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 | Bitforms Gallery | March 6–April 24, 2021, | Harvey’s first solo exhibition presenting a diverse mixed-media practice of sculpture, video games, drawing, and mixed reality works steeped in character creation and mythology. 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/3cHXZFv 

Trans Aesthetics: McKenzie Wark & Shola von Reinhold in conversation with Susan Stryker | April 8 2021 | Price: free – Anyone on or off Facebook | Please join host Susan Stryker, Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women’s Leadership, for a conversation between media theorist McKenzie Wark of the New School for Social Research (The Hacker Manifesto; Reverse Cowgirl) and novelist Shola von Reinhold (LOTE), about Black and femme trans cultural production and world-making. Co-hosted by the Mellon-funded We Are the Voices public arts and humanities series and the Mills College Trans Studies Speakers Series – https://bit.ly/3lU7DHP

Raw Hope of Humanity Rising – Public Dialogues for 2021 | April 14 2021, 6-7:30 pm | Event by Third Space Network, American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center. The third upcoming panel in the series is The Internet as a Medium for Activism & Social Change, exploring the Internet as a platform for political action through social media collaboration, virtual community, alternative journalism, and digital forms of artistic media. The panellists include: Jeff Gates, DC artist and writer, founder of the Chamomile Tea Party; Makia Green, Core Organizer, DC Black Lives Matter; Randall Packer, Artist & Creative Director, Third Space Network. Moderated by Monica O. Montgomery of MuseumHue – https://bit.ly/2NYXkWy

Anthropology Lecture: Arturo Escobar – Against Terricide | Free  · Online event | April 14, 2021, | This talk discusses transition design, broadly speaking, as a praxis for re-weaving the web of life on the basis of pluriversality and relationality, from the perspective of current Latin American theoretico-political debates and struggles. Presented by the Anthropology Department at The New School for Social Research. Cosponsored by Critical Perspectives on Democratic Anti Colonialism – https://bit.ly/3lRq7bY

Social Codes | Curated by Casey Reas | March 24 onwards | An exhibition of software art, also called generative art. All of the work consists of code written by artists to create visual experiences. Some works in the exhibition relate to the visual histories of drawing, painting, animation, and video, but all of it is native digital art, in that each artwork is a performance of code choreographed by the artist. Artists have been working with code since the 1960s, and within that time frame, code has evolved from languages written by engineers to run on room-sized computers to artist-created coding languages running inside a web browser. In 2021, artists are writing code in many languages and environments. Each programming language is like a different material to work with – https://bit.ly/2NYTnRI

Open Call: Resident, Art Tech Nature Culture List | The CreaTures project | Deadline for submissions is April 22, 2021. A curatorial & creative residency for an individual with a creative spirit and a passion for community-building to take the lead in nurturing the Art Tech Nature Culture – a global community of practice for creative practitioners across disciplines (from art, architecture and design to community organising and digital development) who care about social and ecological transformation. The selected applicant will nurture ATNC network as it expands beyond a discussion list, into a series of ongoing initiatives that distribute leadership and foster co-creation. Anywhere on Earth Time. Details available here in standard and large format (for people with a visual impairment) – https://bit.ly/3cC1RYq

Call for Applications: Anthropocene Campus Venice 2021 | Water Politics in the Age of the Anthropocene | Deadline: April 25, 2021 | Venice, Italy, October 11-16 2021 | Join a one-week educational event around the theme of Water Politics in the Age of the Anthropocene, organized by Ca’ Foscari University, the Center for the Humanities and Social Change and the Max Planck Partner Group The Water City in the framework of the Anthropocene Curriculum, a long-term collaborative project initiated by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin) and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin). Over the span of a full week, this forum will provide a space for co-learning, interdisciplinary collaborations, and comparative studies, bringing together environmental scientists, artists, historians of science and technology, geologists, environmental humanities scholars, archaeologists, and architects – https://bit.ly/3uhdJoP

Call for Contributors | A New AI Lexicon: Responses and Challenges to the Critical AI discourse | AI Now Institute | Critical thinking in AI has moved beyond examining specific features and biases of discrete AI models and technical components to recognize the critical importance of the racial, political, gendered and institutional legacies that shape real-world AI systems as well as the material contexts and communities that are most vulnerable to the harms and failures of AI systems. National and transnational, political, economic and racial contexts of production and deployment are integral to the questions of how such AI will operate, and for whose benefit – https://bit.ly/3cwMS23

