded onto the national stage. Published by: NYU Press – https://bit.ly/2r1Bt5l

Networked Content Analysis: The Case of Climate Change | By Sabine Niederer | With a foreword by Klaus Krippendorff | Climate change is one of the key societal challenges of our times, and its debate takes place across scientific disciplines and into the public realm, traversing platforms, sources, and fields of study. The analysis of such mediated debates has a strong tradition, which started in communication science and has since then been applied across a wide range of academic disciplines | Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2019 – https://bit.ly/2SIZyZT

“V[R]erses”: An XR Story Series | A V[R]erse is a microstory. Each story consists of a storybox that can be experienced in 3D via a WebVR enabled mobile device, desktop PC and in Virtual Reality. Each V[R]erse is created by different digital literature authors [text] and Mez Breeze [development + design, model + concept creation, audio]. Designed and Developed by Mez Breeze Design, Supported by Mezangelle. Includes authors/artists: Annie Abrahams,  Davin Heckman, Jeremy Hight, Mark Marino, Scott Rettberg | Online – https://bit.ly/343fFDH

The Memory Police (Fiction) | By Yolo Ogawa | “An elegantly spare dystopian fable . . . Reading The Memory Police is like sinking into a snowdrift: lulling yet suspenseful, it tingles with dread and incipient numbness . . . Ogawa’s ruminant style captures the alienation of being alive as the world’s ecosystems, ice sheets, languages, animal species and possible futures vanish more quickly than any one mind can apprehend.” The New York Times Book Review | Penguin Random House USA – https://bit.ly/35k16wp

Museums Inside Out: Artist Collaborations and New Exhibition Ecologies | By Mark W. Rectanus |  An ambitious study of what it means to be a museum in the twenty-first century | In Museums Inside Out, investigates how museums are blurring the boundaries between their gallery walls and public spaces. He examines how artists are challenging and changing museums, taking readers deep into new experiments in exhibition making while also offering insights about how museums currently exemplify the fusion of the creative and digital economies. Expected publication: February 1st 2020 by University of Minnesota Press – https://bit.ly/2QdrEee

The Red Years: Forbidden Poems from Inside North Korea | Bandi | Translated by Heinz Insu Fenkl | Authored by one of North Korea’s most acclaimed dissident writers, this is the first collection of Bandi’s poetry to be published in English | Though North Korea holds the attention of the world, it is still rare for us to hear North Korean voices, beyond those few who have escaped. Known only by his pen name, the poet and author ‘Bandi’ stands as one of the most distinctive and original dissident writers to emerge from the country | Zed Books – https://bit.ly/2SNr88i

Liberal Arts Perspectives on Globalism and Transnationalism | Unabridged, 1 Jan 2020 | By Hyun Wu Lee, ‎Mark van de Logt  | As international trade and economic activities expand, online technologies spread, and restless populations shift across national boundaries, reactionary movements have sprung up around the globe. These reactionary forces, which include nationalism and populism, have exposed many blind-spots of ongoing globalization projects. To understand the frictions between transnational enterprises and local resistance more fully, as well as analyze the human cost of immigration and the threats posed by online technologies, scholars from around the world gathered in Doha, Qatar, for the Sixth Annual Liberal Arts International Conference (2018) |  Cambridge Scholars Publishing – https://bit.ly/368xdjH

Articles, Interviews, Presentations, videos

BEYOND THE “BLOKECHAIN”: THE CRYPTOFEMINIST AGENDA | Video | This session aims to open your mind. Andy Morales Coto tickles your imaginative bones by offering visual prompts to help us redesign the world’s economic future. Ruth Catlow explores the spaces of convergence between the Commons and P2P movements along with the world of cooperatives and the Social and Solidarity Economy. Denise Thwaites offers a feminist analysis of DAO cultures and the emergent affective economies they instate. And Ailie Rutherford shows how feminist economics can be put into practice on a daily basis by presenting her real and existing The People’s Bank of Govanhill | Speakers: Andy Morales Coto, Ruth Catlow, Denise Thwaites, Ailie Rutherford | Moderator: Rachel Falconer | Institute of Network Cultures | https://vimeo.com/376668856

Only 2% of global art auction spending is on work by women, study finds (2019) | A new study has found that despite perceived signs of progress, the art world remains overwhelmingly male-dominated | According to a report assembled by In Other Words & artnet News, the last 10 years has found a lack of growth for female representation in art with just 2% of global art auction spending on work by women. This figure is also unevenly distributed, with five artists making up 40.7% of this figure and Yayoi Kusama in particular accounting for 25% alone. A new report finds women’s work still underrepresented in the art world, with only 11% of art purchased by institutions female-made | Guardian – https://bit.ly/39wDJCQ

CRISPR Cheat Sheet: The Most Important Gene Editing Stories of 2019: Human trials, bird flu, gene editing in space, and more | By Emily Mullin | Medium | On May 4, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched a Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station. Among its cargo was an experiment involving the CRISPR gene-editing system, which astronauts aboard the ISS used to successfully edit DNA in space. They made targeted cuts to the yeast genome that mimicked genetic damage caused by cosmic radiation, one of the biggest health risks that long-term spaceflight poses to humans. They say the ISS experiment could yield clues about how cells repair their DNA in space – https://bit.ly/2ZHZY4v

Raul Vaneigem: Here we are! At the beginning of everything! | Dec 24, 2019 | The sudden attacks of freedom on the suffocating capitalist hydra, constantly make the epicenter of the seismic disturbances fluctuate. The territories of the whole world, affected by the system of private benefits are exposed to the outburst of insurrectional movements. Consciousness is forced to run after successive waves of events, reacting to constant, paradoxically predictable and unexpected shocks. Two realities struggle against each other in the face of the violence. One is the reality of lying. Taking advantage of technological progress, you try to manipulate public opinion for the benefit of established power. The other is the reality of daily life of the population – https://bit.ly/2QdnanP

I believe Google fired me for organising – but tech workers won’t give up the fight | By Kathryn Spiers | 20 December 2019 | Last week I was fired by Google for informing my colleagues of their rights. I created a pop-up that appeared when Google employees visited the website of the union-busting firm the company recently hired, telling them they had the right to organise. Hours later, I was suspended. Google’s decision to retaliate against its own workers isn’t just an issue for Googlers, but for the entire tech industry, including other large companies like Amazon and Facebook – https://bit.ly/2sridPu

Image: Bring Me My Firetruck, by Mr Gee. Part of the Copy That? Surplus Data in an Age of Repetitive Duplication, exhibition at the Open Data Institute, London, Feb 2020.

FurtherList Archives https://www.furtherfield.org/the-furtherlist-archives/

A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.

Permanent archive of all the FurtherLists.

FurtherList No.28 Nov 5th 2021
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-28-nov-5th-2021/

FurtherList No.27 Oct 1st 2021
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-27-oct-1st-2021/

FurtherList No.26 Sept 3rd 2021
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-26-sept-3rd-2021/

FurtherList No.25 July 4th 2021
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-24-july-4th-2021-2/

FurtherList No.24 June 4th 2021
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-24-june-4th-2021/

FurtherList No.23 April 2nd 2021
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-23-april-2nd-2021/

FurtherList No.22 March 5th, 2021
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-22-march-5th-2021/

FurtherList No.21 January 8th 2021
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-21-january-8th-2021/

FurtherList No.20 December 4th, 2020
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-20-december-4th-2020/

FurtherList No.19 April 3rd 2020
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-19-april-3rd-2020/

FurtherList No.18 March 6th 2020
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-18-march-6th-2020/

FurtherList No.17 February 7th 2020
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-17-february-7th-2020/

FurtherList No.16 January 3rd 2020
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-16-january-3rd-2020/

FurtherList No.15 Nov 29th 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-15-nov-29th-2019

FurtherList No.14 Oct 26th 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-14-oct-26th-2019

FurtherList No.13 Sept 27th 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-13-sept-27th-2019

FurtherList No.12 Sep 20th 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-12-sep-20th-2019

FurtherList No.11 September 6th 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-11-september-6th-2019

FurtherList No.10 August 30th 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-10-august-30th-2019

FurtherList No.9 August 23rd 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-9-august-23rd-2019

FurtherList No.8 August 16th 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-8-august-16th-2019

FurtherList No.7 Aug 9th 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/the-furtherlist-future-fair-special-no-7-aug-9th-2019

FurtherList No.6 July 30th 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/the-furtherlist-no-6-july-30th-2019

The FurtherList No.5 July 5th 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/the-furtherlist-no-5-july-5th-2019

FurtherList No.4 June 21st 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/the-furtherlist-no-4-june-21st-2019

FurtherList No.3 June 14th 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/the-weekly-furtherlist-no-3-june-14th-2019

FurtherList No.2 June 7th 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/the-weekly-furtherlist-no-2-june-7th-2019

FurtherList No.1 May 31st 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/the-weekly-furtherlist-no-1-june-3rd-2019

Main image: Bad Shibe. Story by Rhea Myers and Illustrations by Lina Theodoru. Wall installation. NEW WORLD ORDER exhibition, at Furtherfield 20 May – 25 June 2017. Photo by Pau Ros. https://www.furtherfield.org/new-world-order/

A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.

Events, Exhibitions, Festivals and Conferences

The Big Four | Bob Bicknell-Knight and Rosa-Maria Nuutinen | Exhibition from 15th November – 14th December 2019 | Second Floor at Harlesden High Street, 60-72 Short’s Gardens, Holborn, London WC2H 9AH. The Big Four is an exhibition that considers the technological impact that humans have on the planet, considering the Big Four tech companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple) and how humans and new forms of technology continue to assist in major environmental change. The exhibition consists of new drawings, paintings and sculptural installations from Bob Bicknell-Knight and Rosa-Maria Nuutinen | FB page/link – https://bit.ly/2XWCQhA

Heath Bunting – Intimacy Encryption Workshop | ARTFUTURA 2019 – PROCESSING THE FUTURE – WORKSHOP (Festival of Digital Culture & Creativity) | Sun 1 Dec 2019 11:30 am – 1:30 pm | In a time of surveillance capitalism, privacy requires some radical methods. A workshop in how to communicate secretly over any media using nothing more than sharing some special time together. Used very effectively by former fluffy groups such as Irish Republican Army and Palestine Liberation Organization. Heath Bunting is a contemporary British artist and his work is based on creating open and democratic systems by modifying communications technologies and social systems. Location – IKLECTIK, Londond, SE1 7LG – https://bit.ly/2qUiJUI

Constitution for a co-operative art school | Tuesday 3rd December 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm | Come along to contribute your ideas to a draft constitution for a co-operative art school. Using a series of questions as guidelines, we will collectively generate, articulate, debate and decide the values, principles, processes and working methods of an art school that is organised, structured and governed along co-operative values of autonomy, democracy, equality and solidarity. https://bit.ly/37K3lv7

DISRUPT THE SYSTEM NOT THE CLIMATE: Surveillance, Climate Change & Global Conflict | Friday 6 December, 19:30 at ACUD MACHT NEU, Veteranenstr 21, 10119 Berlin  (U8 Rosenthaler Platz) | DNL’s closing event of 2019, which wraps up the 2019 conference series ‘The Art of Exposing Injustice’, as well as the first year of the Activation community programme. The talks will address respectively counter-surveillance techniques and the right to privacy as well as how climate change is intertwined with political conflicts. After the talks, the privacy-electropunk band “Systemabsturz” will perform live! The programme of the evening is curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli & Lieke Ploeger. https://www.disruptionlab.org/meet-ups

Landscape Symposium 2019: Staying with the trouble: Critical and creative approaches to the climate and biodiversity crises | Friday 6 Dec 2019 | Our Symposium for 2019 will explore another of our Research Strategy themes, Critical and Creative Landscape Thinking. With a varied group of collaborators (see below), we will form a conversational space to apply this to the climate and biodiversity crises. The Symposium title is from Staying With the Trouble, Donna J. Haraway (c) 2016, Duke University Press – borrowed with very kind permission! – https://bit.ly/2Y47HZF

Opening: Raised by Google, by Sarah Selby | A new body of work by Bristol based artist Sarah Selby. Sarah was the final selected artist for hotel generation 2019, areyte Gallery’s annual young artist development programme. Raised by Google explores the impacts of current data practices on our seemingly autonomous lives, investigating to what degree our opportunities and experiences are influenced by the underlying systems of a data-driven society. Opening Thursday 5 December, 6-9pm | 6 Dec 2019 – 11 Jan 2020 | Part of arebyte’s 2019 programme home – https://bit.ly/34wYWcX

Surfing with: Dani Ploeger | Hosted by Art Claims Impulse (Berlin) | Monday, 9 December 2019 | ACI invites you to an exciting evening. Dani Ploeger, Media Performing Artist, who has set himself the goal of confronting the borders of high-tech consumption and their dynamics will accompany you for two hours into his “Internet world” *Also transmitted in livestream. Please check our website on 09.12.2019, 18:30h. https://bit.ly/2Dta3Yx

Paper Struggles & Public Library and the Property Form | Hosted by Post Office research group | AN EXHIBITION AND SEMINAR | EXHIBITION ‘PAPER STRUGGLES’ OPENING: Monday, 9 December, 18.30-21.00 | Continues: Tuesday 10 and Wednesday 11 December, 11.00-21.00 | SEMINAR ‘PUBLIC LIBRARY AND THE PROPERTY FORM’: Tuesday 10 December, 10.30-13.30, Guest speakers: Balász Bodó & Nanna Bonde Thylstrup | Seminar registration: http://tiny.cc/public_library **Post Office Research Group**, Centre for Postdigital Cultures | Coventry University | https://postoffice.media

Figurations: Persons In/Out of Data Conference | Panel Event 9.30am – 6pm, Monday 16 and Tuesday 17 December, 2019 | We’re drowning in an ocean of data, or so the saying goes. Data’s “big”: there’s not only lots of it, but its volume has allowed for the development of new, large-scale processing techniques. Our relationship with governments, medical organisations, technology companies, the education sector, and so on are increasingly informed by the data we overtly or inadvertently provide when we use particular services. This conference brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers to explore how the person—or persons, plural—are figured in/out of data. Our proposition is that it can help us think and study our increasingly datified present. Professor Stuart Hall Building, Goldsmiths, University of London – https://bit.ly/2R5tr5V

Trans\/code: Jonathan Reus Maya Fridman Marije Baalman Miri Lee | This evening we will present the outcome of a short-term “flash residency” period for developing performative work that explores the potential for livecoding practice to overlap with other performative disciplines. The event brings together livecoding performers/researchers with accomplished performance practitioners to prototype a new performance concept over the course of two workdays and to perform this work during an experimental concert evening | 11th Dec 2019 | Hosted by iii, The Hague, Netherlands | FB link – https://bit.ly/35M2mJ7

Books, Open Calls, Papers & Publications

Art Hack Practice: Critical Intersections of Art, Innovation and the Maker Movement | Editors, Victoria Bradbury, Suzy O’Hara | Bridging art and innovation, this book invites readers into the processes of artists, curators, cultural producers and historians who are working within new contexts that run parallel to or against the phenomenon of ‘maker culture’. The book is a fascinating and compelling resource for those interested in critical and interdisciplinary modes of practice that combine arts, technology and making. It presents international case studies that interrogate perceived distinctions between sites of artistic and economic production by brokering new ways of working between them. It also discusses the synergies and dissonances between art and maker culture, analyses the social and collaborative impact of maker spaces and reflects upon the ethos of the hackathon within the fabric of a media lab’s working practices | Publisher: Taylor & Francis Inc – https://bit.ly/33tLd5y

If I Only had a Heart: a DisCO Manifesto: Value Sovereignty, Care Work, Commons and Distributed Cooperative Organizations | The DisCO Manifesto is a deep dive into the world of Distributed Cooperative Organizations. Over its 80 colorful pages, you will read about how DisCOs are a P2P/Commons, cooperative and Feminist Economic alternative to Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (or DAOs). The DisCO Manifesto also includes some background on topics like blockchain, AI, the commons, feminism, cooperatives, cyberpunk, and more | http://disco.coop/manifesto/

The Beautiful Warriors. Technofeminist Praxis in the Twenty-First Century | Edited by Cornelia Sollfrank | The book brings together seven current technofeminist positions from the fields of art and activism. In very different ways, they expand the theories and practices of 1990’s cyberfeminism and thus react to new forms of discrimination and exploitation. Gender politics are negotiated with reference to technology, and questions of technology are combined with questions of ecology and economy. The different positions around this new techno-eco-feminism understand their practice as an invitation to take up their social and aesthetic interventions, to join in, to continue, and never give up | Contributions from Christina Grammatikopoulou, Isabel de Sena, Femke Snelting, Cornelia Sollfrank, Spideralex, Sophie Toupin, hvale vale, Yvonne Volkart – http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=976

The Critical Makers Reader: (Un)learning Technology | Editors: Loes Bogers & Letizia Chiappini | Copy editor: Luke Munn | A decade ago many gushed at the possibilities of 3D printers and other DIY tech. Today makers are increasingly shaking off their initial blind enthusiasm to numerically control everything, rediscovering an interest in sociocultural histories and futures and waking up to the environmental and economic implications of digital machines that transform materials. An accumulation of critique has collectively registered that no tool, service, or software is good, bad, or neutral—or even free for that matter. We’ve arrived at a crossroads, where a reflective pause coincides with new critical initiatives emerging across disciplines | Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2019 – https://bit.ly/2DryPZ7

The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World | By Linsey McGoey | An intriguing investigation, shattering the hackneyed notion that knowledge is power.Deliberate ignorance has been known as the ‘Ostrich Instruction’ in law courts since the 1860s. It illustrates a recurring pattern in history in which figureheads for major companies, political leaders and industry bigwigs plead ignorance to avoid culpability. So why do so many figures at the top still get away with it when disasters on their watch damage so many people’s lives? | Published by Zed books – https://bit.ly/2DsK2Zt

