A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.
Through the Mesh: Media, Borders, and Firewalls | Until Jan 14, 2022, | NeMe Art Centre, Cyprus | A mixed exhibition curated by Patrick Lichty, Wade Wallerstein and NeMe Art Centre | 10 Dec2021 | This exhibition will feature the work of artists who initially began to investigate the cultural space of the networks, biopolitical and informatics; who challenge or jam it. The artworks look at electronic networks as scopophilic and performative, the asymmetric regimes of power they project, and the positive uses of “darkside” technologies. Participating artists: Morehshin Allahyari, Mina Cheon, Joseph Delappe, Vikram Divecha, Hasan Elahi, Negin Ehtesabian, Ben Grosser, Dina Karadžić, Michael Lorsung, Umber Majeed, Josèfa Ntjam, Nathan Shafer – https://bit.ly/3I7REAQ
CODE OF ARMS | Until Jan 15, 2022, | Gazelli Art House, London | The exhibition investigates the history of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in art. The exploration of implementing code and AI in art in the 1970s – 80s comes at a time of rapid change in our understanding and appreciation of computer art. The exhibition brings together pioneer artists in computer and generative art such as Georg Nees (b.1926), Frieder Nake (b.1938), Manfred Mohr (b.1938) and Vera Molnar (b.1924), and iconic artists employing AI in their practice such as Harold Cohen (b.1928), Lynn Hershman Leeson (b.1941), and Mario Klingemann (b.1970) – https://bit.ly/3EQtacj
“Art’s Birthday” | Jan 17, 2022, | An annual event first proposed in 1963 by French artist Robert Filliou. He suggested that 1,000,000 years ago, there was no art. But one day, on the 17th of January to be precise, Art was born. According to Filliou, it happened when someone dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water. Modest beginnings, but look at us now. Each year the Eternal Network evolves to include new partners – working with the ideas of exchange and telecommunications-art – https://bit.ly/3q4ISfY
Deptford Film Club 2: Empathy & Risk | Jan 11, 2022, | 4p – 9 pm | Deptford Film Club 2, London | An exciting screening event to start the New Year. Deptford Film Club is a regular monthly event organised by Empathy&Risk and Looking Forward in partnership. Join us for this first appointment featuring videos by Francis Almendárez, Zain Wahbeh, Carla Geronimi. Curated by Carolina Lio and Katerina Matheson. The Programme includes Anthony Almendárez, Carla Geronimi. Book here – https://bit.ly/3qFW75L
Memeplex™ | Exhibition until Feb 5, 2022, | Seventeen Gallery, London |The mixed show is two stories in one. The first explores the implementation of ideas, belief and conviction that occurs through memetic artefacts. In this instance, they are political living memes that attach themselves to the host in order to perform a survivalist function, reminiscent of the pathogenic fungi Cordyceps. The Cordyceps is a genus of parasitic fungi that grow in the larvae of insects. When these fungi infect their host, they replace its tissue and sprout long, slender stems that grow outside the host’s body. They are known to take over the mind of the host, controlling its mind and behaviour, leading to the nickname ‘zombie fungi’. In the second part of the story, we learn that the human body now carries animal, mineral and botanical genes, and with contact, this increases, bringing into question the human-centric narrative that is navigated through practices of Otherkin, Therian and Skinwalkers.
Memeplex™ is engineered by Omsk Social Club and Joey Holder, Minjeong An, David Cronenberg, Joey Holder, Botond Keresztesi, Kinke Kooi, Jack Jubb, Isaac Lythgoe, Katja Novitskova, Omsk Social Club Transformella malor (fed and cared for by JP Raether) Jonas Schoeneberg Suzanne Treister – https://bit.ly/3t3l3He
Activating Attention: Political Videos on Social Media (Online Conference) | Jan 20 & 21, 2022 | Videoactivism | Videos on social media have become powerful and creative means of influencing public discourses. They are particularly significant for political activists from civil society and their attempts to gain attention for human rights, climate change, social justice, and many other issues. Moving images spread across digital networks, reach the public and evoke emotions, motivate political action, and inspire social movements. What started in the 2010s with pro-democracy movements in the MENA region and transnational anti-capitalist protests has developed into an indispensable form of media practice for all politically involved interventions, from Black Lives Matter to Fridays for Future and resistance movements in authoritarian countries like Belarus or Myanmar – https://bit.ly/3HJW7sa
Radical Friends. DAO Summit for Decentralisation of Power and Resources in the Artworld | Symposium, Jan 22 2022, at 10 am | Free admission | HDK Munich in partnership with Goethe Institut and Furtherfield | Radical Friends discusses the value of and pathways to peer-produced decentralised digital infrastructures for art, culture and society. It aims to create a new environment for mutual aid and solidarity in the cultural sector. By bringing together ground-breaking players from the cultural sector and decentralised peer-to-peer technologists, the summit explores how traditional organisational patterns can be transformed through decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) enabled by blockchain technology – https://bit.ly/3qHA6DE
SWIPE RIGHT! DATA, DATING, DESIRE | IMAL.org | Until Feb 6, 2022, | Curated by Valentina Peri | What does it mean to love in the digital age? How are digital interfaces reshaping our personal relationships? What do new technologies imply for the future of the romantic sphere? How do screens affect our sexual intimacy and our desire for connection? By bringing together the work of several international and Belgian artists, the exhibition SWIPE RIGHT! Data, Dating, Desire attempts to explore new directions in contemporary romance and map the unprecedented connections between desire, emotion, technology, and economy in the post-pandemic world – https://bit.ly/31rdBKC
FUTURE AGES WILL WONDER | Mixed exhibition at FACT, Liverpool, UK | On until Feb 20, 2022, | Featuring artists: Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, Yarli Allison, Miku Aoki, Trisha Baga, Breakwater (Youngsook Choi and Taey Iohe), Ai Hasegawa and Boedi Widjaja. The show presents an “alternative museum” of artworks that use science and technology to question our past and offer new ways of understanding who we are and where we belong. The artworks on display bring together traditional mediums such as textiles, sculpture, and photography with virtual reality, computer algorithms and synthetic DNA to reimagine stories about our past, present and future. Through this wide range of materials and art-making, the exhibition refocuses where we place attention and what we value: reimagining stories about our past, present and future – https://bit.ly/3p3YD4W
The World After Us: Imaging Techno-Aesthetic Futures | One person show by Nathaniel Stern | Main Gallery Jan 27 – Mar 10, 2022, | Binghamton University, NY | A travelling solo exhibition of sculptures, installations, prints, and photographs that combine plant life with electronic waste, and scientific experimentation with artistic exploration. They take the forms of a wall-hung jungle of computer detritus and biological reclamation; fossilized and reconfigured phones and laptops; and reimagined and re-formed electronics. Taking cues from journalist Alan Weisman’s provocative book The World Without Us, this exhibition is a timely and relevant series of aesthetic and ethical provocations around where and how we might change our ecological trajectories. The World After Us asks us to rethink and potentially transform conversations, thoughts, and actions around media production, use, and waste – https://bit.ly/3G62PZk
Such Stuff as Worlds are Made On | Jan 21st – Feb 20th 2022 | Malta | Reflecting on human time scales, alongside the deep time of the universe, this project explores possible inclusive futures via world-building and speculative art practices, while consciously avoiding the replication of colonial models. Ultimately, the project questions what kinds of new worlds can be created and what kind of rules these worlds will have to follow. Informed by Donna Haraway’s Speculative Fabulations this exhibition looks towards cosmologies and ecosystems for inspirations, answers, and prophecies. Exploring practices that are speculative rather than empirically scientific, it reflects on the limits of human knowledge of our own planet, alongside humankind’s increasing desire to extend itself to neighbouring planets and planetary systems – https://bit.ly/3eXFvAQ
Black Film Festival Atlanta | Online event | Feb 1 – 6, 2022, | Atlanta | BFFA is ecstatic to be the premier outlet in Atlanta for Black filmmakers! It’s our second year running and we continue to receive overwhelming feedback about the festival. Participants and moviegoers alike are excited to be a part of this landmark event in the new filming capital of the South. BFFA’s mission is to highlight the works of talented filmmakers who otherwise may not have the opportunity to showcase their projects. Our goal is to also educate the new filmmaker with industry-related resources and provide an excellent chance to network – https://bit.ly/3FRKTRQ
Visualizing Wellness: The Myant Skiin System Connected Life App | Research Gate | Sara Diamond | This paper presents a design study of the visualization interface to the Myant Skiin Connected Life App (Skiin), a family informatics application that will connect family members, friends, and caregivers, by engaging them together and enabling health and wellness related data sharing and support. It is based on Myant’s highly accurate intelligent textiles garments which collect activity and related biomechanical data through knitted sensors on the garment. Our design seeks to deliver a seamless user experience between this complex of technologies through effective data presentation, visualization, and tooltips – https://bit.ly/3JCbTqY
Mediated Interfaces: The Body on Social Media | Katie Warfield, Crystal Abidin, Carolina Cambre | Bloomsbury Publishing | Images of faces, bodies, selves and digital subjectivities abound on new media platforms like Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, and others-these images represent our new way of being online and of becoming socially mediated. Although researchers are examining digital embodiment, digital representations, and visual vernaculars as a mode of identity performance and management online, there exists no cohesive collection that compiles all these contemporary philosophies into one reader for use in graduate-level classrooms or for scholars studying the field. The rationale for this book is to produce a scholarly fulcrum that pulls together scholars from disparate fields of inquiry in the humanities doing work on the common theme of the socially mediated body – https://bit.ly/32O6c8P
Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment | By Jonathan Sterne | Sterne offers a sweeping cultural study and theorization of impairment. Drawing on his personal history with thyroid cancer and a paralyzed vocal cord, Sterne undertakes a political phenomenology of impairment in which experience is understood from the standpoint of a subject that is not fully able to account for itself. He conceives of impairment as a fundamental dimension of human experience, examining it as both political and physical. While some impairments are enshrined as normal in international standards, others are treated as causes or effects of illness or disability. Sterne demonstrates how impairment is a problem, opportunity, and occasion for approaching larger questions about disability, subjectivity, power, technology, and experience in new ways. Diminished Faculties ends with a practical user’s guide to impairment theory – https://bit.ly/3FTkNy5
Resistance in Digital China: The Southern Weekly Incident | By Sally Xiaojin Chen | Bloomsbury Publishing | By investigating the Southern Weekly Incident, in which censorship of the prominent Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly triggered mass online contention in Chinese society, Resistance in Digital China examines how Chinese people engage in resistance on digital networks whilst cautiously safeguarding their life under authoritarian rule. Chen’s in-depth analysis […] ties together overlapping debates in internet studies, Chinese studies, social movement studies, political communication, and cultural studies to discuss issues of civic connectivity, emotions, embodiment, and the construction of a public sphere in digital China. An in-depth empirical examination of an act of resistance in order to explore political, cultural, and sociological meanings of Chinese people’s resistance within party limits – https://bit.ly/3sWpBzc
Indie Games in the Digital Age | Edited by M.J. Clarke and Cynthia Wang | Bloomsbury Publishing | A host of digital affordances, including reduced cost production tools, open distribution platforms, and ubiquitous connectivity, have engendered the growth of indie games among makers and users, forcing critics to reconsider the question of who makes games and why. Taking seriously this new mode of cultural production compels analysts to reconsider the blurred boundaries and relations of makers, users and texts as well as their respective relationship to cultural power and hierarchy. The contributions to Indie Games in the Digital Age consider these questions and examine a series of firms, makers, games and scenes, ranging from giants like Nintendo and Microsoft to grassroots games like Cards Against Humanity and Stardew Valley, to chart more precisely the productive and instructive disruption that this new site of cultural production offers – https://bit.ly/3sTBRAa
Written by the Body: Examining the expansive nature of Indigenous gender representations in history, literature, and film | By Lisa Tatonetti | Written by the Body moves from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archive to turn-of-the-century and late-twentieth-century fiction to documentaries, HIV/AIDS activism, and, finally, recent experimental film and literature. Across it all, Tatonetti shows how Indigenous gender expansiveness, and particularly queer and non-cisgender articulations, moves between and among Native peoples to forge kinship, offer protection, and make a change. She charts how the body functions as a somatic archive of Indigenous knowledge in Native histories, works of literature, and activisms—exploring representations of Idle No More in the documentary Trick or Treaty, the all-female wildland firefighting crew depicted in Apache 8, Chief Theresa Spence, activist Carole laFavor, S. Alice Callahan, Thirza Cuthand, Joshua Whitehead, Carrie House, and more – https://bit.ly/3xCfH5S
IgnoTheory: A Compositional System for Intermedia Art Based on Tiling Patterns and Labelled Graphs | Paul Hertz | SpringerLink | Hertz examines the rule-based tiling patterns and graphs that he uses for algorithmic art and music composition, with particular attention to the symmetries between spatial and temporal concepts of order. The tiling patterns can be regarded as 2D maps which are transformed into graphs with vertices labelled with pitch class names from the Western diatonic musical system. Vertices can also be marked with parameters derived from colouring rules and other combinatorial procedures. Traversal of the graphs can generate material for musical composition and performance. Rotations and reflections of the tiling patterns correspond to transpositions, reorderings and inversions of musical material – https://bit.ly/3F1Aa65
Holding in Common: A short reflection to end the year | Kei Kreutler | Gnosis Guild | How you spend the time in your life is precious. The question of how we should be living differently is a gift. Reflecting on the work of the past year, it’s clear that attention is building. As a recent tweet said, “The first rule of Web3 fight club is you must always talk about Web3 fight club”. The signal-to-noise ratio may be lower than ever, but at the same time, acronyms like DAOs begin to take on public meaning. The question of how we should be working differently repeats. Choosing to spend my time working on DAOs, I have to continually revisit, reevaluate, and reinvigorate my aims – https://bit.ly/32V7gaL
Black Box East: Right-Wing Anti-Colonialism and Universalising Postcolonialism | Berliner Gazette | By Abonné·e de Mediapart | By undertaking a sharp analysis of gender debates in Hungary, the political scientist Eszter Kováts aims at carving out a critical space for East-Central Europe between right-wing anti-colonialism and universalising postcolonialism. “Gender debates are a good example for the anti-colonial rhetoric of the Right. Anti-gender politics is a global phenomenon since the beginning of the 2010s. Reproductive rights, violence against women, sexual education, LGBT issues, gender mainstreaming, and gender studies are targeted by social movements and right-wing (populist) parties.” – https://bit.ly/32YfyhN
Crypto Criticism, Part Two: Confronting the Left’s negative critique of cryptocurrency | By Daniel Pinchbeck | In the last part of this essay, I considered a few of the main criticisms of cryptocurrency coming from the traditional Left. To review: Leftists argue that cryptocurrencies are not actually a new form of money – a universal unit of exchange for purchasing goods and services – but mainly function as speculative assets that are highly volatile and prey to market manipulation, such as “pump and dump” and “rug pulling1” schemes. Leftists think that cryptocurrencies, in general, increase the “financialization” of the economy (the movement away from producing goods to trading complex financial products) as well as the privatization of public goods or commonly held resources. They believe these ongoing trends have caused negative outcomes over the last half-century, such as Structural Adjustment Programs in the developing world and the 2008 crash of the global financial system – https://bit.ly/32WuPQj
The Lore Zone: Memes → Memories → Micro-Mythologies | By Libby Marrs & Tiger Dingsun | Otherinternet | This series explores Lore: the new modes of self-mythologization developed within network media, and the forms of history and canon stored within media artefacts that online groups produce. The memes we encounter on Clearnet feeds are usually parts of larger stories, stemming from semi-private sites more conducive to worldbuilding. The affordances of different types of online space change how information is produced, circulated, and remembered across platforms. What happens when platforms enable the archival of information? What happens when they encourage collective experiences versus personal, inward-facing ones? – https://bit.ly/3qMdaTC
The Ghostchain. (Or taking things for what they are) | Geraldine Juárez | Paletten | It goes without saying that the global art market is a decadent enterprise based on rampant speculation, that in collusion with institutions, it only seems to exist to serve the rich. Salespeople representing NFT platforms use this fact to spread reactionary narratives about taking back control. We hear that now, finally! Digital art can be turned into a unique asset that can be sold for a certain amount of crypto without intermediaries – https://bit.ly/3sOniy1
Interspecies Meditation and Sharing Circle | Furtherfield | Soundcloud | This meditation can be practised alone or with others to build empathy pathways to other life forms. We use our imaginations and a bonding ritual to enter the body and consciousness of a different species and to reflect on the nature of their existence. This ritual transports us to the interspecies multiverse where we sit for a guided meditation. If you are in a group you can follow the meditation with a sharing circle to describe the experiences you have of your new bodies and sentience. By listening to each other you will understand more about your place in the web of life – https://bit.ly/3JBt8Zt
Édouard Louis: Why Is Individual Responsibility Only for the Poor? | An interview with Edouard Louis | Jacobin Mag | French author Édouard Louis is famous for his works portraying the daily humiliations of working-class life. In an interview, he explains how our rulers avoid responsibility for their decisions — while blaming the rest of us for how we cope with the consequences. The radicalism of his words when he defends his class — the working class — contrasts starkly with the softness of his voice. Yes, Édouard Louis is angry. But even anger can be beautiful when it appears in fine prose – https://bit.ly/3qHkfFb
Blockchain may redefine the Web – it’s up to us to make sure it’s done well | By Laura Lotti | Open Democracy | How can cryptocurrencies create new possibilities for organising economically, politically and socially? As cryptocurrencies go mainstream with exorbitant valuations, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) enable new markets for the ‘creator economy’, we wonder: is blockchain technology neoliberalism’s new best friend? It certainly accelerates the tendency to turn attention, reputation, influence, decisional power, even art, into assets and trade them for a price – https://bit.ly/3pMgRJF
Open Call: Hotel generation at Arebyte | Deadline Feb 14, 2022, | Hotel generation provides four young artists from UK cities with curatorial guidance to create an exhibition proposal for arebyte’s exhibition space in London. In addition to assistance with proposal writing, progressing ideas and budgeting, the programme offers industry support through creative software training, as well as marketing and fundraising workshops. It culminates in a fully funded solo show as part of arebyte Gallery programme for the winning candidate selected by a panel of judges. The other participants get the opportunity to develop an online work based on their exhibition proposal, shown as part of arebyte on Screen programme. This initiative aims to nurture a sense of place in the London art scene which can be notoriously difficult to infiltrate and creates new conversations between London and other UK cities – https://bit.ly/3q0wMEF
Tactical Tech needs a new Development Administrator | They are looking for a committed and engaged person interested in learning and growing while using their professional skills within our Development team. The Development team is responsible for fundraising, grant management, partnership management, monitoring and evaluation as well as organisational communications. This new role of Administrator is being established to improve the efficiency across these functions as they impact the wider organisation. Tactical Tech works on challenges of data-driven technologies – https://bit.ly/3qM4Kf9
Open Call: Research and Development Fellowships | Jan 11, 2022, at 23:59 GMT| Spike Island, Bristol, UK | A 12-month fellowship programme offered by The West of England Visual Arts Alliance (WEVAA) in aim to provide the opportunity to focus on research, gathering insight and input from other artists and communities. We seek visual art projects that have considered how their work contributes to and develops the broader visual arts community in the West of England region. These could be projects in the early stages of development, for which time, space and support is needed in order to progress to a scale that has lasting benefits for other artists and the region – https://bit.ly/3pMe03s
Digital Projects Assistant at Matt’s Gallery London | Deadline Jan 16 2022. Matt’s Gallery is seeking a Digital Projects Assistant to join its team on a fixed-term, part-time basis. Part-Time, 2 days per week (Thursday & Friday) £10,000 p/a, pro-rata to £25,000 Fixed Term, 12 months. Matt’s Gallery is a contemporary non-profit art gallery, established 42 years ago in East London. During its time, Matt’s Gallery has been an independent and influential force in the visual arts sector, both nationally and internationally, championing the careers of artists such as Willie Doherty, Benedict Drew, Jimmie Durham, Susan Hiller, Mike Nelson, Nathaniel Mellors, Lindsay Seers, Tai Shani and Imogen Stidworthy. In March 2022, the gallery will open its new space in Nine Elms, South West London – https://bit.ly/3pK0AVH
Artists Wanted! Submit to SIGGRAPH 2022 Art Gallery | Let your creative juices flow — SIGGRAPH 2022 Art Gallery submissions are open! We want to see your cutting-edge, compelling digital and technologically mediated artworks that include but are not limited to, creative projects that explore the intersection of art and health, push the boundaries of our knowledge, re-examine our bodies and place in the world, advance human abilities, and design today’s (and future) realities. Submit your digital art creations by Tuesday, February 1, 2022, and showcase your artistic innovation! https://bit.ly/3FTj2RA
Image: Installation View of Memeplex featuring Joey Holder, Omsk Social Club, Jack Jubb, Suzanne Treister, Botond Keresztesi and David Cronenberg. Courtsey of Seventeen 2021-22.