Symposium: Between Techno-Euphoria and Regimes of Surveillance | Free  · Online event | May 1–3 2021 | Berlin, Zentrum für Netzkunst | Calculating Control: (Net)Art and Cybernetics / (Netz)Kunst und Kybernetik Symposium: Between Techno-Euphoria and Regimes of Surveillance. The location and architecture of Haus der Statistik demonstrates the two-sided nature of the science of cybernetics: On the one hand, the potential of a new organizational model, and on the other, the risks associated with its use as a powerful instrument for surveillance and control – https://bit.ly/3sFrOfa

Critical AI Manifestation in Gent | KIOSK in Gent hosts a Critical AI Manifestation May 8, 2021, | The United Intelligence Lab considers AI to be the most transformative technology of our time that shapes the way we interact, create and think. With C.AI.M we want to study and exploit AI, unmasking its impact. UIL is an ever-growing group of people cooperating on the Critical AI Manifesto exploring the impact of machine learning on culture and society. UIL members are from all walks of life. Whether AI-dominion is something you secretly yearn for or desperately hope to escape from, one thing is for certain, the old vantage points on AI will for nobody suffice anymore. Join us in writing C.AI.M. Anyone is welcome, except if you are an AI – https://bit.ly/31nzbfb

Roger Robinson: Cities Imaginaries Lecture 2021 | The Actuality of Gentrification | May 20 2021 | Writer and T.S. Eliot Prize winner Roger Robinson will deliver this year’s Cities Imaginaries lecture at UCL Urban Laboratory | This event is free | The danger with gentrification is that it breaks up long-held communities and bonds and histories without acknowledging and valuing them. Brixton has resisted gentrification before and it will again but a lot of energy and resources are being placed into the process of its gentrification, far more than the resources that were available to support it’s long time inhabitants – https://bit.ly/31yM4Ds

Call For Papers: In the limits of what is possible: art, science and technology | Artnodes | We are now receiving original work for our 28th issue (July 2021). Deadline for submissions: April 20 2021. When we talk about the intersections between art, science, technology and society (ACTS) we are referring to a set of practices that tend to challenge disciplinary boundaries, entering hybrid territories between the possible and the impossible, the real and the imaginary. Sometimes multidisciplinary, sometimes interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary, and often directly a-disciplinary in an indefinite territory in which what is at stake is the eternal composition of knowledge, of what is yet to be delimited, limited or disciplined in a tremendously fertile magma – https://bit.ly/2Pt3i2m

Books, Papers & Publications

Vera Molnar. Pas Froid aux Yeux | By Francesca Franco | Catalog of the monographic exhibition at the Espace de l’Art Concret from January 30 to May 31, 2021, and then at the Musée des Beaux-arts de Rennes from October 9, 2021, to January 9, 2022, this book presents the work of the artist, Vera Molnar. This exhibition is the first collaboration between two French cultural institutions which have in common a true speciality in the field of abstract art after 1945 and concrete art in particular. A prolific artist still active at the dawn of her 97th birthday, Vera Molnar places her practice between concrete art, constructed art and conceptual art. She is also considered a pioneer of computer drawing, having contributed to the digital art movement since the 1960s – https://bit.ly/2PqnRMZ

Hyperemployment – Post-work, Online Labour and Automation | !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Felix Stalder, Silvio Lorusso, Luciana Parisi, Domenico Quaranta | Co-published by NERO and Aksioma | 24/7. Algorithmic sovereignty. Anxiety. Artificial intelligence. Automation. Crowdfunding. Data extraction. Entreprecariat. Exploitation. Free labour. Free time. Gig working. Human-in-the-loop. Logistics. Machine vision. Man-machine complexity. Micro-labour. No future. Outsourcing. Peripheral work. Platform economy. Post-capitalism. Post-work. Procrastination. Quantification. Self-improvement. Social media fatigue. Time management. Unemployment –  https://bit.ly/3wf8ms4

A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain | Novel by Gary Hall | Two-fifths of Britain’s leading people were educated privately: that’s five times the amount as in the population as a whole, with almost a quarter graduating from Oxford or Cambridge. Eight private schools send more pupils to Oxbridge than the remaining 2894 state schools combined, making modern Britain one of the most unequal places in Europe. In A Stubborn Fury, Gary Hall offers a powerful and provocative look at the consequences of this inequality for English culture in particular. Focusing on the literary novel and the memoir, he investigates, in terms that are as insightful as they are irreverent, why so much writing in England is uncritically realist, humanist and anti-intellectual – https://bit.ly/3u7AR94

