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

Upcoming event: Book launch |The Hologram <> You can’t cut THIS: without multiplying it | Online event | Friday, December 11th, 1:00-2:30 pm EST |
Organized in partnership with Eyebeam,  Pluto Press, artists Cassie Thornton and Tina Zavitsanos will reflect on their shared attention around holograms, debt, and care and Thornton’s recently published pamphlet, The Hologram: Peer to Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future. 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?” The Hologram is developing with the ongoing support of Furtherfield, CreaTures (Creative Practices for Transformational Futures) and many other people and organisations. https://www.eyebeam.org/events/the-hologram/

Feminist International: How to Change Everything | Online event | Friday, 11 December 2020 from 20:00 UTC-21:30 UTC | Hosted by International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs and Verso Books. A conversation with Judith Butler, Susana Draper, Verónica Gago, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Moderated by Natalia Brizuela on Verónica Gago’s Feminist International, which draws on the author’s rich experience with radical movements to enter into ongoing debates in feminist and Marxist theory: from social reproduction and domestic work to the intertwining of financial and gender violence, as well as controversies surrounding the neo-extractivist model of development, the possibilities and limits of left populism, and the ever-vexed nexus of gender-race-class. https://tinyurl.com/yxkqx7u5

RGBFAQ | Alan Warburton | arebyte Gallery presents a new commission by UK based artist Alan Warburton. 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. Until 19 December 2020, and from 5 – 23 January 2021. https://www.arebyte.com/alan-warburton-rgbfaq

Sign up for the DisCO Beat, a brand-new newsletter about the life and times of the DisCO project | The project furthers the ideas and practices put forth in the DisCO Manifesto with a comprehensive framework designed to support the worldwide development of “Distributed Cooperativism”. The project’s aim is to create and provide the following: comprehensive educational and legal resources for people to launch DisCOs, accessible software for value-sovereignty practices, pilot projects supported by hands-on mentorship guidance, participatory action research on distributed cooperativism. It explores and prototypes new and radical forms of ownership, governance, entrepreneurship, and value accounting meant to counteract pervasive economic inequality. https://disco.coop/newsletter/

Call for Submissions – NEoN is excited to be supporting Goethe-Institut Glasgow and Alliance Française Glasgow with their newly reframed residency programme. In response to the impact felt by the cultural sector as a result of the Covid-19 global health crisis, their initial residency project has transformed into a digital one. https://northeastofnorth.com/call-for-submissions/

Aksioma presents Hyperemployment STREAMING #2 | !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Felix Stalder #algoregimes | 7 December 2020 at 5 PM (CET) | The upcoming second event entitled #algoregimes is an informal discussion between artistic duo !Mediengruppe Bitnik and professor of Digital Cultures and Network Theory Felix Stalder. Touching upon topics such as the invisibility of institutional processes, the functioning of infrastructures and logistics, and freedom and control in the data economy. https://aksioma.org/streaming

THE DAOWO GLOBAL INITIATIVE | Announcing Artworld DAO Prototype breakfast meetings 2021 In February 2020, cultural practitioners and representatives of non-profit arts and technology organisations from around the world gathered to participate in a 52hr gathering focusing on Artworld DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations). Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty facilitated a programme hosted by Goethe Institute, London to discuss, analyse and map the obstacles, opportunities, and implications for progressive, decentralised artworld automation. Sign up for the DAOWO newsletter for information about showcase and discussion events with the teams creating Artworld DAO prototypes in Berlin, Hong Kong, Johannesburg and Minsk. Breakfast meetings are planned for January and February 2021. https://www.daowo.org/#daowo-global-initiative

VIDEO-TALKS | Berliner Gazette Winter School online program | Includes talks exploring labour struggles in California’s Silicon Valley, Germany’s Cyber Valley, and India’s AI sweatshops – and back again. The speakers include Sana Ahmad (India), Jose Miguel Calatayud (Spain), Luise Meier (Germany), Yonatan Miller (US), Peng! (Germany), and Katja Schwaller (Switzerland/US). You can access videos of their talks on this website by scrolling down to the TALKS section. https://bit.ly/36lElf5