Vital Forms: Biological Art, Architecture, and the Dependencies of Life | Biological Art, Architecture, and the Dependencies of Life | By Jennifer Johung | Using numerous case studies, Jennifer Johung explores how art and architecture are reimagining life on cellular and subcellular levels. In the process, she maps the constantly evolving dependencies that exist between objects, bodies, and environments. From Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr’s Tissue Culture and Art Project, which developed “semi-living worry dolls,” to Patricia Piccinini’s imagined Still Life with Stem Cells, each chapter pairs a branch of contemporary biological inquiry with the artists who are revolutionizing it | Published Dec 2019, University of Minnesota Press – https://bit.ly/35JHEcJ

DIGITAL ART THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS: New strategies for archiving, collecting and preserving in Digital Humanities | Oliver GRAU, Janina HOTH and Eveline WANDL-VOGT(eds.) | With contributions by: Frieder Nake, George Legrady, José R. Alcalá Mellado /Beatriz Escribano Belmar, Anne-Marie Duguet, Howard Besser, Giselle Beiguelman, Wendy Coones, Sarah Kenderdine, Marianne Ping-Huang, Raphael Lozano Hemmer, Annet Dekker, Janina Hoth, Laura Leuzzi, Diego Mellado, Oliver Grau, Goki Miyakita/Keiko Okawa, Sabine Himmelsbach, Francesca Franco, Patricia Falcão | | NEW PUBLICATION (free e-book download on Academia) – https://bit.ly/35Js2G9

Deadly Biocultures: The Ethics of Life-Making | By Nadine Ehlers and Shiloh Krupar | Deadly Biocultures examines the affirmation to hope, target, thrive, secure, and green in the respective biocultures of cancer, race-based health, fatness, aging, and the afterlife. Its chapters focus on specific practices, technologies, or techniques that ostensibly affirm life and suggest life’s inextricable links to capital but that also engender a politics of death and erasure. The authors ultimately ask: what alternative social forms and individual practices might be mapped onto or intersect with biomedicine for more equitable biofutures? | Published Dec 2019, University of Minnesota Press – https://bit.ly/2DuV9kF

Articles, Interviews & Presentations

Investigation into Amazon Echo devices wins 2019 Beazley Design of the Year award | Written by Jacopo Prisco, CNN | The award and accompanying exhibition is held each year at London’s Design Museum to showcase original and innovative new designs in various fields. The all-digital winning investigation, created by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, looks at the amount of human labor, data and resources required to support the lifespan of a single Echo product, visually illustrating the real-world impact of voice assistants. https://cnn.it/2rAnRxS

Was Humanity Simply Not Ready for the Internet? A 1990s cyber enthusiast considers whether he’s to blame for our digital woes | By Douglas Rushkoff | Steve Jobs as much as told us we were making a pact with the devil. He knew perfectly well what he was doing when he named his company Apple: He was giving people access to the forbidden fruit—the tree of knowledge—and fully disclosing that fact. Thanks to computers and, soon after, the internet, regular people everywhere would have access to everyone and everything – https://bit.ly/2OwYhCO

Rereading Debord | A look at today’s hyperconnected society of social media, cognitive capitalism and algorithms through the lens of the work of Guy Debord | By Ingrid Guardiola | This preference for images as part of commodity fetishism has become accentuated with social media in a world of virtual realities connected through mobile technology. The proxy or representative on the screen has ended up usurping the place of the original. It is no longer a question of managing images, rather we organise our own image using the filters and facial contouring offered by an endless array of apps to tune ourselves up. Even the bodies used as the benchmarks for cosmetic surgery have shifted from a universal look (that of the stars of the moment) to the virtual self; people want to look like the face offered to them by Snapchat or Facetune, they want to show the best version of themselves in a selfie, to mummify their virtual self – http://lab.cccb.org/en/rereading-debord/

Extinction Rebellion Is Creating a New Narrative of the Climate Crisis | By Charlotte Du Cann | In London, activists are taking to the streets to eschew hopelessness in favor of repair. The shape of their rebellion is not the orderly stream of protesters flowing down the streets with placards. It’s a wild, impromptu mix — of circus performers and a funeral procession, of 400 trees left outside Parliament for legislators to plant and 40 “rebel writers” reading in Trafalgar Square, of a mothers and babies “nurse-in” outside Google’s headquarters. It’s a marriage, a game of cricket and a ceilidh (a gathering with dancing and music) on Westminster Bridge, and a singer in a baroque band singing Henry Purcell’s “Remember Me” at the end of Downing Street – https://nyti.ms/2CFzVQy

Image by Kelsey. arcade fire performs at starlight theatre on april 26th, 2014. Also, was the main image for You Say Decentralized, I Say Potato: The DisCO Manifesto, by Stacco Troncoso. 

A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.

Events, Exhibitions, Festivals and Conferences

Playmode | Exhibition at MAAT Lisbon, Sep 2019 – feb 2020 | Curated by Filipe Pais and Patricia Gouveia | It is said that play has saved entire peoples, who, in order not to succumb to hunger, resorted to playing games for hours at a time. While the Lydians, that distant people from Anatolia, invented games as a mode of surviving, play from the beginning has been an invention linked to a vital need — to stay alive and withstand the darkness, immobility and extinction.

The artists understood early on the transformative power of play and began integrating it into their works for various purposes – escaping reality, social construction and transformation, subversion or as a criticism of game and play mechanisms themselves – https://www.filipepais.com/playmode

The Long Term You Cannot Afford. On The Distribution of The Toxic | At SAVVY-Contemporary, Berlin, Germany | 19 Oct 2019 – 1 Dec 2019 | This mixed exhibition unpacks the kaleidoscopic meanings of the toxic, both as matter and as metaphor: In his paintings, Boris Anje captures the essence of the excessive and toxic consumerism of a small minority of the world’s population | The toxic trade-off inherent in exploitative and abusive processes of extraction, production, and disposal lie at the heart of the changing nature of the ecosystems to which we now belong – with millions of metric tons of synthetic materials, pesticides, heavy metals, and chemicals released and circulated every year. Structural inequalities on a global scale permit for some lives to remain relatively untouched by toxic proliferation through systems of “externalisation” [2] whilst many reside in high concentrations and lethal exposure on a daily basis out of mere necessity of survival. The new age of toxicity is “a condition that is shared, but unevenly so, and which divides us as much as it binds us.” – http://tiny.cc/y8ryez

Soft Power 04: an exhibition in a spreadsheet | Hosted by Micheál O’Connell, Andrea Slater and Daniella Norton | Thursday, 31 October 2019 | A fourth exhibition by the Soft Power people, this time in a spreadsheet. Look at it at home, or on your device, or wherever. Drink some wine and chat to friends about what you witness. The link will be supplied with those ‘GOING’ on the date (Thursday 31st October) at 7pm. For updates sign up to Mocksim’s mailing list http://www.mocksim.org/contact.htm

24/7: A wake-up call for our non-stop world | 31 Oct 2019 – 23 Feb 2020 | Somerset House |Embankment Galleries, South Wing | An essential exhibition for today, exploring the non-stop nature of modern life. Many of us feel we’re working more intensively, juggling too many things, blurring our public and private lives, pushing the limits of our natural rhythms of sleep and waking.

24/7 takes visitors on a multi-sensory journey from the cold light of the moon to the fading warmth of sunset through five themed zones and contains over 50 multi-disciplinary works that will provoke and entertain | Inspired by Jonathan Crary’s book of the same name, and curated by Sarah Cook, 24/7& holds up a mirror to our always-on culture and invites you to step outside of your day-to-day routine to engage, reflect and reset – http://tiny.cc/44f7ez

Launch event for Rabbrexit – A Game of Chance / editions tdwm | Hosted by Cecilia Wee and YiMiao Shih | Thursday, 31 October 2019 (London) | On the date of the Brexit deadline, we’re having a little launch party for “Rabbrexit – A Game of Chance” and the birth of editions tdwm. Editions tdwm is delighted to present its first project: a limited edition set of playing cards “Rabbrexit – A Game of Chance”, featuring illustrations by YiMiao Shih, designed with Arjun Harrison-Mann.

Rabbrexit – A Game of Chance reworks images from YiMiao Shih’s exhibition Rabbrexit Means Rabbrexit at the House of Illustration in London (2019), where YiMiao created a parallel universe in which the UK voted not for Brexit but ‘Rabbrexit’: the expulsion of rabbits from the country – http://tiny.cc/p3oyez

Become Ungovernable 2: a day of resistance skill sharing | The Antiuniversity, as part of a coalition of autonomous left groups, invites you to a day of practical and informative workshops, where we will learn from each other simple visual intervention methods that anyone can pick up, grow confidence to use a variety of tools and learn about ways to stay safe when organising on the streets and online. In preparation for the planned attack on our city and communities on 31 Oct (Brexit day), we planned a day of practical resistance skill sharing.

The far right, bolstered by a racist and xenophobic government, is growing in confidence. The response to Boris Johnson’s hard-right vision for society and threat to our basic rights must be equally confident. Some actions will take place through whatever is left of the parliamentary mechanism, others will take place on the streets. Hosted by Antiuniversity, Green Anti-Capitalist Front, Plan C, Feminist Anti-Fascist Assembly, and Women’s Strike Assembly | FB page – http://tiny.cc/1qoyez

NEoN Digital Arts Festival. Multiple Venues in Dundee City, Scotland. Nov 6 – 8 2019. An expanded 3-day symposium entitled, Re@ct: Social Change Art Technology. NEoN Re@ct involves over 30 international speakers over three days addressing a diversity of issues and practices engaging activist digital art. Many artists involved in digital arts have historically been prompted to react and respond to local, national, global, social and political crises (i.e. around issues of environmentalism, gender equality, exploitation, colonialism, militarism, emancipation). Re@ct will be a platform to critically examine the relevance and impact of past and present practices, theories and strategies – to engage an uncertain future through an exploration of the creative potential of digital art. Reigister free to the full symposium – http://tiny.cc/y5lyez

Citizens of Nowhere | Alicja Rogalska: 2019 Stuart Hall Library Artist-in-Residence | Hosted by Iniva | 6 November 2019 | Join 2019 Stuart Hall Library Artist-in-Residence Alicja Rogalska for a screening and discussion about her work developed during the residency alongside two other videos. The three works are concerned with issues of citizenship, immigration and identity, viewed through the lenses of classification methods and systems, legal fictions in immigration law and the lived experiences of statelessness. The screening will be followed by a discussion with invited guests and a Q&A.

The works screened will include: What If As If (2017), The Aliens Act (2019) and Citizens of Nowhere (2019). Total running time of the videos will be 40 mins | Evenbrite bookings here – http://tiny.cc/uiqyez

Books, Open Calls, Papers & Publications

Expanded Internet Art: Twenty-First-Century Artistic Practice and the Informational Milieu By Ceci Moss | Charting the rise of a multidisciplinary approach to online artistic practice in the past decade, the text discusses recent currents in contemporary artistic practice that parallel the explosion of the internet through advances such as social media, smart phones, and faster bandwidth. Internet art is no longer determined solely by its existence on the web; rather, contemporary artists are making more art about informational culture using various methods of both online and offline means. It asks how artists, such as Seth Price, Harm van den Dorpel, Kari Altmann, Artie Vierkant and Oliver Laric, create a critical language in response to the persuasive influence of informational capture on culture and expression, where the environment itself becomes reorganized to be more legible as information | Bloomsbury Academic – http://tiny.cc/ktg7ez

The Cyborg Matrix | Open call for artists, is now online at http://theCyborgMatrix.com !! Make an account and create your own profile. Or type in your name or nickname for a short visit. Doe you want to add you art to the space, go to http://cyarco.com/theCyborgMatrix/ or send us an email at cyborgMatrix@cyarco.com. see you in cyberspace!!

Automation, Artificial Intelligence, and Labour Protection | Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2019 | A collection of articles on “Automation, Artificial Intelligence, and Labour Protection” edited by Valerio De Stefano (KU Leuven). This collection gathers contributions from several labour lawyers and social scientists to provide an interdisciplinary overview of how new technologies, including smart robots, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and business practices such as People Analytics, management-by-algorithm, and the use of big data in workplaces, far from merely displacing jobs, profoundly affect the quality of work. The authors argue that these issues depend, and can be affected by, policy choices – since they are not just the “natural” result of technological innovations – and call for adequate regulation of these phenomena. Contributing authors are Antonio Aloisi, Ilaria Armaroli, Fernanda Bárcia de Mattos, Janine Berg, Miriam Cherry, Emanuele Dagnino, Valerio De Stefano, Elena Gramano, Matt Finkin, Marianne Furrer, Frank Hendrickx, Parminder Jeet Singh, David Kucera, Phoebe Moore, Jeremias Prassl, and Uma Rani. This article introduces this collection and gives an overview of the issues discussed by the authors – http://tiny.cc/s4zyez

Digital Sociology: The Reinvention of Social Research | By Noortje Marres (2017) | This provocative new introduction to the field of digital sociology offers a critical overview of interdisciplinary debates about new ways of knowing society that are emerging today at the interface of computing, media, social research and social life.

Digital Sociology introduces key concepts, methods and understandings that currently inform the development of specifically digital forms of social enquiry. Marres assesses the relevance and usefulness of digital methods, data and techniques for the study of sociological phenomena and evaluates the major claim that computation makes possible a new ‘science of society’. As Marres argues, the digital does much more than inspire innovation in social research: it forces us to engage anew with fundamental sociological questions. We must learn to appreciate that the digital has the capacity to throw into crisis existing knowledge frameworks and is likely to reconfigure wider relations | Polity press – http://tiny.cc/pqg7ez

Articles, Interviews & Presentations

Future Cities as a Network of Waterholes connected by Songlines | Medium | By Steven Liaros | “Irene Watson provides a detailed discussion of the indigenous worldview in Raw Law: Aboriginal Peoples, Colonialism and International Law (2015). Also referred to as relational philosophy, Watson compares and contrasts this with non-indigenous philosophy. This comparison is summarised in Table 1 in which I have included additional descriptions in brackets that express this contrast using other common terms.” – http://tiny.cc/rywyez

Brexit Culture | Feature article on ArtRabbit | By Sandy Di Yu | “Research has been conducted by the Arts Council about the economic and operational impacts of Brexit, but the content of culture has yet to be formally surveyed. While we can only speculate like everyone else what the full-fledged impact of Brexit on cultural production will be in the coming years, the era since the 2016 referendum has already seen a flurry of events that indicate growing precariousness in our time. Right-wing populism has gained more than a foothold in political discourse. Conspiracies run rampant about celebrity sex traffickers and their ties to the global elite. Anxiety over climate change, although leading to inspiring global movements, is still being met with dismissal by political leaders.” – http://tiny.cc/ujtyez

Can Musical Machines Be Expressive? Views from the Enlightenment and Today? by Steven Kemper and Rebecca Cypess | October 2019, Leonardo 52:5 release | How can music produced by automated technologies be expressive? Transitive theories of expression dominated eighteenth-century ideas of automated music, and many contemporary designers of robotic instruments adhere to these ideas, increasing sonic nuance to make their instruments seem more like expressive human performers. A listener-centered understanding of expression—an “intransitive” perspective—allows us to see automatic instruments as capable of expression despite the fact that no human performer is present – http://tiny.cc/m9nyez

Media Art History: Berlin, Cyber City (1989-91) VR – MR installation by Monika Fleischmann & Wolfgang Strauss | Berlin, Cyber City (1989-91) commemorates the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall 1989. VIDEO. The performative VR city simulation system “Berlin – Cyber City” was created as a reaction to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The intention was the staging of an interactive space for debate on the future of the city. To do this, the VR paradigm – the real-time movement in an immersive environment for a single user – should be extended into a communication space for several users. A participative Mixed Reality table combined with a 3D environment and Virtual Reality tools invites people to discuss the past and the future of the former divided city – http://tiny.cc/q2nyez

Neural 63, Surveillance Surveyed | Issue #63, Summer 2019 | interviews with Pip Thornton, Joana Moll, Mendi and Keith Obadike, Owen Mundy | articles, Surveying Surveillance Capitalism, Decode: Data Cooperatives, Our voices granted to machines, and much more – http://neural.it/2019/10/neural-63-surveillance-surveyed/

Image by: Brad Downey. House of Cards #3. Public Work. 2007, Berlin, Germany. Duration: 4 days. Anonymous installation. Material: paving stones – http://tiny.cc/vkf7ez | Currently featured in Playmode exhibition, Lisbon.

A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.

Events, Exhibitions, Festivals and Conferences

Counting Craters on the Moon | Solo exhibition by Kyriaki Goni | Curated by Daphne Dragona | Aksioma | Project Space Komenskega 18, Ljubljana | 2–25 October 2019 | As a result of advances in machine learning, our understanding of today’s world is ever more mediated by machines. What challenges does deep learning bring to human-based knowledge? What do machines see and do differently than humans? How can artificial intelligence enhance new forms of experience and understanding? To address these questions, in Counting Craters on the Moon, Kyriaki Goni purposely turns her gaze to a distant and uncanny territory: the Moon and its surface. The Moon, according to the artist, constitutes a fascinating example and offers an interesting analogy. Lacking an atmosphere, it operates as a data center which stores in its body the memory of our solar system and allows predictions for the future – http://tiny.cc/cgabdz

Acts of Quiet Resistance | 5 October 2019 | Hosted by Foodhall / Sheffield and outsidefilm | Acts Of Quiet Resistance (Ian Nesbitt + Michael Ransley  / 2019 / 70 mins) is a documentary steeped in the slow cinema tradition. Five years in the making, it continues a thread in Ian’s work of collaboratively made films, blurring the line between subject and filmmaker. “For fans of Shirley Collins, Richard Linklater, campfires and Robert Bresson, but this film is so beautifully sideways it sweeps away comparisons really.” Chiz Williams, Cube Microplex | FB link – http://tiny.cc/de5adz

Arts Lab Northampton and Liverpool Arts Lab team up to present ‘Howl’ | Northampton’s Alistair Fruish has taken on Allen Ginsberg’s classic poem, once subject to an obscenity trial, to address the major obscenity of our time; the destruction of the ecological systems that sustain our planet. Visceral, confrontational and very timely, ‘Howl’ was brought to life by the design work of Liverpool’s Slim Smith. Printed on A4 280gm textured cream card. http://tiny.cc/3sk9cz All proceeds will go to the Regenerative Agroforestry Impact Network – http://tiny.cc/77abdz

New Suns: A Feminist Literary Festival | 5 Oct 2019 | Barbican, London | A bookfair and day of talks, workshops and screenings, exploring contemporary feminism and technology. ‘For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ – Audre Lorde | Inviting audiences to explore new and continuing debates in feminist approaches to technology. This year’s festival takes inspiration from science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, which subverts the dominant narrative of technologically driven ‘progress’.  