Vegetal Entanglements: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture | Edited by Giovanni Aloi | Download Issue 53 – Spring 2021 | The contributions gathered in the third volume of ‘Vegetal Entanglements’—a tryptic entirely dedicated to plants in art and culture—focus on the inextricable, actual, and metaphorical links that bind plants, ecosystems, and humans. In this issue, the interconnectedness that characterizes plant lives is explored through a variety of media and approaches designed to foreground vegetal alterity. What role does anthropomorphism play in human-plant relations? How can we approach plant alterity in ways that bypass objectification? How can plants help us build fairer and more sustainable futures? These are only some of the many questions addressed in this issue – https://bit.ly/3djnko9

Punk & Post-Punk (Journal): Volume 10 issue 1 | Editors Russ Bestley, Pete Dale, Matthew Worley, Mike Dines | A peer-reviewed journal for academics, artists, journalists and the wider cultural industries. Placing punk and its progeny at the heart of interdisciplinary investigation, it is the first forum of its kind to explore this rich and influential topic in both historical and critical theoretical terms. Punk & Post-Punk is a Scopus-indexed journal for academics, artists, journalists and the wider cultural industries – https://bit.ly/2QV6jZZ

Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism | By Lauren Fournier || Autotheory—the commingling of theory and philosophy with autobiography—as a mode of critical artistic practice indebted to feminist writing and activism. Fournier provides a long-awaited account of autotheory, situating it as a mode of contemporary, post-1960s artistic practice that is indebted to feminist writing, art, and activism. Investigating a series of works by writers and artists including Chris Kraus and Adrian Piper, she considers the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of autotheory. Fournier argues that the autotheoretical turn signals the tenuousness of illusory separations between art and life, theory and practice, work and the self—divisions long blurred by feminist artists and scholars | MIT publishing – https://bit.ly/3wnin6D

Art and Care, Reflections on the To Mind Is To Care Exhibition | Free PDF Download at V2.nl | Authors: Dora Vrhoci & Florian Weigl | Editor: Michel van Dartel | Design: Jelle Koper | Photography: Fenna de Jong | Art and Care: Reflections on the To Mind Is To Care Exhibition reflects on the curatorial research that has been undertaken by Dora Vrhoci and Florian Weigl in the run-up, but especially during the To Mind Is To Care exhibition and peripheral programming. An exhibition Florian Weigl curated with a strong focus on ‘Caring for’. To Mind Is To Care is an ‘interdisciplinary study of care’ defined as everything we do to maintain and restore our world so that we can live in it to the best of our ability – https://bit.ly/2PtTEMX

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 | MIT Publishing – https://bit.ly/2O6SZ3s

Articles, Interviews, Blogs, Presentations, videos

Buen Vivir. Interview with Penny Travlou on collaborative practices in emerging networks | Framed by her long-standing research on collaborative practices, geographer and ethnographer Penny Travlou introduces two projects she has been involved lately: Platohedro, a space, a platform and community based in Medellín, Colombia, and the Feminist Autonomous Research Center in Athens (FAC). Platohedro refers to the indigenous concepts of Buen Vivir and Buen Conocer and works and adapting them to the contemporary living conditions in urban societies, while FAC puts an emphasis on community-based autonomous knowledge production. Both are concerned with forms of thinking and working together that allow for creating alternatives to extractivist, colonial, racist and anti-feminist modes of (knowledge)production – https://bit.ly/2PKMML5

Indigenous rituals and music | We Make Money Not Art | Sébastien Robert is an artist and researcher whose practise presents a rare combination of visual and sound art, technology, science and ethnographic research. A few years ago, he embarked on a research project called You’re no Bird of Paradise which studies indigenous music and rituals in danger of disappearing. Based on a collaborative and experimental approach, Robert’s projects attempt to translate sounds and rituals into tangible works of art that directly echo the traditions of the communities he meets – https://bit.ly/3sEcVcV

