A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology, and social change.
Events, Exhibitions, Open Calls, Festivals and Conferences
Auriea Harvey, Year Zero | March 6–April 17 2021 | Opening Reception: Saturday, March 6 | bitforms is pleased to announce Year Zero, Auriea Harvey’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Through a diverse mixed-media practice, Harvey creates sculpture, video games, drawing, and mixed reality works steeped in character creation and mythology. Year Zero introduces a new body of work nested within the legacy of Harvey’s solo and collaborative career. Working online from the beginning of net art’s history, the artist expertly combines her experience in video game and software development with a three-dimensional practice. Year Zero is a continuation of this coalescence, presenting early sketchbooks, webcam broadcasts, and multiplayer games alongside Harvey’s latest sculptural installations and drawing. https://bit.ly/3bb8Nep
IPERCUBO presents an Online Exclusive Viewing Room dedicated to Axel Straschnoy’s The Permian Projects | 9–23 March 2021 | The Viewing Room is a preview of The Permian Projects, as well as a presentation of the recently published catalogue. The Permian Projects are two research projects by Axel Straschnoy on the natural history collection at the Perm Regional Museum, Perm Kray, Russia. The backdrop of the projects is the End-Permian Extinction (the biggest extinction ever to take place on Earth). The projects reflect on the Museum of Natural History and on the ongoing extinction process. The Dioramas of the Perm Regional Museum is a series of three-dimensional (lenticular) photographs presenting some of the stuffed animals in the collection in storage. https://bit.ly/2NOPeQ8
New Art City Festival: 2021 | A community celebration of Internet Art: March 15–26 2021 | March 26, 2021, is the one-year anniversary of New Art City’s domain registration. d0n.xyz chose the URL the way he always does for his art projects: by searching keywords and picking the coolest free one. A prototype grew into a tool, and a tool grew into a community. Since then, more than 30,000 people in 120 countries have visited galleries in New Art City. As an organization, we are proud to display artists who show in museums on the same level as art students and to show digital art in its native format alongside traditional media – https://bit.ly/2MG8ZJb
THE Q IN QONSPIRACY: QAnon as a Paradigm for Future Social-media-driven Conspiracism | Disruptive Fridays #19 | March 12 2021 |LIVE: Friday 5 pm | Berlin | Roberto Bui/Wu Ming 1 and Florian Cramer, moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli | In this conversation between Wu Ming 1 and Florian Cramer, QAnon is discussed as a template for contemporary social-media-driven conspiracy fantasies that work simultaneously as games and a new kind of cults. By focusing on the mutation of conspiracy myths from countercultural phenomena to contemporary meme and influencer culture, they will focus on three conspiracy narratives: “The Great Replacement” (from Renaud Camus to Charlottesville), QAnon (from Pizzagate to the Capitol storming), and “The Great Reset” (as a set of pandemic-inspired variations on the old New World Order trope). The conversation is centered around Wu Ming 1’s forthcoming book La Q di Qomplotto [The Q in qonspiracy], to be published end of March by Edizioni Alegre, which describes how conspiracy fantasies help legitimize systems of control. https://bit.ly/2OcAoTx
Bread and Roses: Gender and Class Under Capitalism, with Andrea D’Atri | Free · Online event | Wednesday March 17 2021 7:00 pm–8:30 pm GMT| Is it possible to develop a radical socialist feminism that fights for the emancipation of women and of all humankind? Housmans is proud to welcome Andrea D’Atri to discuss her new publication with Pluto Press, Bread and Roses: Gender and Class Under Capitalism. Join us for a passionate journey through the history of feminism. Using the concrete struggles of women, Andrea traces the history of the women’s and workers’ movement from the French Revolution to queer theory. She analyses the divergent paths feminists have woven for their liberation from oppression and uncovers where they have hit dead ends. https://bit.ly/3uHW6zA
(re)programming: Infrastructure | With Benjamin Bratton | Event by Aksioma, Kino Šiška and KonS | Online with Facebook Live | Monday 15 March 2021 at 6pm UTC | For the 10th anniversary of Tactics & Practice, Aksioma presents (re)programming – strategies for self-renewal a “festival of conversations” with world-class thinkers debating key issues, from infrastructure and energy to community and AI, curated and conducted by writer and journalist Marta Peirano. The festival consists of 8 streaming events taking place every third Monday of the month throughout the year. https://bit.ly/3b0Hu6l
The DAOWO Sessions: Artworld Prototypes | A new set of experimental projects to reinvent the future of arts with blockchain | A partnership between Goethe-Institut, DECAL@Furtherfield, and Serpentine Galleries. The DAOWO Sessions: Artworld Prototypes series of online events ran 28 January – 4 March 2021. The series explores the possibilities for the future of the art world with blockchain by investigating what can be learned from DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations) working with Others (-WO). Each recorded session is an eye-opening presentation and conversation around active experimentation that aims to hack, deconstruct and reinvent the arts in the emerging crypto space in response to people and their local contexts. This is a unique opportunity for cultural practitioners, representatives of arts, technology organisations, communities, and anyone interested in blockchain’s potential to come together and question the future of art and society. https://bit.ly/37YllUg