Call for Proposals: INC Reader #15 – Critical Meme Research | By Chloë Arkenbout | Deadline 16th December | 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 — just as any pandemic will have its own infodemic that will recursively act upon it — issuing in the kinds of cross-contamination that Baudrillard already prefigured in the 1980s: of the convoluted age of simulacra, of epistemological crises associated with postmodernity, and of a generalized informational obesity whose gravitational pull bends reality to whatever “program”, in the multiple senses of that term – https://bit.ly/39sb5oO

The Sir Terry Pratchett Memorial Scholarship | As part of his legacy beyond literature, the Discworld Foundation established by international bestselling author, the late Sir Terry Pratchett, has established a perpetual scholarship in his name through the University of South Australia. Applications are being sought from proven high achievers for this prestigious scholarship working in the areas of social theory, cultural studies, visual and literary studies and identity studies where the research proposed is inspired by Sir Terry Pratchett’s work – https://tinyurl.com/yxjvxkku

OPENING: Tend To It | Group show from TOMA 2019-2021 artists | Saturday, 23 January 2021 | TOMA Project Space, Unit 13, Royals Shopping Centre, Southend, SS1 1DG | The 2019-2021 TOMA (The Other MA) cohort present their end of year show: Tend to it. An instruction that doubles as a confession. How has it affected our art-making? Why do we make art? And what happens when we are faced with death? This show explores how even in a crisis we must tend to our needs to create. Raid the larder, stroke the euphoric parceltape, pass through the silky curtain, step onto the stage, go back in time, ooze into a queer new landscape, journey through screens, pause in isolation, ponder reused, reborn found objects. This exhibition shows how we tend to it. Opening: Saturday 23/01/21 12-6pm RSVP via Eventbrite (bookable slots to ensure social distancing) here – https://bit.ly/3qaIGtn

Books, Papers & Publications

Atlas of Anomalous AI | Edited by Ben Vickers & K Allado-McDowell | Like a snake eating its tail, artificial intelligence exists in a circular relationship with its human creators. The Atlas of Anomalous AI is a compelling and surprising map of our complex relationship to intelligence, from ancient to emerging systems of knowledge. A wildly associative constellation of ideas, stories, artworks and historical materials, the Atlas draws on art historian Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas — an image map of the “afterlife of antiquity” — to approach the defining concepts of AI from an imaginative, artistic and revitalising perspective – https://bit.ly/36lJcge

Coronavirus, Class and Mutual Aid in the United Kingdom | Authors: Preston, John, Firth, Rhiannon | This book considers how the UK government’s response to the recent COVID-19 pandemic disadvantages the working class, and how mutual aid, based on anarchist principles, can be used as a force for social change. The authors draw on Marxist and anarchist thought in class theory and social movement analysis to demonstrate that the virus and its material and discursive consequences are an active part of continuing class struggle and class interpolation. Preston and Firth examine how plans for quarantine and social isolation systematically work against the needs of the working class, and rely on classed assumptions about how markets and altruism operate. Publisher, Palgrave Macmillan – https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030577131

Retracing Political Dimensions: Strategies in Contemporary New Media Art | Edited by: Oliver Grau and Inge Hinterwaldner | De Gruyter |  2021 | At the beginning of the 21st century, new forms and dynamics of interplay are constituted at the interfaces of media, art and politics. Current challenges in society and ecology, like climate, surveillance, virtualization of the global financial markets, are characterized by hybrid and subtle technologies. They are ubiquitous, turn out to be increasingly complex and act invasively. New media art utilizes its broad range of expression in order to tackle the most urgent topics through multi-sensorial, participatory, and activist approaches. This volume shows how media artists address, with a political lens, the core of these developments critically and productively. With contributions by Elisa Arca, Andrés Burbano, Derek Curry, Yael Eylat Van Essen, Mathias Fuchs, Jennifer Gradecki, Sabine Himmelsbach, Ingrid Hoelzl, Katja Kwastek, José-Carlos Mariátegui, Gerald Nestler, Randall Packer, Viola Rühse, Chris Salter – https://bit.ly/37ieNic

Working Class History: Everyday Acts of Resistance & Rebellion | Edited by Working Class History, an international collective of worker-activists, foreword by Noam Chomski. This book presents a distinct selection of people’s history through hundreds of “on this day in history” anniversaries that are as diverse and international as the working class itself. Women, young people, people of colour, workers, migrants, Indigenous peoples, LGBT+ people, disabled people, older people, the unemployed, home workers, and every other part of the working class have organized and taken action that has shaped our world, and improvements in living and working conditions have been won only by years of violent conflict and sacrifice. https://bit.ly/3fQtD3j