The day will include workshops, talks and screenings exploring technofeminism, storytelling, sonic ritual, gender identity, reproductive justice and indigenous knowledge with writers, artists, mystics, poets and academics. In the spirit of the 1980s international feminist bookfairs, there will also be over thirty stalls to explore across Level G, and selected events for free – http://tiny.cc/d86adz

Genetic Automata, Larry Achiampong and David Blandy | 15th oct 2019 | Hosted by Site Gallery (Sheffield) and Arts Catalyst | Genetic Automata forms the first part of an ambitious new body of film-based works that attempt to address this complex history of classification and segregation. Referencing the history of the theory of evolution, and the relationship between Darwin and his taxidermy teacher John Edmonstone, a freed slave, the work takes the form of a video installation combining animation, spoken word and text interspersed with microscopic topographies of varied shades of skin, digital renditions of skin from video games, and film footage of taxidermied bird life from Darwin’s bird skin collection at the Natural History Museum – http://tiny.cc/m45adz

Books, Open Calls, Call for Papers & Publications

Open Call: Rot | In the midst of this hubris of humans becoming humus, we might find tools for living in a rotten age. Across the world, artists, activists, and academics are busy learning to give voice to the sympoetic; bat populations translate into flickering shadows, music composed for moth’s ears, an opera of 176 golden snails, a butoh dance about shrimp deranged by antidepressant medication overflowed into oceans. This is a genre of creative work interested in finding new ways to interrogate the underbelly of today’s ‘wicked problems.

Rot invites artists, scientists, activists, and writers with poorly disciplined curiosities to submit work that digs into this compost heap. We are especially interested in supporting dialogue around works in process; field notes, half-completed projects, the tangled, in-between moments where cross-contaminations and co-creations occur. We would especially like to hear from people who are underrepresented in the fields of art and arts publishing – in particular people who identify as BAME, disabled, LGBT, or low income – http://tiny.cc/5p3cdz

New Myths: Recordings from the Missing Channel, curated by Canan Batur | Conceived as a series of soundscapes/sonic think tanks to assess, develop and propose new social languages and methods to understand, and create unlikely relationships between; the systems of representation, the emancipatory aspect of sound and the social constructs of identity. It takes its foundation from the idea that music is a myth, and myths’ ability to suggest – with primal narrative power- the conflicting forces and ideas that lie at the foundation of society.

Over the course of five months, New Myths will upload contributions by Tarek Lakhrissi, markiscrycrycry, James Massiah, Momtaza Mehri, Harun Morrison, Precious Okoyomon, Claudia Pages, Hannah Perry, Tabita Rezaire and Rowdy SS to 1.1 Basel’s online platform and SoundCloud with the purpose of delving into the multitude of voices, the rhythm of erosion and emergence, and the collusion and contradiction – http://www.1-1.digital/show/new-myths/

Conflictual Aesthetics: Artistic Activism and the Public Sphere | Editor Oliver Marchart | A new wave of artistic activism has emerged in recent years in response to the ever-increasing dominance of authoritarian neoliberalism. Activist practices in the art field, however, have been around much longer. As Oliver Marchart claims, there has always been an activist undercurrent in art. In this book he traces trajectories of artistic activism in theater, dance, performance, and public art, and investigates the political potential of urbanism, curating, and “biennials of resistance.” What emerges is a conflictual aesthetics that does not conform with traditional approaches to the field and that activates the political potential of artistic practice | Sternberg Press 2019 – http://tiny.cc/z5bbdz

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Sound, Image and Interaction | EAI Endorsed Transactions on Creative Technologies | For the last two decades, there has been a growing interest in the study of sound from a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) perspective. This coincides with the shift to a third wave of HCI towards applications in broader cultural contexts. Researchers have paid special attention to the integration of other sensory modalities with sound. This Special Issue “Sound, Image and Interaction”, aims to address emerging issues in research related to the creation of interactive sonic experiences, particularly focusing on the role that image plays in these scenarios. We are interested in submissions related to connections between sound, image and/or interaction, and the topics of interest listed – https://escripts.eai.eu/publication/257

Climate Machines, Fascist Drives, and Truth | By William E. Connolly | Duke University Press Books (23 Aug. 2019) | In this new installation of his work, William E. Connolly examines entanglements between volatile earth processes and emerging cultural practices, highlighting relays among extractive capitalism, self-amplifying climate processes, migrations, democratic aspirations, and fascist dangers. In three interwoven essays, Connolly takes up thinkers in the “minor tradition” of European thought who, unlike Cartesians and Kantians, cross divisions between nature and culture. He first offers readings of Sophocles and Mary Shelley, asking whether close attention to the Anthropocene could perhaps have arrived earlier had subsequent humanists absorbed their lessons – http://tiny.cc/3t0cdz

Articles, Interviews & Presentations

Harness the Power of a Fluid Identity with 3 Simple Strategies | By Marloes de Valk September | Institute of Network Cultures | Why aren’t there stronger regulations protecting our privacy, our democracy? Seemingly off topic but very similar: why aren’t there stricter regulations protecting us from anthropogenic climate change? In an attempt to find answers to these questions, I’ve been looking into strategies used by different industries to delay regulation: democratic intervention in the private market in order to protect citizens and the world on which their lives rely – http://tiny.cc/o4rfdz

Feminism and the Social Solidarity Economy: a Short Call to Action | The following text is a translation of Marian Díez‘s impassioned closing speech at the recent convergence meeting of the World Social Forum for Transformative Economies. The closing event was filled with strong presentations, but we chose Marian’s for its overview of the sheer scope and variety of the Social Solidarity Economy in Spain and, secondly, to highlight the need for intersectional complementarity among post-capitalist movements. This article is also closely linked to our translation of A Charter for the Social Solidarity Economy – http://tiny.cc/gm4adz

David Olusoga: Blackness, Britishness + the Windrush Generation | 8 Oct 2019 | Hosted by Firstsite, Colchester, UK | To coincide with the opening of Super Black, an exhibition co-curated with members of Colchester’s Black African and Caribbean communities, David Olusoga OBE, a British-Nigerian historian, broadcaster, film-maker and award-winning author, is coming to Firstsite to give a unique talk about the history of British African-Caribbean people, and what it means to be black in Britain today.

Every ticket sold raises money to show free exhibitions of award winning artists, and helps Firstsite fund local creative community projects – including free lunches and activities for families during the school holidays. https://firstsite.uk/whats-on/david-olusoga-talk/

Video Doc: The Sex Pistols Riotous 1978 Tour Through the U.S. South: Watch/Hear Concerts in Dallas, Memphis, Tulsa & More | Open Culture | The Sex Pistols “started out as an elaborate Situationist-inspired performance art piece dreamed up by megalomaniac manager Malcolm McLaren,” wrote Jonathan Crow in a post here at Open Culture about one of the band’s storied, disastrous final shows in Dallas of 1978. After beginning as the creation of McLaren and partner Vivienne Westwood, however, they “evolved beyond just being a stunt.” The statement is objectively true by music history standards. The band’s earliest gigs were directly responsible for almost every major band that took British punk in subsequent post-punk, goth, new wave, dub, etc. directions, including the Buzzcocks, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Clash, Joy Division, Wire, and too many others to list – http://tiny.cc/rb8adz

Complexity, uncertainty & scalability: How Assemble’s Granby 4 Streets won 2015 Turner Prize | By Stephen Pritchard (originally written in 2016) | “Did Assemble really play such a big part in Granby 4 Streets?  How ‘community-led’ was the project? What was the role of the Community Land Trust? How did Assemble come to win the Turner Prize 2015?  Who were the private social investors and what did they do to help make the project happen? The intention here is to blow open the façade behind Granby 4 Streets, Assemble and the Turner Prize 2015 win. Pritchard argues that the media and art world picture of Assemble is overly simplistic and masks a far more complex and uncertain set of events that, ultimately, relied on ‘mystery’ private social investors to force local government to act in support of the project and to lever money from national grant funders.” http://tiny.cc/dqq4cz

Extra Squeezed… (extra stuff)

Publishing and Administrative Assistant job at Ognota books | We are hiring for a Publishing and Administrative Assistant. Abilities to divine the future, travel in the astral plane and to write funding applications are a major advantage. We particularly welcome applicants with strong earth placements – http://tiny.cc/5potcz

Image credit: Leila Nadir and Cary Adams, from the series Microbial Selfie (2017) 

A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.

Events, Exhibitions, Festivals and Conferences

EMBODIMENT / Capture Performance Focus (CPF): IRELAND | Until – 31 Oct 2019 | curated by Helen Carey and Michaela Stock | Young Irish artists of the Fire Station Artists’ Studios to Vienna in collaboration with Austrian artists. The exhibition highlights an inter-cultural dialogue. The central enquiry of the exhibition is around being in the world, and the different ways people inhabit space both conceptual and temporal, manifesting cultural differences and similarities. Ideas explored include how contemporary art explores the shifting of what might be stable ideas for nationality, for gender and how history and experience makes meaning fluid – http://tiny.cc/hwetcz

The Art of Activism Exhibition Launch | Hosted by Friends of the Earth and the print space | You’re invited to join The Art of Activism at our launch night on 19 September, for a first look at the exhibition. You’ll find artworks from the activist & creative community inspired by the whimsical, darkly humorous placards that people make for demonstrations alongside artists including Jeremy Deller and Katharine Hamnett plus more to be announced. The evening is free of charge, but please register for a ticket to avoid disappointment.

Other events in relation to the Launch.

Thursday 26 September | The Art of Activism. Exploring how activism and art intersect.

Wednesday 2 October | 1000 Days of Protest. Celebrating 1000 days of fighting Fracking in Lancashire.

Thursday  10 October  | Climate – what next? Following on from the global climate strike, what does the next stage of the fight look like? http://tiny.cc/vsctcz

Republic of Learning | By MAKE @Story Garden, Central Saint Martins | Friday 20th September 2019 – 10.30am to 1pm | A monthly event bringing together the local community to discuss and explore issues surrounding climate change. Republic of Learning is a monthly event bringing together the local community to discuss and explore issues surrounding climate change. Through creativity, science and conversation we hope to better understand both the global and local impact of climate change, generating an open forum for experts and non-experts to share knowledge, experiences and ask questions of each other.

Our first event will coincide with the Global Climate Strike, an international strike ahead of the UN emergency climate summit, in which young people around the world ask as many people as possible to join them on the streets to protest the government’s lack of action on the Climate Crisis – http://tiny.cc/m9rtcz

YOKO ONO: LOOKING FOR… (Pieces from ‘Grapefruit’ and other works) | Opening: 26 Sep 2019 | 19 Sep 2019 – 1 Nov 2019 | Alison Richard Building, Cambridge, UK | Showcasing Yoko Ono’s work in the city of Cambridge for the first time ever, the exhibition YOKO ONO: LOOKING FOR… will evolve throughout the year 2019, featuring installations, interventions, performances, film screenings and a symposium, taking place at various venues and public sites – http://tiny.cc/c6etcz

Confessions of a Digital Gun for Hire | Hosted by Open Rights G. | September 23, 2019 | Hear a digital marketing expert blow the whistle on deceitful tactics used by digital advertisers and show us how we can “opt out” of the corporate surveillance economy. We’ll also receive an update about Open Rights Group’s AdTech complaint against Google and the Interactive Advertising Bureau. This event is a great way to learn easy and practical ways to protect yourself online from companies that aggressively target and track you across the Internet. Bring your laptops and mobile phones so you can use what you learn immediately – http://tiny.cc/m3htcz

Mr Processor, do you understand life? | Hosted by Aksioma and Cirkulacija2 (Slovenia) | 24 September 2019 | New improvements in machine learning have yet again turned artificial intelligence (AI) into a hot topic. Contextually, the old myth of the Technological Singularity, which first emerged with the early cybernetic thinking and science fiction, has been revived, making us scared about a possible, ever closer, future in which the development of an upgradable intelligent agent could lead to a “runaway reaction” of self-improvement cycles, resulting in a powerful superintelligence that would far surpass all human intelligence – bringing humanity to an end. Is this the only possible outcome of the development of self-awareness in machines? Couldn’t these machines, as often humans do, employ its self-awareness to indulge in stupidity and bad behaviours? Laying claim to art’s freedom to imagine, rather than predict, Slovenian artist Boštjan Čadež’s work Mr Processor, do you understand life? explores this scenario, sardonically commenting on our current, pathological relationship with machines – http://tiny.cc/qigtcz

The Victorian Pleasure Garden | Hosted by London Fortean Society | Wednesday, 25 September 2019 | Historian Lee Jackson, author of Palaces of Pleasure, recounts the history of London’s 19th-century pleasure gardens, from the faltering last days of Vauxhall to Chelsea’s infamous Cremorne Gardens, Highbury Barn and the Eagle Tavern (of “Pop Goes the Weasel” fame). The rise and fall of the Victorian pleasure garden tells us a good deal about the growth of commercial mass entertainment in the industrial age. It’s a story packed with dramatic spectacle, from fake icebergs to burning men, tightrope walkers and human frogs, prostitution and the Polka, parachuting monkeys, and the power of money – FB link – http://tiny.cc/48atcz

Homo Sensorium at DDW Brainwave Wedding Lab | By Baltan Laboratories | Eindhoven, Netherlands | Dates: 19, 20, 25, 26 Oct 2019 | The Wedding lab is a temporary testing ground where love and technology converge. This High Tech wedding experience developed by Baltan Laboratories together with artists Lancel/Maat, investigates future forms of marriage in a technological society. The lab launches a new wedding ritual for a sustainable social future.

When kissing, the wedding couples’ brain activity is measured with EEG sensors. The two patterns of the wedding kiss are materialized and 3d printed in two unique (wedding) rings. The rings encapsulate a code, representing their marriage contract, stored in a Blockchain system, no longer determined by restrictive social mores and local legislation – http://tiny.cc/1cctcz

FutureFest Late: The future of storytelling | Hosted by FutureFest | Thursday, 24 October 2019 | Join us at the Barbican conservatory for an evening of talks, installations and an interactive performance. We’ll be discussing the ingredients of storytelling with writer and critic Olivia Laing, exploring how stories might be told in the future through installations from the Royal College of Art, and immersing ourselves in an animal love story with performance artist David Finnigan. Your FutureFest Late ticket will include a talk, a pop-up installation, an immersive performance and a complimentary drink and canapés – http://tiny.cc/8zbtcz

Books, Call for Papers & Publications

The Horrors of the Atomic Age Through Artists’ Eyes | Clayton Schuster reviews Gabrielle Decamous’s book Invisible Colors: The Arts of the Atomic Age |  How art makes visible what had been invisible—the effects of radiation, the lives of atomic bomb survivors, and the politics of the atomic age. The effects of radiation are invisible, but art can make it and its effects visible. Artwork created in response to the events of the nuclear era allow us to see them in a different way. In Invisible Colors, Gabrielle Decamous explores the atomic age from the perspective of the arts, investigating atomic-related art inspired by the work of Marie Curie, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the disaster at Fukushima, and other episodes in nuclear history – http://tiny.cc/zqhtcz

Entreprecariat (Onomatopee) out soon! | By Silvio Lorusso | Entrepreneur or precarious worker? These are the terms of a cognitive dissonance that turns everyone’s life into a shaky project in perennial start-up phase. Silvio Lorusso guides us through the entreprecariat, a world where change is natural and healthy, whatever it may bring. A world populated by motivational posters, productivity tools, mobile offices and self-help techniques. A world in which a mix of entrepreneurial ideology and widespread precarity is what regulates professional social media, online marketplaces for self-employment and crowdfunding platforms for personal needs. The result? A life in permanent beta, with sometimes tragic implications – http://tiny.cc/dfitcz

PODCAST: ‘Radicals in Conversation’ | Art the Arms Fair with Peter Kennard | by Pluto Press | On 10th September one of the world’s largest arms fairs returns to London. The Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) will feature hundreds of exhibitors, including many of the world’s biggest arms manufacturers – BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and many more besides. Also attending, at the invitation of the UK government, will be countless national delegations, including those from authoritarian regimes, countries in conflict and countries identified as having major human rights concerns – http://tiny.cc/najtcz

What about Activism? | Steven Henry Madoff (Ed.) | With the global rise of a politics of shock driven by authoritarian regimes that subvert the rule of law and civil liberties, what paths to resistance, sanctuary, and change can cultural institutions offer? What about activism in curatorial practice? In this book, more than twenty leading curators and thinkers about contemporary art present powerful case studies, historical analyses, and theoretical perspectives that address the dynamics of activism, protest, and advocacy. What unfolds in these pages is a vast range of ideas—a tool kit for cultural producers everywhere to engage audiences and face the fierce political challenges of today and tomorrow – http://tiny.cc/uvjtcz

Articles, Interviews & Presentations

From Surveillance Capitalism to Glitch Capitalism | Interview with DISNOVATION.ORG — 2019 | Schloss Post | The work of DISNOVATION.ORG is characterized by producing critical works about the cult of technological innovation and disseminating radical counter-narratives. For the web residencies by Solitude & ZKM on the topic »Rigged Systems« curated by Jonas Lund, the working group developed the project Profiling the Profilers as a response to information asymmetry in digital profiles. The work seizes the means of data analytics to create a series of psychological, cultural and political profiles of the most data-extractivist Big Tech companies of our time. In our interview with DISNOVATION.ORG, we spoke about their working processes and their thoughts on the role of copy culture, free access, and media piracy – http://tiny.cc/shdtcz

Ingrid LaFleur – There Are Black People In The Future | Interview by Ruth Catlow | Transcribed by Anna Monkman | Ingrid LaFleur is on a mission to ensure “equal distribution of the future”. The curator of Manifest Destiny in Detroit, she also recently stood for mayor with an Afrofuturist manifesto. Detroit has long played a critical role in the history of ‘domestic and global labor struggles.’