Virtual Reality Residency | Program OPEN CALL until March 29 | Museums Without Walls is seeking proposals for its virtual reality residency program. Residencies will take place through April and May in different versions of the Espírito Santo Art Museum – MAES hosted in the Mozilla Hubs plataform. Four participants will be selected to occupy and recreate this environment based on their artistic and/or curatorial visions. The selected proposals will receive specialized mentorship and a development fee of CAD $ 600. The residency outcomes will be presented in the Museum Without Walls program in late May. https://bit.ly/3qbGMru
Pick Me Up (& hold me tight) | Compass festival | 19–28 March 2021 | An invitation for collective listening, experienced through public pay-phones across Leeds. Through an invitation to answer a public payphone, Pick Me Up (& hold me tight) is a mass act of contemplation about the relationship between mental health and modern life. Created by award-winning theatre and digital art company ZU-UK in response to rising suicide rates across the country, Pick Me Up (& hold me tight) is an audio event where every phone box in Leeds rings at the same time. Pick up the phone to participate in a gentle but thought-provoking audio experience that explores contemporary loneliness, and exposes the edges of our humanness. It’s an invitation to pause, take stock, and explore what kind of listeners we are. https://bit.ly/3kAcLAj
MoneyLab Berlin: Disaster Capitalism | From 26–28 March 2021| MoneyLab Berlin will shine a light on emerging communities that are starting to organize themselves around sustainable finance, inclusive tech, community-based currencies, and progressive monetary systems. Now for the first time in Berlin, the 11th edition of MoneyLab aims at creating space for utopias, experiments, and radical ideas around an economy for the people and for the planet. Over the course of this event we will present creative coping strategies, answers to the problems of data capitalism, platform monopolies and online surveillance, and modes of resistance. Free – online event. https://bit.ly/3dTaPkZ
Ecology and the Anthropocene Art-Game Commission | Phoenix Art-Game Commission Opportunity | LocationEast Midlands | We are seeking to commission an artist, group or studio to create an art-game exploring ecology and the Anthropocene, responding to the Daisyworld Simulation. We are open to proposals that use gaming as a medium in its widest sense, however, it is important to consider how the work could be exhibited in a gallery setting and published online, using platforms such as Steam and Itch. £4000 Commission fee to cover the production of work. Development support during the production of the work. Deadline – midnight on Sunday 28th March. Shortlisted applicants will be contacted by Monday 5th April – https://bit.ly/2MAnLBb
Center and Periphery: Marxism and Postcolonial Theory | Instructor: Nara Roberta Silva | Online event and Course Schedule 6–27 April 2021 | Brooklyn Institute for Social Research | £229.61 Registration Open | Marxism and anti-colonialism were once deeply intertwined in national liberation and other movements, from Vietnam to Angola to Algeria and beyond. However, by the end of the 20th century, Marxist and other socialist thought often seemed dated in a world with a waning Soviet bloc and an emerging neoliberal consensus. Postcolonial theory, itself often in conversation with Marxist thought, offered new understandings of liberation and emancipation. https://bit.ly/3b2JATe
Radical Kinship: Solidarity & Political Belonging | Free · Online event | Apr 22, 2021 12:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada) | By Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at NYU and Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU | a panel discussion with Lisa Duggan, Che Gossett, Shellyne Rodriguez, & Helga Tawil Souri, & moderated by Layal Ftouni | This panel explores contemporary debates on solidarity and coalitional politics that are instrumental to conceptualizing political subjectivity, collectivity and belonging in our current political conjuncture. Engaging with questions of intersectionality, afro-pessimism, and Marxism, this session invites speakers to address the urgency of political affinities (comradeship, radical kinship) that can activate new socio-political imaginaries and envision alternative foundations and horizons for coalitional politics. Register for this free Zoom webinar. https://bit.ly/3swngY2
Computer Mouse Conference | Presented by CultureHub | 29 & 30 April 5pm EDT | Through lectures, live performances, discussions, and more, conference participants explore the question: what does the computer mouse see? The Computer Mouse Conference 2021 will take place on a website. Organized and moderated by Emma Rae Bruml & Ashley Jane Lewis. With support from The Processing Foundation, The Media Archaeology Lab, and The Coding Train. All ticket sales directly support CultureHub and the conference participants. https://bit.ly/3rdGvWe