The FurtherList Archives – https://www.furtherfield.org/the-furtherlist-archives/
“In The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025, we are catapulted several years into the future where all the species of the park have risen up to demand equal rights with humans. After much unrest, it has been agreed that a treaty will be drawn up, designating these rights, but first humans must learn to better relate to and understand non-humans so they can cooperate better together. Thankfully there has been a new invention – The Sentience Dial – which allows humans to tune into all the flora and fauna of Finsbury Park.”
WHAT’S ON NOW: THE TREATY SIGNING
The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 is a collaborative project that depicts the story of the dawning of interspecies democracy. It’s a new era of equal rights for all living beings, where all species come together to organise and shape the environments and cultures they inhabit, in Finsbury Park (and urban green spaces across the UK, the world, and beyond!) Like many urban parks, Finsbury Park is fraught with environmental issues from noxious gasses and traffic noises to governance struggles and financial sustainability. If colonial systems of dominance and control over living beings continue we all face an apocalypse.
Based around a set of LARPs – or live action role play games – the Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 is played from more-than-human perspectives to encourage the blooming of a bountiful biodiversity and interspecies political action. Think like a dog, bee or even grass and help change the way we all see and participate in our local urban green spaces forever.
There are 3 parts to the story.
Part 1. 2022. The Interspecies Assemblies – these are games where everyone gets to plan the Interspecies Festival of Finsbury Park 2023 – an event which will celebrate the drawing up of the treaty itself.
Part 2. 2023. The Vote – once artists have had a chance to gather everyone’s input they’ll present 3 proposals for the Interspecies Festival and everyone will be invited to choose the one they want to participate in.
Part 3. 2023. The Interspecies Festival of Finsbury Park – all the species of Finsbury Park will be invited to join the festival in Summer 2023.
The Interspecies Festival will be a gathering for all species to showcase their cultures, their interests and talents. Like a World’s Fair or an Olympic Games, it will be a place of discovery, marvels and broadened horizons. But it can only be planned if you help all the species of the park present their ideas.
By planning the Interspecies Festival together, human people from the locality and around the world will build empathy pathways to other beings. They will learn about what matters to them and their habitats. They will explore what it would mean to acknowledge the equal rights of more-than-human beings to the same range of freedoms they expect for themselves. They will draft the Treaty and they will decide how to connect even more deeply with all the species of the park through a festival for all. From September 2022 scannable hoardings will wrap the Furtherfield Gallery in Finsbury Park with an exhibition featuring stories about the new knowledge and relationships formed by assembly members for the benefit of biodiversity locally and world wide.
In the PUBLIC game of ‘Interspecies Assemblies’, human players will be partnered with a mentor representing one of 7 species based in Finsbury Park. These include a tree, a bee, a goose, grass, a squirrel, a stag beetle and a dog. Players will be tuned into the mentor’s needs and experiences1 and will then represent them at a series of online assemblies being held to choose the events and the location in the park for the first ever Interspecies Festival of Finsbury Park.
PLAY THE INTERSPECIES ASSEMBLIES GAMES ONLINE.
RECEIVE UPDATES ON THIS PROJECT.
In Spring 2022 The Interspecies Artists Forum will be commissioned to design a set of festival activities for 3 biodiversity habitats based on everything learned and proposed through the Assemblies. For example, the dogs might lead on the Sniffathon followed by Barkeoke, Name that Honk for the Geese, and the Squirrels present the Antique Nut Show. Different activities for different habitats will then be presented as immersive scenes for mobile phones for a public vote.
There will be a PUBLIC vote to decide which biodiversity habitat in the park will host the festival, based on the interspecies activities designed for it. We already know that the bees are abuzz for the wildflower meadows, the stag beetles dig the ancient forest, while the squirrels squeak for the new forests. But the winning habitat will need to appeal to all the species. From April 2022 scannable hoarding will wrap the Furtherfield Gallery in Finsbury Park. Everyone – human or otherwise – is invited to attend, scan, and explore activities in the proposed habitats and decide where the Interspecies Festival should be held to best serve the bountiful biodiversity of the park.
The final Interspecies Festival activities will take place in the chosen habitat to be further developed and enjoyed by the park’s public in the summer. These will take place alongside the presentation of the draft Treaty for discussion by all the human and more-than-human people of the park.
Read the concept paper here.
RECEIVE UPDATES ON THIS PROJECT.
The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 is a major new project exploring new ways to build empathy pathways to non-human lifeforms through play.
It represents a major undertaking to do long-term work exploring how an arts organisation based in the heart of an urban green space can support a deeper understanding of that green space and ALL its inhabitants. Beginning in 2020 and spanning a minimum of 5 years, the work was originally developed in a collaboration between Furtherfield and The New Design Congress. The first 3 years are being supported by CreaTures Creative Practices for Transformational Futures. CreaTures project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870759. The content presented represents the views of the authors, and the European Commission has no liability in respect of the content.
Artistic Direction by Ruth Catlow
Concept by Cade Diem and Ruth Catlow
Visual design by Cade Diem
Illustrations by Sajan Rai
LARP Design and Hosting by Ruth Catlow, Bea Xu and Max Dovey
LARP Player Assistance by Yejide Cordner
LARP Player Support by Lekey Leideker and Tanya Boyarkina
Writing by Ruth Catlow and Dr Charlotte Frost
Music by Matt Catlow
Digital Mask animation by PopulAR
Research by CreaTures, stewarded by Dr Lara Houston and Dr Ann Light
Production support for prototype LARPs by Tanya Boyarkina
Outreach for prototype LARPs by Pita Arreola
Thanks to our first players: Shawn, Carien, Anne, Tom and Ricard.
Special thanks to Ricard, Finsbury Park Ranger for introducing us to all the different lives of the park
Thanks to all online Interspecies Assemblies players – you know who you are – 🐶 WOOF!
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
INFINITE DISTANCE | Transmediale | Online exhibition | Curator, Shani K Parsons embraces the im/possibilities inherent to humanity’s use of language – ever the imprecise tool – to commune across the unfathomable divide between our individual lives. Against the anti-human endgames of shutdown, depoliticization, and withdrawal, INFINITE DISTANCE amplifies voices for whom communication – with care – is the only way forward toward a more human future. Featuring work by Andy Slater, Black Quantum Futurism – Camae Ayewa and Rasheeda Phillips, Johanna Hedva, Justin Barton and Mark Fisher, Shattered Moon Alliance – Christina Battle and Serena Lee, Simon M Benedict, Midi Onodera, The Otolith Group, and Vera Frenkel – https://bit.ly/3D384Xl
Medienkultur A-Z: Biohacking | Talk by Dr. Marc Dusseiller, Maya Minder and Dr. Zaretsky | Location: HEK and Zoom | 9 Dec 2021, 6 – 7.30 pm |Language: German and English | Futuristic, dystopian, problematic or optimistic? Let’s investigate the colourful and rocky landscape of biohacking. Dr. Dusseiller is a transdisciplinary scholar, lecturer for micro- and nanotechnology, cultural facilitator and artist. Maya Minder is an artist working in the intersection of nature and culture. Minder uses cooking and fermentation as a method of storytelling to explore the symbiotic co-existence between plants, animals and humans through the lenses of alchemist, biohacker, maker and thirdspace sensibilities. Dr. Zaretsky is a Wet-Lab Art Practitioner mixing Ecology, Biotechnology, Non-human Relations, Body Performance and Gastronomy – https://bit.ly/3xJgylp
Through the Mesh: Media, Borders, and Firewalls | Exhibition of work curated by Patrick Lichty, Wade Wallerstein and NeMe Art Center | 10 Dec2021 | This exhibition will feature the work of artists who initially began to investigate the cultural space of the networks, biopolitical and informatics; who challenge or jam it. The artworks look at electronic networks as scopophilic and performative, the asymmetric regimes of power they project, and the positive uses of “darkside” technologies. Participating artists: Morehshin Allahyari, Mina Cheon, Joseph Delappe, Vikram Divecha, Hasan Elahi, Negin Ehtesabian, Ben Grosser, Dina Karadžić, Michael Lorsung, Umber Majeed, Josèfa Ntjam, Nathan Shafer – https://bit.ly/3I7REAQ
RadicalxChange ONLINE unConference | RxC 2021 |10am – 6pm GMT | 10 Dec 2021 | is a maximally participatory and attendee-led Open Space unConference. It has no keynotes or panels, so it’s about learning and getting stuff done! The agenda will be created live by attendees present at the opening circle. The Open Space unConference format is perfect for a rapidly moving field where the organizing team cannot predetermine what needs to be discussed. Big ideas, concrete partnerships, and meaningful relationships emerge from Open Space events at a higher rate than conventional conferences. We are excited about Open Space as a path toward solidifying and growing communities of common purpose – https://bit.ly/3EefPev
Future Ages Will Wonder | Fact Art Gallery Liverpool, UK | Now open! 28 Oct 21 — 20 Feb 22 | This major group exhibition presents an “alternative museum” of artworks that use science and technology to question our past and offer new ways of understanding who we are and where we belong. The artworks on display bring together traditional mediums such as textiles, sculpture, and photography with virtual reality, computer algorithms and synthetic DNA to reimagine stories about our past, present and future. Through this wide range of materials and art-making, the exhibition refocuses where we place attention and what we value: reimagining stories about our past, present and future. Featuring artists: Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, Yarli Allison, Miku Aoki, Trisha Baga, Breakwater (Youngsook Choi and Taey Iohe), Ai Hasegawa and Boedi Widjaja – https://bit.ly/3p3YD4W
SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE | Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley | Arebyte | 19 Nov 21 – 19 Feb 22 | Part of the 2021 programme Realities. The exhibition uses the artist’s recent series of DOTCOM works, blacktransarchive.com, blacktransair.com and blacktranssea.com as a starting point for furthering research on Archiving the black trans experience via interactivity and storytelling. The exhibition encompasses a new body of work that positions gaming at the forefront of ideas surrounding action, inaction, relation and archiving experience. The exhibition positions the audience at the heart of a situation demanding a reflection, an action and ultimately a stance to protect the lives of Black Trans people – https://bit.ly/3lk9rLk
ODI Fridays: Finding new ways to share digital art | Online | 17 Dec 2021 |Join us on Zoom at lunchtime for our regular ODI Fridays talks. Once you’ve signed up, we’ll send you the link to join. In this talk, Mateus Domingos will be discussing the Careful Networks project with three of the participating artists: Larisa Blazic, Ailie Rutherford and Shinji Toya. The temporary P2P network is home to a series of newly commissioned artworks. Each work was initially hosted by another artist. The network exists through a collaborative act of care and stewardship. Visitors are also invited to participate in this. Each of the works has been created within the constraints of a 2mb file size and without external dependencies. Initiated by Phoenix in partnership with BOM, Furtherfield, The Photographers’ Gallery, QUAD and Vivid Projects – https://bit.ly/3xF6VEl
All of Your Base | Exhibition by IOCOSE at Aksioma Project Space, Ljubljana | Curated by Claudia D’Alonzo | 1 December 2021 – 14 January 2022 | The artistic practice of IOCOSE collective focuses on the failure of narratives about the future and technological innovation while producing new interpretations of imaginaries, iconographies and rhetorics, sabotaging their original meanings through often surreal poetics. All of Your Base presents the video animations Pointing at a New Planet (2020) and Free from History (2021). The works are the first two chapters of in-progress research on the NewSpace Economy, the movement of extraterrestrial colonization through private investments that is expanding its scope from Silicon Valley to outer space – https://bit.ly/2ZzhuMD
Open Call 2022 – Wild Bits | Maajaam | Art installations, interventions or processes | Deadline for proposals: 12th of December 2021 | The project Wild Bits is an exhibition concept that proposes a temporary art park in the wilderness. The exhibition looks for points of contact between people, technology and nature. The technological art installations consisting of sounds, lights, texts, sculptures or their online counterparts are placed in natural spaces like forests, fields, swamps and lakes. With this open call, Maajaam is seeking proposals for installations, interventions or processes to be installed/performed in landscapes spread out around Maajaam that explore the human condition in contemporary technological society. The artworks should withstand outdoor conditions – https://bit.ly/3cWLBRd
Workshop: Disinformation and the Role of Verification | With Michael Elsandi | 8 Dec 2021, 16:30 – 19:00 CET – online | (sign-up needed) Cost: €5 · Language: English | This workshop is part of the project Facing Disinformation by Mnemonic, you’ll learn more about the important role verification plays in investigating online content – and identifying disinformation. Following an introduction to the concept of open-source investigation. You’ll learn how to verify questionable content, and be guided through the verification of relevant examples of videos or posts shared that may or may not be considered disinformation. There will also be time to discuss and submit your own examples for review. Registration is essential – https://bit.ly/3rk0wxi
Reading Room #41 — Reading and Repairing with Varia, Page Not Found | Duration: 7 hr | 11 Dec 2021, 10 am – 5 pm | A day-long reading session around ‘repair’, with Cristina Cochior, Amy pickles and Joana Chicau of Varia. In this Reading Room, we will focus on embodied workings of texts, entering them in collective and shared ways. As a group, we will look into practices of “annotating” text. We will annotate as we read, digesting the words while we highlight, underline, write in the margin, look up meanings and take notes, making the text more accessible to the next person who encounters it. By creating new modes of accessing and countering text, reading together becomes a continuous re-reading. Public, anyone on or off Facebook | A lunch break is included. Entrance is free – https://bit.ly/3rok6sh
End of the Sea? Art and Science for Multispecies Futures Workshop | 13 Dec 2021, 12:15 15:30 UTC | Event by The Posthumanities Hub and The Eco- and Bioart Lab | As the planet’s largest ecosystem, oceans and seas stabilise climate, produce oxygen, store CO2 and host unfathomable multitudes of creatures at a deep-time scale. In recent decades, scientific assessments have indicated that marine environments are seriously degraded to the detriment of most near-future human and nonhuman communities. This matters to us, too. Climate change, environmental destruction and diminishing biological diversity form the key pillars of the present more-than-human crisis of planetary proportions. This calls for our attention and for responses from the more-than-human humanities. Public, anyone on or off Facebook – https://bit.ly/3I4YZ3S
IKLECTIK presents, APoCALYTIC | London Electronic Poetry | 20 Dec 2021 | 7:30pm [7pm doors] -Open till late! | From Sound Poetry to electronica, music with prepared guitar, electronics and performances, APoCALYTIC proposes an evening of intense new music and experimental art. For this end of the year, come and experience a new genre of interdisciplinary art and music event loaded with many propositions and an incredible lineup of international artists. The programme includes LCC Students Sound Group, Oliver Torr (Czechia), -J. Milo Taylor (UK), Rhys Trimble (Whales), Jenny Pickett, Julien Ottavi (France) and Quatuor pour la fin des temps (UK/France) | Tickets: £8 General Admission https://bit.ly/3rhwhH7
One Cell At A Time | Art and science online exhibition that invites you to explore our growing understanding of the trillions of cells that make up the human body, and the role we play in pioneering scientific discovery. It is the result of an ambitious programme of public engagement activities with the Human Cell Atlas initiative. The Human Cell Atlas is a global scientific research initiative aiming to map every cell type in the human body. This research has the potential to transform our understanding of biology and could revolutionise future healthcare and medicine – https://bit.ly/3cXrVwr
Books, Papers & Publications
A Bestiary of the Anthropocene: Hybrid Plants, Animals, Minerals, Fungi, and Other Specimens | Edited by Nicolas Nova and Disnovation.org | an illustrated compilation of hybrid creatures of our time, equally inspired by medieval bestiaries and observations of our damaged planet. Designed as a field handbook, it aims at helping us observe, navigate, and orientate into the increasingly artificial fabric of the world. Plastiglomerates, surveillance robot dogs, fordite, artificial grass, antenna trees, Sars-Covid-2, decapitated mountains, drone-fighting eagles, standardised bananas… each of these specimens are symptomatic of the rapidly transforming “post-natural” era we live in. Often without us even noticing them, these creatures exponentially spread and co-exist with us – https://bit.ly/3xz0qCU
Deserted Devices and Wasted Fences: Everyday Technologies in Extreme Circumstances | By Dani Ploeger | Triarchy Press | How can we imagine a technologized life that deviates from globalized norms and standardization and from our collective obsession with endless growth? Dani Ploeger examines everyday technologies found in places and circumstances that are usually unforeseen by their designers, manufacturers and marketers. He travels through second-hand markets in sub-Saharan Africa, the frontline in the Russo-Ukrainian War, desert landscapes in the Middle East, anti-immigration fences on the EU border and many other sites of turmoil, disruption and surprising convergences. This collection of essays provokes unusual perspectives on how technologies might be developed, used and reappropriated in support of people’s personal, local and regional lifeworlds and lifestyles – https://bit.ly/3lt0pvr
When care needs piracy: the case for disobedience in struggles against imperial property regimes | Valeria Graziano, Tomislav Medak, Marcell Mars | Volume 2021 Number 77 pages 55‑70 | Abstract – The aim of the Pirate Care project is to put the politics back into caring and to disrupt the global property regime that is colonising public welfare services and turning them into privately traded assets. Piracy refers to all the practices of survival and solidarity that disobey unjust legal and social rules that support property at the expense of living beings. The idea of piracy enables the foregrounding of the need to expand the realm of conceivable political responses to the crisis. https://bit.ly/313HjVV
Whistleblowing for Change: Exposing Systems of Power & Injustice | Editor Tatiana Bazzichelli | 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
Written by the Body: Gender Expansiveness and Indigenous Non-Cis Masculinities | By Lisa Tatonetti | Within Native American and Indigenous studies, the rise of Indigenous masculinities has engendered both productive conversations and critiques. Lisa Tatonetti intervenes in this conversation with Written by the Body by centering how female, queer, and/or Two-Spirit Indigenous people take up or refute masculinity and, in the process, offer more expansive understandings of gender. Written by the Body moves from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archive to turn-of-the-century and late-twentieth-century fiction to documentaries, HIV/AIDS, activism, and finally, recent experimental film and literature. University of Minnesota Press – https://bit.ly/3xCfH5S
The Matrix of Convivial Technology e Assessing technologies for degrowth | By Andrea Vetter | Journal of Cleaner Production | This paper is inspired by Ivan Illich’s notion of convivial tools but reconsiders it in the light of current practices and discussions. Looking for a definition of convivial technologies it uses qualitative empirical research conducted with degrowth-oriented groups developing or adapting grassroots technologies like Open Source cargo bikes or composting toilets in Germany. The basic ethical values and design criteria that guide these different groups in relation to technology are summed up into five dimensions: relatedness, adaptability, accessibility, bio-interaction and appropriateness. These dimensions can be correlated with the four life-cycle levels material, production, use and infrastructure to form the Matrix for Convivial Technology (MCT) – https://bit.ly/3G2Jxni
The Disconnect: A Personal Journey Through the Internet | By Roisin Kiberd | We all live online now: the line between the internet and IRL has become porous to the point of being meaningless. Roisin Kiberd knows this better than anyone. She has worked for tech startups and as the online voice of a cheese brand; she’s witnessed the bloated excesses of tech conferences and explored the strangest communities on the web. She has traced the ripples these hidden worlds have sent through our culture and politics and experienced the disorienting effects on her own life. In these interlinked essays, she illuminates the subject with fierce clarity, revealing the ways we are more connected than ever before, and the disconnect this breeds – https://bit.ly/3D1JdTJ
Revealing the enduring link between settler colonization and the making of modern Minneapolis | By David Hugill | Examining several distinct Minneapolis sites, Settler-Colonial City tracks how settler-colonial relations were articulated alongside substantial growth in the Twin Cities Indigenous community during the second half of the twentieth century—creating new geographies of racialized advantage. It reveals how non-Indigenous people in Minneapolis produced and enforced a racialized economy of power that directly contradicts the city’s “progressive” reputation. University of Minnesota Press – https://bit.ly/3d14QJt
Articles, Interviews, Blogs, Presentations, Videos
