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

Events & Exhibitions

Paloma Polo: The earth of the Revolution | Arts Catalyst | Thu 11 July 2019 – Sat 3 August 2019 | The second phase in the Towards the Planetary Commons exhibition programme will see artist Paloma Polo’s The earth of the Revolution (2019) premiered for the first time. Emerging from Polo’s research in the Philippines, cultivated over three years, and during which time the artist located herself at the heart of the ongoing democratic struggles in the region – a struggle in which marginalised countryside communities are actively fighting for democratic and progressive transformations, emancipation and the common good – this new work offers viewers a glimpse into the political practices that underlie the revolution – http://tiny.cc/gaofaz

Algorave | Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry, UK| 16 August 2019 | Organised by Antonio Roberts | An evening of futuristic electronic rhythms, brought to you by some of the leading lights of the Algorave movement. Experience the exciting and unpredictable phenomenon of algorithms brought to life as music and visuals. Featuring Maria Witek, Innocent, Rosa Francesca and Carol Breen. Tickets only £5! Book here – http://tiny.cc/d2nfaz

Europa Endlos | In collaboration with CPH:DOX | 21 mar – 11 aug 2019 | In 2019 Kunsthal Charlottenborg puts Europe and the EU on the agenda with a group exhibition presented in collaboration with CPH:DOX, one of the world’s most important documentary film festivals | The exhibition presents installation, sculpture, film and photography by the international artists Monica Bonvicini (1965, Italy), Jeremy Deller (1966, Great Britain), Daniil Galkin (1985, Ukraine), Sara Jordenö (1974, Sweden), Šejla Kamerić (1976, Bosnia-Hercegovina), Bouchra Khalili (1975, Morocco), and some older exponents such as Jimmie Durham (1940, USA), the artist duo Fischli Weiss with Peter Fischli (1952, Switzerland) and David Weiss (1946 – 2012, Switzerland) as well as the pioneers Olafur Eliasson (1967, Iceland/Denmark) and Wolfgang Tillmans (1968, Germany). All the selected art works deal with current topics regarding Europe today and EU’s role in the future, some with an activist approach, others in a more documentary style – http://tiny.cc/q2kfaz

At the 58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, the Danish-Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour presents Heirloom, an otherworldly rumination on memory, history and identity. Comprising of a two-channel science-fiction film, a sculptural installation and an architectural intervention, the exhibition invites the viewer into a dark universe. “The film, entitled ‘In Vitro’, is staged in the town of Bethlehem decades after an eco-disaster. The dying founder of a subterranean orchard is engaged in a dialogue with her young successor, who is born underground and has never seen the town she’s destined to replant and repopulate. Inherited trauma, exile and collective memory are central themes.” – https://www.danishpavilion.org/

Trying out divinatory strategies for Making | Hosted by Access Space, Heffield | 6-9.30, Friday 2nd August | Access Space Artist in Residence, Hestia Peppe, is holding a residency event and all are welcome. Hestia is a doctoral candidate at Sheffield Hallam University. Her research concerns divinatory methodologies for arts practice. Book on FB – http://tiny.cc/6gqfaz

Faith Ringgold exhibition at Serpentine Galleries | London, United Kingdom, 6 Jun 2019 – 8 Sep 2019 | Focusing on different series that she has created over the past 50 years, this Serpentine survey will include paintings, story quilts, tankas and political posters. It will be the first solo exhibition of Ringgold’s work in a European public institution – http://tiny.cc/9ckfaz

Books

This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against | By Peter Pomerantsev | ‘The world’s most powerful people are lying like never before, and no one understands the art of their lies like Peter Pomerantsev.’ Oliver Bullough, author of Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World. As Pomerantsev seeks to make sense of the disinformation age, he meets Twitter revolutionaries and pop-up populists, ‘behavioural change’ salesmen, Jihadi fan-boys, Identitarians, truth cops, and much more. Forty years after his dissident parents were pursued by the KGB, he finds the Kremlin re-emerging as a great propaganda power. His research takes him back to Russia – but the answers he finds there are surprising – http://tiny.cc/lopfaz

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World | by Joseph Menn | The shocking untold story of the elite secret society of hackers fighting to protect our privacy, our freedom — even democracy itself Cult of the Dead Cow is the tale of the oldest, most respected, and most famous American hacking group of all time. Though until now it has remained mostly anonymous, its members invented the concept of hacktivism, released the top tool for testing password security […] Today, the group and its followers are battling electoral misinformation, making personal data safer, and battling to keep technology a force for good instead of for surveillance and oppression. Cult of the Dead Cow shows how governments, corporations, and criminals came to hold immense power over individuals and how we can fight back against them – http://tiny.cc/07ofaz