Call for Proposals: Digital Matters: Designing/Performing Agency for the Anthropocene. 25th annual conference of the DRHA (Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts), Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany, 5-7.09.2021. Taking place from September 5-7, 2021 in Berlin, the 25th Digital Research in Humanities and Arts conference invites contributions and interventions that focus on such transfers and interactions between digital and natural environments. Digital Matters takes on the challenge to explore new material and multi-species agencies, forms of embodiment, and interactions between the performing arts, the humanities, and the natural sciences that engage the sense of relationality and expanded scale that the Anthropocene affords. http://www.drha.uk/2021/call-for-paper/
Books, Papers & Publications
Aesthetics of the Commons | By Shusha Niederberger , Cornelia Sollfrank and Felix Stalder | What do a feminist server, an art space located in a public park in North London, a ‘pirate’ library of high cultural value yet dubious legal status, and an art school that emphasizes collectivity have in common? They all demonstrate that art can play an important role in imagining and producing a real quite different from what is currently hegemonic; that art has the possibility to not only envision or proclaim ideas in theory, but also to realize them materially. They are art in the sense that they place themselves in relation to (Western) cultural and art systems, developing discursive and aesthetic positions, but, at the same time, they are ‘operational’ in that they create recursive environments and freely available resources whose uses exceed these systems | Published by Diaphnes. https://bit.ly/3r4OFjr
Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies | By Winnie Soon and Geoff Cox | Aesthetic Programming explores the technical as well as cultural imaginaries of programming from its insides. It follows the principle that the growing importance of software requires a new kind of cultural thinking — and curriculum — that can account for, and with which to better understand the politics and aesthetics of algorithmic procedures, data processing and abstraction. It takes a particular interest in power relations that are relatively under-acknowledged in technical subjects, concerning class and capitalism, gender and sexuality, as well as race and the legacies of colonialism. Open Humanities Press. https://bit.ly/2ZYduBV
Some Ways of Making Nothing: Apophatic Apparatuses in Contemporary Art | By Curt Cloninger | What if all works of art were better understood as functioning apparatuses, entangling their human audiences in experiences of becoming? What if certain works of art were even able to throw the brakes on becoming altogether, making nothings rather than somethings? What would be the ethical value of making nothing, of stalling becoming; and how might such nothings even be made? Punctum Books. https://bit.ly/3b3tDMN
The Routledge Guidebook to Paine’s Rights of Man | By Frances A Chiu | Upon publication in 1791-92, the two parts of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man proved to be both immensely popular and highly controversial. An immediate bestseller, it not only defended the French revolution but also challenged current laws, customs, and government. The Routledge Guidebook to Paine’s Rights of Man provides the first comprehensive and fully contextualized introduction to this foundational text in the history of modern political thought, addressing its central themes, reception, and influence. Routledge. https://bit.ly/3b2Bees
Anthropocene islands: There are only islands after the end of the world | By David Chandler and Jonathan Pugh | Dialogues in Human Geography | Published March 1, 2021 | Many Anthropocene scholars provide us with the key take-home message that they are writing ‘after the end of the world’. Not because they are writing about the apocalypse, but because they are engaging the Anthropocene after the profound crisis of faith in Western modernity which has swept across academia in recent decades. […] In this article, we examine how the figure of the island as a liminal and transgressive space has facilitated Anthropocene thinking, working with and upon island forms and imaginations to develop alternatives to hegemonic, modern, ‘mainland’, or ‘one world’ thinking. Thus, whilst islands, under modern frameworks of reasoning, were reductively understood as isolated, backward, dependent, vulnerable, and in need of saving by others, the island is being productively re-thought in and for more recent Anthropocene thinking. Sage. https://bit.ly/3rb36mb
Gut Feelings: The Microbiome and Our Health | By Alessio Fasano and Susie Flaherty | Why the microbiome—our rich inner ecosystem of microorganisms—may hold the keys to human health. We are at the dawn of a new scientific revolution. Our understanding of how to treat and prevent diseases has been transformed by the knowledge of the microbiome—the rich ecosystem of microorganisms in and on every human. These microbial hitchhikers may hold the keys to human health. In Gut Feelings, Alessio Fasano and Susie Flaherty show why we must go beyond the older, myopic view of microorganisms as our enemies to a broader understanding of the microbiome as a parallel civilization that we need to understand, respect, and engage with for the benefit of our own health. MIT Press. https://bit.ly/3kH8bjL