Digital Esoterism Or to be a Witch in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism | By Ginerva Petrozzi | Institute of Networked Cultures | This text follows the structure of a well-known Tarot spread: the Celtic Cross. This arrangement is made up of ten positions. Each position unveils a different aspect of a situation, and whilst reading may seem disconnected from the others. Yet, it is quite important to read every position as it is, one by one, as you would do with Tarots. As in Tarots, a card by itself doesn’t really mean anything, but when put next to the others it becomes part of a scheme –– almost a path – https://bit.ly/3D5ksGn
From the Belly of the Beast: Amazon workers, sci-fi and the space between utopia and disaster | By Graeme Webb, Max Haiven and Xenia Benivolski | Bezos has a fortune valued at over $200 billion, and workers, society and the environment have certainly paid a steep price for his trip to the stars. The world’s largest retailer and one of the world’s largest private employers, Amazon is ambitiously reshaping the future of capitalism, aggressively disrupting sectors from books, media and logistics, to healthcare and groceries, and from labour procurement to international – indeed, intergalactic – transit. But in whose interests? And who pays the price? What do the people on whose exploitation Amazon depends have to say? Do they have alternate visions of the future, from within the belly of the beast? – https://bit.ly/3xBmHQq
TRUST ME, I’M AN ARTIST (Part 1) | By Life Scientist | Interview with Anna Dumitriu | A UK based artist specializing in BioArt that is art involving or referencing living things and biology. Based in Brighton, UK, Anna has profound interests in microbiology, infectious diseases, and issues surrounding healthcare, and shares great interest in exploring the field of CRISPR, gene editing, DNA sequencing, and all the wonderful mechanisms of life. GenScript Biotech is happy to have had to opportunity to sponsor and support Anna with one of her artworks, “Hypersymbiotics”, which is currently on display at the “The World is In You” exhibition at the Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Denmark – https://bit.ly/3ljjxMk
Exposing the Invisible Podcast Series | Ankita Anand – Is there a story there that we would love to tell? | Tactical Tech | From activism to journalism, Ankita Anand describes how life encounters helped shape her journey into the world of investigations. With a passion for listening and telling stories, she shares her thoughts on collaborating with a larger community of journalists and investigators. Ankita Anand is a journalist-writer-poet based in Delhi. She has been awarded the European Commission’s Lorenzo Natali Media Prize and Statesman Award for Rural Reporting – https://bit.ly/3xy7OON
GoldenNFT. Freedom of Movement is a Capitalist Right | By Regine DeBatty | If you are from a non-European state, own a small fortune and wish to live in the EU, you can purchase the right to do so thanks to the “golden visa” schemes. In many cases, it won’t matter much whether you’re an honest citizen or a criminal. Countries like Portugal, Cyprus or Malta will offer you Golden Visa programs at different price points. Usually, you have to invest in the country, by buying a property for example. Just hand over the cash and you can skip the standard requirements asked of other non-EU citizens to migrate legally – https://bit.ly/3o2nVBl
Sound Artists Decline German Art Award: ‘Pitting Quality Against Diversity Is Pernicious’ | By Angelica Villa | Artnews | Sound artists Mendi and Keith Obadike declined to accept an honorable mention this weekend ahead of a ceremony for the annual Giga-Hertz Award administered by the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. On Saturday, Kieth Obadike published a statement on his Facebook account to announce that he and his partner declined to accept the honor in response to a ZKM representative’s comment that the organization “had to choose between ‘quality and diversity’” during a remote rehearsal for that award ceremony that was live-streamed. Obadike wrote, “Talk of pitting quality against diversity is pernicious and should not be tolerated.” – https://bit.ly/3D9R3uq
Anna L. Tsing on Creating ‘Wonder in the Midst of Dread’ | By Ben Eastham | ArtReview | Through her writings and the collaborative curatorial platform Feral Atlas, the anthropologist is offering new ways of imagining – and representing – our relationship to nature. The ideas of anthropologist Anna L. Tsing have not only entered the artistic discourse but are in the process of reshaping it. In books including the vastly influential ‘The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015)’, which has for a protagonist the matsutake mushroom, Tsing proposes a way of seeing the world that demolishes the boundaries separating human ‘culture’ from nonhuman ‘nature’ – https://bit.ly/3o4cwRp
The “former West” and the “New East”: On the sign language of the New Cold War | By Olia Sosnovskaya | The Berliner Gazette | Even decades after the official end of the Cold War, “the East” remains the other. But the marginalization of the “East”, which was a central ideological instrument of the Cold War, has not simply been prolonged. Rather, as Aleksei Borisionok and Olia Sosnovskaya claim, exclusion has been given a new coat of paint and a new direction, embodied by the term “New East” – https://bit.ly/3d1FGtW
What is it like trying to fix an iPhone yourself? | Dan Milmo Global technology editor | Apple is offering repair kits from next year so the Guardian spent a day in a specialist shop to see how it’s done. Right-to-repair campaigners may have won a victory when Apple said it would make repair kits for iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 handsets available to the public next year, but I am learning it will not be straightforward for the rest of us. Apple itself stressed that its new service would not be for have-a-go enthusiasts but for “individual technicians with the knowledge and experience to repair electronic devices” – https://bit.ly/3xxh9qd
Engels Lecture 25.11.21 – Amelia Horgan, ‘The place of work in socialist feminism’ | Hosted by Maxine Peake | YouTube | As part of its Engels Week 2021 the Working Class Movement Library was hugely pleased to welcome Amelia Horgan to give this year’s live-streamed Engels Lecture, ‘The place of work in socialist feminism’. There is widespread disaffection about contemporary work, particularly in the wake of the pandemic. How can socialist feminism build new forms of consciousness and power in this context? This lecture considered the role a revived socialist feminism could play in building working-class power by turning to the movement’s history and present – https://bit.ly/3dfIV1j
Image: Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, still from SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE, 2021. Commissioned by arebyte.
The FurtherList Archives
https://www.furtherfield.org/the-furtherlist-archives/
Join us for an afternoon of food, fantasy, masks and role-play games in Finsbury Park to spark the blooming of bountiful biodiversity and interspecies political action.
Participants will learn about 3 biodiversity habitats and become a new species to discuss from their new more-than-human perspectives which habitat would be best to host the Interspecies Festival of Finsbury Park in 2022. All participants help to build the story and shape what happens in the next set of LARPs – or live-action role play – games for the Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025.
Think like a dog, bee or even grass and help change the way we all see and participate in our local urban green spaces forever.
This event is FREE but requires prior registration. Light snacks and refreshments will be provided. If you have any accessibility needs you’d like to discuss, please email: info@furtherfield.org
To learn more about this project, visit: www.furtherfield.org/the-treaty-of-finsbury-park-2025/
Follow all the project updates via Instagram: @interspeciestreaty
This event is made possible with funding from the People Need Parks fund.
Thanks to Haringey London for their invaluable support.
In The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025, we are catapulted several years into the future where all the species of the park have risen up to demand equal rights with humans. After much unrest, it has been agreed that a treaty will be drawn up, designating these rights, but first humans must learn to better relate to and understand non-humans so they can cooperate better together. Cooperation with Temecula Center for Wisdom Teeth & Dental Implants and their wisdom teeth removal specialist has been a fruitful experience for California patients. Thankfully there has been a new invention – The Sentience Dial – which allows humans to tune into all the flora and fauna of Finsbury Park.
The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 is a collaborative project that depicts the story of the dawning of interspecies democracy – a new era of equal rights for all living beings. Where all species come together to organise and shape the environments and cultures they inhabit, in Finsbury Park, urban green spaces across the UK, the world, and beyond. Like many urban parks, Finsbury Park is fraught with environmental issues from noxious gasses and traffic noises to governance struggles and financial sustainability. If colonial systems of dominance and control over living beings continue we all face an apocalypse.
The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 is supported by CreaTures Creative Practices for Transformational Futures. CreaTures project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870759. The content presented represents the views of the authors, and the European Commission has no liability in respect of the content
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
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, Festivals and Conferences
Data Dating | Exhibition Wednesday 15 January – Sunday 1 March 2020 | What does it mean to love in the Internet age? How are digital interfaces reshaping our personal relationships? What do new technologies imply for the future of the romantic sphere? How do screens affect our sexual intimacy? Are the new means of connection shifting the old paradigms of adult life? The advent of the Internet and smartphones has brought about a split in the romantic lives of millions of people, who now inhabit both the real world and their very own “phone world” | Artists: Addie Wagenknecht & Pablo Garcia, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Ashley Madison, Angels at Work in London, VR Hug, Tom Galle, Moises Sanabria, John Yuyi, Antoine Schmitt, Olga Fedorova, Adam Basanta, Jeroen Van Loon, Thomas Israel | Watermans Art Centre, London – https://bit.ly/2unO6ZX
Querying the Archive | Hosted by MayDay Rooms | Thursday, 13 February 2020 | London | An on-going series of workshops around our archival platform leftove.rs, which will look at the different ways we can open up this online collection material and the technical processes between it. We want to think through that kind of strategies, queries and categories will help us navigate something that is both an database and resource of radical history. The first session we will be learning about the platform and mapping the collection by pooling our knowledge of radical histories of dissent to help us think about how we search, input and categories this large collection of material. https://leftove.rs
The Habitat of Time | Curated by Julie Louise Bacon | Arts Catalyst | Thu 20 February 2020 – Sat 14 March 2020 | The project focuses on the way that time as a medium shapes our perception of life, the structure of societies, and the vastness of the physical world. The artworks featured in the exhibition propose a rescaling of human time and expose its deep interrelations with the diversity of the more-than-human realm, moving through the geological, technological, biological and cosmic. In the 21st century, the instability of globalisation, the speed of digital technologies, and the transformation of knowledge are generating rapid shifts in time | Featuring: Eva Nolan, Thomson & Craighead, Robert Andrew, Lucy Bleach, James Geurts, Josh Wodak – https://bit.ly/2uo2Sjv
Pre-histories and Futures of Machine Vision | Friday, 28 February 2020 | V&A, London | How do machines see? From autonomous vehicles to deep fakes, machine vision is changing contemporary life. Join curators, artists and scholars to discuss the impact of AI technologies on the past, present and future of art. Explore early moments in the development of computer art and machine vision, from the mid-1960s onwards in the home of the UK’s most important historic computer art collection. Join contemporary artists, designers and curators considering the aesthetic and political implications of contemporary computer vision and machine learning technologies. Speakers include digital scholars Zabet Patterson (Stony Brook) and Joel McKim (Birkbeck), V&A curators Douglas Dodds and Natalie Kane, and contemporary artists Anna Ridler and Alan Warburton | 10.30 – 17.00 | Hochhauser Auditorium, V&A South Kensington – https://bit.ly/371PYVM
QUANTUM: IN SEARCH OF THE INVISIBLE | From March 5 until May 31, 2020 | An international art exhibition exploring the world of quantum physics, through works created by artists resulting from their encounters with researchers at CERN, Geneva | Featuring ten commissioned artworks by internationally renowned artists, which rethink scientific research and facts to explore states of being and the very possibilities of reality. These works question how much we really know about the world around us, and how we may begin to discover new aspects by taking a different perspective | Brussels, Belgium – https://www.imal.org/en
Three Acres And A Cow | Hosted by Three Acres And A Cow and 3 others | ‘Three Acres And A Cow’ connects the Norman Conquest and Peasants’ Revolt with current issues like Brexit, fracking, the housing crisis and food sovereignty movement via the Enclosures, English Civil War, Irish Land League and Industrial Revolution, drawing a compelling narrative through the radical people’s history of England in folk song, stories and poems. Part TED talk, part history lecture, part folk club sing-a-long, part poetry slam, part storytelling session… Come and share in these tales as they have been shared for generations. Featuring Robin Grey and Rachel Rose Reid | 12 March 2020 – http://threeacresandacow.co.uk
Workshop: Subvertising for the right to housing | March 26, 2020 @ SUPERMARKT BERLIN | With Steal This Poster (Subvertising Collective IT/UK) and others. These workshops show us how subvertising offers a creative way to rewrite the narrative about the housing market in the streets where gentrification operates. Outdoor advertising is the most emblematic form of consumerist propaganda. It privatises sections of public spaces with the purpose to conditioning mass behaviours imposing specific narratives. How can we untangle those narrations? And how can we take over those spaces subtracted from the public realm for private interests? | registrations open soon | sign up for the newsletter – https://bit.ly/2OqppD2
EVICTED BY GREED: Global Finance, Housing & Resistance | Uncovering how ghostly shell companies and real estate speculation evict real people from their homes – and what to do about it | Investigations on how how speculative finance drives the global and local housing crisis, and gathers experts & activists from around the world to share and find counter-strategies | The Conference, March 27-28, 2020, Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien | Disruption Network Lab – https://bit.ly/2S2SEya
Books, Open Calls, Papers & Publications
Open Call – Science Gallery London | Inviting expressions of interest for projects to become part of the forthcoming AI & Ethics season. Whether your application is art, scientific inquiry, or a combination of these, we are looking to work with individuals and groups who are critically exploring ethical issues around the development and implementation of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly (though not exclusively) within the context of healthcare | Open from 31st January 2020 to 23rd February 2020 – https://bit.ly/2Ut377q
Open Call – URgh! zine #1 on Alternative Art Education | DEADLINE Friday, 21 Feb 2020 | Submissions are open for the first issue of URgh! We welcome contributions that explore and document alternative art education within self-organised, DIY, peer-led art schools and collectives, to extend the existing research and amplify the movement. A new zine on precarious labour dreaming up alternative economies at the coalface of the art educational creative industrial complex. The first issue will be launched on Saturday, 21 March 2020 at the Festival of Alternative Art Education 2020 at Conway Hall. https://videomole.tv/urgh-zine/
Art Meets Radical Openness 2020 – OPEN CALL: Of Whirlpools and Tornadoes | 20th – 23rd of May 2020 | Deadline: Monday 24.02.2020 | AMRO is a biennial community festival in Linz that explores and discusses new challenges between digital culture, art, everyday life, education, politics and activism. The 2020 edition of the AMRO festival is characterized by reflections upon the “centripetal” and “centrifugal” dynamics of acceleration visible in contemporary society and the ways artistic practice, activism and radical thinking can engage with it – http://radical-openness.org/en
Technological Sovereignty: Democratising Technology and Innovation Green Paper | Within DiEM25, by crowdsourcing collective knowledge have identified three key ways to achieve Technological Sovereignty. They try to define the issues, and provide short, medium and long term solutions, based on two processes: Regulation and Renewal. And we need to establish the conditions for social innovation and democratic societal transformation – https://internal.diem25.org/en/vote/205/public
Culture, Technology and the Image: Techniques of Engaging with Visual Culture | Edited by Jeremy Pilcher | Culture, Technology and the Image explores the technologies deployed when images are archived, accessed and distributed. The chapters discuss the ways in which habits and techniques used in learning and communicating knowledge about images are affected by technological developments. The volume discusses a wide range of issues, including access and participation; research, pedagogy and teaching; curation and documentation; circulation and re-use; and conservation and preservation | Intellectbooks – https://bit.ly/2v9CFoF
Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures | By Christina Dunbar-Hester | Hacking, as a mode of technical and cultural production, is commonly celebrated for its extraordinary freedoms of creation and circulation. Yet surprisingly few women participate in it: rates of involvement by technologically skilled women are drastically lower in hacking communities than in industry and academia. Hacking Diversity investigates the activists engaged in free and open-source software to understand why, despite their efforts, they fail to achieve the diversity that their ideals support | Prince University Press – https://bit.ly/2SlvCBl
Call for Papers – Media Theory, Media Fiction, and Infrastructures Beyond the Earth | Today, established space agencies are struggling with national funding, and numerous countries are starting ambitious space programs, and private companies and individuals are building innovative space plans and technologies. The current socio-political configuration offers thinkers and practitioners new opportunities by which to intervene in how we envision and inhabit the cosmos. Media Theory, Media Fiction, and Infrastructures Beyond the Earth is a two-day workshop May 7-8, 2020 at University of Toronto, Mississauga that will investigate space exploration and inhabitation from the point of view of media studies | University of Toronto Mississauga, USA – https://bit.ly/383z623
Call for proposals – (Infra)Structures | 4 – 5 June 2020 | Centre for Postdigital Cultures annual conference | Coventry University, UK | Proposals for its 3rd annual conference on infrastructures | This conference takes interest in infrastructures as an invisible system of meaning-making and a mode of structuring people and knowledge, in the institutional contexts and conditions of this structuring, as well as in possible models of intervening in these very structures. By doing so, we hope to interrogate the potential of making infrastructure visible – remarkable – as a means of speaking to power. We are interested in exploring what new ways of understanding, developing, reconfiguring or hacking infrastructures might be possible if we focus on their radical potential – https://bit.ly/31rd1rC
Articles, Interviews, Presentations, videos
Poetry v. the Body Politic: writing a political movement | Excerpts from a dialogue on the relationship between poetry and politics in Iran today, between Poetry International Archives Iran editor Abol Froushan and Ali Abdolrezaei, a major Iranian poet and leader of a grassroots political movement that has been spreading in Iran since the uprising of January 2018, when the multimedia Colleges of Persian Poetry and of Fiction became a political movement. What incubated as a literary movement calling for democracy of the text and literary styles transformed into a movement for democracy and freedom from the Islamic Republic and its political and economic stranglehold on Iranians – https://bit.ly/2Sn6bPJ
Interview with Helen Knowles by Regine Debatty | Trickle Down, A New Vertical Sovereignty | A prison in Liverpool, an Ethereal Summit in New York city, a prestigious Russian art auction at Sotheby’s, a market in North Manchester. These places and the communities that spend time there have little in common. What is more, they sit at opposite ends of the spectrum of financial power. That’s exactly what appealed to Helen Knowles. Helen Knowles is currently exhibiting the result of this long research at Arebyte Gallery in London – https://bit.ly/2S16mkR
Rowland Atkinson reviews Thomas Piketty’s eagerly awaited new book Capital and ideology in the city | “In all nations and at all times societies require some system or series of defences of the disparities that exist within them. Different kinds of societies have achieved this in their own distinctive ways and in fact much of this more than 1,000 page work delves into the long history of such arrangements. Piketty calls these narratives and systems of thinking inequality regimes. There is power at work in the narratives, ideas and legitimising frameworks deployed by elites and which are shared more broadly within society as a whole.” https://bit.ly/2UtAE1j
OBIETTIVO BOLOGNA REPORTAGE BY ARIANNA FORTE | The itinerant tour of the project DATAPOIESIS runs into Bologna, historically one of the most active and aware Italian cities in urban policies. Datapoiesis in the city, took place from the 24 to 26 of January 2020, coordinated by Singlossa with local partner MaisonVentidue. Obiettivo, was the first datapoietic artwork, and trigger for reflecting on a new kind of processes capable of bringing awareness and social activation using public data in a conscious way and to face complex global phenomena such as poverty from different points of view – https://datapoiesis.com/home/?p=2348
Image from: Data Dating, Exhibition. Wednesday 15 January – Sunday 1 March 2020 at Watermans Art Centre, London.