And now its quest for social justice has an avant-entrepreneurial dynamic, working across art, politics and technology. Activists respond to the city’s (often highly racialized) political failures to provide basic utilities with impressive social innovation. The recent boot-strapping community mesh networks for instance, was a response to the fact that 40 percent of Detroit residents have no access to the Internet at all. The alliances and networks formed in this project are now providing the social grounding for peer-to-peer technical education and experimentation with emerging decentralisation technologies. DACTROIT (an EOS project) is now exploring how payment for this infrastructure might be made through a community token.

Catlow, first interviewed LaFleur in July shortly before Detroit Art Week and the opening of Manifest Destiny at Library Street Collective Gallery – http://tiny.cc/6uqtcz

The Art of Being Black in White Spaces – Lesson #1: “You black (and that’s a problem).” | By Ruth Terry | Learning the Art of being black in white spaces is a lifelong process that begins with a single lesson: “You black (and that’s a problem).” I got lesson number one out of the way in kindergarten when Daniel, the other black kid in my class, informed me, “You black!” I went home sobbing. “But Mom, I’m brown! I’m brown!”. White spaces can be defined as having an “overwhelming presence of white people and… absence of black people,” writes sociologist Elijah Anderson, though most are no longer explicitly anti-black. They are, however, fluid. Everything from desegregation and civil rights to upward social mobility and media portrayals of black people have recast the borders of white spaces and, in doing so, defined new ways that blackness is unacceptable within them – https://bit.ly/2micBDB

A Swiss house built by robots promises to revolutionize the construction industry | By Anne Quito | Switerland September 12, 2019 | “Erecting a new building ranks among the most inefficient, polluting activities humans undertake,” reports Qz. “The construction sector is responsible for nearly 40% of the world’s total energy consumption and CO2 emissions, according to a UN global survey. A consortium of Swiss researchers has one answer to the problem: working with robots.” Over four years, 30 different industry partners joined a team of experts at ETH Zurich university for a cutting-edge “digital fabrication” project: building the DFAB House. Timber beams were assembled by robots on site, it used 60% less cement, and it features some amazing ceilings printed with a large-scale 3D sand printer – http://tiny.cc/go7scz

Transgenic Male Mosquito Experiment Failed in the Worst Way | “What seemed like a very straight forward and safe genetic modification to male mosquito, mixing in genes that would end up creating non-viable offspring, seems to have gone wrong as indicated in a paper published in Nature’s Scientific Reports journal (an open access journal). It was expected that most offspring would die quickly, but instead, the few that survived managed to mate with the native population and transfer the mixed in genes. After an initial reduction of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, they have bounced back and now have genes from the two other mosquito species used to create the original GM males.” (Sourced from Slashdot.org) The article/abstract – http://tiny.cc/d87scz

Big Brother at the border | By Rachael Jolley | Index on Censorship | Jolley argues that travel restrictions and snooping into your social media at the frontier are new ways of suppressing ideas. Travelling to the USA this summer, journalist James Dyer, who writes for Empire magazine, says he was not allowed in until he had been questioned by an immigration official about whether he wrote for those “fake news” outlets. Also this year, David Mack, deputy director of breaking news at Buzzfeed News, was challenged about the way his organisation covered a story at the US border by an official – http://tiny.cc/czdtcz

Extra Squeezed….. extra stuff)

Publishing and Administrative Assistant job at Ognota books | Publishing and Administrative Assistant | We are hiring for a Publishing and Administrative Assistant. Abilities to divine the future, travel in the astral plane and to write funding applications are a major advantage. We particularly welcome applicants with strong earth placements – http://tiny.cc/5potcz

Main image: Bubble up in Blue, 2012, by Amanda Coogan. Part of EMBODIMENT / Capture Performance Focus (CPF): IRELAND, 2019.

A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.

Events, Exhibitions, Festivals and Conferences

Expanded Realities Exhibition | Sep 5 — Sep 10 2019 | At Festival Hub Studio | The Expanded Realities programme seeks to find new pathways for storytelling at the intersection of art and technology. With the digital increasingly ever-present and algorithmic living becoming the norm, artists and filmmakers are grasping the opportunity to challenge our understanding of “reality” and offer audiences a space to enhance, expand and re-evaluate their experience of the world around them. The exhibition includes a number of interactive installations as well as a 360 Cinema showcasing a selection of virtual reality films. This year’s installations all seek to push the boundaries of our understanding of interaction, connection and space within the digital landscape – http://tiny.cc/b718bz

The DRHA 2019 Conference – Radical Immersions: Navigating between virtual/physical environments and information bubbles | 8 – 10 September & The group exhibition runs 6-20 September | The exhibition http://tiny.cc/nu18bz engages critically with ideas, practices and beliefs of immersion in relation to digital culture and new media. It will run in parallel with this year’s Digital Research in the Humanities & Arts (DRHA) conference, which will address the same theme and take place in the conference. Keynote Speakers: Prof Matthew Fuller (Goldsmiths University of London) Dr Maria Chatzichristodoulou (aka Maria X; London Southbank University). Radical Immersions is convened by Dr Dani Ploeger and Dr Elena Papadaki. The conference will take place at Watermans Arts Centre in West London and is hosted by The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London – http://www.2019.drha.uk/

Last chance to apply! Call for participants: Collective Conditions | From 1 July to 10 September | Collective Conditions is a worksession which experiments with the generative potential of codes of conduct, complaints procedures, bug reports and copyleft licenses. We understand these socio-technical protocols as artistic and activist media and are curious about the role they can play in the (different) imagination of complex collectivities. By ’complex collectivity’ we mean, for example, non-normative human constellations, or collectives where participants with radically different needs, backgrounds and agencies come together. ’Complex collectivity’ can be self-chosen, or be the result of structural forces such as laws, racism, technology, wars, austerity, queerphobia and ecological conditions – http://tiny.cc/g218bz

Citizens of Evidence: Independent Investigations for Change | The Art of Exposing Injustice – Part 3 | Hosted by Disruption Network Lab and Supermarkt | Sept 20—21 2019 | Berlin | Workshop at Supermarkt & Tempelhofer Feld · Sept 22 | Exploring the investigative power of grassroots communities and citizens to expose injustice, corruption and power asymmetries. In the context of the debate about deliberate disinformation, fake news, and spreading of false facts, does it still make sense to speak about “evidence” as providing direct proof of the truth of facts? How can journalists, storytellers and activists provoke awareness by disclosing hidden information, when the boundary between the meaning of what is fake and what is real is becoming progressively blurred? | Curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli. In cooperation with: Transparency International – http://tiny.cc/m748bz

Book Launch of ‘Free, Fair, and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons’ | Mon, 16 September 2019 | By UCL Institute for Global Prosperity | The Institute for Global Prosperity, UCL is delighted to host the launch of ‘Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons’, a book by David Bollierand Silke Helfrich. The event will be introduced by Ruth Catlow, Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Furtherfield and DECAL Decentralised Arts Lab, followed by presentations from authors David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, and finishing with a response from Dr Feja Lesniewska, Senior Teaching Fellow on Climate Change and Energy Law and Policy at the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, SOAS, and Research Fellow at the Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy department at UCL – http://tiny.cc/k208bz

Control voltage 6: Fiend/Masal/Justin Paton/The Spermaceti Organ | Thursday, 12 September 2019 | Westcliff, Essex, UK | Four Great Electronic acts join us for another night of audio visual delight. Best PA in town and a brand new projector bring you a full sensory experience. FIEND – Brendan O’Hares one man Post Rock masterclass – what more can you wish for. Masal – Ozlem Simsek & Alien Music UK – just for this performance Masal are ditching the computer and presenting two long-form improvised pieces one nice and one nasty. THE SPERMACETI ORGAN – Southend scene stalwart Steve O’Malley has finally crossed the Rubicon and has stepped up as a performer, improvised electronics to kick off the night. Justin Paton – Brings us some live acid – a real treat for the feet. FB link – http://tiny.cc/em48bz

STATISTA Presentation Week | 12–16 September 19 | Opening: 11 September 19, 7 pm | Venue: Haus der Statistik, Karl-Marx-Allee 1, 10178 Berlin | The complete program of events will be available at www.allesandersplatz.berlin. Within the vast empty spaces of the Haus der Statistik near Alexanderplatz, STATISTA is testing whether working in the spirit of the Commons is an option even within today’s context of city development. With the aid of ten distinct playing fields, STATISTA generates artistic prototypes for a civil society built on collective principles. Including neighbourhood initiatives, a cryptocurrency reflecting the wellbeing of bees, a facade design built for ecological inclusivity, and an international conference. Temporary usage, in this case, does not lead to gentrification, but to a form of urban renewal that is to the benefit of all – https://www.kw-berlin.de/en/statista-presentation-week/

OPEN SCORES. How to program the Commons | Curated by Creating Commons (Shusha Niederberger, Cornelia Sollfrank, Felix Stalder) | For the exhibition, artists have developed a SCORE relating to their practice. A SCORE can have different meanings: It can be a general instruction, a working instruction, a performance instruction or an operating instruction. In any case, it is meant to lead to a realization of an intended action and as such is an interface between a human actor and an object/material/machine. And a SCORE can also be linked to a technical HOWTO document, in that it contains information on how to perform a specific task. Within the exhibition, the newly developed SCORES add an aesthetic layer while pointing to the socio/political impact of the presented projects. The exhibition features interviews conducted as part of the research project as well as a temporary library on the subject of digital commons. Furthermore, there will be a program of talks, screenings, and workshops.

21 September 2019 – 12 October 2019 | Wed. til Sat 15:00 ~ 19:00 and for special events | VERNISSAGE : Saturday, September 21st 2019 20:00 TEMPLATES, Music Performance, Johannes Kreidler 21:00 Let’s make a salad. Homage to Alison Knowles 22:00 DJ Gigsta 23:30 DJ ROLUX-FOX – https://www.panke.gallery/exhibition/open-scores/

Exhibition – Rewriting The Future | Sophia Al Maria, Sonya Dyer, Ursula Mayer, Victoria Sin | 27 Sep 2019 – 26 Jan 2020 | Site Gallery, Sheffield, UK | Feminist artists and writers have long been presenting new angles on gender, power, ecology and community and this exhibition explores some of those narratives. In an age where wealth controls our systems of power and the world is ruled by patriarchal societies, feminist speculative perspectives can offer new insights, predictions and even possible alternatives. The exhibition will be accompanied by a digital publication compiling new speculative fiction writing from some brilliant feminist minds. Curated by Angelica Sule – http://tiny.cc/vu28bz

Books, Call for Papers & Publications

The Controversial Archive: Negotiating Horror Images in Syria | by Enrico De Angelis | ‘The Controversial Archive: Negotiating Horror Images in Syria’ is part of the upcoming INC Theory on Demand book titled ‘The ArabArchive: Mediated Memories and Digital Flows” edited by Donatella Della Ratta, Kay Dickinson, and Sune Haugbolle – http://tiny.cc/tcg9bz

The Authoritarian Personality | Verso Books | By Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford With Betty Aron, Maria Hertz Levinson, and William Morrow Introduction by Peter E. Gordon | What makes a fascist? Are there character traits that make someone more likely to vote for the far right? The Authoritarian Personality is not only one of the most significant works of social psychology ever written, it also marks a milestone in the development of Adorno’s thought, showing him grappling with the problem of fascism and the reasons for Europe’s turn to reaction. Over half a century later and with the rise of right-wing populism and the reemergence of the far-right in recent years, this hugely influential study remains as insightful and relevant as ever – http://tiny.cc/krg9bz

Articles, Interviews & Presentations

Post-Platform Desires: Build 1, 2, 3 New | By Geert Lovink | The text is written as an introduction to a week-long discussion on the empyre email list in which I participate, with the topic STAY UNFINISHED, YOURS SINCERELY, moderated by Shulea Cheang. The debate happens in conjunction with STAY UNFINISHED, the 5th edition of Stadtwerkstatt‘s 48 hour showcase extravanganza held in association with Ars Electronica (Linz), curated by Tanja Brandmayr, Shu Lea Cheang and Franz Xaver – http://tiny.cc/54f9bz

The Vernacular of Space Through Images of the Moon | By Jonathan Atkins on Hyperallergic | The Met’s exhibition shows us that our cosmos is divided between the pictured, and the real, and that the character of the pictorial asserts a powerful influence over our conception of the actual. “The images were beguiling and beautiful less often for the visual experience — the landscapes of Mars or Venus are in these pictures stubbornly ordinary — than for the knowledge I vested in them, or perhaps for the color they brought to my knowledge. These were places, actual locales, from which no compass could point you home.” – http://tiny.cc/46e9bz

Margaret Atwood Expands the World of “The Handmaid’s Tale” | Review by Jia Tolentino | In the New Yoker | In “The Testaments,” the novelist examines the kinds of complicity that are required for constructing such a frightening future. Women wore this uniform to the protest in Texas, and they have since worn it to protests in England, Ireland, Argentina, Croatia, and elsewhere. When “The Handmaid’s Tale” was published, in 1985, some reviewers found Atwood’s dystopia to be poetically rich but implausible. Three decades later, the book is most often described with reference to its timeliness – http://tiny.cc/rah9bz

How Porn Performers Fall Victim to Twitter Impersonators | By Lux Alptraum | Medium | Adult entertainment workers count on social media to connect with fans, but the platform’s opaque rules leave them vulnerable to impersonators | “A few weeks ago, a porn performer friend of mine tweeted out a seemingly simple request. Someone had created a Twitter account impersonating her, one that not merely used her name and image, but copied her bio verbatim, creating a page that could easily be mistaken for the real thing at first glance. She wanted her friends and followers to report it.” – https://tinyurl.com/y2rpqsk5

Wire Formation: eerie images of Dhaka’s appetite for electricity | Guardian | Photographer Sounak Das walks the city’s streets at night, which are devoid of the people whose demands for electricity create tangled, sculptural structures – http://tiny.cc/vkh9bz

Main image: Predictive Art Bot by disnovation.org – Installation, 2017 | Recently exhibited at Radical Immersions exhibition at Watermans Arts Centre 2019.

A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.

Events, Exhibitions, Festivals and Conferences

THE ATMOSPHERICS 9 (A Blue Million Miles) | Jeremy Welsh & Trond Lossius,Aug 23 – Sept 29, 2019 | The Atmospherics is one of the ongoing collaborative projects of Trond Lossius and Jeremy Welsh. Through field recordings they capture unique qualities from different natural landscapes and urban areas. The recorded audio and video material is then filtered, edited, modified and mixed to highlight some characters or to mute others. The intention is not to document the sites, but rather to build a database of audiovisual material that is combined in different ways in their installations, where each assembly becomes a “temporary place”, constructed of impulses from different geographical areas. https://teks.no/event/atmospherics-9/

XEN – Assemblage #10 Technoshamanism | Hosted by XenoEntities Network, Aug 31st 2019 | Panel discussion about INDIGENOUS HEALTH / BRAZIL: “Mutirão Pataxó: Task Force for Health!” with Fabiane M. Borges & Rafael Frazão in conjunction with XEN presents: Anti-hijacking Dream Lab presented by XenoEntities Network in collaboration with Maria F. Scaroni | The invitation is extended to anyone interested in what is happening now to the indigenous population in Brazil | free entry – Uferstudios Für Zeitgenössischen Tanz, Studio 11 | Berlin, Germany | FB – Link – http://tiny.cc/9dlibz

The Old Waterworks Relaunch | Hosted by The Old Waterworks | Reopening our doors and kicking off with a relaunch event on Saturday 31 August, 12-6pm! “Throughout the day our new library is accessible to browse, a collaboration with GRRRL ZINE FAIR and The Agency of Visible Women. TOW’s risograph printer will be up and running for you to print your own poster, and a drop in zine making workshop will be running on the day too.” Southend-on-Sea, Essex, UK | FB link – http://tiny.cc/smkibz

Sonic Electronics with Territorial Gobbing / High Pit / LauraNetz | Hosted by Laura Netz and Theo Gowans | Sonic Electronics is an experimental event which happens 1st Wednesday monthly The Others – Stoke Newington. “We propose an anti-techno-capitalist approach to music genres like ambient, drone, techno, experimental, electronics, acousmatic, live coding, noise, vaporwave, glitch, …..” Sonic Electronics is an inclusive event to the LGBT community, female artists, no discrimination on gender, races, MH, disability | FB link – http://tiny.cc/6llibz

Jan Robert Leegte – Clear Obscure | 07.07–​01.09.2019 | Jan Robert Leegte’s ex­hi­bi­tion Clear Obscure fills the Ge­nieloods with draw­ings and per­for­mances. The draw­ings refer to the prac­tice of chiaroscuro from the Re­nais­sance pe­riod. The com­puter per­for­mances range from doc­u­ment per­for­mances and syn­thetic wilder­nesses to recita­tions from be­hind the wall of the black box. As ar­chi­tec­ture the in­stal­la­tion mir­rors the en­vi­ron­ment of Fort bij Vijfhuizen, cre­ating an im­mer­sive land­scape of mul­tiple per­spec­tives, frag­ments and times – http://tiny.cc/4ojibz