Reading ′Black Mirror′ – Insights into Technology and the Post–Media Condition (Media Studies (COL)) | By German Duarte and Justin Michael Battin | Very few contemporary television programs provoke spirited responses quite like the dystopian series Black Mirror. This provocative program, infamous for its myriad apocalyptic portrayals of humankind’s relationship with an array of electronic and digital technologies, has proven quite adept at offering insightful commentary on a number of issues contemporary society is facing. This timely collection draws on innovative and interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks to provide unique perspectives about how confrontations with such issues should be considered and understood through the contemporary post-media condition that drives technology use. https://bit.ly/3sDUEMB
The Politics of Dating Apps: Gender, Sexuality, and Emergent Publics in Urban China | By Lik Sam Chan | An examination of dating app culture in China, across user demographics—straight women, straight men, queer women, and queer men. The open-access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing. In this exploration of dating app culture in China, Lik Sam Chan argues that these popular mobile apps are not merely a platform for personal relationships but also an emerging arena for gender and queer politics. Chan examines the opportunities dating apps present for women’s empowerment and men’s performances of masculinity, and he links experiences of queer dating app users with their vulnerable position as sexual minorities. He finds that dating apps are both portals to an exciting virtual world of relational possibilities and sites of power dynamics that reflect the heteronormativity and patriarchy of Chinese society. MIT Press. https://bit.ly/2MK3R6R
AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams | By Joanna Zylinska | Can computers be creative? Is algorithmic art just a form of Candy Crush? Cutting through the smoke and mirrors surrounding computation, robotics and artificial intelligence, Joanna Zylinska argues that, to understand the promise of AI for the creative fields, we must not confine ourselves solely to the realm of aesthetics. Instead, we need to address the role and position of the human in the current technical setup – including the associated issues of labour, robotisation and, last but not least, extinction. Offering a critique of the socio-political underpinnings of AI, AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams raises poignant questions about the conditions of art making and creativity today. Open Humanities Press. https://bit.ly/3kyNg29
Articles, Interviews, Blogs, Presentations, videos
Beeple Brings Crypto to Christie’s | The artist’s brash riffs on the news have whipped up a frenzy of interest within the cryptocurrency scene | By Josie Thaddeus-Johns | Mike Winkelmann never used to call himself an artist. But that was before he made $3.5 million in a single weekend from selling his artworks. In December, he auctioned off multiple editions of three digital artworks, each priced at $969, and 21 unique works, most of which sold for about $100,000 each. It was only the second time he had put his art on sale. The digital artist, who goes by Beeple, has created a drawing every single day for the last 13 years. He started with pen and paper but now mostly uses computer software such as the program Cinema 4D. A two-week-long online auction of a composite of the first 5,000 days of the project at Christie’s, is the auction house’s first sale of solely digital artwork. It will also be the first time that Christie’s will accept payment in the cryptocurrency Ether – https://nyti.ms/300t4gj
On Language, Technology, and Power: Jennifer Chan in Conversation With Hiba Ali | New media artists Hiba Ali and Jennifer Chan discuss absurd performance, making artwork about work, and diasporic afterlives | Hyperallergic | They both talk about absurd performance, making artwork about work, and the challenges w/in diasporic communities in openly discussing the nuances of privilege and oppression. “Ali and I recently reconnected — we met six years ago while teaching sessionally at SAIC in Chicago, and stayed in touch — to discuss the motivations around absurd performance, making artwork about work, and the difficulties people of color face with openly discussing specific privileges and oppressions.” https://bit.ly/3rioCp4
Reimagining Black Art and Criminology: A New Criminological Imagination | By Martin Glynn | It is time to disrupt current criminological discourses which still exclude the perspectives of black scholars. Through the lens of black art, Martin Glynn explores the relevance black artistic contributions have for understanding crime and justice. Through art forms including black crime fiction, black theatre, and black music, this book brings much-needed attention to marginalized perspectives within mainstream criminology. Refining academic and professional understandings of race, racialization, and intersectional aspects of crime, this text provides a platform for the contributions to criminology which are currently rendered invisible. Bristol University Press. https://bit.ly/2Pez1nC