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, Festivals and Conferences
Panel Discussion: My Mind, Your Weapon | Hosted by arebyte | Sat 11 Jan 2020 | Join artist Sarah Selby in a discussion around the impact of behavioural targeting on democracy, diversity and autonomy with panelists: Ves Popov, Laurie Love, Kadine James and Rod Dickenson. The panel will focus on fostering curiosity, facilitating discussion and provoking critical thinking around often inaccessible issues surrounding the processes and applications of big data – particularly with regards to data bias, the Internet of Things and Smart Cities – https://bit.ly/2tlGoyU
WILDBIYOO 2020 Artist Residency in the jungle, Goa, India | The tribe goa | 13 Jan 2020 – 2 Feb 2020 | Wildbiyoo is dedicating January 2020 to the arts to summon the world’s most progressive thinkers and creatives to join us in reckoning with the greatest existential crisis of our times. The mission of the month is to investigate how creatives can facilitate new dialogue, inspire social and political transformations and reimagine our relationship to nature in response to climate breakdown | More details on FB – https://bit.ly/2Qh4pA1
Afterall Journal Reading Group: Disobedient Video | Hosted by Arts Catalyst and Afterall | Wednesday, 22 January 2020 | Arts Catalyst hosts the second session in a new series of collaborative reading groups presented by Afterall, for which curator Lauren Houlton will lead a discussion of Afterall Journal article ‘Disobedient Video in France in the 1970s: Video Production by Women’s Collectives’. To mark each new issue of the journal, Afterall is inviting a UK-based reading group to identify a text from the current issue and pair it with external readings and films | FB link – http://tiny.cc/s3ghhz
Trickle Down, A New Vertical Sovereignty – Helen Knowles | Hosted by arebyte and FutureEverything | Thurs 23 Jan 2020, 18:00-21:00 | New Vertical Sovereignty, a new body of work by UK based artist Helen Knowles, is a tokenised four-screen video installation and generative soundscape attached to the blockchain, which explores value systems and wealth disparity. The artwork is composed of auction scenes, performances and choral interludes by different communities such as prisoners, blockchain technology employees, market sellers, and Sotheby’s auction bidders, looking to re-imagine our vertically stacked digital ecosystem to horizontally distribute wealth – https://bit.ly/2F7ThPt
Sonic Electronics with Fixateur Externe/Bubble People/Onin | Hosted by Laura Netz | Sat 25 Jan 2020 | Sonic Electronics is an experimental event | We propose an anti-techno-capitalist approach to music genres like ambient, drone, techno, experimental, electronics, acousmatic, live coding, noise, vaporwave, glitch, dark, new wave, postpunk,….. | Artists: Fixateur Externe / Bubble People (Per Jas) / Onin (James L Malone and Joe Wright) / Medial Ages (Laura Netz) | FB link – http://tiny.cc/n8ghhz
Soft Power 04: an exhibition in a spreadsheet | Hosted by Micheál O’Connell, Andrea Slater and Daniella Norton | Fri 31 Jan 2020, 18:30-23:59 | A fourth exhibition by the Soft Power people, this time in a spreadsheet. Look at it at home, or on your device, or wherever. Drink some wine and chat to friends about what you witness. The link will be supplied with those ‘GOING’ on the date (Thursday 31st October) at 7pm. “We will be limiting numbers Going to this (file) Opening event to a maximum of 60.” For updates sign up to Mocksim’s mailing list http://www.mocksim.org/contact.htm
Queer techno rave INFERNO take over the ICA’s Theatre, Bar and Cinema with an all-night programme of music, queer porn and performance art. Brought to you by performance artist and DJ Lewis G. Burton and producer and musician Sebastian Bartz under their DJ alter-ego Venice Calypso, INFERNO marries the camp with the underground, pop with techno, and the very good with the very bad | Fri, 31 Jan 2020 – https://bit.ly/2S0ntDT
Copy That? Surplus Data in an Age of Repetitive Duplication | Private view of the 2020 art exhibition from the Open Data Institute (ODI), Copy That? Surplus Data in an Age of Repetitive Duplication. The exhibition will be unveiled in the company’s Shoreditch offices on Tuesday 4 February 2020. Artists are Mr Gee, Alistair Gentry and Ben Neale, Edie Jo Murray & Harmeet Chagger-Khan
The evening kicks off with an in-conversation to celebrate the publication of Art Hack Practice: Critical Intersections of Art, Innovation and the Maker Movement, edited by Victoria Bradbury and Suzy O’Hara, which features a chapter on Data as Culture. The panel will be facilitated by Dr. Suzy O’ Hara. Participants are: Hannah Redler-Hawes (ODI), Marc Garett (Furtherfield), Inini Papadimitriou (FutureEverything) – https://bit.ly/39xkk4C
Books, Open Calls, Papers & Publications
Beyond Hashtags: Racial Politics and Black Digital Networks | Critical Cultural Communication | By Sarah Florini | Beyond Hashtags explores these everyday practices and their relationship to larger social issues through an in-depth analysis of a trans-platform network of black American digital and social media users and content creators. In the crucial years leading up to the emergence of the Movement for Black Lives, black Americans used digital networks not only to cope with day-to-day experiences of racism, but also as an incubator for the debates that have since exploded onto the national stage. Published by: NYU Press – https://bit.ly/2r1Bt5l
Networked Content Analysis: The Case of Climate Change | By Sabine Niederer | With a foreword by Klaus Krippendorff | Climate change is one of the key societal challenges of our times, and its debate takes place across scientific disciplines and into the public realm, traversing platforms, sources, and fields of study. The analysis of such mediated debates has a strong tradition, which started in communication science and has since then been applied across a wide range of academic disciplines | Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2019 – https://bit.ly/2SIZyZT
“V[R]erses”: An XR Story Series | A V[R]erse is a microstory. Each story consists of a storybox that can be experienced in 3D via a WebVR enabled mobile device, desktop PC and in Virtual Reality. Each V[R]erse is created by different digital literature authors [text] and Mez Breeze [development + design, model + concept creation, audio]. Designed and Developed by Mez Breeze Design, Supported by Mezangelle. Includes authors/artists: Annie Abrahams, Davin Heckman, Jeremy Hight, Mark Marino, Scott Rettberg | Online – https://bit.ly/343fFDH
The Memory Police (Fiction) | By Yolo Ogawa | “An elegantly spare dystopian fable . . . Reading The Memory Police is like sinking into a snowdrift: lulling yet suspenseful, it tingles with dread and incipient numbness . . . Ogawa’s ruminant style captures the alienation of being alive as the world’s ecosystems, ice sheets, languages, animal species and possible futures vanish more quickly than any one mind can apprehend.” The New York Times Book Review | Penguin Random House USA – https://bit.ly/35k16wp
Museums Inside Out: Artist Collaborations and New Exhibition Ecologies | By Mark W. Rectanus | An ambitious study of what it means to be a museum in the twenty-first century | In Museums Inside Out, 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. Expected publication: February 1st 2020 by University of Minnesota Press – https://bit.ly/2QdrEee
The Red Years: Forbidden Poems from Inside North Korea | Bandi | Translated by Heinz Insu Fenkl | Authored by one of North Korea’s most acclaimed dissident writers, this is the first collection of Bandi’s poetry to be published in English | Though North Korea holds the attention of the world, it is still rare for us to hear North Korean voices, beyond those few who have escaped. Known only by his pen name, the poet and author ‘Bandi’ stands as one of the most distinctive and original dissident writers to emerge from the country | Zed Books – https://bit.ly/2SNr88i
Liberal Arts Perspectives on Globalism and Transnationalism | Unabridged, 1 Jan 2020 | By Hyun Wu Lee, Mark van de Logt | As international trade and economic activities expand, online technologies spread, and restless populations shift across national boundaries, reactionary movements have sprung up around the globe. These reactionary forces, which include nationalism and populism, have exposed many blind-spots of ongoing globalization projects. To understand the frictions between transnational enterprises and local resistance more fully, as well as analyze the human cost of immigration and the threats posed by online technologies, scholars from around the world gathered in Doha, Qatar, for the Sixth Annual Liberal Arts International Conference (2018) | Cambridge Scholars Publishing – https://bit.ly/368xdjH
Articles, Interviews, Presentations, videos
BEYOND THE “BLOKECHAIN”: THE CRYPTOFEMINIST AGENDA | Video | This session aims to open your mind. Andy Morales Coto tickles your imaginative bones by offering visual prompts to help us redesign the world’s economic future. Ruth Catlow explores the spaces of convergence between the Commons and P2P movements along with the world of cooperatives and the Social and Solidarity Economy. Denise Thwaites offers a feminist analysis of DAO cultures and the emergent affective economies they instate. And Ailie Rutherford shows how feminist economics can be put into practice on a daily basis by presenting her real and existing The People’s Bank of Govanhill | Speakers: Andy Morales Coto, Ruth Catlow, Denise Thwaites, Ailie Rutherford | Moderator: Rachel Falconer | Institute of Network Cultures | https://vimeo.com/376668856
Only 2% of global art auction spending is on work by women, study finds (2019) | A new study has found that despite perceived signs of progress, the art world remains overwhelmingly male-dominated | According to a report assembled by In Other Words & artnet News, the last 10 years has found a lack of growth for female representation in art with just 2% of global art auction spending on work by women. This figure is also unevenly distributed, with five artists making up 40.7% of this figure and Yayoi Kusama in particular accounting for 25% alone. A new report finds women’s work still underrepresented in the art world, with only 11% of art purchased by institutions female-made | Guardian – https://bit.ly/39wDJCQ
CRISPR Cheat Sheet: The Most Important Gene Editing Stories of 2019: Human trials, bird flu, gene editing in space, and more | By Emily Mullin | Medium | On May 4, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched a Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station. Among its cargo was an experiment involving the CRISPR gene-editing system, which astronauts aboard the ISS used to successfully edit DNA in space. They made targeted cuts to the yeast genome that mimicked genetic damage caused by cosmic radiation, one of the biggest health risks that long-term spaceflight poses to humans. They say the ISS experiment could yield clues about how cells repair their DNA in space – https://bit.ly/2ZHZY4v
Raul Vaneigem: Here we are! At the beginning of everything! | Dec 24, 2019 | The sudden attacks of freedom on the suffocating capitalist hydra, constantly make the epicenter of the seismic disturbances fluctuate. The territories of the whole world, affected by the system of private benefits are exposed to the outburst of insurrectional movements. Consciousness is forced to run after successive waves of events, reacting to constant, paradoxically predictable and unexpected shocks. Two realities struggle against each other in the face of the violence. One is the reality of lying. Taking advantage of technological progress, you try to manipulate public opinion for the benefit of established power. The other is the reality of daily life of the population – https://bit.ly/2QdnanP
I believe Google fired me for organising – but tech workers won’t give up the fight | By Kathryn Spiers | 20 December 2019 | Last week I was fired by Google for informing my colleagues of their rights. I created a pop-up that appeared when Google employees visited the website of the union-busting firm the company recently hired, telling them they had the right to organise. Hours later, I was suspended. Google’s decision to retaliate against its own workers isn’t just an issue for Googlers, but for the entire tech industry, including other large companies like Amazon and Facebook – https://bit.ly/2sridPu
Image: Bring Me My Firetruck, by Mr Gee. Part of the Copy That? Surplus Data in an Age of Repetitive Duplication, exhibition at the Open Data Institute, London, Feb 2020.
FurtherList Archives https://www.furtherfield.org/the-furtherlist-archives/
Introduction
Marc Garrett, curator of the current incarnation of the Children of Prometheus exhibition at the NeMe gallery, interviews artist Joana Moll about the artwork, The Virtual Watchers, developed in collaboration with french anthropologist Cédric Parizot.
This project began in 2010, and looks critically at an online platform group, consisting of 203,633 volunteers surveilling the US-Mexico border, through a social media platform, such as Facebook. The community of The Virtual Watchers existed well before, and briefly, during, President Donald Trump’s signature promise in 2016 to build a wall at the US southern border, to stop more migrants crossing over onto US soil. The project also touches upon the wider online culture of attacks by bots and trolls from clandestine right-wing groups. The interview also explores Joana Moll’s interpretation of the Children of Prometheus exhibition, and briefly discusses other projects such as CO2GLE, which is an attempt to visualize how much carbon dioxide the company is emitting per second.
Interview
Marc Garrett: I remember when I first came across The Virtual Watchers, it left a deeply, unnerving impression on me. It reminded me of how threatening people can be towards others through the Internet. The project illustrates how participatory platforms which have come about, due to the rise of Web 2.0 culture; has not only paved the way for positive forms of mass communications for small groups and individuals to connect with each other, and with families and friends, but, there is also a darker side that people around the world have only in the last few years become aware of.
Out of the many scenarios you have witnessed when studying this virtual surveillance group, what has grabbed your attention the most, or feels most significant to you?
Joana Moll: The platform that gathered this group of people was specifically created to crowdsource national security by allowing citizens to monitor and report illegal activity in the us/mexico border. Ultimately the project shows how citizens can easily, and silently, be militarized by means of free labour, by translating a physical territory into social media, in this case, a border. Personally, what surprised me the most was the fact that most of the users we investigated, were either retired, unemployed or sick and couldn’t leave home.
The platform was a stage which allowed them to socialize and feel useful. A couple of users even claimed that the platform saved their lives, that their days became meaningful again. This use of the platform also revealed something important: according to the authorities, and this was that it was quite ineffective when it came to stop illegal activity around the border. Actually, some Sheriffs claimed that the amount of reports that they received on a daily basis were useless and difficult to process. However, the platform worked quite well in terms of keeping a large number of users monitoring the border. It had more than 200.000 registered users which spent more than 1 million hours securing the border for free.
Marc Garrett: This project and or artwork, has been around for nine years now. Yet, its subject matter was ahead of its time, and looking at it now it feels even more relevant. For example, across the world, the general public is only now coming to terms with the political and social, aspects and consequences behind the varied forms of virtual surveillance, dominating online interaction.
This is also true in regard to climate collapse, which brings me to your essay Deep Carbon (2018 ), where you say, the “amount of users and network connections has increased at a whooping pace ever since. In 2015, the Internet registered 966 Exabytes of IP traffic (1.037.234.601.984 GB) and is expected to reach 1579,2 Exabytes by 20182.”
And, then you say, “despite the growing number of Internet users and information flows, the material representation of the Internet and surveillance economy behind it remains blurred in the social imagination.”
What do you think will help to resolve the difficult issue in respect of material representation, in your terms?
Joana Moll: This is quite a difficult question to answer, indeed! I think there has to be a radical change in the way we produce and consume data, but most importantly, in the way our interfaces and interactions are designed. Even though our internet ecosystem is expansive we only interact with it through interfaces, and I really believe interfaces hold the key to start solving the problem. The energy consumption of most of our interactions in the digital realm are very opaque, we have no idea about all the processes that are taking place beyond the interface (i.e. a website, an app) and where all our data is going. I’m about to launch a project called The Hidden Life of an Amazon User which tries to bring to light all the amount of processes that are triggered by doing a simple purchase in Amazon. The amount of information that is involuntarily being loaded in the user’s browser is massive, let alone its energy consumption and environmental impact.
Since 2015, within the Critical Interface Politics group I founded at HANGAR (Barcelona), we’ve been developing experimental workshops that focus on developing sustainable interfaces. We usually work with a limited energy budget, which means that the interfaces we design can just use a certain amount of energy. It is really amazing how this seemingly small shift radically changes the way we think and design online interactions. If this would be a standard process when it comes to design our online experiences (which it should), would possibly have tremendous collateral positive consequences for the entire internet ecosystem, specially in terms of preventing to collect massive amounts of user data, which consume vast amount of resources. In this sense sustainable websites would be privacy friendly 😉
Marc Garrett: In what way do you think your own work fits into the context of the exhibition?
Joana Moll: It’s always hard to talk about my own work beyond my own work, but I’ll do my best! I feel my work tries to reveal very complex and hard to grasp techno-social arrangements in a very simple way. To allow people to understand the infrastructures and processes that govern their day to day lives without feeling smashed about their complexities it’s a central concern in my practice. I think my work fits in the exhibition in many ways, but I believe that this need to urgently discuss critical implications of our technologies with broader communities is one of the most relevant.
Marc Garrett: The postmodernist, feminist and theorist, Donna Haraway has recently re-emphasized the importance of re-evaluating certain contemporary contexts, especially those involving the patriarchy, politics, and climate change, in the age of the Anthropocene. I consider yourself, and myself, have been exploring our practices in parallel to Haraway’s critical ambitions, in respect that, we share similar values, but express them differently.
Thus, we need to re-examine our relationship with the world in the midst of spiraling ecological devastation, and find new ways to reconfigure our approach and connection to the earth and all its inhabitants.
Could you give us an example of your current works that you feel could be materializing Haraway’s writings, but as part of your own artistic production and or intention, and what the links and differences are?
Joana Moll: I agree, our work involves many of Haraway’s concerns, indeed. As for my practice, I believe politics, patriarchy, climate change and technology are continuously meeting and being questioned, in the sense that I always approach this contexts from different angles, which also talks a lot about my own process of understanding complex contemporary arrangements and how they affect and modify each other. For example, in my latest projects: The Dating Brokers and The Hidden Life of an Amazon User (HLAU), I examine how user activity, or in other words free labour, is heavily monetized by third parties. However in HLAU I also examine the energy costs that such exploitation is involuntarily assumed by the user. Graham Harman said it is very important no to assume that everything is connected, but to continuously trace the connections between things, which is something that I try to remember when I do a new project and I believe that Haraway’s body of work heavily points in that direction. However, I believe that techno-colonialism is a central issue to tackle while re-evaluating technology, politics, environment and most importantly, the way it affects and informs our ability to think and imagine. Together with my colleague Jara Rocha we’ve been recently collaborating in a series of projects and workshops that aim to reveal tangible outcomes of techno-colonialism in our daily lives.
Marc Garrett: The Children of Prometheus exhibition was mainly inspired by Mary Shelley. What elements in the exhibition’s: themes, ideas, and contexts, do you relate to personally?
Joana Moll: I relate to all of them, they are all so relevant and urgent! As for my work, I especially connect with the way invisible processes triggered by human-centered technologies affect our natural habitats. I believe that the exhibition opens highly relevant and urgent discussions about how society has been “Frankensteined” at large. The way our technologies are designed, produced and used are seriously damaging not just our life-giving habitats but also our relationship to them, our ability to imagine habitable ways to inhabit this planet.
Conclusion
When I first began the Children of Prometheus exhibition project, it was called Monsters of the Machine: Frankenstein in the 21s Century. Both titles fit the same curation function, and that is, to examine critically with other the artists in this touring show, Mary Shelley’s questions, that were asked in 1818, today, looking through her eyes.
I can’t imagine what she would think of Trump and all the other extreme right-wing, racist, groups and politicians, and dodgy corporations, exploiting people’s data, whilst adding to the destruction of the planet. However, in the spirit of Shelley, we have individuals such as Joana Moll who can play that role, with other artists doing what Shelley did so well then, but today. Our world is dying and those in power are part of non-friendly systems designed to kill it further, while the poor and oppressed take the brunt of it all. Moll, and the other Artists the exhibition, are presenting us with serious questions. But, accompanying these necessary and urgent concerns, are also answers at the same time. But there’s not much time.
Joana Moll is part of the touring exhibition, Children of Prometheus currently at the NeMe Arts Centre, Limassol, Cyprus 11 Oct – 20 Dec, 2019. This exhibition was originally produced in partnership with LABoral, in Gijon, and is an extension of the Monsters of the Machine: Frankenstein in the 21st Century, 18 Nov 2016 – 21 May 2017. We are currently negotiating other venues, in different countries across the world. Please contact if you’re interested in the exhibition.
Joana Moll will also be leading a workshop, THE INTERFACE, DECONSTRUCTED, and participating in a conversation with Tatiana Bazzichelli, founder of Disruption Network Lab as part of ACTIVATION: Collective Strategies to Expose Injustice, Saturday, 30 November 2019.
Artist Bio
Joana Moll is a Barcelona / Berlin based artist and researcher. Her work critically explores the way post-capitalist narratives affect the alphabetization of machines, humans and ecosystems. Her main research topics include Internet materiality, surveillance, social profiling and interfaces. She has lectured, performed and exhibited her work in different museums, art centers, universities, festivals and publications around the world. Furthermore she is the co-founder of the Critical Interface Politics Research Group at HANGAR [Barcelona] and co-founder of The Institute for the Advancement of Popular Automatisms. She is currently a visiting lecturer at Universität Potsdam and Escola Superior d’Art de Vic [Barcelona].
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
Playmode | Exhibition at MAAT Lisbon, Sep 2019 – feb 2020 | Curated by Filipe Pais and Patricia Gouveia | It is said that play has saved entire peoples, who, in order not to succumb to hunger, resorted to playing games for hours at a time. While the Lydians, that distant people from Anatolia, invented games as a mode of surviving, play from the beginning has been an invention linked to a vital need — to stay alive and withstand the darkness, immobility and extinction.