Herbert Marcuse and the Student Revolts of 1968: An Unpublished Lecture | By Herbert Marcuse | Jacobin Mag | In May 1968, the neo-Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse visited Paris and Berlin at the height of the student movements that were making news around the world. The text presented here is the transcript of a two-hour talk about those events that Marcuse delivered on May 23, 1968, shortly after his return to the United States, while the outcome of the May movement in France was still very much in doubt. It offers unique insights into the way a thinker often credited with providing the European student movements of 1968 with much of their ideological energy viewed them as they unfolded – https://bit.ly/3wh6QWi

Taxi Studio Visit: Marcel·lí Antúnez | Art matters Blog | In the context of  Ars Electronica 2020 we visited Marcel·lí Antúnez’s studio, today we retrieve the interview. The artist – whose work can be understood mainly in terms of performativity – began his artistic career with the internationally renowned group ” La Fura dels Baus “, with whom he worked for 10 years. In the 90s his interest in the study of technological complexity materialized for the first time with a robot called Joan l’home de Carn created in collaboration with the physicist, musician and programmer Sergi Jordà. Since then, Antúnez’s artistic production has delved into the idea of utopia in relation to a holistic ideal provided by technology, rethinking the barriers that are no longer so solid that separate the body from the machine – https://bit.ly/31kTLNl

On the Paris Commune: Part 1 | Stathis Kouvelakis | 29 March 2021 | The first instalment of a new text by Stathis Kouvelakis on the development, events and legacy of the Paris Commune, published in three parts across the week. Any perspective on the past tells us at least as much about the subject doing the looking, and the historical moment in which their perspective is situated, as about the object they are looking at. Editing a collection of Marx and Engels’s texts on the Paris Commune of 1871 is a quite different prospect today to what it would have been in decades past, separated from us by a deep historical rift even if they are not ever so remote in purely chronological terms. Half a century ago, upon the 1971 centenary of the Commune, it would have been almost self-evident that delving into these texts was a useful endeavour – https://bit.ly/3fuHX3e

Re-enchanting Our Art, Cultures and Everyday Lives | By Stephen Pritchard | A transcript of Pritchard’s talk, called ‘Cultural Democracy, Community Development and the Old/New Normal’ presented at the Imagine Belfast Festival on 28 March 2021. It’s about re-enchanting our art, cultures and everyday lives. Sheelagh Colcough, David Boyd, Conor Shields and Pritchard had a great conversation after the talk which could have gone on a lot longer. The talk will be published by Imagine Belfast soon – https://bit.ly/3wpmqPM

Is the Music Over at Mills College? | By Geeta Dayal | new York Times | A hotbed of experimental sound for nearly a century, this school in Oakland, Calif., is preparing to close its doors. Now that program and the electronics-focused Center for Contemporary Music, together with the most distinguished havens for experimental work in America over the past century, are facing possible closure. On March 17 the college, founded in 1852, announced that ongoing financial problems, exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, would mean the end of its history as a degree-granting institution made up of an undergraduate women’s college and several coeducational graduate programs – https://nyti.ms/39wzF7h

Bill Gates Can’t Save the Planet | Grace Blakeley | Can Bill Gates save the world from capitalism? Gates’s new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, lays out his plan for achieving net-zero. With all the fanfare around the book’s release — his face was splashed on the cover of multiple magazines this week — this plan is depressingly familiar. Climate change, Gates and many economists argue is an example of a market failure. Markets have failed to adequately “price” carbon emissions, meaning we produce too much of them. If governments could only assign the correct price to these emissions, the market failure would be corrected and the planet would be saved – https://bit.ly/3u92X3J

Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to long-term Android support | Ron Amadeo | Qualcomm ended support for the phone after Android 6, but Fairphone is still going. The most interesting part of this news is a video from Fairphone detailing the update process the company went through, which offers more transparency than we normally get from a smartphone manufacturer. To hear Fairphone tell the story of Android updates, the biggest barrier to longer-term support is—surprise!—Qualcomm – https://bit.ly/3ss8XnL

Smashing the Patriarchy: Exposing Culture | Lilith Magazine | We’ve started an awesome collaboration with the amazing Wiam. At Lilith, we love the way she’s breaking taboos. Whether it is about sexuality, relationships or rap music. For Lilith, she will be making a series of videos on smashing the patriarchy. In this first episode, she is discussing the taboo that is shame culture. The past few weeks there has been a lot of online talk about exposers exposing young girls and queer folks for behaviour that is perfectly healthy. Wiam opens up about her own experience with being exposed and gives you the lesson of lessons on what helped her break the cycle – https://bit.ly/3wbR7I6

Image from: Installation shot. Auriea Harvey, Year Zero, exhibition at Bitforms Gallery. March 6 – April 24, 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.