Opening: The Underlying by Ami Clarke | Exhibition hosted by arebyte gallery | The Underlying, a new body of work by London based artist Ami Clarke, including Derivative (Virtual Reality, 6 mins), Lag Lag Lag (video interface with live sentiment analysis), and The Prosthetics (prosthetic optics, blown glass). The contractual condition of both finance, and insurance, reveals the negative effects of capitalism on the environment, through a relationship with the past, that indicates that the future is coming up increasingly short. Thursday, 19 September 2019 | FB link – http://tiny.cc/ou8jbz

CITIZENS OF EVIDENCE: Independent Investigations for Change | Exploring the investigative impact of grassroots communities and citizens to expose injustice, corruption and power asymmetries. The Art of Exposing Injustice – Part 3. In the context of the debate about deliberate disinformation, fake news, and spreading of false facts, does it still make sense to speak about “evidence” as providing direct proof of the truth of facts? How can journalists, storytellers and activists provoke awareness by disclosing hidden information, when the boundary between the meaning of what is fake and what is real is becoming progressively blurred? Curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli. In cooperation with Transparency International |  #dnl17 #Citevidence · Berlin · september 20—21 · 2019 – http://tiny.cc/1a7jbz

RE: Infrastructures | Exploring the collective care and maintenance of alternative networking practices—new protocols, peer-to-peer connections, offline-first computing, and community-based governance. Our Networks is a conference about the past, present, and future of building our own network infrastructures. The event brings together enthusiasts, hardware and software hackers, researchers, organizers and more to collectively explore creative and critical engagements with the Internet and alternative infrastructures  September 20–22, 2019 Toronto Media Arts Centre, Toronto, Ontario – https://ournetworks.ca/

Books, Call for Papers & Publications

How to Make a Mask | By Pedro Barateiro | Edited by João Mourão and Luís Silva | How to Make a Mask borrows its title from a 2011 performance by the Portuguese artist Pedro Barateiro in which he reflects upon the role of the individual within the sociopolitical situations of the collective through references ranging from psychological tests to the history of theater. It is now apparent, after all these years, that such new forms of communication and interaction are easily manipulated, facilitating new forms of political control. Along with the artist’s own writings and visual material, this volume features new essays by Ana Teixeira Pinto and Anders Kreuger, an epilogue by Pieternel Vermoortel and Els Silvrants-Barclay, and an extended note by the editors João Mourão and Luís Silva | Sternberg Press – http://tiny.cc/6pnibz

Call for Papers! Reflecting Black: 400 Hundred Years of African American Life and History | Thursday, October 24, 2019 | The Symposium aims to promote cutting-edge research in Africana studies produced by scholars and emerging scholars. During the symposium, we will also discuss effective transdisciplinary pedagogical strategies and creative methods that faculty might employ to enrich the educational experiences of students of color, especially transfer and first-generation college students – http://tiny.cc/xtekbz

Peter Kennard: Visual Dissent | This fully illustrated anthology showcases key images from Peter Kennard’s work as Britain’s foremost political artist over the last fifty years. The book centres around Kennard’s images, photomontages and illustrations from protests, year by year, which provoked public outrage; including Israel/Palestine protests, anti-nuclear protests, responses to austerity, climate destruction, and more. Each image is accompanied by captions detailing not only the events in question, but Kennard’s approach to the work, including the genesis of the images and the techniques employed. Pluto Press – http://tiny.cc/6n9obzh

The Art of Direct Action: Social Sculpture and Beyond | Karen van den Berg, Cara M. Jordan, Philipp Kleinmichel (Eds.) | One of the most significant shifts in contemporary art during the past two decades concerns artists and collectives who have moved their artistic focus from representation to direct social action. This publication shows why this transition might change our understanding of artistic production at large and make us reconsider the role of art in society. The book gathers internationally recognized artists, scholars, and experts in the field of socially engaged art to reflect upon historical developments in this field and explore the role that German artist Joseph Beuys’s concept of social sculpture played in its evolution | SternbergPress – http://tiny.cc/ulpibz

Matter and Form, Self-Evidence and Surprise: On Jean-Luc Moulène’s Objects | By Alain Badiou | Foreword by Miguel Abreu | Translated by Robin Mackay | The eminent French philosopher “dialecticizes” five of the artist Jean-Luc Moulène’s objects with five conceptual formations from the history of Western philosophy. Badiou’s musings go on to pair a broken and repaired plastic chair with Victor Hugo; a terrible hand made of concrete with the Freudian unconscious; and a large-scale “red and blue monster” with rudimentary mechanisms of the Cartesian cogito, the famous “I think, therefore I am,” with unexpected inversions and variations – http://tiny.cc/e0nibz

Articles, Interviews & Presentations

UK’s first-ever permanent rainbow crossing unveiled in London | By Vic Parsons on Pink news | For the first time, a permanent rainbow crossing in solidarity with the LGBT+ community has been installed on a street in London. The crossing – which is actually four separate rainbow crossings, across four lanes of major roads – has been unveiled in Lambeth, a south London borough, and was officially opened on August 16 – http://tiny.cc/l4ekbz

India: Digital Platforms, Technologies and Data in the 2014 and 2019 Elections | When Tactical Tech’s Data and Politics research team began to investigate how personal and individual data was being utilised in modern, digitally-enhanced political campaigns, we were quickly struck by the unbalanced coverage, particularly in the media, of the methods and strategies of data acquisition, analysis and utilisation by political campaigns across countries and different political contexts – http://tiny.cc/zzekbz

A cycle of renewal, broken: How Big Tech and Big Media abuse copyright law to slay competition | Cory Doctorow | As long we’ve had electronic mass media, audiences and creators have benefited from periods of technological upheaval that force old gatekeepers to compete with brash newcomers with new ideas about what constitutes acceptable culture and art. Those newcomers eventually became gatekeepers themselves, who then faced their own crop of revolutionaries. But today, the cycle is broken: as media, telecoms, and tech have all grown concentrated, the markets have become winner-take-all clashes among titans who seek to dominate our culture, our discourse and our communications | Boing Boing – http://tiny.cc/t5iibz

I Am a Meme Now — and So Are You | By Timothy Kreider | Maybe wisdom is accepting that you don’t get to decide who you are | The culture of unabashed appropriation on the internet only makes more literal the loss of ownership to which any artist has to resign themselves. Any time you publish a piece of writing, or release a work of art into the world, you relinquish control over it. People get to interpret it however they want, projecting their experience and biases onto it, twisting it to fit their own history and issues, sometimes misunderstanding it entirely. Medium – https://humanparts.medium.com/i-am-a-meme-now-and-so-are-you-3bae8ecf9971

New evidence emerges of Russian role in Ukraine conflict | Forensic Architecture, a London-based research group, has collected and catalogued evidence of Russian military involvement in the battle of Ilovaysk in August 2014, including the presence of a model of tank used only by the Russian armed forces at that time. The evidence will be appended to a case to be ruled on by the European court of human rights (ECHR) and has been released on a publicly viewable online platform | Shaun Walker, Guardian – http://tiny.cc/1i4fbz

Market Forces video documentation | Film of the Market Forces event on Thursday 18th July 2019 hosted by Swap Market at Bike for Good, Govanhill, Glasgow | The event looked at the relationship of artists project to issues of gentrification and rent increase. With talks from Stepehen Pritchard, Raman Mundair, Peel Eezy, Living Rent and an introduction from artists in residence for Southside Central: Alex Wilde, Ailie Rutherford and Alaya Ang – https://vimeo.com/354722263

‘It’s an act of defiance’: the rise of all-female festival lineups | Sarah Marsh | Major music festivals such as Reading and Leeds continue to feature mostly male artists, but a number of events are fighting back by removing men from the billing altogether. This year, a number of festival organisers are attempting to redress the issue by having only women on stage. Those with all-female lineups include Native festival in Kent, Loud Women Fest in north London, and Boudica festival in Coventry | Guardian – http://tiny.cc/pziibz

Concrete Science Fiction Riot: Why Do We Ignore The 70s French Underground? | By Warren Hatter | English-speaking music fans don’t clumsily refer to “underground and progressive German music of the 70s”, because we have a handy shorthand: Krautrock. No such luck if you’re looking to refer collectively to a body of work that is just as challenging and impressive overall: the French avant-garde/progressive underground of the same period | The Quietus – http://tiny.cc/3j5fbz

Main image “Drawings” Jan Robert Leegte – Clear Obscure. Pastel on paper, 2019. Shown at Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen 2019.

A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change

Events & Exhibitions

SCRATCH! George Barber | TACO! presents SCRATCH! | An exhibition of over 15 works made between 1983 and 2012 by the influential British Video artist George Barber. Though George Barber’s work is as varied and fluid as it is non conformist and irreverent, this exhibition focuses exclusively on a specific approach in his production oeuvre, – that of Barber’s use of appropriation. The exhibition is accompanied by a programme of events including screenings, talks and experimental music | see — https://taco.org.uk/George-Barber-SCRATCH

Unpredictable Series presents AV Night | Wednesday, 21 August 2019 | Unpredictable Series presents AV Night dedicated to various audiovisual performances, combining digital and analogue approaches with improvisation in each set. The evening will feature: The first time trio: Matt Black, Blanca Regina and Reuben Sutherland | FB invite – http://tiny.cc/ryk6az

MTCD – A Visual Anthology of My Machine Life | A lecture performance, in which the artist Teresa Dillon walks through key machines that have marked her life – it begins with an incubator, which has significantly affected her life, but not just hers; for most machines in her life, almost all of us remember their first use: the internet, for example, an android robot, or a mobile phone. She talks about machines, but also about people and places and relationships – therefore, it is not a performance about machines, but rather about us | 2 dates · 25 Aug – 26 Aug 2019 – http://tiny.cc/v6k6az

Porn The Theory – Fantasy The Practice | By Stewart Home & Itziar Bilbao Urrutia — 30 August 2019, 7-10PM | Public · Hosted by Cable Depot and Darling Pearls & Co | The exhibition invites us to re-consider obsolete gender politics in the arts as well as in the sex industry. Porn The Theory (2019) – 06’42’’ – is a re-enactment of the butter scene from Last Tango In Paris (1972). In it Stewart Home plays the part originally assigned to the actress Maria Schneider (1952-2011) while Itziar Bilbao Urrutia plays composite of the male roles: Marlon Brando (1924-2006) and Bernardo Bertolucci (1941-2018) FB link – http://tiny.cc/b7l6az | Exhibition Continues : 31 August – 1 September 2019

Susan Hiller at Matt’s Gallery presents Ghost / TV | An exhibition of objects and video by Susan Hiller that continues her investigations into the numinous, the ephemeral, and the personal. At the time of her passing in January 2019, Hiller was due to start planning her fifth exhibition with Matt’s Gallery, following on from Work in Progress in 1980, An Entertainment in 1991, The Last Silent Movie in 2008, and Channels in 2013 – shows which introduced some of her most groundbreaking and iconic works. The exhibition had to be postponed, and Ghost / TV has been developed since then in close collaboration with Susan Hiller’s son, Gabriel Coxhead. 25 September–27 October 2019 | Private View: Sunday 22 September 2019 — http://tiny.cc/6kh8az

Live Code Summer School | European live coding summer school! Learn to quickly+easily make algorithmic patterns with Hydra (for visuals) or TidalCycles/FoxDot (for music). Hang out with other nice people in the fine city of Sheffield, one of the crucibles of electronic music, with the rugged Peak District national park a stone’s throw away. 30th Aug (around 5pm-7pm) & 31st Aug – 1st Sep (10am-5pm both days) – a two-day intensive course in TidalCycles or Hydra, from the ground up. Full info and registration: https://livecode-summerschool.github.io/

LYDIA LUNCH Presents: SO REAL IT HURTS | Lydia Lunch & special guests come together to mark the London launch of her most recent book, So Real It Hurts. An occasion for senseless celebration | “So Real It Hurts is the perfect title for this collection. It’s a mission statement. A few bleeding slices straight from the butcher shop. A sampler from an enormous archive of work that will, no doubt, be pored over by grad students, book lovers, film historians, music nerds and straight-up perverts a hundred years from now.” | At the Horse Hospital, London  Friday, 13 September 2019 7:30 pm 11:30 pm – http://tiny.cc/mvu6az

Books

Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency | By Finn Brunton | The incredible story of the pioneers of cryptocurrency takes us from autonomous zones on the high seas to the world’s most valuable dump, from bank runs to idea coupons, from time travelers in a San Francisco bar to the pattern securing every twenty-dollar bill, and from marketplaces for dangerous secrets to a tank of frozen heads awaiting revival in the far future. Along the way, Digital Cash explores the hard questions and challenges that these innovators faced: How do we learn to trust and use different kinds of money? What makes digital objects valuable and more – http://tiny.cc/3rn6az

ORGANIZE | By Timon Beyes, Lisa Conrad, and Reinhold Martin | A pioneering systematic inquiry into—and mapping of—the field of media and organization | The dialogical form of the essays in Organize provides a concise and path-breaking view on the recursive relation between technological media and social organization. Bringing together leading media thinkers and organization theorists, the book interrogates organization as an effect and condition of media, and establishes and maps “media and organization” as a highly relevant field of inquiry | University of Minnesota Press – http://tiny.cc/r2t6az

Josephine Berry – Art and (Bare) Life: A Biopolitical Inquiry | By Joesphine Berry | Art and (Bare) Life: A Biopolitical Inquiry analyzes modern and contemporary art’s drive to blur with life, and how this is connected to the democratic state’s biologized control of life. Art’s ambition to transform life intersects in striking ways with modern biopower’s aim to normalize, purify, judge, and transform life-rendering it bare – http://tiny.cc/mak6az

Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage | Phil Smith & Tony Whitehead (text) ~ John Schott (photography) | In the 15th century, Felix Fabri combined the two, using his visits to Jerusalem to write a handbook for nuns wanting to make a pilgrimage in the imagination, whilst confined to their religious houses. The Guidebook followed Fabri’s example: first walking together over many weeks – not to reach a destination but simply to find one – then, in startling words and images, conjuring an armchair pilgrimage for the reader… along lanes and around hills, into caves and down to the coast. Triarchy Press – http://tiny.cc/0yw6az

Digital Sound Studies | Editor(s): Mary Caton Lingold, Darren Mueller, Whitney Trettien | The digital turn has created new opportunities for scholars across disciplines to use sound in their scholarship. This volume’s contributors provide a blueprint for making sound central to research, teaching, and dissemination. They show how digital sound studies has the potential to transform silent, text-centric cultures of communication in the humanities into rich, multisensory experiences that are more inclusive of diverse knowledges and abilities | Duke press – http://tiny.cc/n5o6az

Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations (1995) | Editor(s): Carol J. Adams, Josephine Donovan | A collection of pioneering essays that explores the theoretical connections between feminism and animal defense. Offering a feminist perspective on the status of animals, this unique volume argues persuasively that both the social construction and oppressions of women are inextricably connected to the ways in which we comprehend and abuse other species. Furthermore, it demonstrates that such a focus does not distract from the struggle for women’s rights, but rather contributes to it | Duke press – http://tiny.cc/8ep6az

Articles & Interviews

Last Night A Distributed Cooperative Organization Saved My Life: A brief introduction to DisCOs | By Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel | A set of organisational tools and practices for groups of people who want to work together in a cooperative, commons-oriented, and feminist economic form. DisCO is also an alternative to another form called the Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, or DAO. By design, DAOs can earn their own money, and contract and pay for services — they can actually create and wield their own economic power, according to the interests of their programmers – http://tiny.cc/xnj6az

Murray Bookchin’s libertarian technics | The first in a series of critical introductions to thinkers and concepts that inform discussion of the climate crisis, looking at Murray Bookchin’s ideas about technology. For Bookchin, the profit motive constrains and limits human creativity to that which can be commodified – http://tiny.cc/yl1xaz

The Artistic Achievements of Native Americans Through the Ages | By Eric Vilas-Boas | The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s series of talks and tours on Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection helps visitors better contextualize artwork by Indigenous creators across the centuries. It was a big deal when the Metropolitan Museum of Art began displaying work by Indigenous artists in its American Wing in 2018. […] The acquisition and subsequent 2018 exhibition sought to correct that discrepancy in the Met, as well as locate work by Indigenous artists firmly within the context of “American art.” | Hyperallergic – http://tiny.cc/nqp6az

Peaches on her post-human sex toy art show: ‘It’s disturbing – but a lot of fun’ | Benoit Loiseau | The pop provocateur has created an artwork in which an army of ‘fleshies’, or masturbation devices, seek sexual liberation. She talks us through its deeper meanings | The work was one of 100 that appeared in Calle’s show Take Care of Yourself, which premiered at the Venice Biennale. Then in 2013, Yoko Ono invited Peaches to re-enact her seminal 1964 performance Cut Piece, letting audience members snip away at the singer’s clothes until they had entirely gone. Now, 20 years after unleashing her sex-positive signature song Fuck the Pain Away, Peaches finally has an exhibition of her own | Guardian – http://tiny.cc/2yq6az

Futures of Habermas’s Work | By Matthias Fritsch | THE 90TH BIRTHDAY of Germany’s most important living philosopher provides a welcome opportunity to reflect on the mark his work will have left. What legacy will his work leave for humanity? What aspects of his immense corpus will endure for future generations? I will single out three areas in response to these questions as we celebrate Habermas’s birthday – http://tiny.cc/9xa8az

Why Posting Selfies With Street Art Could Get You Sued | By Helen Holmes | Observer | We already know that copyright infringement and intellectual property law dictates that original artistic work may be used for another purpose only when permission is granted by the creator. When permission isn’t granted, things can get hairy. Apparently, a new precedent is being set: social media influencers with big followings are being sued for posting content where the influencer in question is posing in front of artwork, without having asked the artist first – http://tiny.cc/0or6az

Extra Squeezed extra stuff)

Metal Liverpool (UK) Are hiring new staff | Administrator &  Projects Manager | Visit here for more details – http://www.metalculture.com/vacancies/

Image: Susan Hiller: Ghost / TV | Matt’s Gallery 25 September–27 October 2019

Editors Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett, Corrado Morgana.