Vol 19. Media Populism | Edited by Giuseppe Fidotta, Joshua Neves, & Joaquin Serpe | Culture Machine | Parasitical, unstable, excessive, corrupt, inexact, threatening—the intellectual history of populism is, to say the least, vexed. ‘Few terms have been so widely used in contemporary political analysis’, Ernesto Laclau famously observed, and ‘few have been defined with less precision’ (1977: 143). As populism has increasingly become ‘the preserve of political scientists’ (Rovira Kaltwasser et al., 2017: 10; Canovan, 1982), so too has its focus on political parties and movements become a default position in academic and popular thought. This orientation, today contested by many political scientists but nonetheless widespread, has the advantage of making populism visible, even measurable, through its analysis of speeches, polls, rallies, and electoral victories – https://bit.ly/3oapYAf

The Forest of Dean Miners’ Riot of 1831 | By Chris Fisher | Bristol Radical Pamphleteer | In June 1831, the free miners and commoners of the Forest of Dean rioted. This book considers the background to the uprising and the motives of the participants. Chris Fisher contends that the uprising was a clear expression of considerable and justifiable resentment towards the state and capitalists as they encroached on the customary rights of free miners. The Forest of Dean Miners’ Riot of 1831 places the events in the context of a social and economic transformation which favoured private property, the exchange of commodities for profit, and the accumulation of wealth for a few at the expense of the labouring many – https://bit.ly/3lpsb9o

Bank Job | Hilary Powell and Daniel Edelstyn | Art hacks life when two filmmakers launch a project to cancel more than £1m of high-interest debt from their local community. A white-knuckle ride into the dark heart of our financial system, in which filmmaker and artist duo Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn risk their sanity to buy up and abolish debt by printing their own money in a disused bank in Walthamstow, London. Tired of struggling in an economic system that leaves creative people on the fringes, the duo weave a different story, both risky and empowering, of self-education and mutual action. Behind the opaque language and defunct diagrams, they find a system flawed by design but ripe for hacking. This is the inspiring story of how they listen and act upon the widespread desire to change the system to meet the needs of many and not just the few. And for those among us brave enough, they show how we can do this too in our own communities one bank job at a time – https://bit.ly/3lpUSCU

Articles, Interviews, Blogs, Presentations, videos

Body and Digitality: From early experiments to theatre-making | Marco Donnarumma | Youtube | In this talk produced by Fronte Vacuo artists group, co-founder Marco Donnarumma discusses the relation of body and technology in the arts and how the body is at the centre of transdisciplinary avantgarde meshing media art, dance and theatre; a set of practices that made possible much of the art we see today. The first 30 minutes are dedicated to a historical overview of body and technology works and performances from the 1960s until 2010s, including Alvin Lucier, E.A.T, Stelarc Stelarc, Marcel.lí Antúnez Roca, #VNSMatrix, Seiko Mikami, Shulea Cheang, Santasangre Santasangre. The next 30 minutes are focused on my own work as well as on the collaborative works created with Fronte Vacuo co-founders #margheritapevere and Andrea Familari Fax – https://bit.ly/37lIP4P

The Invisible Hand | Thierry Fournier | Series of 8 digital images, fine art prints on dibond, variable dimensions, 2020 | Created from photographs and courtesy of NnoMan, Amaury Cornu, Benoît Durand, Anne Paq, Julien Pitinome, Kiran Ridley and Charly Triballeau.The Invisible Hand transforms eight photographs that witness police violence by completely erasing the police officers from the image. By raising the question of censorship and pretending to submit to it, the image now shows only the people under assault, surrounded by a spectral void that no longer has a body or face. The term “invisible hand” is one of the historical concepts of liberalism, which postulates that the sum of individual market actions would spontaneously lead to the common good – https://bit.ly/2VgJ6QS