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, Open Calls, Festivals and Conferences

News From Where We Are: The Furtherfield Podcast | First broadcast Friday 10th April 2020 | We may be confined to our homes by the Coronavirus emergency but we still have access to thriving networked cultures from around the world.  ‘News From Where We Are’ is the Furtherfield podcast hosted by co-founder and co-artistic director Marc Garrett, a conversation with many voices from the ground | Coming soon in April | Join us and send 90-second audio updates | Interviews with Cassie Thornton, Cade Diem & Joseph DeLappe. Contributions from Jaya Klara Brekke, Régine DeBatty, Jeremy Height, and more. More info at https://buff.ly/33C3kYG | Every 2nd Friday, on Soundcloud – https://soundcloud.com/furtherfield

Upcoming: Art & Animals in the Age of AI and Bio-Engineering | Next month, Regine DeBatty will be giving online classes on the theme of Art & Animals in the Age of AI and Bio-Engineering with the School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe | How do artists, designers and activists use artificial intelligence, virtual reality, robotics, synthetic biology, the blockchain or gaming to probe and communicate techno-scientific developments? To investigate the shifting paradigms of the living, thinking world? To make us accept that time has come to co-evolve in a more sympathetic and mutually beneficial way with other living entities, whether “natural”, lab-grown or hybrid? | Mon, Apr 6, 2020, 7:00 PM – Mon, May 4, 2020, 9:00 PM CEST – https://tinyurl.com/w9y6d2v

Distant Movement(s) | A series of performances experimenting with online togetherness and the possibility to experience dance in front of a screen, while we close our eyes. Exploring, being attentive and dancing together are the key concepts of this artistic experience. The project originated in 2018 from a combination of two different approaches, both anchored in exploring bodily sensation. Daniel Pinheiro and Annie Abrahams are interested in the limits and possibilities of online collaboration and communication and use telematic performance as a tool to understand more about it – https://distantmovements.tumblr.com/dm

Peoples Bank of Govanhill | Join us for remote exchange and collective imagining | Drawing Workshop | Monday 13th April 3pm | Join artists Raman Mundair and Ailie Rutherford to collectively imagine a post-capitalist future DRAWING WORKSHOP | This moment of global crisis and the Covid pandemic is likely to transform capitalism as we know it. While this is a difficult time for all of us, times of crisis can also open up space for new possibilities to emerge. It is in these times that large collective shifts in consciousness are possible and major shifts in political and economic structures can happen. We are already seeing lower pollution levels, reduced consumption and new mutual care networks. What else do we imagine happening that didn’t seem possibly before? https://tinyurl.com/wzua7vu

OPEN CALL FOR ART! In response to COVID-19 | Amplifier is launching an emergency open call for artwork around the themes of Public Health & Safety or Mental Health & Well-being. Throughout the month of April, 30 artists will be selected to receive $1k awards, starting next week! I’ll be one of the guest curators for this project, alongside Nancy Spector and Hank Willis Thomas. You can submit and vote on artwork here: bit.ly/globalopencall. These symbols will stand long after the virus is gone as a testament to our resilience, join Amplifier in this historic moment by submitting! – https://tinyurl.com/yx3v3nmb

Michael Szpakowski | Visit his latest phtographs on Flicker. An artist, composer & writer. His music has been performed all over the UK, in Russia & the USA. He has exhibited work in galleries in the UK, mainland Europe & the USA. His short films have been shown throughout the world. He is a joint editor of the online video resource DVblog – https://www.flickr.com/photos/szpako/

#Covid Creatives Toolkit: Mutual aid for digital spaces | Set up by Kat Braybrooke | A set of carefully-curated mutual aid resources, ideas and pathways for creative practitioners (including artists, makers, curators, designers, hackers, educators, facilitators, etc) who find themselves needing to migrate their practice onto digital spaces and places. The kit’s 7 sections are intended to support different aspects of this journey, from digital gathering to digital well-being – https://tinyurl.com/reakdoz

Books, Papers & Publications

Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age | Brian Jefferson | Brian Jefferson explores the history of digital computing and criminal justice, revealing how big tech, computer scientists, university researchers, and state actors have digitized carceral governance over the past forty years. He shows how digital technology has expanded the wars on crime and drugs, enabling our current state of mass incarceration and further entrenching the nation’s racialized policing and punishment. Brian Jefferson is associate professor of geography and geographic information science at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign | University of Minnesota Press – https://tinyurl.com/ugkj2dq