Digital games are important not only because of their cultural ubiquity or their sales figures but for what they can offer as a space for creative practice. Games are significant for what they embody; human computer interface, notions of agency, sociality, visualisation, cybernetics, representation, embodiment, activism, narrative and play. These and a whole host of other issues are significant not only to the game designer but also present in the work of the artist that thinks and rethinks games. Re-appropriated for activism, activation, commentary and critique within games and culture, artists have responded vigorously.

Over the last decade artists have taken the engines and culture of digital games as their tools and materials. In doing so their work has connected with hacker mentalities and a culture of critical mash-up, recalling Situationist practices of the 1950s and 60s and challenging and overturning expected practice.

This publication looks at how a selection of leading artists, designers and commentators have challenged the norms and expectations of both game and art worlds with both criticality and popular appeal. It explores themes adopted by the artist that thinks and rethinks games and includes essays, interviews and artists’ projects from Jeremy Bailey, Ruth Catlow, Heather Corcoran, Daphne Dragona, Mary Flanagan, Mathias Fuchs, Alex Galloway, Marc Garrett, Corrado Morgana, Anne-Marie Schleiner, David Surman, Tale of Tales, Bill Viola, and Emma Westecott.

BUY THE BOOK HERE

In collaboration with FACT – http://www.fact.co.uk
http://www.furtherfield.org
http://www.http.uk.net/

Publisher: Liverpool University Press (31 Mar 2010)
Language English
ISBN-10: 1846312477
ISBN-13: 978-1846312472
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/1846312477

Co-published by Furtherfield and The Hyperliterature Exchange.

Vooks and cultural decadence

Last October I received an e-mail headed “Introducing Vook”:

The Vook Team is pleased to announce the launch of our first vooks, all published in partnership with Atria, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. These four titles… elegantly realize Vook’s mission: to blend a book with videos into one complete, instructive and entertaining story.

The e-mail also included a link to an article about Vooks in the New York Times:

Some publishers say this kind of multimedia hybrid is necessary to lure modern readers who crave something different. But reading experts question whether fiddling with the parameters of books ultimately degrades the act of reading…

Note the rather loaded use of the words “lure”, “crave”, “fiddling” and “degrades”. The phraseology seems to suggest that modern readers are decadent and listless thrill-seekers who can scarcely summon the energy to glance at a line of text, let alone plough their way through an entire book. If an artistic medium doesn’t offer them some form of instant gratification – glamour, violence, excitement, pounding beats, lurid colours, instant melodrama – then it simply won’t get their attention. But publishers have a moral duty not to pander to their readers’ base appetites: the New York Times article ends by quoting a sceptical “traditional” author called Walter Mosley –

“Reading is one of the few experiences we have outside of relationships in which our cognitive abilities grow,” Mr. Mosley said. “And our cognitive abilities actually go backwards when we’re watching television or doing stuff on computers.”

In other words, reading from the printed page is better for your mental health than watching moving pictures on a screen: an argument which has been resurfacing in one form or another at least since television-watching started to dominate everyday life in the USA and Europe back in the 1950s. To some extent this is the self-defence of a book-loving and academically-inclined intelligensia against the indifference or hostility of popular culture – but in the context of a discussion of Vooks, it can also be interpreted as a cry of irritation from a publishing industry which is increasingly finding the ground being scooped from under its feet by younger, sexier, more attention-grabbing forms of entertainment.

The fact that the Vook publicity-email links to an article which is generally rather sniffy and unfavourable about the idea of combining video with print no doubt reflects a belief that all publicity is good publicity – but it is also indicative of the publishing industry’s mixed attitudes towards the digital revolution. On the whole, up until recently, they have tended to simply wish it would just go away; but they have also wished, sporadically, that they could grab themselves a piece of the action. But those publishers who have attempted to ride the digital surf rather than defy the tide have generally put their efforts and resources into re-packaging literature instead of re-thinking it: and the evidence of this is that the recent history of the publishing industry is littered with ebooks and e-readers, whereas attempts to exploit the digital environment by combining text with other media in new ways have generally been ignored by the publishing mainstream, and have therefore remained confined to the academic and experimental fringes.

Ebooks and e-readers

The publishing industry’s determination to make the digital revolution go away by ignoring it has been even more evident in the UK than in the US. The 1997 edition of The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, for example, contains no references to ebooks or digital publishing whatsoever, although it does contain items about word-processing and dot-matrix printers. On the other hand, Wired magazine was already publishing an in-depth article about ebooks in 1998 (“Ex Libris” by Steve Silberman, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.07/es_ebooks.html) which describes the genesis of the SoftBook, the RocketBook and the EveryBook, as well as alluding to their predecessor, the Sony BookMan (launched in 1991). Even in the USA, however, enthusiasm for ebooks took a tremendous knock from the dot-com crash of 2000. Stephen Cole, writing about ebooks in the 2010 edition of The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, summarises their history as follows:

Ebook devices first appeared as reading gadgets in science fiction novels and television series… But it was not until the late 1990s that dedicated ebook devices were marketed commercially in the USA… A stock market correction in 2000, combined with the generally poor adoption of downloadable books, sapped all available investment capital away from internet technology companies, leaving a wasteland of broken dreams in its wake. Over the next two years, over a billion dollars was written off the value of ebook companies, large and small.

After 2000, there was a widely-held view (which I shared) that the ebook experiment had been tried and failed: paper books were a superb piece of technology, and perhaps a digital replacement for them was simply never going to happen. There were numerous problems with ebooks: too many different and incompatible formats, too difficult to bookmark, screens hard to read in direct sunlight, couldn’t be taken into the bath, etc. But ebooks have always had a couple of big points in their favour – you can store hundreds on a computer, whereas the same books in paper form demand both physical space and shelving, you can find them quickly once you’ve got them, and they’re cheap to produce and deliver. Despite the dot-com crash and general indifference of the reading public, publishers continued to bring out electronic editions of books, and a small but growing number of people continued to download them.

Things really started to change with the launch of Amazon’s Kindle First Generation in 2007. It sold out in five and a half hours. With the Kindle, the e-reader went wireless. Instead of having to buy books on CDs or cartridges and slot them into hand-helds, or download them onto computers and then transfer them, readers using the Kindle could go right online using a dedicated network called the Whispernet, and get themselves content from the Kindle store.

Despite this big step forward, the Kindle was still an old-school e-reader in some respects: it had a black and white display, and very limited multimedia capabilities. The Apple iPad changed the rules again when it was launched in April 2010. The iPad isn’t just an e-reader – it’s “a tablet computer… particularly marketed for consumption of media such as books and periodicals, movies, music, and games, and for general web and e-mail access” (Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-pad). Its display screen is in colour, and it can play MP3s and videos or browse the Web as well as displaying text. For another thing, it goes a long way towards scrapping the rule that each e-reader can only display books in its own proprietary format. The iPad has its own bookstore – iBooks – but it also runs a Kindle app, meaning that iPad owners can buy and display Kindle content if they wish.

It seems we may finally be reaching the point where ebooks are going to pose a genuine challenge to print-and-paper. Amazon have just announced that Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has become the first ebook to sell more than a million copies; and also that they are now selling more copies of ebooks than books in hardcover.

It is certainly also significant that the past couple of years have seen a sudden upsurge of interest in the question of who owns the rights over digitised book content, and whether ordinary copyright laws apply to online text – a debate which has been brought to the boil by a court case brought against Google in 2005 by the Authors Guild of America.

Google and digital book rights

In 2002, under the title of “The Google Books Library Project”, Google began to digitise the collections of a number of university libraries in the USA (with the libraries’ agreement). Google describes this project as being “like a card catalogue” – in other words, primarily displaying bibliographic information about books rather than their actual contents. “The Library Project’s aim is simple”, says Google: “make it easier for people to find relevant books – specifically, books they wouldn’t find any other way such as those that are out of print – while carefully respecting authors’ and publishers’ copyrights.” They do concede, however, that the project includes more than bibliographic information in some instances: “If the book is out of copyright, you’ll be able to view and download the entire book.” (http://books.google.com/googlebooks/library.html)

In 2004 Google launched Book Search, which is described as “a book marketing program”, but structured in a very similar way to the Library Project: displaying “basic bibliographic information about the book plus a few snippets”; or a “limited preview” if the copyright holder has given permission, or full texts for books which are out of copyright – in all cases with links to places online where the books can be bought. Interestingly, my own book Outcasts from Eden is viewable online in its entirety, although it is neither out of copyright nor out of print, which casts a certain amount of doubt on Google’s claim to be “carefully respecting authors’ and publishers’ copyrights”.

In 2005 the Authors Guild of America, closely followed by the Association of American Publishers, took Google to court on the basis that books in copyright were being digitised – and short extracts shown – without the agreement of the rightsholders. Google suspended its digitisation programme but responded that displaying “snippets” of copyright text was “fair use” under American copyright law. In October 2008 Google agreed to pay $125 million to settle the lawsuit – $45.5 million in legal fees, $45 million to “rightsholders” whose rights had already been infringed, and “$34.5 million to create a Book Rights Registry, a form of copyright collective to collect revenues from Google and dispense them to the rightsholders. In exchange, the agreement released Google and its library partners from liability for its book digitization.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Book_Search_Settlement_Agreement). The settlement was queried by the Department of Justice, and a revised version was published in November 2009, which is still awaiting approval at the time of writing.

The settlement is a complex one, but its most important provision as regards the future of publishing seems to be that “Google is authorised to sell online access to books (but only to users in the USA). For example, it can sell subscriptions to its database of digitised books to institutions and can sell online access to individual books.” 63% of the revenue thus generated must be passed on to “rightsholders” via the new Registry. “The settlement does not allow Google or its licensees to print copies of books in copyright.” (“The Google Settlement” by Mark Le Fanu, The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook 2010, pp. 631-635).

Google, it will be noted, are now legally within their rights to continue their digitisation programme. This means they don’t have to ask anyone’s permission before they digitise work. If authors or publishers would prefer not to be listed by Google it is up to them to lodge an objection online. Google would argue that in launching their Library Project and Books Search they have merely been seeking to make their search facilities more complete, and thus to “make it easier for people to find relevant books” – but whether or not they have been deliberately plotting their course with wider strategic issues in mind, the end result has been to make them the biggest single player – almost the monopoly-holder – where digital book rights are concerned. As a reflection of this, an organisation called the Open Book Alliance has been set up to oppose the settlement, supported by the likes of Amazon and Yahoo: “In short,” their website claims, “Google’s book digitization strategy in the U.S. has focused on creating an impenetrable content monopoly that violates copyright laws and builds an unfair and legally insurmountable lead over competitors.” (http://www.openbookalliance.org/)

Signs of change

Whatever the pros and cons of the Google Settlement, it has undoubtedly helped to focus the minds of writers and publishers alike on the question of digital rights. Copyright laws and publishers’ contracts were designed to deal with print and paper, and until very recently there has been almost no reference at all to electronic publication. Writers who have agreed terms with a publisher for reproduction of their work in print have theoretically been at liberty to re-publish the same work on their own websites, or perhaps even to collect another fee for it from a digital publisher; and conversely, publishers who have signed a contract to bring out an author’s work in print have sometimes felt free to reproduce it electronically as well, without asking the writer’s permission or paying any extra money.

But things are beginning to change. A June 2010 article in The Bookseller notes that Andrew Wylie, one of the most prestigious of UK literary agents, “is threatening to bypass publishers and license his authors’ ebook rights directly to Google, Amazon or Apple because he is unhappy with publishers’ terms.” This is partly because he believes electronic rights are being sold too cheaply to the likes of Apple: “The music industry did itself in by taking its profitability and allocating it to device holders… Why should someone who makes a machine – the iPod, which is the contemporary equivalent of a jukebox – take all the profit?” Clearly, electronic rights are going to be taken much more seriously from now on.

Further indications that authors, publishers and agents are beginning to wake up and smell the digital coffee can be found in the latest editions of The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook and The Writers’ Handbook. For those who are unfamiliar with them, these annual publications are the UK’s two main guides to the writing industry. The 2010 edition of The Writer’s Handbook opens with a keynote article from the editor, Barry Turner, entitled “And Then There was Google”. As the title indicates, its main subject is the Google settlement and its implications – but its broader theme is that the book trade has been ignoring the digital revolution for too long, and can afford to do so no longer:

In the States… sales of e-books are increasing by 50 per cent per year while conventional book sales are static. An indication of what is in store was provided at last year’s Frankfurt Book Fair where a survey of book-buying professionals found that 40 per cent believe that digital sales, regardless of format, will surpass ink on paper within a decade.

The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook is more conservative in tone, but if anything its coverage is more in-depth. It has an entire section titled “Writers and Artists Online”, which leads with an article about the Google settlement. In addition there are articles on “Marketing Yourself Online”, “E-publishing” and “Ebooks”. Even in the more general sections of the Yearbook there is a widespread awareness of how digital developments are affecting the book trade. For example, there is a review (by Tom Tivnan) of the previous twelve months in the publishing industry, which acknowledges the importance not just of ebooks but print-on-demand:

Amazon’s increasing power underscores how crucial the digital arena is for publishing… Ebooks remain a miniscule part of the market,… yet publishers and booksellers say they are pleasantly surprised at the amount of sales… And it is not all ebooks. The rise of print-on-demand (POD) technology (basically keeping digital files of books to be printed only when a customer orders it) means that the so-called “long tail” has lengthened, with books rarely going out of print… POD may soon be coming to your local bookshop. In April 2009, academic chain Blackwell had the UK launch of the snazzy in-store Espresso POD machine, which can print a book in about four minutes…

There is also an article about “Books Published from Blogs” (by Scott Pack):

Agents are proving quite proactive when it comes to bloggers. Some of the more savvy ones are identifying blogs with a buzz behind them and approaching the authors with the lure of a possible book deal… Many bestsellers in the years to come will have started out online.

Digital technology and writing style

Most of the emphasis in these articles falls on the impact which digital developments are having on the marketing of books rather than the practice of writing itself. But now and again there are signs of a creeping awareness that digitisation may actually change the ways in which our literature is created and consumed. In The Writer’s Handbook, Barry Turner attempts to predict how the digital environment may affect the practice of writing in the coming years:

Those of us who make any sort of livng from writing will have to get used to a whole new way of reaching out to readers. Start with the novel. Most fiction comes in king-sized packages… Publishers demand a product that looks value for money… But all will be different when we get into e-books. There will be no obvious advantage in stretching out a novel because size will not be immediately apparent… Expect the short story to make a comeback… The two categories of books in the forefront of change are reference and travel. Their survival… is tied to a combination of online and print. Any reference or travel book without a website is in trouble, maybe not now, but soon.

Scott Pack’s article on “Books Published from Blogs” tends to focus on those aspects of a blog which may need remoulding to suit publication in book form; but an article by Isabella Pereira entitled “Writing a blog” is more enthusiastic about the blog as a form in its own right:

The glory of blogging lies not just in its immediacy but in its lack of rules… The best bloggers can open a window into private worlds and passions, or provide a blast of fresh air in an era when corporate giants control most of our media… Use lots of links – links uniquely enrich writing for the web and readers expect them… What about pictures? You can get away without them but it would be a shame not to use photos to make the most of the web’s all-singing, all-dancing capacities.

Even here, however, the advice stops short of videos, sound-effects or animations. Another article in The Writers’ and Artists’ Handbook (“Setting up a Website”, by Jane Dorner) specifically forbids the use of animations:

Bullet points or graphic elements help pick out key words but animations should be avoided. Studies show that the message is lost when television images fail to reinforce spoken words. The same is true of the web.

It’s a little difficult to fathom exactly what point Dorner is trying to make here, but it seems to be something along the lines that using more than one medium may have a distracting rather than enhancing effect. If the spoken words on your television are telling you one thing, but the pictures are telling you another, then “the message is lost”. Perhaps a more interesting point, however, is where Dorner draws her dividing-line between acceptable and unacceptable practice. “Bullet points or graphic elements” are all right, because they “help pick out key words”, but “animations should be avoided”. In other words visual aids are all very well as long as they remain to subservient to text. They minute they threaten to replace it as the focus of attention, they become undesireable.

Clearly this point of view continues to enjoy a lot of support, particularly from traditionalists in the writing and publishing industries. All the same, combinations of text with other media may be about to enjoy some kind of vogue; and the development of the Vook brand since its launch last October is an instructive case-history in this regard.

Vooks again

When Vooks were first launched it seems fair to say that they were broadly greeted with a mixture of indifference and scorn. Reviews which appeared in the first couple of months after the launch were usually either lukewarm of downright unfavourable. Here, for example, is one from Janet Cloninger, writing in The Gadgeteer, November 2009:

So how were the video clips? Have you ever seen any of those old 60s TV shows where they were trying to show a bad acid trip? You know the crazy camera work, the weird color changes, the really bad acting?… I don’t think they added anything to the story at all… I found they were very distracting while trying to read.

Here is another from the Institute for the Future of the Book:

In terms of form the result is ho-hum in the extreme, particularly as there doesn’t seem to be much attempt to integrate the text and the banal video, which seems to exist simply to pretty-up the pages.

Following on from this generally unenthusiastic reception for the first Vooks, news about the brand over the next few months seemed to suggest that it was struggling to establish itself. In January 2010 Vook announced that they were publishing a range of “classic” titles, mostly for children – since “classic” normally means “out of copyright”, this seemed to imply that they were trying to boost their titles-list on the cheap. In February there was an announcement that Vook had raised an extra $2.5 million in “seed-financing” from a number of Silicon Valley and New York investors, suggesting that perhaps initial sales had been disappointing, Simon & Schuster had been reluctant to put up more money, and new sources of finance had therefore been sought.

