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

Events, Exhibitions, Festivals and Conferences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Books, Open Calls, Papers & Publications

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Articles, Interviews & Presentations

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

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

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

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

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