Museums Inside Out: Artist Collaborations and New Exhibition Ecologies | Mark W. Rectanus | Rectanus 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. Museums Inside Out introduces a new vocabulary to understand the place of artists in redefining and contesting the museum in the context of globalization and the creative economy | University of Minnesota Press – https://tinyurl.com/tbwmgmq

Embodied Computing: Wearables, Implantables, Embeddables, Ingestibles | Edited by Isabel Pedersen and Andrew Iliadis | Practitioners and scholars explore ethical, social, and conceptual issues arising in relation to such devices as fitness monitors, neural implants, and a toe-controlled computer mouse. The contributors examine technologies that range from fitness monitors to neural implants to a toe-controlled mouse. They discuss topics that include the policy implications of ingestibles; the invasive potential of body area networks, which transmit data from bodily devices to the internet; cyborg experiments, linking a human brain directly to a computer; the evolution of the ankle monitor and other intrusive electronic monitoring devices; fashion tech, which offers users an aura of “cool” in exchange for their data; and the “final frontier” of techno-supremacism: technologies that seek to read our minds | MIT Press – https://tinyurl.com/s6bjrt6

The filth and the fury: punk graphics – in pictures | Guardian | Andrew Krivine has been collecting punk memorabilia since 1977. His book Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die contains over 650 posters, flyers, record sleeves and adverts, charting a DIY ethos that changed graphic design for ever | The book is published on 2 April by Pavilion Books – https://tinyurl.com/ut4aqn4

Articles, Interviews, Blogs, Presentations, videos

Is Accelerationism a Gateway Aesthetic to Fascism? On the Rise of Taboo in Contemporary Art | By Dorian Batycka | What does cancel culture have to do with the rise of techno-futurism and accelerationist ideas in contemporary art? Art critic Dorian Batycka analyzes the recent uptick in accelerationist inspired artworks, examining their manifestation in exhibitions such as the 6th Athens Biennale and the 9th Berlin Biennale, asking to what extent ideas inspired by the accelerationist philosopher Nick Land, have led to proto-fascist ideas percolating within the realm of contemporary art. Download PDF – https://tinyurl.com/rxusqrk

Tales of a DisCO, Straight from the Dancefloor | By Timothy McKeon and Sara Escribano | Guerilla Translation | DisCOs are a commons-oriented, feminist, cooperative way for people to work together. A set of ideals and criteria for ensuring that patterns of oppression and violence that permeate our society are not replicated within intentional, cooperative spaces. DisCOs systematize fairness and the recognition of care work. They help to keep projects geared towards the common good, towards the Commons. DisCOs are essentially a system, but systems are best understood when implemented and that’s where Guerrilla Translation comes in. Our small translation collective is the first DisCO—the pilot project – https://t.co/foEgIV4C2I?amp=1

Excursion to an Alien World | Living with Plan B | Blog post by Aileen Deirig disussing life since living in a commune in Spain | “Calafou has been described as giving the impression of a post-apocalyptic scene, and post-capitalist is one of the self-descriptions. As I have been living in Calafou since the end of last August, this has become so normal that it can feel quite jarring to go to other places and find that they are still pre-apocalyptic and apparently haven’t got the memo yet that capitalism is dying. When I stepped out of a train last Monday evening and found myself in the midst of a brightly illuminated shopping mall, I felt I had landed uncomfortably on the wrong planet.” Read on – https://tinyurl.com/wxzozao

Mutual aid for those who have lost work | Pirate Care Network | pirate.care.syllabus  ▒▒▒ 🐙 | Outlined forms of mutual aid to help those who are precarious and currently have no source of income, those who are being laid off, and in general those who have not enough money. It includes propositions where to start if you want to mutualise money, resources and labour — a solidarity fund, a common wallet, shared purchases, a library of things, common.coin, time bank and labour related legal and union support. All this assumes strikes at the point of production, circulation and care work, rent strikes, and demands for a universal sick pay and a quarantine universal basic income – https://tinyurl.com/vgehfbm