With the launch of the iPad, however, it became obvious that Vook was making another throw of the dice. In April they launched 19 titles specially adapted for the iPad: In a statement, Bradley Inman, Vook CEO and founder said, “We will remember the iPad launch as the day that the publishing industry officially made the leap to mixed-media digital formats and never looked back…” The Vook blog makes this pinning-of-hopes on the iPad even more apparent:

The release of the iPad this Saturday was not just a red letter moment for Silicon Valley, it marked a turning point for the publishing and film industries, and a great opportunity for those invested in the future of media. The team at Vook has been working hard for months to prepare apps for submission to Apple… In many ways, it seems like the iPad was literally made for us…

And it seems their hopes may not have been misplaced. In May they launched a title about Guns’n’Roses (Reckless Road, documenting the creation of the Appetite for Destruction album), and lo and behold it was favourably greeted:

…unprecedented photos and memorabilia from the early years of one of the great rock bands from the 1980s and 1990s… If you are a true hard rock fan, and Guns ‘N’ Roses was one of your favorite bands, this app is worth the try. (PadGadget)

Now that I’ve had some time to read through Reckless Road and watch many of the videos included in it I can see the value of the Vook approach. It lends itself well to a product like this… This is an app any Guns N’ Roses fan would greatly appreciate. (Joe Wickert)

In June, the Vook version of Brad Meltzer’s bestseller Heroes for my Son was also favourably received:

It is easy to see the tremendous possibilities in the Vook format, especially when tied to a tablet device like the iPad. I very much enjoyed my first experience with a Vook mainly because I rapidly dropped my attempt to think of it as a Book with video plug ins. A Vook is really a multimedia platform that centers around text, rather than a traditional book. (MobilitySite)

Both these books are non-fiction – a genre in which the relationship between video footage and text seems far less problematic. It is interesting to note, however, that in both cases the non-linear structure of the Vook is singled out as a positive feature, compared to the sequential organisation of a traditional book:

It is charmingly non-linear and can be approached from many different angles. More a chocolate box than a book, especially if you are like me and enjoy really digging down into a subject while reading. (MobilitySite)

Remember that old VH1 series, Behind the Music? Canter’s Vook app feels like a modern version of that approach, with the added benefit that you can hop around the story to your heart’s content… (Joe Wickert)

There are hints here of a realisation that digital media can sometimes offer kinds of reading which are unavailable to, or hampered by, traditional print-and-paper.

Further recognition that ebooks with multimedia in them might actually have market appeal came at the end of June from none other than Amazon, who announced that they were adding audio and video to the Kindle iPhone/iPad app. The irony of this move is, of course, that Kindle ebooks are now multimedia-capable on the iPhone and iPad but not on the Kindle itself – an irony which can hardly be allowed to continue, and which therefore doubtless presages the launch of a multimedia Kindle some time in the near future.

Publishers, new media, and the cultural divide

Of course, the story of multimedia innovation in literature goes back much further than Vooks and the iPad. The British writer Andy Campbell, for example, has been publishing his own new media fiction online for years – most recently on the Dreaming Methods website. Most of his work has been designed in Flash, which the iPad unfortunately does not support. He therefore finds himself in the one-step-forward-and-two-steps-back position where new media literature is finally starting to make some headway in the marketplace, but thanks to a whim of the Apple corporation his own work in the field, developed over more than a decade, been landed with a big disadvantage. Understandably, his feelings are mixed:

It does indeed seem like there is a shift going on with digital fiction, although there are still a large number of stumbling blocks from a development point of view… Whilst the potential of the iPhone and iPad is undoubtedly exciting, a lot of authors – including myself – do not work with Macs or have the programming experience required to produce Apple-happy content…. However that’s from the point of view of Apple dominating the market and forcing everyone to use their SDK, whilst in actual fact Android holds considerable promise… I wouldn’t say digital fiction is breaking through into the mainstream – although perhaps it depends what you mean by digital fiction… Whether anything has been produced that really takes reading as an experience to a new level, I’m not sure.

Since Flash has hitherto been one of the main tools used by new media writers and artists, many of them will now find themselves in the same predicament as Campbell – and many of them will doubtless be hoping, like him, that alternative platforms such as Android are going to make some headway in the coming months. But leaving the question of platforms on one side, another difficulty for existing new media writers seems to be that although publishers are suddenly discovering a new enthusiasm for the form, they have very little knowledge or understanding of the work which has already been done, and very few links with those who have been doing it. Nor is this entirely the publishers’ fault, because there seems to be a genuine cultural divide between those who work in the publishing industry and those who take an interest in new media literature. Emily Williams of Digital Book World alludes to this divide in her article about this year’s London Book Fair (“Old London vs. New Media”, April 2010):

In most [publishing] houses, the digital innovators are still operating on a parallel plane, touching on but not fully integrated into the publishers’ core business centers. This segregation is so complete that much of the digital crowd is liable to skip the traditional fairs altogether, gravitating instead to their own tech confabs (which are in turn often boycotted by, or unknown to, the bookish folk).

Michael Bhaskar, a publisher and one of the judges of the Poole Literary Festival’s New Media Writing Prize, makes a similar point in his blog:

There has been no real conversation between the two [publishers and new media writers]. Why? It seems like we should have hit the meeting point where there could and should be a productive alliance, when in fact the gulf seems as wide as ever… Publishers have to sell books – or something – to keep going… [whereas] much new media writing is not designed to be commercial, being associated with a more recondite and experimental mindset.

In other words, publishers and new media writers have failed to come together, not simply because publishers have been hoping for the digital revolution to go away, nor because new media writers have been go-it-alone experimentalists, but because culturally they have belonged to different worlds, moved in different circles and spoken different languages.

Even assuming that these difficulties can be overcome, it is open to doubt whether new media writers will necessarily want to throw themselves headlong into the commercial mainstream. Many of them, like Andy Campbell, have been going it alone for so long that the habit of independence may be difficult to shake. Undoubtedly a bit of money would be very welcome, but advice from marketing men about how to make their work more commercial might be less well-received. On the publishing side of the equasion, however, there are definite signs that things are starting to change. Experimentation was the buzzword of the 2010 London Book Fair:

The publishing industry must move at speed to adopt new business models and new ways of working if it is to seize the opportunities of the digital revolution, delegates were told at London Book Fair… Industry figures focused on the need to experiment and to get a real understanding of what consumers want from the new technologies in a fast-changing environment. (The Bookseller)

Digital technology and writing style, part 2

There are also signs that the influence of digital technology on writing now extends beyond the software-savvy fringe, and is starting to affect the ways in which less specialised writers create their work. One of the surprize best-sellers of last year was a book called Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewellery, by Leanne Shapton, which (as the title suggests) takes the form of an auction catalogue, selling off the belongings of a fictional couple. As befits an auction catalogue, the book consists of photographs of the articles for sale, accompanied by snippets of text –

Lot 1231: Two pairs of white shoes. Two pairs of white bucks. The label inside the men’s pair reads “Prada”, the women’s reads “Toast”. Sizes men’s 11, women’s 9. Well worn. $40-60.

The artefacts in the catalogue are arranged in chronological order, which makes it easier for them to tell the story of the couple’s love-affair; but despite this concession to linearity what is striking about the novel, to anyone who has had very much to do with new media literature, is how like a piece of new media literature it is. Experimental it may be as a novel in print, but as a piece of digital writing it would be fairly conventional, albeit unusually well-put-together. It was obviously composed as collection of objects and pictures as much as a a piece of written text; there is no conventional dialogue or storytelling; despite its chronological sequence there is a strong non-linear element to the book, a feeling that it is as much designed to be dipped and skimmed as to be read from one end to the other; it makes a knowing reference to Raymond Queneau, the Oulipo writer; and in many ways it would be more at home on the Web, where the pictures could be in full colour and zoomable at no extra expense.

Another example of the influence of digital technology on “ordinary” literature comes from the small-scale end of the publishing industry – Martha Deed’s poetry chapbook The Lost Shoe, which was published earlier this year by Dan Waber at Naissance Chapbooks (about whom, more in a moment). The first point to note about this collection is that in order to publicise it Martha made a video, also called “The Lost Shoe” (http://www.sporkworld.org/Deed/lostshoe.mov), which deserves to be thought of as a companion-piece rather than a “trailer”. The poems in the collection are based on Martha’s experiences as a psychologist specialising in family law – more specifically, they deal with cases in which family members have done violence to each other, and some of them are harrowingly raw:

Upstairs, he tried twice to change his clothes
his fingers slippery with your blood…
You were looking at him
the last person you saw before your death
It bothered him, that lifeless stare,
so he stepped over your mother
your dying baby sister
and tried to close your eyes…

The video has the same combination of near-documentary authenticity and artistic control. It starts with a 911 telephone call from a man who has harmed his own children. There is a terrible moment when he is asked what has happened and he breaks into hysterical tears and says “They got stabbed”, as if somebody else might have done it. It ends with Martha reading aloud from one of her own poems, “Practice Tips”, which is based on the Center for Criminal Justice Advocacy‘s “Criminal Pre-Trial and Trial Practice”:

Play the tape 10 times at trial.
The jury will become accustomed to the carnage…
Obfuscate. Whine. Grandstand.
Fumble with your papers.

The fact that Martha feels equally at home working with both the written word and the camera, and therefore feels able to shoot her own video as a means of publicising her collection of poems, is an indication of the way in which digital technology is beginning to influence literary practice at grass-roots level. But the influence goes further. As well as conventional verse, her collection contains a number of visual poems – you could almost call them diagram poems – combining text with graphic design. “Jury Pool”, for example, shows a number of black stick-figures in and around the jury pool, labelled with reasons why they have been disqualified from the jury, or factors which will influence their outlook on the case: “Have to go back to school”, “Ate lunch with defendant’s mother”, “Crime victim”, “Don’t understand English”, and so forth. Including a diagram-poem such as this in a collection of poetry would not have been impossible before digital technology came along, but the fact that software packages such as Microsoft Word and Open Office Writer can handle images as easily as text, and make it simple to customise page-design without incurring any extra cost, means that poets now have an enormous range of experimental possibilities constantly at their fingertips.

Furthermore a lot of writers haven’t just moved beyond the pen or the portable typewriter to computers and word processing software; they have moved on to such things as blogs and web-pages, which have built-in multimedia capabilities. Sound-files and videos are rapidly becoming a normal part of the amateur writer’s working environment, and as a result the combination of text with other media is becoming a grassroots staple rather than a specialists-only field.

The Lost Shoeis published by Naissance Chapbooks, run by Dan Waber. A glance through Waber’s catalogue is enough to confirm the effect which digital technology is starting to have on poetic style. Amongst more formally conventional poetry he publishes, for example, Psychosis by Steve Giasson, which is based on comments collected by a YouTube posting of the shower scene from Psycho:

kthevsd Lame movies ? Kid I like all movies, old films, new films, etc. How is this classic lame ? Have you even ever watched it ? What would some 16 year old teenybopper know about cinema ? You probably have never even heard of Kurosawa and I bet you have never even seen a Daniel Day Lewis or Meryl Streep movie in your life. No wonder everyone laughs at your generations taste…

Or there is a collection by Jenny Hill called Regular Expressions: the Facebook status update poems –

Ron: I delivered a fucking BABY tonight! Yep, a fucking BABY!!!!!!!!! what did
u do today? Nursing school is AWESOME!!!!!!!
Someone asks if it was slimy, another wants
the placenta, most are stumped
at how to comment
on all your exclamation marks.

Then there is Watching the Windows Sleep by Tantra Bensko, which combines “fiction, poetry, and photographs”; or Open your I by endwar, which is “at times concrete, at times typoem, at times visual poem, at times conceptual poem, at times typewriter poem”. It is clear that the digital revolution has affected all of these collections in one way or another – either by making a wider range of experimental options available, or by providing them with their inspiration and subject-matter.

Of course, these are atypical exhibits, because Dan Waber, the publisher, is clearly interested in adventurous and experimental kinds of poetry. He also publishes a series called “This is Visual Poetry“, which now runs to about fifty full-colour booklets of visual poems, “answering the question [What is visual poetry?] one full-color chapbook at a time”, and answering it extremely variously. All the same, even allowing for Waber’s adventurous tastes, the fact that within a couple of years he has managed to put together fifty chapbooks of visual poetry, plus nineteen “conventional” poetry collections which often show clear signs of technological influence, is strongly suggestive of the directon in which things are moving.

Digital technology and small-scale publishing

Just as noteworthy is the business-model behind Waber’s publishing ventures. Basically, his operation relies on three key elements. The first is print-on-demand technology, which has almost completely done away with the printing expertise on which book production used to rely. These days, as long as writers can produce a competently-laid-out electronic original it can be turned into a book at the touch of a button. Colour reproduction is slightly more expensive than black-and-white, but not prohibitively so. Standards of reproduction are undoubtedly lower than they would be in the hands of a specialist printer, but most people never notice the difference. Self-publishing ventures such as Lulu (www.lulu.com) rely on this kind of print-on-demand process, and although Waber sends his electronic originals to the local print shop rather than using a completely automated online process, the technology is the same.

However, whereas the Lulu publishing process involves quite a bit of donkeywork (and usually a crash course in book-design and pagination) on the part of the author, the second key element of Waber’s publishing model is a drastically simplified and stringent set of layout criteria. Submissions to the visual poetry series must be “17 color images of visual poems of yours that are 600 pixels wide by 800 pixels tall”; and submissions to the Naissance chapbook series must be a maximum of 48 pages, in A4 portrait layout, with specified page-margins. Waber has designed a macro which takes Word files laid out according to these specifications and converts them instantaneously into print-ready book originals. This means that responsibility for the page layout is left squarely with the author – as Waber’s guidelines say, “all you need to do is make each page look how you want it to look… and we’ll convert it” – with the added effect that as long as authors stay within the guidelines, they are free to experiment as much as they like.

This combination of strict limitations and artistic freedom has undoubtedly helped to foster some of the adventurous design his chapbook series displays. At the same time, however, Waber has eliminated so much complexity from the publishing process that the third key element of the business model looks after itself: his costs (including time-costs) have come right down, to the point where he can show a modest profit on print-runs as low as ten units. All he has to do is decide whether he wants to publish something: if he does, he runs his macro, sends his print-ready file to the printer, and has ten copies of the chapbook in his hands within 24 hours. As he writes with understandable pride:

The beauty in all of this is no cash outlay. No huge print runs. No wondering if there’s grant money to support it, no worrying if it’ll actually sell enough to cover costs. It’s all profit after one copy sells… I am in a situation where because I make money off of every book I publish, all I need to do is find more books to publish. Because I de-complexified the process so completely.

Waber believes that his kind of venture represents the way forward for literary publishing in the era of digital technology, and he also believes that it is the kind of solution which can probably only come from outside the existing print industry, not from inside, because, as he puts it, “Big Publishing has a model that is blockbuster-based”. To explain this more fully, he cites an article by Clay Shirkey called “The Collapse of Complex Business Models“, which argues that big and complex businesses become unable to adapt to new circumstances, because their ideas about how they should operate become culturally embedded. If the new circumstances are sufficiently challenging then the only way forward will be for big organisations to collapse, and for new small ones, without the same culturally embedded assumptions, to take their place.

When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to… when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

This, argues Waber, is likely to be the ultimate effect of the digital revolution on the publishing industry; not simply dramatic changes in publishing formats and marketing methods, but a complete collapse of “Big Publishing”, and a multitude of small-scale, dynamic new ventures like his own, growing up out of the wreckage.

Clearly this is something that publishers themselves are worried about. As Michael Bhaskar writes in his blog for The Poole Literary Festival’s New Media Writing Prize,

On the writing side I often hear that people feel ignored by publishers.Essentially the world of commercial publishing is a closed shop unwilling to listen to the maverick, the outsider and the original, and will ultimately pay for this as audiences gravitate to newer and amorphous forms… This might be an argument for by-passing publishers or intermediaries altogether… [but] what I would like is mediation.

New models for publishing

Clay Shirkey quotes the example of the “Charley bit my finger” video on YouTube to illustrate how production values have changed:

The most watched minute of video made in the last five years shows baby Charlie biting his brother’s finger… made by amateurs, in one take, with a lousy camera… Not one dime changed hands anywhere between creator, host, and viewers. A world where that is the kind of thing that just happens from time to time is a world where complexity is neither an absolute requirement nor an automatic advantage.

The “not one dime changed hands anywhere” line is perhaps a bit of an oversimplification. Wikipedia notes that “According to The Times, web experts believe the Davies-Carr family could earn £100,000 from ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’, mostly from advertisements shown during the video.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Bit_My_Finger) But the Davies-Carrs didn’t make or post the video with the intention of becoming celebrities or making money. They posted it so that it could be viewed by the boys’ godfather. The success of the video, in other words, owes nothing to its production values or to any marketing strategy, and everything to the environment created by YouTube and its viewers.

An alternative to the Big Publishing model is already with us, and despite odd viral phenomena like “Charlie Bit My Finger”, it consists in the main of very large numbers of small-scale products reaching small audiences, rather than small numbers of very high-profile products reaching huge audiences. This alternative model is enabled by digital technology, and it replaces high production values and market-minded editorial controls with the principle that people’s desire to publish themselves and to look at each other’s efforts is itself a profit motor. No single book published by Lulu, for example, has to sell a lot of copies for Lulu itself to make a profit – it’s the volume which counts. The same is true of YouTube, and it’s also true, on a much smaller scale, of Dan Waber’s enterprise.

YouTube is now crawling with people hoping to become the next viral phenomenon – and there are also a number of talented individuals who have built up sizeable audiences on YouTube and who are making decent amounts of money out of those audiences – but the really big money is being made not by the people who contribute material, but by YouTube itself. The same is true of print-and-paper publishing via Lulu. The removal of editorial constraint has greatly freed up and democratised the creative side of the publishing process, but on the other hand, a system where most writers made relatively small amounts of money compared to publishers and agents is being increasingly shoved aside by a new system where most creators make no money at all, while the publishers do very nicely.