The artists understood early on the transformative power of play and began integrating it into their works for various purposes – escaping reality, social construction and transformation, subversion or as a criticism of game and play mechanisms themselves – https://www.filipepais.com/playmode
The Long Term You Cannot Afford. On The Distribution of The Toxic | At SAVVY-Contemporary, Berlin, Germany | 19 Oct 2019 – 1 Dec 2019 | This mixed exhibition unpacks the kaleidoscopic meanings of the toxic, both as matter and as metaphor: In his paintings, Boris Anje captures the essence of the excessive and toxic consumerism of a small minority of the world’s population | The toxic trade-off inherent in exploitative and abusive processes of extraction, production, and disposal lie at the heart of the changing nature of the ecosystems to which we now belong – with millions of metric tons of synthetic materials, pesticides, heavy metals, and chemicals released and circulated every year. Structural inequalities on a global scale permit for some lives to remain relatively untouched by toxic proliferation through systems of “externalisation” [2] whilst many reside in high concentrations and lethal exposure on a daily basis out of mere necessity of survival. The new age of toxicity is “a condition that is shared, but unevenly so, and which divides us as much as it binds us.” – http://tiny.cc/y8ryez
Soft Power 04: an exhibition in a spreadsheet | Hosted by Micheál O’Connell, Andrea Slater and Daniella Norton | Thursday, 31 October 2019 | A fourth exhibition by the Soft Power people, this time in a spreadsheet. Look at it at home, or on your device, or wherever. Drink some wine and chat to friends about what you witness. The link will be supplied with those ‘GOING’ on the date (Thursday 31st October) at 7pm. For updates sign up to Mocksim’s mailing list http://www.mocksim.org/contact.htm
24/7: A wake-up call for our non-stop world | 31 Oct 2019 – 23 Feb 2020 | Somerset House |Embankment Galleries, South Wing | An essential exhibition for today, exploring the non-stop nature of modern life. Many of us feel we’re working more intensively, juggling too many things, blurring our public and private lives, pushing the limits of our natural rhythms of sleep and waking.
24/7 takes visitors on a multi-sensory journey from the cold light of the moon to the fading warmth of sunset through five themed zones and contains over 50 multi-disciplinary works that will provoke and entertain | Inspired by Jonathan Crary’s book of the same name, and curated by Sarah Cook, 24/7& holds up a mirror to our always-on culture and invites you to step outside of your day-to-day routine to engage, reflect and reset – http://tiny.cc/44f7ez
Launch event for Rabbrexit – A Game of Chance / editions tdwm | Hosted by Cecilia Wee and YiMiao Shih | Thursday, 31 October 2019 (London) | On the date of the Brexit deadline, we’re having a little launch party for “Rabbrexit – A Game of Chance” and the birth of editions tdwm. Editions tdwm is delighted to present its first project: a limited edition set of playing cards “Rabbrexit – A Game of Chance”, featuring illustrations by YiMiao Shih, designed with Arjun Harrison-Mann.
Rabbrexit – A Game of Chance reworks images from YiMiao Shih’s exhibition Rabbrexit Means Rabbrexit at the House of Illustration in London (2019), where YiMiao created a parallel universe in which the UK voted not for Brexit but ‘Rabbrexit’: the expulsion of rabbits from the country – http://tiny.cc/p3oyez
Become Ungovernable 2: a day of resistance skill sharing | The Antiuniversity, as part of a coalition of autonomous left groups, invites you to a day of practical and informative workshops, where we will learn from each other simple visual intervention methods that anyone can pick up, grow confidence to use a variety of tools and learn about ways to stay safe when organising on the streets and online. In preparation for the planned attack on our city and communities on 31 Oct (Brexit day), we planned a day of practical resistance skill sharing.
The far right, bolstered by a racist and xenophobic government, is growing in confidence. The response to Boris Johnson’s hard-right vision for society and threat to our basic rights must be equally confident. Some actions will take place through whatever is left of the parliamentary mechanism, others will take place on the streets. Hosted by Antiuniversity, Green Anti-Capitalist Front, Plan C, Feminist Anti-Fascist Assembly, and Women’s Strike Assembly | FB page – http://tiny.cc/1qoyez
NEoN Digital Arts Festival. Multiple Venues in Dundee City, Scotland. Nov 6 – 8 2019. An expanded 3-day symposium entitled, Re@ct: Social Change Art Technology. NEoN Re@ct involves over 30 international speakers over three days addressing a diversity of issues and practices engaging activist digital art. Many artists involved in digital arts have historically been prompted to react and respond to local, national, global, social and political crises (i.e. around issues of environmentalism, gender equality, exploitation, colonialism, militarism, emancipation). Re@ct will be a platform to critically examine the relevance and impact of past and present practices, theories and strategies – to engage an uncertain future through an exploration of the creative potential of digital art. Reigister free to the full symposium – http://tiny.cc/y5lyez
Citizens of Nowhere | Alicja Rogalska: 2019 Stuart Hall Library Artist-in-Residence | Hosted by Iniva | 6 November 2019 | Join 2019 Stuart Hall Library Artist-in-Residence Alicja Rogalska for a screening and discussion about her work developed during the residency alongside two other videos. The three works are concerned with issues of citizenship, immigration and identity, viewed through the lenses of classification methods and systems, legal fictions in immigration law and the lived experiences of statelessness. The screening will be followed by a discussion with invited guests and a Q&A.
The works screened will include: What If As If (2017), The Aliens Act (2019) and Citizens of Nowhere (2019). Total running time of the videos will be 40 mins | Evenbrite bookings here – http://tiny.cc/uiqyez
Books, Open Calls, Papers & Publications
Expanded Internet Art: Twenty-First-Century Artistic Practice and the Informational Milieu By Ceci Moss | Charting the rise of a multidisciplinary approach to online artistic practice in the past decade, the text discusses recent currents in contemporary artistic practice that parallel the explosion of the internet through advances such as social media, smart phones, and faster bandwidth. Internet art is no longer determined solely by its existence on the web; rather, contemporary artists are making more art about informational culture using various methods of both online and offline means. It asks how artists, such as Seth Price, Harm van den Dorpel, Kari Altmann, Artie Vierkant and Oliver Laric, create a critical language in response to the persuasive influence of informational capture on culture and expression, where the environment itself becomes reorganized to be more legible as information | Bloomsbury Academic – http://tiny.cc/ktg7ez
The Cyborg Matrix | Open call for artists, is now online at http://theCyborgMatrix.com !! Make an account and create your own profile. Or type in your name or nickname for a short visit. Doe you want to add you art to the space, go to http://cyarco.com/theCyborgMatrix/ or send us an email at cyborgMatrix@cyarco.com. see you in cyberspace!!
Automation, Artificial Intelligence, and Labour Protection | Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2019 | A collection of articles on “Automation, Artificial Intelligence, and Labour Protection” edited by Valerio De Stefano (KU Leuven). This collection gathers contributions from several labour lawyers and social scientists to provide an interdisciplinary overview of how new technologies, including smart robots, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and business practices such as People Analytics, management-by-algorithm, and the use of big data in workplaces, far from merely displacing jobs, profoundly affect the quality of work. The authors argue that these issues depend, and can be affected by, policy choices – since they are not just the “natural” result of technological innovations – and call for adequate regulation of these phenomena. Contributing authors are Antonio Aloisi, Ilaria Armaroli, Fernanda Bárcia de Mattos, Janine Berg, Miriam Cherry, Emanuele Dagnino, Valerio De Stefano, Elena Gramano, Matt Finkin, Marianne Furrer, Frank Hendrickx, Parminder Jeet Singh, David Kucera, Phoebe Moore, Jeremias Prassl, and Uma Rani. This article introduces this collection and gives an overview of the issues discussed by the authors – http://tiny.cc/s4zyez
Digital Sociology: The Reinvention of Social Research | By Noortje Marres (2017) | This provocative new introduction to the field of digital sociology offers a critical overview of interdisciplinary debates about new ways of knowing society that are emerging today at the interface of computing, media, social research and social life.
Digital Sociology introduces key concepts, methods and understandings that currently inform the development of specifically digital forms of social enquiry. Marres assesses the relevance and usefulness of digital methods, data and techniques for the study of sociological phenomena and evaluates the major claim that computation makes possible a new ‘science of society’. As Marres argues, the digital does much more than inspire innovation in social research: it forces us to engage anew with fundamental sociological questions. We must learn to appreciate that the digital has the capacity to throw into crisis existing knowledge frameworks and is likely to reconfigure wider relations | Polity press – http://tiny.cc/pqg7ez
Articles, Interviews & Presentations
Future Cities as a Network of Waterholes connected by Songlines | Medium | By Steven Liaros | “Irene Watson provides a detailed discussion of the indigenous worldview in Raw Law: Aboriginal Peoples, Colonialism and International Law (2015). Also referred to as relational philosophy, Watson compares and contrasts this with non-indigenous philosophy. This comparison is summarised in Table 1 in which I have included additional descriptions in brackets that express this contrast using other common terms.” – http://tiny.cc/rywyez
Brexit Culture | Feature article on ArtRabbit | By Sandy Di Yu | “Research has been conducted by the Arts Council about the economic and operational impacts of Brexit, but the content of culture has yet to be formally surveyed. While we can only speculate like everyone else what the full-fledged impact of Brexit on cultural production will be in the coming years, the era since the 2016 referendum has already seen a flurry of events that indicate growing precariousness in our time. Right-wing populism has gained more than a foothold in political discourse. Conspiracies run rampant about celebrity sex traffickers and their ties to the global elite. Anxiety over climate change, although leading to inspiring global movements, is still being met with dismissal by political leaders.” – http://tiny.cc/ujtyez
Can Musical Machines Be Expressive? Views from the Enlightenment and Today? by Steven Kemper and Rebecca Cypess | October 2019, Leonardo 52:5 release | How can music produced by automated technologies be expressive? Transitive theories of expression dominated eighteenth-century ideas of automated music, and many contemporary designers of robotic instruments adhere to these ideas, increasing sonic nuance to make their instruments seem more like expressive human performers. A listener-centered understanding of expression—an “intransitive” perspective—allows us to see automatic instruments as capable of expression despite the fact that no human performer is present – http://tiny.cc/m9nyez
Media Art History: Berlin, Cyber City (1989-91) VR – MR installation by Monika Fleischmann & Wolfgang Strauss | Berlin, Cyber City (1989-91) commemorates the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall 1989. VIDEO. The performative VR city simulation system “Berlin – Cyber City” was created as a reaction to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The intention was the staging of an interactive space for debate on the future of the city. To do this, the VR paradigm – the real-time movement in an immersive environment for a single user – should be extended into a communication space for several users. A participative Mixed Reality table combined with a 3D environment and Virtual Reality tools invites people to discuss the past and the future of the former divided city – http://tiny.cc/q2nyez
Neural 63, Surveillance Surveyed | Issue #63, Summer 2019 | interviews with Pip Thornton, Joana Moll, Mendi and Keith Obadike, Owen Mundy | articles, Surveying Surveillance Capitalism, Decode: Data Cooperatives, Our voices granted to machines, and much more – http://neural.it/2019/10/neural-63-surveillance-surveyed/
Image by: Brad Downey. House of Cards #3. Public Work. 2007, Berlin, Germany. Duration: 4 days. Anonymous installation. Material: paving stones – http://tiny.cc/vkf7ez | Currently featured in Playmode exhibition, Lisbon.
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
Through Other Eyes | Events hosted at NeMe Gallery (Cyprus) | Curated by James Bridle | 6 Sep – 2 Oct | Throughout the Twentieth Century, the ability to see the world became ever more separate from human vision; in the Twenty-First, the ability to think and understand the world will follow. While they began by seeing the world, cameras are now starting to process and analyse what they see; to make decisions about the world they share with us – http://www.neme.org/blog/through-other-eyes-press
The Most Powerful Woman in the Universe | At Gallery 46 | 6 to 28 September 2019, Tuesday to Saturday, 1-6pm | British artist, painter and feminist Kelly-Anne Davitt has teamed up with Whitechapel’s Gallery 46 to curate an empowering, punk, pop show to celebrate contemporary female artists. The exhibition will feature work from the likes of Nina Mae Fowler, Sara Pope, Salena Godden, Bex Massey, Clancy Gebler Davies, Hanne J Kemfor, Kelly-Anne Davitt and Nancy Fouts, who sadly passed away before the exhibition came together | Whitechapel, London – http://tiny.cc/4c1ybz
Garden of Earthly Delights | On until 1 Dec 2019 | In this large-scale group exhibition, the artists interpret the motif of the garden as a metaphor for the state of the world and as a poetic expression to explore the complexities of our increasingly precarious world. Their artworks open up a wider discourse on social, political and ecological phenomena, such as migration, gentrification and gender politics. In addition to common understanding of the garden as a place of yearning full of meditative, spiritual and philosophical possibilities, the exhibition will tread the line between reality and fantasy, harmony and chaos, beauty and exile. At Gropius Bau, Berlin – http://tiny.cc/og1ybz
D’EST | A Multi-Curatorial Online Platform for Video Art from the Former ‘East’ and ‘West’ – Berlin | Until 31 Dec 2020 | Initiated by cultural studies scholar Ulrike Gerhardt, the curatorial research summit will kicked off in April (2018) through an open-access framework. Between June and November 2018, the online platform will publish a total of six screening chapters reflecting post-socialist transformation. Their thematic focal points delineate post-socialism along post-geographic, horizontal, and gender-critical perspectives. In collaboration with fifteen curators, fifty artists, and other cultural experts, D’EST maps out artistic forms of historiography, especially from the perspective of female and collective production. www.district-berlin.com
Being Human exhibition, Wellcome Collection | Opens 5 September 2019, London | The gallery aims to explore four areas of, what it means to be alive in these uncertain times. The new space will be divided into themes examining genetics, minds and bodies, infection and climate breakdown with around 50 artworks from a diverse selection of artists. The section on genetics will include a project by artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg in which she extracted DNA from cigarette butts, hair and chewing gum found on the streets of New York. The genetic information was then analysed and used to build speculative, but extremely convincing, portraits with a 3D printer – http://tiny.cc/2j1ybz
Currents New Media Festival 2020 – Open Call For Artists | With 10 years of new media production, display, and support in its wheelhouse, CURRENTS New Media has become known as one of the leading emerging media arts festival in the States. Bringing together the work of established and emerging new media artists from the USA and around the world, the CURRENTS team is excited to announce that we are now accepting submissions for our next festival: #CURRENTS2020. We invite artists across all mediums of electronic art and new media to apply | Submission Deadline: November 5, 2019 – https://currentsnewmedia.org/
Books, Call for Papers & Publications
Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle | By Jamie Woodcock | In Marx at the Arcade, acclaimed researcher Jamie Woodcock delves into the hidden abode of the gaming industry. In an account that will appeal to hardcore gamers, digital skeptics, and the joystick-curious, Woodcock unravels the vast networks of artists, software developers, and factory and logistics workers whose seen and unseen labor flows into the products we consume on a gargantuan scale. Along the way, he analyzes the increasingly important role the gaming industry plays in contemporary capitalism and the broader transformations of work and the economy that it embodies | Haymarket Books – http://tiny.cc/8n1ybz
Entangle: Physics and the Artistic Imagination | Black holes, dark matter, gravity, time, motion—these phenomena fascinate physicists and artists alike. Both strive to discover how they shape our world. The connection between art and science is gaining increasing significance in contemporary art. This ground-breaking publication also contains interviews with the artists and physicists who share their different ways of seeing. Featuring interviews with and works of art by Julius von Bismarck, Julian Charrière, Sou Fujumoto, Iris van Herpen, Ryoji Ikeda, William Kentridge, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Goshka Macuga, Davide Quayola, Solveig Settemsdal, Sarah Sze, Keith Tyson, Jorinde Voigt, and Carey Young | Published by Hatje Cantz – http://tiny.cc/wq1ybz
Making and Being: Embodiment, Collaboration, & Circulation in the Visual Arts | Making and Being draws upon the lived experience of Susan Jahoda and Caroline Woolard, visual arts educators who have developed a framework for teaching art with the collective BFAMFAPhD that emphasizes contemplation, collaboration, and political economy. The authors share ideas and pedagogical strategies that they have adapted to spaces of learning which range widely, from self-organized workshops for professional artists to Foundations BFA and MFA thesis classes. This hands-on guide includes activities, worksheets, and assignments and is a critical resource for artists and art educators today. Making and Being is a book, a series of videos, a deck of cards, and an interactive website with freely downloadable content | PIONEER WORKS PRESS – http://tiny.cc/2s1ybz
Stolen: How to Save the World from Financialisation | By Grace Blakeley | A must-read polemic about why the ‘recovery’ from the 2007-08 crash mostly benefited the 1%, and how democratic socialism can save us from a new crash and climate catastrophe. For decades, it has been easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Stolen is a history of finance-led growth and a guide as to how we might escape it. We’ve sat back as financial capitalism has stolen our economies, our environment and even the future itself. Now, we have an opportunity to change course. What happens next is up to us | Publisher: Repeater books – http://tiny.cc/lv1ybz
Articles, Interviews & Presentations
Notting Hill 2019: ‘Carnival should be taken as seriously as Glastonbury’ | By Aamna Mohdin | Guardian | London’s first carnival was held in 1959 in response to a series of racist attacks and rioting that spread from Nottingham to west London, where white youths went out targeting black people. The carnival was put together to celebrate the culture of the local community because, according to a brochure handed out during the time: “A people’s art is the genesis of their freedom.” – http://tiny.cc/z01ybz
Deal or no deal: Scottish arts survey looks at impact of Brexit | By Chris Sharratt | The Scottish Contemporary Art Network and Federation of Scottish Theatre is asking those working in the arts in Scotland to share their views on impact in a newly issued survey. More than half (57%) said that Brexit has already had a negative impact on their work. Nine out of 10 said they expected Brexit to have a negative impact on the arts sector in Scotland in the future. It also found that 26% of the respondents were considering or planning to leave Scotland and the UK after Brexit | AN Newsletter – http://tiny.cc/b41ybz
Tackling Gentrification and Other Injustices Through Landscape Painting | By Julia Friedman | Eddie Arroyo decidedly updates the genre of American landscape painting, recording real-estate developments and gentrification and capturing the flux of contemporary urban landscapes. Picturesque charm and political energy characterize Eddie Arroyo’s paintings. Arroyo often portrays political action, including protests at the Whitney Museum and The New Museum, and in Miami’s Little Haiti, as well as activist ephemera, including posters and buttons. One of the eight artists to request (on July 20) their work be withdrawn from the Whitney Biennial in protest of Warren B. Kanders’s seat on the museum’s Board of Trustees, he thoughtfully intertwines his activism with his art | Hypperallergic – http://tiny.cc/061ybz
The Power of Face Filters as Augmented Reality Art for the Masses | By Jessica Herrington | Augmented reality (AR) is here. Rapid developments in smartphone technology mean AR is now available to many. AR ‘face filters’ — a mask-like augmented reality that adds virtual objects to an individual’s face, are becoming hugely popular. However, little attention has been given to face filters as AR art. Often seen as non-serious play, AR face filters can instead provide an engaging and personal art experience | Medium – http://tiny.cc/u81ybz
Image credit: video still from Brent Watanabe, San Andreas Deer Cam, 2016, with the artist’s permission.