Nationalism on the Internet: Critical Theory and Ideology in the Age of Social Media and Fake News | By Christian Fuchs | In this timely book, critical theorist Christian Fuchs asks: What is nationalism and what is the role of social media in the communication of nationalist ideology? Advancing an applied Marxist theory of nationalism, Fuchs explores nationalist discourse in the world of contemporary digital capitalism that is shaped by social media, big data, fake news, targeted advertising, bots, algorithmic politics, and a high-speed online attention economy – http://tiny.cc/dujfaz

Articles & Interviews

Nonument symposium part 2: How artists deal with old monuments that polarize opinions | By Regine Debatty | Second part of an overview of the Nonument Symposium dedicated to hidden, abandoned and forgotten monuments of the 20th century which took place last June at CAMP, Prague’s Centre for Architecture and Metropolitan Planning. http://tiny.cc/zyhfaz

Digital design and time on device; how aesthetic experience can help to illuminate the psychological impact of living in a digital culture | By Vanessa Bartlett | Aesthetic techniques are increasingly used by marketeers to create enticing digital products. In this paper, I work with the aesthetic experiences of one audience group to consider the psychological impact of living in a culture where digital devices are deliberately designed to influence behaviour. I argue that aesthetic encounters can help with understanding the impact of the interplay between visual stimulus, affect and digital culture, in ways that may support situated understandings of mental distress in a digital age. I show how audiences respond to the artist-led research project (and exhibition) Are We All Addicts Now? – http://tiny.cc/9gjfaz

Downloads preparations for two talks on PDF | By artist Annie, Abraham’s | The first #PEAE (Participatif Ethology in Artificial Environments) is about her relation to electronic literature and struggles defining artworks. In the second Diffractive Reading in the Reading Club, Abraham’s describes how she became to consider the Reading Club as an example of a diffractive reading practice – https://aabrahams.wordpress.com/2019/07/29/elocork/

“Inter Alia: Aliens and AI” 2019 | By Rita Raley and Russell Samolsky. The premise of this paper is that the disquieting sense that AI possesses, or is possessed of, an external intelligence, one that operates autonomously, unpredictably, and, in our deepest fears, mutinously, is projectively displaced onto extra-planetary aliens. Our paper offers an analysis of Trevor Paglen’s satellite work, The Last Pictures, as well as Eduardo Kac’s Inner Telescope and Lagoogleglyph series. We conclude with a speculative imagining of an AI-archaeologist encountering in the distant future the orbital ring of dead satellites, one of which contains Paglen’s curated image archive. Free PDF Download here – https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8453532n

Daniel Rourke via Twitter, offers three decolonising reading lists, made by others, he has saved over the years (big thanks to Daniel):

Human, Social, and Political Sciences Tripos (2018-2019) at Cambridge | What follows is a general list of important decolonial texts, a brief history of decolonization of HSPS at Cambridge, some advice on how to tackle the course, and most importantly, a set of decolonial reading lists for POL1, POL2, SOC1, and SAN1 based on the 2018-2019 reading lists. Compiled by recent graduates and current students, the lists aim to provide a set of critical perspectives with which incoming first year students can re-situate the canonical (“set”) – http://tiny.cc/9hifaz

Decolonizing technology: A reading list | By Beatrice Martini | Western culture has long been defining how the world came to existence, its history, and how it works from a perspective which is centred on a Western and white point of view. While this specific paradigm has been the dominant position of power, others have been hegemonized by it, their cultures and experiences dismissed and excluded – http://tiny.cc/trifaz

Decolonising Science Reading List: It’s The End of Science As You Know It | By Chanda Prescod-Weinstein | You’ll find texts that range from personal testimony to Indigenous cosmology to anthropology, to history to sociology to education research. All are key to the process of decolonising science, which is a pedagogical, cultural, and intellectual set of interlocking structures, ideas, and practices. This reading list functions on the premise that there is value in considering the ways in which science and society co-construct. It is stuff that I have read all or part of and saw some value in sharing with others – http://tiny.cc/q4ifaz

Extra Squeezed (Jobs other opportunities & extra stuff)

Art+Feminism has recently become a 501(c)3 non-profit, and is hiring an Executive Director to help further the vision we’ve developed over the past six years. FT, with salary range 60-75k. Job description below. Application review will begin immediately. Apply by the August 13th deadline for full consideration. Please post widely and forward the description onto anyone you think would be interested in the role: http://www.artandfeminism.org/executive-director/

Main image from – Daniil Galkin, Tourniqet, 2013. Šejla Kamerić, EU / Others, 2000. Installation view, Europa Endlos, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, 2019. Photo by Anders Sune Berg.