Add to this the fact that YouTube is now in the hands of Google – the same Google which has been “creating an impenetrable content monopoly” over digitised books through the Google Books programme – and the future of publishing starts to look less like an open field for small enterprises, created by the collapse of big corporations, and more like a battleground where a few monster Web 2 corporations – Amazon/Kindle, YouTube/Google and Apple – are carving up the territory as fast as they can, much as the major European countries carved up Africa during the nineteenth century.

What the future really holds for the publishing industry is probably a mixture of these two scenarios. It’s unlikely that conventional publishing is going to disappear any time soon, but in a shrinking market publishers are going to be more and more reluctant to publish untried material, more and more inclined to go with material which seems to tap into an already-established audience. The celebrity biography or autobiography; the book of the comedy series; the first novel by a TV personality; these are already familiar. The book version of a popular blog and the “global distribution” edition of something which has already sold very well via the Web are going to become increasingly familiar in the near future. Add to this books with associated websites, increasing emphasis on ebooks, and a cautious trial of ebooks with interactive elements, and you have a pretty good picture of how the conventional publishing industry is shaping up to deal with the digital revolution.

In the meantime, entrepreneurs like Dan Waber are taking fuller advantage of the new possiblities offered by digital technology, and perhaps planting the seeds for a whole new generation of publishing houses; while writers like Martha Deed and Leanne Shapton, under the influence of the digital revolution, are redefining literary genres.

But one consideration which should not be overlooked in all this is the importance of open standards. The digital revolution itself is predicated not only on technical advances – such as broadband, print-on-demand, digital video and multimedia handheld devices – but on the Web itself, and in particular on the fact that the Web is non-commercial and belongs to all its users. Material which appears on the Web doesn’t have to comply with a proprietary format laid down by any one corporation: it has to comply with standards laid down by the World Wide Web Consortium. It is this open structure which has enabled the Web to develop so rapidly and to serve as a framework within which so many enterprises have been able to flourish. For the field of publishing to flourish in the same way, open standards need to prevail here as well – open standards for ebooks, for example, so that standards-complaint work will be viewable on a whole range of different devices. Only under those circumstances can small enterprises and individual artists stand some kind of chance against the big corporations.

Link to original article:

http://www.hyperex.co.uk/reviewdigitalpublishing.php

© Edward Picot, August 2010
© The Hyperliterature Exchange

Ambient Information Systems
English, some texts in German. Translator: Nicholas Grindell
400 pages, 6-colour hardbound, 17.5 x 23 cm
edition of 1,500 unique & numbered.
now available at ambient.publishing.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9556245-0-6

Ambient Information Systems by Manu Luksch and Mukul Patel is a hardback book that presents writing, images and art by and about ambient.tv (Luksch and her collaborators) from during the last decade. Its purple and yellow cover tempered by a tracing paper slip-cover, contains almost four hundred pages of sans-serif text cleanly laid out among images and sidebars. As intermedia artists with a strong emphasis on research and dissemination. Recent works have addressed surveillance, corporate data harvesting, and the regulation of public space.

The material presented in the book ranges from written essays and project proposals through preparatory sketches, computer server log files and video screen grabs to modification of the printed book iteslf by unique rubber stamps and scribbling over sections of text. This diverse and detailed presentation of ambient.tv’s work provides an insight into the inspiration, planning and production of some conceptually and aesthetically rich new media art.

There’s a report from Kuwait during Ramadan 2002, a description of using cutting-edge wearable PCs, a discussion of the role of television, information about the harp in mythology, cyborg markets, the UK Data Protection Act, climate change, anti-gentrification, art and systems theory, UAVs, the Pacific plastic dead zone, and much, much more. There are projects that create free networks, dangerous musical instruments, taped-out surveillance camera boundaries, video installations, photographic images, movies of CCTV footage gained through freedom of information requests, manifestos, snowglobes, and cocktails.

(It’s a fascinating pleasure to read but it’s overwhelming to try and review.)

The portrait of Ambient.tv that emerges from all this is of intensive cultural critique pursued through a playful low-fi digital aesthetic. This isn’t a contradiction, the latter is in the service of the former. Ambient.tv’s projects and proposals tackle serious social and political issues. They do so through skilled use of the aesthetics and attitude of low-fi new media art and technological activism.

The wealth of ideas contained in the essays and other writing in the book show how historical, political and philosophical knowledge grounds the resulting art and indicates how it embodies a critique of contemporary culture.

Contemporary culture as seen by Ambient.tv is surveillance culture, the database state with its DNA databases and laws that protect freedom by removing freedom. Ambient.tv is a realistic project, depicting the hidden forms of contemporary society that intrude into our lives. This is heavy stuff, and to air it critically without alienating the audience it requires precisely the playful touch that ambient.tv often bring to their art.

To take the example of FACELESS, 2007, (the first project I personally saw Luksch present), there is an exquisite balance between the disturbing idea of pervasive surveillance, the practical limitations of Freedom Of Information requests, and the visual and science-fictional narrative aesthetic that emerged from this. On their web site it states that it was produced “…under the rules of the Manifesto for CCTV Filmmakers. The manifesto states, amongst other things, that additional cameras are not permitted at filming locations, as the omnipresent existing video surveillance (CCTV) is already in operation.” The result is something more interesting and disturbing to watch than a simple collage of CCTV footage would be. The fact that the work can be made like this, that it can look like this, means something.

This strategy can be seen in “Mapping CCTV around Whitehall”, 2008, as well, which I also reviewed for Furtherfield here, and in many other pieces by Ambient TV.

Reading the proposals and essays shows the depth I suspected to this work, when I first saw it projected in a darkened room is there in its conception and execution.

It’s an intense and inspiring experience to be faced with the textual equivalent of a decade-long open studio. The first essay in the book, a theory-laden piece by Fahim Amir, is almost overwhelming in a different way. It’s pure Theory, which will hopefully sell Ambient.tv to the artworld sectors that thrive on that sort of thing, but it isn’t the best introduction for newcomers to the project’s very accessible art.

But what a rare pleasure to be given such a wealth of insight into art that so acutely depicts our times. “Ambient Information Systems” is an important resource for contemporary artists and critics, an insight into the ideas and development of a very successful new media art practice. The grungey, playful, important realism of Ambient.tv’s work deserves presentation in a context that shows just what has gone into the art and just what people can get out of it. This is it.

The text of this review is licenced under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence.

We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion
Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar
Scribner Book Company, December 2009
ISBN 1439116830

Featured image: We Feel Fine project poster

“We Feel Fine – An Almanac Of Human Emotion” is a hardback book that in just under 300 pages of well designed montages, data visualisations, diagrams, illustrations and text presents and analyses the data gathered by the We Feel Fine project. Started in 2005 and launched in early 2006 by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, We Feel Fine is based around a database assembled using a webcrawler that searches the blogosphere for statements of the form “I feel” or “I feel like”. Any matches are stored along with as much contextual data as the webcrawler can find (a photograph nearby in the blog post, the poster’s age, gender, and location, local weather). The database contained twelve million such entries by the time the book was published.

Sections of the book categorise statements of feelings by age, gender, the location of the poster, and subject of the statement. Individual statements are presented superimposed over images found in the same blog post. The photographs presented with their accompanying expressions of emotion have a high-contrast, shallow depth of field, and highly focused look that resembles Lomography. But this is a product of the presentation of photographs on the web rather than an hipsterly ironic invocation of the contingent aesthetics of mass photography. The images are for the most part JPEGs, and show the contrast, mach banding and visual noise of that technology.

The montages of “I feel…” statements in a standard format superimposed over an image found in the same blog post serve to provide a (sometimes incongruous) context for the statements that the project is based on. They resemble Gillian Wearing’s “Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say” 1992-3 featured photographs of people holding up placards on which the artist had asked them to write down what was on their mind. Going back further into the history of art, the montages and in a novel way particularly the data visualisations and graphs bear comparison to Vermeer’s seventeenth Century paintings of bourgeois social relations and reverie. Both “Girl reading a Letter at an Open Window” and “We Feel Fine” present social class, social self-presentation, advanced communication technology and consideration of the thoughts of others in a medium and way that epitomises the way people see things in that era.

The book’s volume of data and graphics quantifying social phenomena might resemble a “state of the blogosphere” corporate social media report in some ways, but its presentation directs attention back to the emotions featured rather than trying to tie them to any corporate or governmental agenda. This is a book by, about and for individuals in contemporary mediatised society. I found reading it became quite overwhelming sometimes once I had adjusted to its presentation.

Dictionary definitions, statistical breakdowns of the kinds of words, ages and genders of bloggers and other demographic and affective data are presented in compact graphic form on every page, and larger charts show more general conclusions. Feelings, or the words used to refer to them, are shown to vary between genders and as people age. This is an exemplary application of Edward Tufte’s science of the graphical presentation of information. They even have sparklines. But that science is applied to data that is at its heart qualitative rather than quantitative.

Such “data visualization” was a hot trend in 2009. Visualisations of crime rates, corruption, climate change and other issues can be produced using such data, and have become an important weapon in the arsenal of visual persuasion. On the We Feel Fine web site, feeling data is mapped to coloured blobs in an interactive user interface to the constantly updated (every minute) database. In the book, feelings and demographic information are processed to produce graphics that represent the prevalence of feelings over time, between genders, in different locations and in relation to each other. But as visual persuasion this is directed back to the vividness of human, qualitative experience rather than a more political or economic agenda.

“Sentiment analysis” was also hot trend in social media marketing in 2009 and its limitations quickly became apparent. Current systems simply cannot handle irony, sarcasm, regional differences in the usage of words and in many cases even simple negation. The We Feel Fine system is an exercise in gathering affective or sentiment data to visualise, but it avoids the pitfalls of sentiment analysis by automating only the gathering of the statements of emotion themselves, not analysis of how they relate to what they refer to. This is a classic example of well-chosen limits strengthening a project.
The problem of the relationship between qualitative (how you feel) and quantitative (how many people feel what you feel) data and how to deal with this in a non-voodoo way are avoided in We Feel Fine because of this.

Another 2009 hot trend was “big data”, the assembling of datasets that vary from many megabytes to many gigabytes in size. Datasets from regional and national governments, scientific research and freedom of information requests can be used in “data mining” to search for facts among the numbers. The We Feel Fine system is a good example of a big data dataset (and API, application programming interface, for accessing that data over the web). Unlike global temperature data it neither offers the possibility of objective accuracy nor involves any great risk if it lacks it. But it does reintroduce the human subjectivity that big data threatens to replace with numbers.

The striking thing about this is that although the We Feel Fine book is very much of the zeitgeist for 2009 the web-based system it presents started five years ago in 2005. At that time blogs were regarded by the mass media as disposable, narcissistic and somehow inauthentic. They were an unlikely subject at that time for art concerned with the authentic expression of emotion. We Feel Fine’s history, subject and results therefore both prefigure and go beyond the current state of the art in Internet social and corporate culture.

Harris and Kamvar are admirably candid in laying out the history, methodology, technology and in the case of the book’s production even the finances of their project. The code listings included in the book are tantalising glimpses into how the We Feel Fine server works, allowing a rare chance for students and artists to study such a system, and are licenced under the GPLv3. The book is under the obscure but principled Creative Commons “Founders Copyright” licence which will automatically expire the copyright on the book in twenty years time. This is all invaluable for critique and study of the project by artists, academics and anyone with an interest in art and technology, and more artists should do it.

In the FAQ and other essays contained in the book Harris and Kamvar are open about the methodological strengths and weaknesses of the We Feel Fine system. They acknowledge the limitations and demographics inherent in profiling bloggers (who are younger, wealthier and more technologically savvy than is usual). They also make a convincing case for the very real conceptual strengths of the project, discussing how the system holds up as science and statistics. And the project itself is overwhelming as an aesthetic and, strangely, somehow as a social experience.

Even if we don’t deny or question the existence or status of emotions for ideological reasons, do we know what we really feel? And even if we do know what we really feel can we really express it in a way that will be understood by others? We Feel Fine doesn’t address these questions. They are outside of its scope. Its acceptance of sentiment at face value and its mechanical (re-)production of representations of sentiment might look like the hallmarks of kitsch. But that would deny the subjectivity of the original authors of the expressions of sentiment that We Feel Fine processes. And a progressive art needs to represent the masses, not merely rulers and pop stars. Not everyone will be feeling ironic or critical on any given day. Given this, the transparency, scale and effectiveness of We Feel Fine mean that ideological objections to big data, to emotional taxonomies, or to the very idea of emotion face a problem in the project’s aesthetic and affective success rather than vice versa.

Some of the stories found while researching the posts and presented in the book are heartbreaking or uplifting, but the statistical nature of the project makes these outliers – they are rare events and can be identified as such. What comes through from page after page of casual statements of feeling is an impression of the range of human experience, or at least the range of human expression. If you can adjust to the montage format and the diagrams then the book can inspire sympathy, pity, and joy for your fellow human beings.

The book ends by considering the philosophical and spiritual meaning of feelings, how they affect our lives, and what we can do about this. The data gathered to back up this consideration makes the conclusions both persuasive (this is a paradigmatic representation of humanity) and surprising (that would be telling).

We Feel Fine faces up to the challenge of making Internet art that realistically deals with the scale of the contemporary web. It does this by tackling the millions of daily new entries in the blogosphere but crucially it retains a focus on qualitative, subjective human experience. In its engagement with multiple levels and kinds of representation, from emotional taxonomies and statistical methods to digital photography, weblogs, and data visualisation, it shows just how broad are the range of systems and modes of depiction that artists can and possibly must deal with today. And it’s a project that simply wouldn’t exist if the people who made it couldn’t code.

We Feel Fine is a persuasive and insightful portrait of the individuals that make up the blogosphere. It can be overwhelming in terms of the amount of information and in terms of the volume and strength of emotion presented, but that is part of what makes it vivid. It is a paradigmatic, realistic and persuasive depiction of the qualitative experience of individuals within networked information society.

The text of this review is licenced under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence.

Press Release for print (pdf 1.6 Mb)

This Summer you are invited to gather your friends, give us a call and drop by to HTTP where you can browse, borrow and organise books and journals from ThE DiStRiBuTeD LiBrArY whilst savouring delicious Iranian sweets and a cup of El Salvadorian coffee brought to us by Feral Trade.

We’d also like visitors of all backgrounds and experiences to suggest, demonstrate and implement their ideas for displaying, categorising and borrowing books from the library in the hope that by the end of the Summer we’ll have an expanded philosophy of knowledge sharing. All participants’ contributions will be documented and made accessible online, as well as in the space for others to observe. For more information about this please email info@http.uk.net

The ThE DiStRiBuTeD LiBrArY also provides the context for an informal season of associated events including meetings of other distributed librarians and introductions to semantic web by experienced categorizors of networked digital data.

The first of these events is ’48 hour wake’ which begins at 12 midnight Friday 21st July ending at Midnight Sunday 23rd July.

The 48 hour wake with David Goldenberg and guests, uses participatory practices to examine how it is possible to disengage from the principle model of Euro centric Modern art tradition, including any mindset that one inherits before going onto develop new ways of thinking, and from there new ways of acting.

This event will be webcast for simultaneous viewing at East Open International and provides the opportunity for a wide range of persons to take part IP.

HTTP has free wireless access to the Internet so bring your laptops.

More About Activities and Events

Feral Trade
Feral Trade is an initiative to develop new trade relations along social networks. Whilst never actually calling itself art, this project reveals the social-context, texture and aesthetics of this venture in ‘new international trade relations’, with coffee and sweets as its medium.

The use of the word ‘feral’ denotes a process which is wilfully wild (as in pigeon) as opposed to romantically or nature-wild (wolf). The passage of goods can open up wormholes between diverse social settings, routes along which other information, techniques or individuals can potentially travel.

Ruth Catlow’s review of Feral Trade Coffee.

ThE DiStRiBuTeD LiBrArY

ThE DiStRiBuTeD LiBrArY provides a resource for creative research that encourages a re-evaluation of where one stands in the world beyond the established canons, structures, processes and mediation.

Expect to find amongst the 250 books, fact, fiction and theory surrounding Net Art, New Media, Activism, Art & Technology, Wireless technology, Locative Media, Critical Thinking, Anarchism, Feminism, Marxism, Cyber culture and theory, Programming, Psychology, Complexity Theory, Pirate Broadcasting, Politics, Philosophy, Post-modernism, Gay and Lesbian writings, Underground Film and more.

Ron Briefel, an active Situationist, has distributed is personal library among a number of venues, people’s private homes, community centres, squats and galleries for public reading and lending.

HTTP also welcomes a recent loan of historic DIY journals and zines from the 90s from Media Arts Projects.

MAP’s most recent projects have been a series of workshops and events that emphasise skill-sharing, promoting the visibility of non-commercial uses of new technologies, and building local networks.

Physical Folksonomy

Whilst recent technological developments in semantic web and folksonomy allow digital files to appear in more than one category at once, the books in ThE DiStRiBuTeD LiBrArY exist in physical space. Develop a ‘Couple’s Catalogue’ to represent a mutual understanding or perhaps a a group of three would create a ‘Tripart Taxonomy’. Any structural additions to the fabric of the building to accommodate a reflection of your thinking will be considered. We hope to develop a range of strategies of specific relevance and use for the individuals and groups who visit HTTP.

References for Physical Folksonomy at HTTP:

The Faculty of Taxonomy at the University of Openness Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags by Clay Shirky.

48 Hour Wake

David Goldenberg and guests will take part in a continous 48 hour wake at HTTP gallery. During this time they will stay awake while on-site inside HTTP gallery to dream, relax, take part in discussions and share ideas with a community who enter into the project.

The 48 hour wake examines how it is possible to disengage from any mindset that one inherits before going onto develop new ways of thinking, and from there, new ways of acting. The event is to be web cast so that it will be seen simultaneously at a venue in Norwich gallery as part of the East Open International – along with facilities that will allow the opportunity for a wide range of persons to take part in the discussions via Voice-Over IP.

The project develops a work staged last year for the STRUKTUR show at artist: network in New York.