Episode IV. Arcadian Dreams: AI-Generated Worlds from the Sublime to the Beautiful | By Filippo Lorenzin | “The Uncanny Valley” is Flash Art’s new digital column offering a window on the developing field of artificial intelligence and its relationship to contemporary art. When artists ask an AI to build an entirely digital world, implicit is the demand that it be appreciable to a human public. In the process, the AI discards variables that are unsuitable — elements that won’t be detectable to human senses or that don’t fulfil the narrative demands of its makers. Landscapes generated by AI are thus affected by the requirement for public enjoyment and cannot entirely recapture nature’s unpredictability. https://bit.ly/3uKjsEm
Reset or rewild: perspectives on future arts infrastructures | By Dr. Susan Jones | Pandemic conditions have shaken the foundations and functions of the art infrastructure to the core, illustrating the baked-in flaws while exposing the polar perspectives on conditions for a healthy, productive arts ecology in future. There was little emergency funding or practical support for individual freelance artists, and an apparent failure to acknowledge their dire situation after being hit by a dual economic and emotional tsunami. Although ensuring equality in the workforce is a beacon principle for the funded arts, staffers in art institutions were able to benefit from furlough while compounding the precarity of freelance artists was somehow socially acceptable to funders and most arts funded institutions. https://bit.ly/2O702ca
The model of an “inverted tree” for researching subcultures | By Frederick Lawrence. Expert with over 40 years of experience in investigating subcultures. Subcultures as a phenomenon are not unvarying, subcultures have changed and retransformed in fluctuating environments; some of them disappeared, but new forms arose or became a synthesis of pre-existing ones. Any study of social development requires a particular model first, that could guide the researcher in his work by acting as a “navigation system” in the course of his intellectual work. https://bit.ly/3r3P1Hg
Podcast – News From Where We Are # 3 – The Radical Friendship Series | In 2021 Furtherfield celebrates 25 years of radical friendship. We revisit and open up conversations with some of the fascinating and radical people with whom we have worked and collaborated through the years from the Internet to post-digital contexts. They are changing culture, their lives, and the lives of their communities. Filippo Florenzin interviews artist and independent, Mexican Curator, Doreen Rios. Ruth Catlow reads her foreword for the DisCO manifesto publication, edited by Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel. Marc Garrett interviews artist Kate Southworth about her work with Art and Witchcraft. Stewart Home reads from his recent book edited by Home – Denizen of the Dead published by Cripplegate Books. Experimental, Avant-Folk by artists Alan Sondheim & Azure Carter, from their latest, excellent album Plaguesong. And more… http://bit.ly/3tuCIp6
Poly Styrene documentary: Celeste Bell on her mother’s incredible, complex legacy | The daughter of multi-layered punk icon Poly Styrene hopes her new film will give her mum the respect she deserves. As Bell says in a new, extraordinary documentary about her mother’s life and work, “it took an incredible amount of strength for my mum to walk away from X-Ray Spex,” a band at “the height of their success”. But as Bell adds: “Poly Styrene had to die so that Marianne Elliott could survive.” How she got to that point, and the various rebirths that followed, is all unpacked in the film, narrated by Bell, who co-directed it alongside Paul Sng. The Evening Standard. https://bit.ly/2ZZo1gc
The Secret Life of a Coronavirus | An oily, 100-nanometer-wide bubble of genes has killed more than two million people and reshaped the world. Scientists don’t quite know what to make of it | By Carl Zimmer | At the same time, the pandemic etched a scar across humanity that will endure for decades. More than 2.4 million people have died so far from Covid-19, and millions more have suffered a severe illness. In the United States, life expectancy fell by a full year in the first six months of 2020; for Black Americans, the drop was 2.7 years. The International Monetary Fund predicts that the global economy will lose over $22 trillion between 2020 and 2025. UNICEF is warning that the pandemic could produce a “lost generation.” At the center of these vast shocks is an oily bubble of genes just about 100 nanometers in diameter. Coronaviruses are so small that 10 trillion of them weigh less than a raindrop. https://nyti.ms/2NIXktI
‘Ari Up just kicked the door down’ | Neneh Cherry and others reflect on the legacy of the Slits and New Age Steppers singer as previously unheard songs are released | By Helen Barrett | I’ll never forget the first time I saw Ari Up,” says singer-songwriter Neneh Cherry. “She had her locks tied up, this huge pillar on her head, and she was wearing a tutu and walking on ballet pointe shoes. I was barely 15, really impressionable, and it was instant love.” Less well-known is the music Up recorded alongside and afterward — early cross-cultural experiments in sound and genre, collaborations with reggae artists, and immersion in Jamaican music that would take her from south London to Kingston and the jungles of Indonesia and Belize. Financial Times. February – https://on.ft.com/3dSv56e
Main image by Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow 2020.
The FurtherList Archives
Furtherfield content is published