Ambivalence, part 2: On the uneasy relationship between digital art and the environment | Regine Debatty | With considerable delay and only pitiful excuses to justify it, here’s the second part of the notes I scribbled down during the conference AMBIVALENCES #1 which took place in early October in Rennes in the framework of the Maintenant digital art festival. Part 1 of my report summed up Bénédicte Ramade’s overview of the History of Ecological Art. Today, I’m sharing the notes I took during the round table “Digital Arts and Environmental Awareness” that discussed the ambivalent relationship between digital artists and the environmental crisis. Contemporary art has a massive ecological footprint. Contemporary art that uses -and sometimes even champions- digital tools also relies on technologies that generate extractivism, e-waste, human misery and unbridled energy consumption – https://tinyurl.com/y6gb8nuq

Thinking the Unthinkable: The Idea of an Eco-state | David Garcia | If any serious individual in late February had argued that under conditions, other than war, that wealthy technologically advanced states were capable of shutting down 80% of the global economy… and in the process ending mass air transportation, the proposition would not just have been dismissed it would simply not even have been heard.” This forces us to ask how the same level of agency can be made available to address the far more profound threat of the climate emergency? And ask why in comparison with Covid the ecological crisis yields little more than a collective shrug of the shoulders? https://bit.ly/3moswu9

How an Algorithm Blocked Kidney Transplants to Black Patients | A formula for assessing the gravity of kidney disease is one of many that is adjusted for race. The practice can exacerbate health disparities. A new study of patients in the Boston area is one of the first to document the harm that can cause. It examined the effect on the care of a widely used but controversial formula for estimating kidney function that by design assigns Black people healthier scores. https://tinyurl.com/y56tyl9y

UNINVITED. A “horror experience by and for machines” | Regine Debatty | On 31 October, the Furtherfield Gallery in London launched an exhibition centered around “the world’s first horror experience by and for machines”. In true horror movie style, a pandemic is keeping the gallery closed and the human visitors locked up inside their home. Meanwhile, the machine is left undisturbed, using CCTV cameras to observe the world remotely and turn its understanding of it into a horror film for machines. UNINVITED, by Nye Thompson and UBERMORGEN, is a puzzling, disturbing but strangely seducing work. It rejects human viewers as much as it draws them in. A mix of dystopia, scifi and reality, the film echoes our confusion about the machines which intelligence (or utter stupidity) we sometimes fail to fully appreciate – https://tinyurl.com/yyfqat7x

DISRUPTION NETWORK LAB | Youtube Video Collection | Examining the intersection of politics, technology, and society, Disruption Network Lab exposes the misconduct and wrongdoing of the powerful. Disruption Network Lab is an ongoing platform of events and research focused on the intersection of politics, technology and society. Since 2014 the Berlin-based nonprofit organisation in Germany has organised participatory, interdisciplinary, international events at the intersection of human rights and technology with the objective of strengthening freedom of speech and exposing the misconduct and wrongdoing of the powerful – https://bit.ly/3lkvqyV

Nomadland: Mortality And Materialism In 21st Century America | Daniel Broadley | Quietus | Chloé Zhao’s majestic new film Nomadland is set to lead the 2021 awards season, but its power will last much longer by tapping into a fear and hope about metaphysical materialism, finds Daniel Broadley. “The last free place in America is a parking spot,” writes Jessica Bruder in Nomadland: Surviving America in the 21st Century, the book upon which Chloé Zhao’s stunning film Nomadland is based – https://tinyurl.com/y2powhc8

Future Machine Live Autumn 2020 – Creating Rituals for When The Future Comes | Artist Rachel Jacobs blogs about the stresses and uncertainties of creating a safe performance in Finsbury Park during lockdown.
“The rules of the Future Machine compares the data to the monthly averages for the place where the machine is and then the algorithm decides if it is cold, mild, warm, hot, breezy, windy etc… and if the climate is expected, unexpected or extreme. In the live performance the machine plays the algorithm, the musicians play their feelings, their emotional, creative, reflective, experiential (and incredibly skilled) ability to translate the being-ness of this place and time, with the wind, rain, air, the smells, the sensations of moisture and dryness, warmth, coldness, prickling our skin.” Read the blog and watch and listen to the performance https://www.whenthefuturecomes.net/2020/12/03/future-machine-live-autumn-2020/

Image by Cassie Thornton from, The Hologram <> You can’t cut THIS: without multiplying it | Eyebeam December 2020.

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