A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change
Events & Exhibitions
SCRATCH! George Barber | TACO! presents SCRATCH! | An exhibition of over 15 works made between 1983 and 2012 by the influential British Video artist George Barber. Though George Barber’s work is as varied and fluid as it is non conformist and irreverent, this exhibition focuses exclusively on a specific approach in his production oeuvre, – that of Barber’s use of appropriation. The exhibition is accompanied by a programme of events including screenings, talks and experimental music | see — https://taco.org.uk/George-Barber-SCRATCH
Unpredictable Series presents AV Night | Wednesday, 21 August 2019 | Unpredictable Series presents AV Night dedicated to various audiovisual performances, combining digital and analogue approaches with improvisation in each set. The evening will feature: The first time trio: Matt Black, Blanca Regina and Reuben Sutherland | FB invite – http://tiny.cc/ryk6az
MTCD – A Visual Anthology of My Machine Life | A lecture performance, in which the artist Teresa Dillon walks through key machines that have marked her life – it begins with an incubator, which has significantly affected her life, but not just hers; for most machines in her life, almost all of us remember their first use: the internet, for example, an android robot, or a mobile phone. She talks about machines, but also about people and places and relationships – therefore, it is not a performance about machines, but rather about us | 2 dates · 25 Aug – 26 Aug 2019 – http://tiny.cc/v6k6az
Porn The Theory – Fantasy The Practice | By Stewart Home & Itziar Bilbao Urrutia — 30 August 2019, 7-10PM | Public · Hosted by Cable Depot and Darling Pearls & Co | The exhibition invites us to re-consider obsolete gender politics in the arts as well as in the sex industry. Porn The Theory (2019) – 06’42’’ – is a re-enactment of the butter scene from Last Tango In Paris (1972). In it Stewart Home plays the part originally assigned to the actress Maria Schneider (1952-2011) while Itziar Bilbao Urrutia plays composite of the male roles: Marlon Brando (1924-2006) and Bernardo Bertolucci (1941-2018) FB link – http://tiny.cc/b7l6az | Exhibition Continues : 31 August – 1 September 2019
Susan Hiller at Matt’s Gallery presents Ghost / TV | An exhibition of objects and video by Susan Hiller that continues her investigations into the numinous, the ephemeral, and the personal. At the time of her passing in January 2019, Hiller was due to start planning her fifth exhibition with Matt’s Gallery, following on from Work in Progress in 1980, An Entertainment in 1991, The Last Silent Movie in 2008, and Channels in 2013 – shows which introduced some of her most groundbreaking and iconic works. The exhibition had to be postponed, and Ghost / TV has been developed since then in close collaboration with Susan Hiller’s son, Gabriel Coxhead. 25 September–27 October 2019 | Private View: Sunday 22 September 2019 — http://tiny.cc/6kh8az
Live Code Summer School | European live coding summer school! Learn to quickly+easily make algorithmic patterns with Hydra (for visuals) or TidalCycles/FoxDot (for music). Hang out with other nice people in the fine city of Sheffield, one of the crucibles of electronic music, with the rugged Peak District national park a stone’s throw away. 30th Aug (around 5pm-7pm) & 31st Aug – 1st Sep (10am-5pm both days) – a two-day intensive course in TidalCycles or Hydra, from the ground up. Full info and registration: https://livecode-summerschool.github.io/
LYDIA LUNCH Presents: SO REAL IT HURTS | Lydia Lunch & special guests come together to mark the London launch of her most recent book, So Real It Hurts. An occasion for senseless celebration | “So Real It Hurts is the perfect title for this collection. It’s a mission statement. A few bleeding slices straight from the butcher shop. A sampler from an enormous archive of work that will, no doubt, be pored over by grad students, book lovers, film historians, music nerds and straight-up perverts a hundred years from now.” | At the Horse Hospital, London Friday, 13 September 2019 7:30 pm 11:30 pm – http://tiny.cc/mvu6az
Books
Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency | By Finn Brunton | The incredible story of the pioneers of cryptocurrency takes us from autonomous zones on the high seas to the world’s most valuable dump, from bank runs to idea coupons, from time travelers in a San Francisco bar to the pattern securing every twenty-dollar bill, and from marketplaces for dangerous secrets to a tank of frozen heads awaiting revival in the far future. Along the way, Digital Cash explores the hard questions and challenges that these innovators faced: How do we learn to trust and use different kinds of money? What makes digital objects valuable and more – http://tiny.cc/3rn6az
ORGANIZE | By Timon Beyes, Lisa Conrad, and Reinhold Martin | A pioneering systematic inquiry into—and mapping of—the field of media and organization | The dialogical form of the essays in Organize provides a concise and path-breaking view on the recursive relation between technological media and social organization. Bringing together leading media thinkers and organization theorists, the book interrogates organization as an effect and condition of media, and establishes and maps “media and organization” as a highly relevant field of inquiry | University of Minnesota Press – http://tiny.cc/r2t6az
Josephine Berry – Art and (Bare) Life: A Biopolitical Inquiry | By Joesphine Berry | Art and (Bare) Life: A Biopolitical Inquiry analyzes modern and contemporary art’s drive to blur with life, and how this is connected to the democratic state’s biologized control of life. Art’s ambition to transform life intersects in striking ways with modern biopower’s aim to normalize, purify, judge, and transform life-rendering it bare – http://tiny.cc/mak6az
Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage | Phil Smith & Tony Whitehead (text) ~ John Schott (photography) | In the 15th century, Felix Fabri combined the two, using his visits to Jerusalem to write a handbook for nuns wanting to make a pilgrimage in the imagination, whilst confined to their religious houses. The Guidebook followed Fabri’s example: first walking together over many weeks – not to reach a destination but simply to find one – then, in startling words and images, conjuring an armchair pilgrimage for the reader… along lanes and around hills, into caves and down to the coast. Triarchy Press – http://tiny.cc/0yw6az
Digital Sound Studies | Editor(s): Mary Caton Lingold, Darren Mueller, Whitney Trettien | The digital turn has created new opportunities for scholars across disciplines to use sound in their scholarship. This volume’s contributors provide a blueprint for making sound central to research, teaching, and dissemination. They show how digital sound studies has the potential to transform silent, text-centric cultures of communication in the humanities into rich, multisensory experiences that are more inclusive of diverse knowledges and abilities | Duke press – http://tiny.cc/n5o6az
Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations (1995) | Editor(s): Carol J. Adams, Josephine Donovan | A collection of pioneering essays that explores the theoretical connections between feminism and animal defense. Offering a feminist perspective on the status of animals, this unique volume argues persuasively that both the social construction and oppressions of women are inextricably connected to the ways in which we comprehend and abuse other species. Furthermore, it demonstrates that such a focus does not distract from the struggle for women’s rights, but rather contributes to it | Duke press – http://tiny.cc/8ep6az
Articles & Interviews
Last Night A Distributed Cooperative Organization Saved My Life: A brief introduction to DisCOs | By Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel | A set of organisational tools and practices for groups of people who want to work together in a cooperative, commons-oriented, and feminist economic form. DisCO is also an alternative to another form called the Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, or DAO. By design, DAOs can earn their own money, and contract and pay for services — they can actually create and wield their own economic power, according to the interests of their programmers – http://tiny.cc/xnj6az
Murray Bookchin’s libertarian technics | The first in a series of critical introductions to thinkers and concepts that inform discussion of the climate crisis, looking at Murray Bookchin’s ideas about technology. For Bookchin, the profit motive constrains and limits human creativity to that which can be commodified – http://tiny.cc/yl1xaz
The Artistic Achievements of Native Americans Through the Ages | By Eric Vilas-Boas | The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s series of talks and tours on Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection helps visitors better contextualize artwork by Indigenous creators across the centuries. It was a big deal when the Metropolitan Museum of Art began displaying work by Indigenous artists in its American Wing in 2018. […] The acquisition and subsequent 2018 exhibition sought to correct that discrepancy in the Met, as well as locate work by Indigenous artists firmly within the context of “American art.” | Hyperallergic – http://tiny.cc/nqp6az
Peaches on her post-human sex toy art show: ‘It’s disturbing – but a lot of fun’ | Benoit Loiseau | The pop provocateur has created an artwork in which an army of ‘fleshies’, or masturbation devices, seek sexual liberation. She talks us through its deeper meanings | The work was one of 100 that appeared in Calle’s show Take Care of Yourself, which premiered at the Venice Biennale. Then in 2013, Yoko Ono invited Peaches to re-enact her seminal 1964 performance Cut Piece, letting audience members snip away at the singer’s clothes until they had entirely gone. Now, 20 years after unleashing her sex-positive signature song Fuck the Pain Away, Peaches finally has an exhibition of her own | Guardian – http://tiny.cc/2yq6az
Futures of Habermas’s Work | By Matthias Fritsch | THE 90TH BIRTHDAY of Germany’s most important living philosopher provides a welcome opportunity to reflect on the mark his work will have left. What legacy will his work leave for humanity? What aspects of his immense corpus will endure for future generations? I will single out three areas in response to these questions as we celebrate Habermas’s birthday – http://tiny.cc/9xa8az
Why Posting Selfies With Street Art Could Get You Sued | By Helen Holmes | Observer | We already know that copyright infringement and intellectual property law dictates that original artistic work may be used for another purpose only when permission is granted by the creator. When permission isn’t granted, things can get hairy. Apparently, a new precedent is being set: social media influencers with big followings are being sued for posting content where the influencer in question is posing in front of artwork, without having asked the artist first – http://tiny.cc/0or6az
Extra Squeezed extra stuff)
Metal Liverpool (UK) Are hiring new staff | Administrator & Projects Manager | Visit here for more details – http://www.metalculture.com/vacancies/
Image: Susan Hiller: Ghost / TV | Matt’s Gallery 25 September–27 October 2019
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.
A list of Furtherfield recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.
Kiss My Genders | A group exhibition at the Hayward Gallery celebrating more than 30 international artists whose work explores and engages with gender fluidity, as well as non-binary, trans and intersex identities | features works from the late 1960s and early 1970s through to the present moment, and focuses on artists who draw on their own experiences to create content and forms that challenge accepted or stable definitions of gender | 12 Jun 2019 – 8 Sep 2019 – https://tinyurl.com/y3txhcl7
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Atmospheric Memory opens this Saturday for its World Premiere at MIF19, 6-21 July | An array of ‘Atmospheric Machines’ mine the air for turbulence caused by speech, then transform it into trails of vapour, ripples on water, epic 360-degree projections. These artworks are presented alongside a section of a Babbage Analytical Engine, a rare object in the prehistory of computing from the Science Museum Group’s collection – https://tinyurl.com/yxt2kk6c
Event Two | An exhibition by the Computer Arts Society and FLUX Events in collaboration with the Royal College of Art, the Electronic Visualisation and the Arts conference (EVA), Interact Digital Arts and Lumen Art Projects. Featuring talks by Lumen Art Projects and FLUX Events. 12th – 17th July 2019 Royal College of Art, Kensington Campus, London – https://tinyurl.com/yxd379g9
Peripheries: Electronic literature and new media art | A week-long exhibition of cutting-edge expression in electronic literature and media art as part of University College Cork’s hosting of the internationalElectronic Literature Organization conference and festival in Cork. Featuring artists: Betül Aksu, Graham Allen, John F. Barber & Greg Philbrook, Natasha Boškić / Mohamad Kebbewar / Mary McDonald, Mez Breeze & Andy Campbell, Richard A. Carter, John Cayley & Joanna Howard, Qianxun Chen, Hilda Daniel, Tina Escaja, Brenda Grell, Chris Hales, Brian James, Alinta Krauth, Paul O’Neill, Sabrina Rubakovic, Anastasia Salter, Colm Scully, Lyle Skains, Joel Swanson, Daniel Temkin, Pip Thornton, Theadora Walsh, Marcelina Wellmer | 11 – 17 July 2019 – https://tinyurl.com/yyvd8trc
Birth Rites Collection Summer School | A unique 5-day programme of lectures, workshops and exchange. It is generated through engaging directly with the artworks in the collection which are installed across the historic Guy’s campus, King’s College London, and hosted by the Department of Midwifery. If you are a midwife, academic, artist, medic, health professional, art historian or policy advisor, you will arrive on the course with your skill set and leave with a bespoke multi-media pack of visual, textual, auditory and filmic material, to be used thereafter in your own future work | 15-19th July 2019 Guy’s Campus, Kings College London, UK – https://tinyurl.com/y32cfbkq
A Strange Weave of Time and Space | Exhibition at Site Gallery | Sheffield UK, 12 Jul 2019 – 28 Jul 2019 | An exhibition and research project exploring notions of aura and authenticity in the post-digital context | The works selected circle the complex relations between the auratic, (Walter Benjamin’s term for the authentic, original artefact, singular in space and time) and the technologically reproduced, dispersed and viewed art object prevalent in the current post-digital period. Including moving image, sculpture, drawing, audio and 3D printed objects. Curated by Jeanine Griffin. https://tinyurl.com/y5cnncfv
Vector Festival 2019 Toronto, July 11-14, 2019 | InterAccess is thrilled to announce the theme of Vector Festival 2019, Speculative Ecologies: Media Art at the Anthropocenic Precipice. Curated by Katie Micak and Martin Zeilinger, this year’s festival explores the ways in which contemporary media art reflects—and reflects on—mass-scale environmental shifts. The 2019 festival program will include works by over 30 local and international artists in more than 8 locations across Toronto and online – http://vectorfestival.org/
Radical Networks Deadline Extended | A conference that celebrates a free and open internet, with hands-on workshops, speakers, and a gallery exhibiting artworks centered around radio and networking technology. What: We invite anyone interested in presenting a workshop, lunchtime meetup, talk, panel, performance or film screening, tour / field trips or artwork to be exhibited | The deadline for submitting your proposal is now July 9, 2019 – https://radicalnetworks.org/
Symposium: “The sculptural in the (post-) digital age” | 1 July 2020 (Central Institute for Art History, Munich) | Submission deadline: 21 July 2019 | A number of theoretical approaches discuss the implications of so-called ‘Aesthetics of the Digital’, referring above all to screen-based phenomena. Art history, however, continues to pay little attention to sculptural works that are conceived and ‘materialized’ using digital technologies – https://tinyurl.com/yyomlbxa
UFO-Urban Flying Opera Swarms of Painting Drones | Following the success of write&erase robot Scribit, CRA unveils the world’s first crowdsourced graffiti, designed by thousands of people and painted by a swarm of drones in the city of Torino, Italy. The UFO-Urban Flying Opera project is promoted by Compagnia di San Paolo, ideated and curated by CRA, and coordinated and produced by Fondazione LINKS, in collaboration with Tsuru Robotics | Visited Youtube Video – https://tinyurl.com/y6y7almm
Digital Conversations: Celebrating Ten Years of the New Media Writing Prize | As part of their Digital Conversations series and the season of events accompanying the Library’s Writing: Making Your Mark exhibition, in partnership with Bournemouth University, if:book uk, and sponsored by the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library; they are celebrating ten years of the New Media Writing Prize, by hosting a panel consisting of writers, Christine Wilks, Kayt Lackie and Amira Hanafi, on Thursday 18 July in the British Library Knowledge Centre – https://tinyurl.com/y574l5a5
Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All | By Robert Elliott Smith | Having worked in the field of artificial intelligence for over 30 years, Smith reveals the mounting evidence that the mechanical actors in our lives do indeed have, or at least express, morals: they’re just not the morals of the progressive modern society that we imagined we were moving towards. Instead, as we are just beginning to see – in the US elections and Brexit to name but a few – there are increasing incidences of machine bigotry, greed and the crass manipulation of our basest instincts – Bloomsbury Business (27 Jun. 2019) – https://tinyurl.com/y5oct3xg
Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent | By Priyamvada Gopal | Insurgent Empire shows how Britain’s enslaved and colonial subjects were not merely victims of empire and subsequent beneficiaries of its crises of conscience but also agents whose resistance both contributed to their own liberation and shaped British ideas about freedom and who could be free. This book examines dissent over the question of empire in Britain and shows how it was influenced by rebellions and resistance in the colonies from the West Indies and East Africa to Egypt and India. It also shows how a pivotal role in fomenting dissent was played by anti-colonial campaigners based in London at the heart of the empire. Publisher: Verso Books 2019 – https://tinyurl.com/y579t24y
Vital Forms: Biological Art, Architecture, and the Dependencies of Life | By Jennifer Johung | Shows how the intersection of biotech, art, and architecture are transforming the world we live in. Examining cutting-edge developments in biotechnological research—including tissue-engineering, stem cell science, regenerative medicine, and more—Vital Forms brings biological art and architecture into critical dialogue | The University of Minnesota Press 2019 – https://bit.ly/2KK5nCl
Harriet Bart: Abracadabra and Other Forms of Protection | A comprehensive look at the prolific and dynamic career of this international feminist conceptual artist. The book, which accompanies the first retrospective exhibition of her work at the Weisman Art Museum in 2020, features poetry and prose contributions by significant writers, artists, and curators who have been influenced by her art. Laura Wertheim Joseph, Editor. Foreword by Lyndel King 2019 | University of Minnesota Press – https://tinyurl.com/y4edoy7q
Ledger – Human Centric Values Technology Enterprises, Youtube video | LedgerProject VentureBuilder | The Builder Programme LEDGER chose the 16 most human-centric and innovative projects among a pool of 291 applicants. LEDGER, a European Commission funded project looking for people working on decentralized technologies to give back citizens control over their data, held its Jury Day on Tuesday 28 May in Amsterdam | A must watch for those who to build better relations with technology, community & the climate – https://tinyurl.com/y6eduxbf
Situationism Now – Understanding Guy Debord in a Contemporary Political Context | by Caitríona Devery, 2017 Should we still be reading Guy Debord or encouraging others to read him politically for the first time in a contemporary context? In popular culture parlance, Debord’s name will always be associated with the political moment of May ’68, the general strike and the student riots which spread from the campus of Nanterre (led by philosophy and sociology lecturers Jean Francois Lyotard and Henri Lefebvre) – http://politicalscience.ie/?p=1065
Rec, Barcelona’s social currency – Description / Objectives | Barcelona Digital City | Economic resource to create a citizen exchange system that is complementary or equal to the euro | This social currency acts as a complementary form of payment, but does not replace the national currency. It gives us the opportunity to measure the impact of consumption on the city. It is estimated that 5,000 people are now using one of the 70 social currencies in Spain – https://tinyurl.com/y2y8oh8t
Augmented Reality Art Commission, NEoN Digital Arts Festival: REACT | Deadline for submissions: 31 July 2019, For exhibition beginning: 4 November 2019 | Artist Fee £2000 (inclusive of research and production costs and any licensing fees) From 4 – 10 November 2019 the NEoN Digital Arts Festival in Dundee, Scotland will be focused on the theme “REACT”, exploring how artists use digital systems to effect change within our social and political realities. We are now seeking proposals for a commissioned project utilising AR and mobile technologies inspired by NEoN’s theme – https://tinyurl.com/y5n6kote
Image by John.F.Barber and Greg Philbrook, Sound Spheres, still 2018 web based interactive installation. Exhibited at Peripheries: Electronic literature and new media art 2019.S
A list of Furtherfield recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.