Ann Pettifor on Coronavirus Capitalism | Interview with author and campaigner Ann Pettifor, getting her take on the economic consequences of Coronavirus. I specifically ask Ann about the prospects of a debt write down, and whether we may be able to achieve lasting change from the embers of this crisis to capitalism. Hope & Action’s new Vodcasts, explore the need for urgent economic change. Join filmmakers Dan Edelstyn & Hilary Powell as they debate ideas of how to attack the financial crisis with leading thinkers | Youtube – https://tinyurl.com/roctuw4

Ideas to resist | CCCB Lab | Some inspiration to lift our mood during the days of confinement we’re experiencing in certain parts of the world. A couple of weeks before confinement started we asked some of our collaborators to send us inspiring texts to offset the wave of bad news about the current state of the world. We wanted to publish a plural post to inspire hope and optimism, with essential questions, bright ideas and simple solutions. This is the result, in the midst of the global pandemic with consequences and lessons that will define the near future | Víctor Recort Berta Gómez Santo Tomás Albert Lloreta João França Joana Moll Tania Adam Lucas Ramada Prieto Toni Navarro Míriam Hatibi – http://lab.cccb.org/en/ideas-to-resist/

This Is Not the Apocalypse You Were Looking For | Laurie Penny | Pop culture has been inundated with catastrophe porn for decades. None of it has prepared us for our new reality. For years, angry young idiots have fantasised about a shit-hits-the-fan collapse of civilisation scenario, where men would be real men again, and women would be grateful. But in this crisis, our heroes are not soldiers -they are healers and carers | Wired – https://tinyurl.com/uoswgws

Socialism in a time of pandemics | International Socialism | Joseph Choonara’s analysis of the Covid-19 crisis looks at the history of epidemics, the origins of the coronavirus in capitalist development and agriculture, what the outbreak means for the world economy and how the left can respond. “Above all, a pandemic on this scale intensifies the pre-existing fault lines of capitalism. At the most basic level it poses a choice: defend profits or save lives. The indications, thus far, are that the former has been the overriding priority for those presiding over the system. This article explores how pandemics enmesh with the logic of capital and offers some potential responses from the left | https://tinyurl.com/r6owqay

The Political Possibility of Sound. Interview with Salomé Voegelin  | By Leandro Pisano | Digicult | What are the political potentials of listening? How does sound define the crossing of the territories of contemporaneity, of the differences in race, gender, social belonging? How can we, in the invisible depth of sound, define our belonging to the contemporary world, taking an active position in issues that concern ethics, subjectivity, the principles of collective and individual living? After attempting to define a series of possible philosophical and post-phenomenological approaches to sound art in the previous two books – Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (Continuum, 2010), and Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound (Bloomsbury, 2014) – the Swiss writer and artist Salomé Voegelin continues her analysis on listening practices, in a new book entitled The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening (Bloomsbury) whose themes juxtapose and which reflects on the encounter between political processes and the sounds we are constantly immersed in – https://tinyurl.com/t9xzszo

Pandemic Inequalities, Pandemic Demands | By weareplanc |  We need to recognise that ‘staying at home’ doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. For some, homes are a sanctuary. For others, the home is another place of work, where cooking, cleaning and childcare take up the majority of their time and energy. There are many for whom the home is a place of danger, with time outside, if possible, being a respite from abuse. For people with mental or physical illness, for the elderly and disabled, the isolation they may face through being confined to the home can be deeply unhealthy, at times terrifying. Some people don’t have homes at all; being shunted from one sofa to another, sleeping in night shelters or out on the streets are dangerous “options” during this pandemic for those that have few already – https://bit.ly/2wJnynq

Is This a Dress Rehearsal? | Bruno Latour | The unforeseen coincidence between a general confinement and the period of Lent is still quite welcome for those who have been asked, out of solidarity, to do nothing and to remain at a distance from the battle front. This obligatory fast, this secular and republican Ramadan can be a good opportunity for them to reflect on what is important and what is derisory. . . . It is as though the intervention of the virus could serve as a dress rehearsal for the next crisis, the one in which the reorientation of living conditions is going to be posed as a challenge to all of us, as will all the details of daily existence that we will have to learn to sort out carefully. I am advancing the hypothesis, as have many others, that the health crisis prepares, induces, incites us to prepare for climate change. This hypothesis still needs to be tested – https://tinyurl.com/s2y9hcp

Image: An assemblage from an excellent collection of photographs taken by Michael Szpakowski. https://www.flickr.com/photos/szpako/

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