Events & Exhibitions
POSTCENTRAL | Group show | NOME is pleased to present POSTCENTRAL, a group show curated by Navine G. Khan-Dossos, featuring works by Zach Blas, Jesse Darling, Marjolijn Dijkman, Antye Guenther, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Kirsten Stolle, Addie Wagenknecht, and Xiyadie | The work of the artists assembled in POSTCENTRAL touches on the question of where “the body” can be found and where it might be heading, with a focus on non-naturalist ideas of women’s and queer bodies as spaces of futurity and potential. As Donna Haraway foretold in 1985, the exhibition stands “for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction | June 22 – July 26, 2019 – https://bit.ly/2Iu7r01
Satellite Devotion, a new installation by Tabita Rezaire | Hosted by arebyte 2 July – 24 August 2019 | The Center for Moon Studies and Practices is an ever-evolving anchor for Moon knowledge to understand and experience the vastness of her influence and nourish our relationship with the Earth’s sole* natural satellite. In a quest to share Moon wisdoms across time and space, a 12 video-channel dome presents a constellation of Moon teachings from astrophysics to cosmology, astrology, agriculture, healing, history, magic, meditation, theology and spatial politics – https://bit.ly/2Zom8Y2
Toggler | A new website feature allowing commissioned artists to explore, demonstrate and celebrate the potential of creativity in website design. As websites become increasingly standardised to ensure familiarity and ease of use for online visitors, Toggler allows artists to champion the role of curiosity and creativity in exploring other possibilities for presenting content online. The first artists commissioned are Luke Harby, Violet Forest, Sam Francis Read, Antonio Roberts and Tobias Zehntner – https://bit.ly/2KWzTJB
New Writings: Re-Enter the Dragon with Stewart Home | The artist and cult author discusses his new book, with a look at the cinematic copy-cats of Bruce Lee and the Sleazy Joys of Lowbrow Cinema. Brucesploitation films riff on tropes associated with Bruce Lee, sometimes using actors who copy and clone the phenomenally successful kung-fu master’s name or look. Home will talk through the finer points of this sprawling sub-genre as he joins BFI curator William Fowler in conversation | Reuben Library at Bfi Southbank, SE1 8 London, UK – https://bit.ly/2ZxVmMM
AI TRAPS Meetup: Reshape the future – Revealing & transforming algorithmic inequality | Part of the DNL Activation programme | Following up on their upcoming Disruption Network Lab conference ‘AI Traps: Automating Discrimination’, with a closer look at how AI & algorithms reinforce prejudices and biases of its human creators and societies, in this meetup we focus on possible strategies for exposing and transforming algorithmic inequality | Wednesday 26 June, 19:00 at STATE Studio, Hauptstr 3, 10827 Berlin (U7 Kleistpark) – Entrance is free – https://bit.ly/2KpgOjB
High Weirdness: with Erik Davis, Jeremy Gilbert and Debra Shaw | Hosted by Culture, Power, Politics and 2 others | Since the 1990s, Erik Davis has been charting the multiple interfaces between consciousness-expansion, technological trickery, drug cultures and social change | Erik’s new book High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica and Visionary Experience in the Seventies is a study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson. High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s – https://bit.ly/2ZDTORD
Platform Parasite: A Personal Voyage by Cosmos Carl | Hosted by Banner Repeater and Cosmos Carl – Platform Parasite | Platform Parasite: A Personal Voyage is a pilot episode of a new series by Cosmos Carl commissioned by Banner Repeater. Platform Parasite: A Personal Voyage includes contributions from Snorri Ásmundsson, Gnax Type, Art+Feminism, Alex Frost, Kate Mackeson, Angels Miralda, Joseph Ridgeon, Jorik Amit Galama, Emilia Bergmark, NX Panther, Harry Meadley, Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson, Laura Yuile featured on the parasitical online art platform Cosmos Carl. Opening: 26th April 6.30-9pm, exh: 26th April – 29th June – https://www.bannerrepeater.org/
Books
Vital Forms: Biological Art, Architecture, and the Dependencies of Life | By Jennifer Johung | Shows how the intersection of biotech, art, and architecture are transforming the world we live in. Examining cutting-edge developments in biotechnological research—including tissue-engineering, stem cell science, regenerative medicine, and more—Vital Forms brings biological art and architecture into critical dialogue | The University of Minnesota Press 2019 – https://bit.ly/2KK5nCl
Articles & interviews
The Bank of Facebook | By Rachel O’ Dwyer | A response to Facebook’s announcement that it’s releasing a digital currency and wallet | Marshall McLuhan argued that money is communication. This rings particularly true at a time when so many platforms are entering the payments space | Institute of Network Cultures Wed, 19 Jun 2019 – https://bit.ly/2x6KKs0
Regine Debatty reviews Digital Cash. The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency, by Finn Brunton, assistant professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Brunton reveals how technological utopians & political radicals created experimental money to bring about their visions of the future: protecting privacy or bringing down governments, preparing for apocalypse or immortality – https://bit.ly/2MSqC7I
An AI Completes an Unfinished Composition 115 Years After Composers Death | By Suchi Rudra | It’s never too late to finish what you’ve started, even if AI does the job for you | This November, the Prague Philharmonic will perform the third and final movement of “From the Future World,” an AI-completed composition based on an unfinished piano piece by the famous composer Antonín Dvořák, 115 years after his death. Emmanuel Villaume will conduct – https://bit.ly/2XWnTva
How Ethical Is Facial Recognition Technology? By Yaroslav Kuflinski | In this article, we’ll explore the issues that surround facial recognition in depth and look at how these technologies can be made safer for everyone. Photo by Steinar Engeland on Unsplash The Potential of Facial Recognition Technology – https://bit.ly/2MNQAsX
What Happens When a US Border Protection Contractor Gets Hacked? The government wants all the data it can get from you at the border. But what happens when a hacker shows they can’t store it safely? A hacker known as “Boris the bullet dodger” hacked a license plate reader company called Perceptics. Now, less than a month later, CBP issued a statement confirming a data breach at one of its contractors – https://bit.ly/2Fhu1Xs
Environment reporters facing harassment and murder, study finds | By Juliette Garside and Jonathan Watts | Tally of deaths makes it one of most dangerous fields for journalists after war reporting | Thirteen journalists who were investigating damage to the environment have been killed in recent years and many more are suffering violence, harassment, intimidation and lawsuits, according to a study – https://bit.ly/2IOWMMa
Extra Squeezed
Superflux are looking for a freelance visual / graphic designer (print + digital) to come on board and work with them on a 🔥 worldbuilding project. Drop them a line with portfolios👇🏼⚡️📢 || Designers and strategic thinkers, researchers and artists; exploring, imagining and prototyping different possible futures – hello@superflux.in
Two Fully Funded PhD Scholarships to Study the Geographies of Homelessness, Veganism, Unschooling, or Heavy Metal Music at the University of Newcastle, in Australia. Two Domestic (Australia) or one International PhD scholarships will be awarded to study at the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies under the direction of Professor Simon Springer in the Discipline of Geography and Environmental Studies – https://bit.ly/2In3ZnK
Image from Satellite Devotion, a new installation by Tabita Rezaire at arebyte gallery | Opening Tuesday 2 July – 24 August 2019.
A weekly list of Furtherfield recommendations that we are sharing with others. It reflects the expansive and dynamic culture we enjoy, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.
Events & Exhibitions
Solo show H4ppy D33p W3b (Happy Deep Web) by Systaime aka Michael Borras, at Watermans Arts centre, London. Systaime is the creator of The French Trash Touch movement, which mixes low and high culture and pop culture with internet folklore, like memes, emojis or GIFs. He offers an explosive mashup of internet aesthetics, where information, images and comments are remixed in an audiovisual spectacle that exposes the language of the internet | 12 June – 28 July 2019 – https://bit.ly/2KfGQWy
Antiuniversity Festival is back 15 Jun – 22 Jun 2019, for the fifth time with events across the UK and internationally. This year’s programme is absolutely bursting with radical education, militant feminism, anarchist tendencies, autonomous organising, shit hot politics, critical analysis and progressive discussions about care and culture and gender and class | Full programme – http://www.antiuniversity.org/
Aaron Bastani in conversation with Dr. Richard Barbrook on his new book ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto‘ 2019. This event is hosted by Newspeak House, the London College of Political Technologists. Tue, 25 June 2019 | Virtual Futures partners with Verso Books | Book here – https://bit.ly/31p7Xnv
Take the Money and Run: Power, Money and Counter-Power | Wednesday 19 June, 19.00 – 21.00 | The light recently shone on the sources of money that supports arts organisations – from fossil fuels to deadly pharmaceuticals – has illuminated some corners of the ‘hidden abode of production” (Marx) to valuable effect. Live Art Development Agency (LADA), London | Book here – https://bit.ly/2WBGkUk
West Den Haag – Summer School 2019 Spinoza: Passionate Action | Human Being is a Measure | With: Ewa Majewska (PL), Florence Freitag (DE) , Baruch Gottlieb (CA) and Cassie Thornton (US). In order to keep the discussions and experiences substantive and immersive, this Summer School is limited to 30 participants. There is a fee of € 175 per participant, which includes lunches as well as a reader. The program will be held in English. To apply, please e-mail theo@westdenhaag.nl before 26 June 2018 with a short introduction and a 100-word motivation. If successful, you will receive a confirmation of registration and instructions for payment within the week – https://bit.ly/2IHDg4l
About all things languages of all sorts | lingagens an online ReadingClub ***** session. Duration 20 min | Lai-TzeFan, Abdulmohsen Alonayq, Sören Pold and Andréa Catrópa will rearite a text originally written by Erika Fülöp. June 20, 8:15pm (UTC+01:00) – https://bit.ly/2WktGsM
Books
Vital Forms: Biological Art, Architecture, and the Dependencies of Life | By Jennifer Johung | Shows how the intersection of biotech, art, and architecture are transforming the world we live in. Examining cutting-edge developments in biotechnological research—including tissue-engineering, stem cell science, regenerative medicine, and more—Vital Forms brings biological art and architecture into critical dialogue | The University of Minnesota Press 2019 – https://bit.ly/2KK5nCl
Archives | Authors – Andrew Lison, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, Rick Prelinger, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Götz Bachmann, Mercedes Bunz, and Timon Beyes | How digital networks and services bring the issues of archives out of the realm of institutions and into the lives of everyday users. Archives have become a nexus in the wake of the digital turn—electronic files, search engines, video sites, and media player libraries make the concepts of “archival” and “retrieval” practically synonymous with the experience of interconnected computing – The University of Minnesota Press, 2019 – https://bit.ly/2WBWjli
Fucking Law: The search for her sexual ethics | By Victoria Brooks | An urgent call for everyone, not just academics and researchers, to find inventive ways to question the ethics of sexuality. Since a sex life is full of so many diverse moments of joy and suffering, for each and everybody, the book attempts to bridge a gap between philosophical and non-philosophical questioning | Zero Books, 2019 – https://bit.ly/31CMxDs
Articles & interviews
Gadgets, Power and the New Modes of Political Consciousness | By Joss Hands | What impact does our relentless fixation on gadgets have on the struggle for new kinds of solidarity, political articulation and intelligence? Joss Hands, author of Gadget Consciousness: Collective Thought, Will and Action in the Age of Social Media, explores the new political and social forces that are emerging in the age of social media – https://bit.ly/2KJp4Kx
Physical Tactics for Digital Colonialism | Video documentation of artist Morehshin Allahyari and her performance-lecture from February 28th 2019. Commissioned and co-presented by New Museum affiliate Rhizome, presenting her concept of digital colonialism in relation to the technologies of 3-D scanning and 3-D printing. https://vimeo.com/337394969
Allahyari also talks to Hrag Vartanian via Hyperallergic on the subjects of ownership of data, forgotten stories, issues surrounding digital colonialism and her scifi project on a podcast – https://bit.ly/2ZnBJa3
The Data Sublime | Giles Lane, writes about his experience at Act Otherwise as a participant at Blast Theory’s annual two day seminar, ‘Act Otherwise – The Invisible Hand: On Profiling and Personalisation.’ He dscusses issues around the generation and use of “Big Data” in artworks and by artists as well as more generally in culture and society – https://bit.ly/2IbjTS3
Forgiven Not Forgotten? A long and detailed challenge to the modern cult of memory | Book review by Christopher Hale on History Today, of ‘Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice’ by Mary Fulbrook, recent winner of the Wolfson History Prize 2019, Oxford University press – https://bit.ly/2wOgulR
Doctored video of sinister Mark Zuckerberg puts Facebook to the test | Last month Facebook declined to remove a manipulated video of Nancy Pelosi even after it was viewed millions of times, and now a doctored video of Mark Zuckerberg delivering a foreboding speech has been posted to Instagram, in a stunt that put Facebook’s content moderation policies to the test | Guardian – https://bit.ly/2F72doC
The Past, Present, and Future of AI Art | AI art has a long history that is often overlooked | By Fabian Offert & Andrey Kurenkov | “AI art”, or more precisely art created with neural networks, has recently started to receive broad media coverage in newspapers (New York Times), magazines (The Atlantic), and countless blogs. It has also led to the popularization of an ever-growing list of philosophical questions surrounding the use of computers for the creation of art – https://bit.ly/2wKD7Y3
Waves to Waveforms: Performing the Thresholds of Sensors and Sense-Making in the Anthropocene | By Richard Carter | This paper details the technical and conceptual background for the developing art project Waveform, a creative-critical meditation on the role of digital sensors in monitoring and representing environmental change. It explores the origins and functioning of the global sensory architectures used to detect and assess these changes, deconstructing the connotations of omniscience, abstraction, and control associated with the ‘top-down’, data-driven mappings they generate – https://bit.ly/2MHs8K4
Extra Squeezed
Looking for a MoneyLab intern | The Institute of Network Cultures is looking for an intern with production and research skills for the organisation of MoneyLab #7: Feminist Finance and overall project management support of the MoneyLab project, NL | Internship period: September 1 until December 15 2019 – https://bit.ly/2WJhKWv
transmediale | Work with us! For the preparations of #transmediale2020 we are looking for interns who would like to gain experience in the administration, communication, and production of the festival. https://bit.ly/2MpGv5k
Main image by Michael Borras aka Systaime | NETICONES 2019.
A weekly list of Furtherfield recommendations that reflects the expansive and dynamic culture we enjoy, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.
Events & Exhibitions
Towards the Planetary Commons | A new exhibition investigating agency and autonomy in the face of global ecological crises | Arts Catalyst | Free entry! Thu 23 May 2019 – 6.00pm, Sat 3 August 2019 – http://bit.do/eTLtx
Call out | NEoN Digital Arts Festival – REACT 2019 in Dundee, Scotland, exploring how artists use digital systems to effect change within our social and political realities – http://bit.do/eTLqy
Symposium | Digital Ecologies 2: Fiction Machines | The Centre for Media Research at Bath Spa University is proud to host the second Digital Ecologies symposium: Fiction Machines and it will take place on Tuesday July 16th 2019 – http://bit.do/eTLkv
Books
Energies in the Arts | Edited by Douglas Kahn | Investigating the concepts and material realities of energy coursing through the arts: a foundational text | (MIT Press) – http://bit.do/eTLh8
Virtual Menageries: Animals as Mediators in Network Cultures | By Jody Berland | The close interdependency of animal emissaries and new media from early European colonial encounters with the exotic to today’s proliferation of animals in digital networks – http://bit.do/eTLiz
To Exist is to Resist: Exploring Black feminist politics beyond national boundaries | By Lynsey May | New essay collection reveals the particularities of experiences and understandings of Black feminism in Europe – http://bit.do/eTLjz
Articles
What is Ethereum? By Ethan Sidelsky | Created in 2015 by Vitalik Buterin to empower users to build their own applications on the blockchain. It is now both the second most well known cryptocurrency and the second most valuable, behind Bitcoin – http://bit.do/eTLfT
Automatic insect identification for better grasp on biodiversity by Eelke Jongejans, Radboud University. One hundred camera traps, developed specifically for the automatic counting and recognition of insects, will be placed throughout the Netherlands this summer – http://bit.do/eTLfy
Network-ing Does Not Equal Network WEAVING | By Christine Capra | Those of us who work with change networks could sometimes do a better job of clarifying the distinction between ‘networking’ and ‘network weaving’ – http://bit.do/eTLgq
Sell Your Data. Earn Passive Income. What Could Go Wrong? | By Garrett Hazelwood | Your data is not property. It’s a piece of who you are – http://bit.do/eTLgT
Extra Squeezed
The LSD Archive at The Institute of Illegal Images “It kept me from eating it if it was framed on the wall” – Mark Mcloud on his amazing collection of LSD Blotters – http://bit.do/eTLKx
Main Image – Marwa Arsanios: Still from ‘Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part I’ (2017), courtesy the artist. At Arts Catalyst exhibition, Towards the Planetary Commons.
On a blustery cold and wet Sunday in the build up to Christmas I joined a group of people at Furtherfield Commons to discuss the future of Finsbury Park. I finally arrived after prowling around their darkened Gallery in the centre of the park, only to discover the event was being hosted in their other space in the far southeastern corner of the park. This brief detour gave me a moment to breathe in one of my local parks and I experienced a familiar feeling of vulnerability as the night drew in and cold drops of rain started to make themselves felt. The few brave families and exercisers were beginning to retreat as I crossed the open stretch of field that runs parallel to the roaring Seven Sisters Road. Drawn by the welcoming light coming from the building in the small gardens behind the legendary Rowans Ten Pin Bowling and guided by the sound of the drumming, a regular feature of this corner of the park, I entered the workshop and was greeted with mince pies, tea and other goodies, and met the 11 other workshop participants.
Timed to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Finsbury Park, this workshop for local residents, aimed to tap into our experiences and imaginations to generate future visions of the park. The event was led by Dr Rachel Jacobs, who is a local with a special affection for the park, and she started by sharing it’s stories and describing some of the features that are no longer in existence including a bandstand and the many trees that have been removed over the years.
We started by identifying features of the park that we would like to ‘lose’ and those we wanted to ‘protect’. Answers were varied but along similar themes. Many people shared a desire to preserve the trees and if possible, have more. The lake featured prominently with many people wanting to maintain the space and the sanctuary it provides for birds. Rose, one of my fellow workshoppers, gleefully called for those people who feed bread to the ducks to be poisoned.
The underground reservoir, a cathedral-like temple to water supply was hailed as a hidden gem that could be utilised as a space during the colder months by Polly a local resident and manager of Space4. Simon, Chair of Friends of Finsbury Park, suggested we consider uses for Manor House Lodge (another building that had escaped my attention). Zeki prioritised the the rocks in the park for protection – especially at the amphitheatre space beside the play park. There were wistful expressions of personal connections to conkers, squirrels and swans. The things that people wanted to lose were more elusive: the atmosphere that the park creates at night; its association with crime and a lack of safety. Gab who overlooks the park from his 8th floor flat, feels the park can be scary and in his words, sometimes ‘sly’. Removing the fences was suggested as a possible remedy.
Next, we were introduced to an initially bemusing process based on Play Your Place, designed by artists Ruth Catlow and Mary Flanagan, to introduce playful and game-like activities to public consultation. We were each asked to select different cards with random words that we were told would help us to disrupt our conventional view of problem solving. The cards were divided into provocative statements, for example mine were: ‘London is no longer’ and ‘getaway car’. Then a spinning wheel contained words associated with game features, like ‘mission’, ‘protagonist’, ‘goal’ or ‘reward’. After drawing or writing out our scenarios based on the random words we had to pick a segment of the wheel in which to place our ideas.
I asked if London is no longer, why is that so? Perhaps the park has eaten London. I was making the park the protagonist, the hero of the story. My ‘getaway car’ card prompted me to imagine Finsbury Park criss-crossed by many roads. So what if a part of the park could move very slowly, a moving park that people could take in the rest of the park from and jump on and off.
Zeki, one of the youngest participants had the cards ‘maps‘ and ‘someone caring for the park’ they assigned it the wheel word ‘reward’. He imagined the rocks in the park could become an area where people could come and paint and draw on the rocks. People will be able to look at the drawings and climb on the rocks. He said this suited ‘reward’ because you get a nice place.
Finally we worked with lego and plasticine, felt and coloured paper, to make a representation of our scenarios. Time flew by before we were then asked to talk about what we had created.
Simon and Talal ended up using a lot of lego. They said they weren’t that confident ‘creating’ but their riotous explosion of lego pieces described the Finsbury Park Lodge with lots of tropical trees growing around them. They included a clocktower which they felt the park needed. Ominously on the edge of their diorama there was, in their words: ‘the threat of a forest fire’.
Ilenia and Gab created intricate visions of the park modelled from tiny pieces of plasticine. Ilenia created crosses to represent all the buildings that she was going to destroy. She said “All the fences will be replaced by nice trees. The lake will be larger than it is now. There will be more people using the park.” Gab described the a tree as becoming “a colourful multi-form creator. It will be very friendly and very different from normal. Everything will be very colourful and this will be linked to representing climate change.” Emma who earlier in the workshop explained her love of conkers ended up building robot conkers.
The outcomes were unexpected and realised in a wonderfully ad hoc way with a rich mix of ideas. Rachel and the Furtherfield team were on hand to support and provide more insight. Although the process of drawing cards and selecting from a wheel was initially quite perplexing, staying with the uncertainty of the process meant that we came up with ideas that were novel and unhindered by more formal or conservative notions of preserving or enhancing Finsbury Park. The two hour time limit, meant that everything moved along at pace that kept the idea generation restless. I believe I speak for all who took part in anticipating the results of the wider project.
What can possibly be made from such a kaleidoscope of raw material, I wondered on my way home in the pouring rain? Perhaps my plant car or Emma’s robot conkers will see the light of day or the darkness of the underground reservoir.
Futurescapes is an Innovate UK Audience of the Future Design Foundations project that uses Finsbury Park as a test case to examine the commercial potential for using immersive experiences as a tool for collaborative placemaking for public spaces and integrated public services. Furturescapes is a partnership project with Furtherfield, The Audience Agency and Wolf in Motion.
“À la recherche de l’information perdue” was a performance that Cornelia Sollfrank contributed to the ‘Post-Cyber Feminist International’ event at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.1 The event in November 2017 marked the twentieth anniversary of the First Cyberfeminist International (documenta X, Kassel, Germany, 1997) organized by the Old Boys Network, paying homage to its productive format and legacy. In her own words, Sollfrank set out to offer an “one-hour lecture performance that makes a (techno-)feminist comment on the entanglements of gender, technology and information politics,” with the rationale that “with the technological landscape vastly changed since the first Cyberfeminist International, we are living in a time well beyond the imagined future of the early cyberfeminists. Expanding upon this particular genealogy, this convening purposefully constellates thinkers to consider a new vision for “post-cyberfeminism” that is substantive and developed, without being exclusionary of contestation.”
I was surprised at the invitation of the charismatic woman I came to know as “Coco” to attend her performance. My surprise, which I bet is going to surprise Coco in turn, was due to two reasons. I had published two academic papers on WikiLeaks (2012, 2014 with Robinson), later included in a monograph charting on digital activism from 1994-2014 (2015), and at the time I was working on another paper on ‘Leaktivism and its Discontents’ examining the DCLeaks, CIA Vault7Leaks and DNCLeaks (2018). Although I took a critical view of the ideological and organizational conflicts within WikiLeaks as an organization internally, and examined the impact of that organization externally on academic debates in three disciplines between 2010-2012, and followed the leaks religiously in my scholarship, I had not written or commented on the rape allegations against Julian Assange.2 The related legal requirements, however, were what forced him to be stranded in the Ecuadorian Embassy from the 12th of June 2012 to the time of writing in 2018, in the first place. On March 6th, 2016, I was one of the signatories urging Swedish and UK Permanent Representatives to the United Nations in Geneva, to respect the United Nations’ decision to free Julian Assange. Moreover, as my work almost in its entirety has not focused on gender aspects of technology, or gender studies (apart from say examining ethno-patriarchal racist ideologies in anti-migrant discourses on digital networks in 2010-2013 for the Project, see et al. 2018),3 I felt rather intrigued by the invitation to the event, and its technofeminist context and agenda. If Coco was brave enough to invite me to watch her performance and trust me to comment on it, considering both my research (see references), and critical but supportive stance to Julian Assange’s quest for freedom, then I had to also be brave enough to take up the challenge!
As academics we are encouraged not to write in the first person. In fact, “do not use the first person in your scholarship” is served up in higher education establishments around the world, bar in certain sub-disciplines who take a certain pride in reflecting on the situated knower and their reflective positionality. In my own scholarship, I have used the first person sparingly. Here, in this text however, I feel obliged to do so, as I watched an artist perform and I would like to convey the thoughts aroused in the internal empire; and also understand whether and if so, how it has transformed me. After all, that is what art is for, right?
Sollfrank’s performance consists of her reading a text, overlaid by electronic sounds, and the projection of changing images behind her. There are nine images: orange font capital letters on a black and white pixel background: INFORMATION, ORGANISATION, ZEROS+ONES, BINARY WORLDS, PURE DIFFERENCE, CYBERFEMINISM, GENDER+TECHNOLOGY, NAKED INFORMATION, TRANPARENCY. The first image background is a very close zoom in to a black-and-white image and each image background zooms out to the final one. Only the last two images reveal the subject of the image: the photograph of the ripped condom used by Julian Assange during sexual intercourse with one of the women that subsequently accused him of rape, table by the Swedish police and published in their report. This was the final image of her lecture below.
The structure of the lecture is an assemblage really of separate elements she uses to launch her critique. In introducing her performance, she asks:
“On the road to freedom, one has to make sacrifices; but what remains when the way gets swampy and forks into affective structures? Rape can be performed in many ways.
So, what is missing? What are we looking for?
Has it been lost at all? Maybe it just multiplied, and stayed a much as it has gone away? Who knows?
We all create reality collectively and long ago have become zombies of transparency.”
Here, already I am baffled by the sentence “Rape can be performed in many ways.” I hadn’t thought about the “performativity” of rape. I make a mental note of this. Who “performs” during a rape? Can you perform before, during, or after a rape? What are the “many ways” a rape can be performed? This thought grabs me immediately at the start of her performance. But I relieve myself of it, thinking I got to be self-policing: this is the kind of thought that gets you into hot water: she must mean either literally the various categories of rape in Sweden, or this is some kind of allegory on reactive affect, discursive violence, a form of sexual misconduct, or again literally the case of broken trust found in a broken condom? I don’t have time to think, as Sollfrank swiftly moves on to the first section “INFORMATION,” where she talks about theoretical approaches to information: structure, knowledge, signal, message, meaning, process. In the sentence,“Julian Assange is accused of rape,” the information is coded in words and letters, the meaning of that structure is conveyed and at the pragmatic level, the receiver finds value in that information depending on whether he/she is interested in this person, his organization, what he represents, subjectively decoding this information to create meaning. The next piece of the puzzle is, of course, “ORGANISATION.” Sollfrank quotes the WikiLeaks organisation mantra: “One of our most important activities is to publish original source material alongside our news stories so readers and historians alike can see evidence of the truth.” Assange faced criticism for his centralised style of leadership in the organisation, which caused people to leave it. And obviously his political aims are somewhat inconclusive. Here, in this part of the lecture, I recognise my own writing, when Sollfrank says: “Maybe, the man and his organisation are an empty signifier, filled ideologically to reflect the discursive mood of anyone.” I had made that argument in ‘WikiLeaks Affects’ (2012), analyzing the diverse actors who supported Assange and the public feelings of him as a traitor or hero, the overflow of affective structures and the acceleration offered by digital networks (digital materialisation of the revolutionary virtual that may or not happen in the real).
But Sollfrank extends this argument by asking: “Why do they all express their particular feelings, even though these are uniformly rooted in their own individual causes and systems of belief?” Yes, what is at stake when Assange’s organisation jump-scaled globally after the release of the Collateral Damage video in 2010? Would the strong tradition of the women-protective Swedish state have taken on the same exact legal process for someone less than Assange? Letting him leave for the UK, after a police station visit, but then after the leaks occurred, recall him for further questioning? The saga between the Swedish government and Assange,culminated in Swedish prosecutors dropping their investigation into Assange, bringing to an end a seven-year legal standoff on May 19, 2017.4 In February 2018, a judge, nevertheless, upheld the warrant for his arrest. On 28 March 2018, Ecuador cut Assange’s Internet connection at its London embassy refuge “in order to prevent any potential harm,” caused by his social media posts denouncing the arrest of a Catalonian separatist leader, which Ecuador officials claimed “to put at risk” Ecuador’s relations with European countries. Assange might well be an obnoxious bastard to whom rape charges might be thrown at and dropped, but he becomes a target for Sollfrank for another reason…
This is where the performance goes SURREAL. Of the ONE and ZERO, Sollfrank makes beautiful poetry of this, in her “BINARY WORLDS” section:
“The man is the ONE, and ONE is everything. And the female has nothing you can see. Woman functions as a hole, a gap, a space, a nothing that is not the same, identical, identifiable, … a fault, a flaw, a lack, an absence outside the system of representations and auto-representations. Lacan lays down the law and leaves no doubt when he syas: ‘There is woman only as excluded by the nature of things. She is not “all,” “not whole,” “not-one,” and whatever she knows can only be described as “not-knowledge.” There is no such thing as THE woman, where the definite article stands for the universal. She has no place like home, nothing of her own, other than the place of the Other which,” writes Lacan, “I designate with a capital O.”
And it remains up to us, the audience, to make the association she would never express herself: the ONE mal god, is it him?
In “PURE DIFFERENCE,” Sollfrank finally gets irritated herself! “ONE, the definite, upright line; and ZERO the diagram or nothing at all: penis and vagina, thing and hole; a perfect match… Now the only thing that counts is whether there is something to see, and there seems to be something missing with the Zero. What makes the <woman> in this respect? …Why not admit that we are as blind for the invisible sexual difference as between a Zero and a ONE, because we always have to see pictures and that means something else?”
“CYBERFEMINISM” is brought in to help answer some of the questions here, but its focus has been how to use technology to fight “Big Daddy Mainframe,” technology as a way to dissolve sex and gender. The cyberfeminist techno-utopian expectations did not digitally or otherwise materialise, and Sollfrank asks: “What is between your legs NOW? Zeroes and ones? Liberated data? Digital slime? The warm machine still awaits your intention, but never forget the flesh.” What Sollfrank goes on to declare in “GENDER & TECHNOLOGY” is that “Big Daddy rules supreme.” That is my least favorite part of the lecture. Yes, engrained spheres of masculinity are still ubiquitous within all techno-cultures, and Sollfrank offers the GamerGate example with men harassing women, trolling, doxxing, cyberstalking, intimidation and policing experienced by women and queers are real. Indeed.
But here’s also where the binary lures to manifest itself. Extending Assange’s obnoxious techno-geek persona accused of rape and making him the master signifier of patriarchy reproduced in digital networks and especially technoculture would in turn reproduce exactly the same that fills the empty signifier Assange with the baggage of their own beliefs. Watch out and not fall into the same trap here, although it might be beautiful just to fall.
Sollfrank’s contribution here is really not on Assange’s signifier as a male God of ONE the personification of toxic masculinity, it is more her critique of his ideology of TRANSPARENCY, in the last section of her performance.
The inconvenient question remains, what information at which moment and from whom? If it is not related to a political goal, transparency becomes an end in itself – an ideology, and we: its zombies. With transparency as the new imperative: How do we distinguish … between accountability, surveillances and privacy invasion? Liberating public data and protecting private ones? All data are made of similar substance and follow the same logic; who might be able to stop the flow, once it is flowing? Who would want to interrupt the continuum, to crack and leak and disrupt the flow – of capital? No way!
The performance finishes with “Naked information is incapable of generating a myth, I live off that which others do not know about me. And will I ever know myself? In contrast to calculating, thinking is not self-transparent. There is nothing more intransparent than the subject to herself – no matter how much data I have and share. Information is just information, only once you know what you are looking for, the search can begin.”
Sollfrank’s performance approached information from all the sides she started with: structure, knowledge, signal, message, meaning, process. I had to reflect on why I never wrote about the Swedish case in all the scholarship I developed on WikiLeaks over the years. I felt Assange is an easy target to be used as a prop to talk about sexism reproduced in digital networks, techno-patriarchy and cyberfeminism, filling him in as an empty signifier to whatever the pet subject and the ideological discursive purpose happens to be. And yet, I think here Sollfrank does something brilliant, bringing a picture of the ripped condom as a background to her red-font words. Because she is connecting meanings to structures, material, affective, digital and interrogating trust, extending to the trust that a condom should not be ripped, interrogating the winner takes all justification register of transparency as an ideology, surveillance as the normal, and the end of secrecy, the quest of truth at all costs, even disrupting democracy, even the neoliberal capitalist kind. When there is no true self, even in itself, the search for lost information can be the point or utterly pointless, the same way as ZERO and ONE. This is what Sollfrank I think transformed with her art in my (post-cyberfeminist?) soul machinery.
Link to most recent performance at the hacker convention 35c3 in Leipzig:
1 https://www.ica.art/whats-on/season/post-cyber-feminist-international
2 https://diem25.org/urging-sweden-and-the-uk-to-free-julian-assange
4 https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/oct/12/timeline-julian-assange-and-swedens-prosecutors
Associate Professor in Media and Communication at the University of Leicester. Her work contributes to theorising cyberconflict, and exploring the potential of ICTs and network forms of organization for social movements, resistance and open knowledge production.
artist, researcher and university lecturer, living in Berlin (Germany). Recurring subjects in her artistic and academic work in and about digital cultures are artistic infrastructures, new forms of (political) self-organization, authorship and intellectual property, techno-feminist practice and theory. She was co-founder of the collectives women-and-technology, – Innen and old boys network, and currently is research associate at the University of the Arts in Zürich for the project ‘Creating Commons.’ Her recent book Die schönen Kriegerinnen. Technofeministische Praxis im 21.Jahrhundert was published in August 2018 with transversal texts, Vienna. For more information, pls visit: artwarez.org
In thinking about the relationship between science fiction and social justice, a useful starting-point is the novel that many regard as the Ur-source for the genre: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). When Shelley’s anti-hero finally encounters his creation, the Creature admonishes Frankenstein for his abdication of responsibility:
I am thy creature, and I will be even mild and docile to my natural lord and king, if thou wilt also perform thy part, the which thou owest me. … I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, who thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. … I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.
Popularly misunderstood as a cautionary warning against playing God (a notion that Shelley only introduced in the preface to the 1831 edition), Frankenstein’s meaning is really captured in this passage. Shelley, influenced by the radical ideas of her parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, makes it clear that the Creature was born good and that his evil was the product only of his mistreatment. Echoing the social contract of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Creature insists that he will do good again if Frankenstein, for his part, does the same. Social justice for the unfortunate, the misshapen and the abused is what underlies the radicalism of Shelley’s novel. Frankenstein’s experiments give birth not only to a new species but also to a new concept of social responsibility, in which those with power are behoved to acknowledge, respect and support those without; a relationship that Frankenstein literally runs away from.
The theme of social justice, then, is there at the birth also of the sf genre. It looks backwards to the utopian tradition from Plato and Thomas More to the progressive movements that characterised Shelley’s Romantic age. And it looks forwards to how science fiction – as we would recognise it today – has imagined future and non-terrestial societies with all manner of different social, political and sexual arrangements.
Shelley’s motif of creator and created is one way of examining how modern sf has dramatized competing notions of social justice. Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1950) and, even more so, The Caves of Steel (1954) ask not only the question, ‘can a robot pass for human?’, but also more importantly, ‘what happens to humanity when robots supersede them?’. Within current anxieties surrounding AI, Asimov’s stories are experiencing a revival of interest. One possible solution to the latter question is the policing of the boundaries between human and machine. This grey area is explored through use of the Voigt-Kampff Test, which measures the subject’s empathetic understanding, in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and memorably dramatized in Ridley Scott’s film version, Blade Runner (1982). In William Gibson’s novel, Neuromancer (1984), and the Japanese anime Ghost in the Shell (1995), branches of both the military and the police are marshalled to prevent AIs gaining the equivalent of human consciousness.
Running parallel with Asimov’s robot stories, Cordwainer Smith published the tales that comprised ‘the Instrumentality of Mankind’, collected posthumously as The Rediscovery of Man (1993). A key element involves the Underpeople, genetically modified animals who serve the needs of their seemingly godlike masters, and whose journey towards emancipation is conveyed through the stories. It is surely no coincidence that both Asimov and Smith were writing against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, but it is also indicative of the magazine culture of the period that both had to write allegorically. In N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (2015-7), an unprecedented winner of three successive Hugo Awards, the racial subtext to the struggle between ‘normals’ and post-humans is made explicit.
Jemisin, like Ann Leckie’s multiple award-winning Ancillary Justice (2013), is indebted to the black and female authors who came before her. In particular, the influence of Octavia Butler, as indicated by the anthology of new writing, Octavia’s Brood (2015), has grown immeasurably since her premature death in 2006. Butler’s abiding preoccupation was with the compromises that the powerless would have to make with the powerful simply in order to survive. Her final sf novels, Parable of the Talents (1993) and Parable of the Sower (1998), tentatively posit a more utopian vision. This hard-won prospect owes something to both Joanna Russ’s no-nonsense ideal of Whileaway in The Female Man (1975) as well as the ‘ambiguous utopia’ of Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974). Leckie, in particular, has acknowledged her debt to Le Guin, but whilst most attention has been paid to the representation of non-binary sexualities in both the Ancillary novels and Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), what binds both authors is their anarchic sense of individualism and communitarianism.
Whilst sf has, like many of its recent award-winning recipients, diversified over the decades, there is little sense of it having abandoned the Creature’s plaintive plea in Frankenstein: ‘I am malicious because I am miserable.’ It is the imaginative reiteration of this plea that makes sf into a viable form for speculating upon the future bases of citizenship and social justice.
When I first heard about MoneyLab, it was back in 2013 or the beginning of 2014, when I was doing my masters in London. A friend of mine handed a flyer to me and I was intrigued by the strange typography and the combination of bright colours. However, I didn’t quite believe that any kind of initiative could really start an alt-economy movement. Not that I didn’t believe in local currency or creative commons, but those gentle approaches generally seemed to lack traction, just like liberals do with voters. I naturally thought MoneyLab was one of those initiatives.
However, as Bitcoin was becoming a hype, the name popped up again; MoneyLab itself was also becoming a hype. While bitterly regretting not being able to be associated as the first wave of participants, I started to think that maybe MoneyLab might be the framework that can really push out alternative economic attempts as mainstream culture. My stance towards economic shifts was somewhat similar to that of William Gibson’s; he said in an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian, ‘What would my superpower be? Redistribution of wealth’. How did that change after reading the MoneyLab Reader 2?
Before going into the details of what blockchain technology can really do, it is crucial to understand a new “unit of value” created in modern society (Pine and Gilmore 1999). Since the most prominent piece of technology of our era is undoubtedly smartphones (with Apple being the first 1 trillion dollar publicly listed company in the US), a lot of transactions are inevitably conducted through apps and web services. The proliferation of the so-called “payments space” signifies the era of UX design, which is the third paradigm of HCI (Human-Computer Interaction), “tak[ing] into account…affect, embodiment, situated meaning, values and social issues” (Tkacz and Velasco 2018). In other words, experience has become the deciding factor of customers’ choices. With vast amounts of data generated at the back of sleek interfaces, one can precisely oversee the users’ behaviour, which then is fed back into the system.
All the payments spaces are essentially digital. This means transactions leave digital traces whether you like it or not. The idea of a cashless society exactly stems from this interest, the authorities can have better understandings of how people make money; in other words, where black money flows. Brett Scott has been pointing out the danger of a cashless society for quite some time now, I saw another variation in this book.
According to Jaya Klara Brekke, blockchain technology can make money programmable, “allow[ing] for very fine-grained (re)programming of the medium of money, from what constitutes, and how to measure, value-generating activity to the setting of parameters on the means and conditions of exchange – what is spendable, where and by whom” (Brekke 2018). The overall impression I got from the MoneyLab Reader 2 about what blockchain technology can really do is basically this. Making a currency programmable using smart contracts.
More than a couple of authors discuss how “contingency” should take place in designed currencies. Contingency is different from randomness; in fact, it could mean exactly the opposite. For example, when coins are distributed in a perfectly random manner, you have absolutely no control in the handling process. If contingency is embedded in a system, it means there are exploitable gaps, which seem to almost randomly benefit people. On the other hand, some individuals would find ways to make use of these gaps, which are considered to be legitimate. Brekke discusses how the way in which contingency is programmed into a currency will be a key for the future of finance, both in terms of experience and redistribution of wealth. Therefore, currency designers will be the next UX designers.
A number of ideas applying blockchain technology to both physical and cultural objects are mentioned in this book, from a self-maintaining forest to blockchain-based marriage. “Terra0” is the concept of an autonomous forest which can “self-harvest its own value” (Lotti 2018). Utopian views of a human-less world are prevalent, but in reality, a healthy forest requires an adequate amount of human intervention. In addition, the value of a forest cannot be determined by itself; trade routes, demand and supply, they are all drawn by human movements. For example in Japan, domestic wood resources are generally not profitable because of the expensive labour costs. Illegally cut trees without certification from Southeast Asia dominate the market, putting domestic ones in a bad position. When a forest itself is not profitable, how can it accumulate capital autonomously? Besides, the oracle problem has not been discussed at all. Unless everything is digital in the first place, there always needs to be somebody to put data onto the blockchain. In other words, the transcendence of the boundaries between the physical and the digital is not possible without human intervention. Blockchain marriage would face a similar problem; who might be the witness if circumventing the government official? Max Dovey investigates the notion of “crypto-sovereignty” while introducing an example of a real blockchain marriage where they “turn[ed] ‘proof of work’… into ‘proof of love’”(Dovey 2018). Just as the sacramental bond between spouses can be broken before Death Do Them Part, so can any cryptographic marriage unravel despite having been recorded in an immutable ledger. Whatever repercussions may exist for divorce, there are no holy or technological mechanisms to prevent it.
Platform co-ops is one of the largest topics in the book besides Universal Basic Income (UBI). A platform co-op is often a cooperatively owned version of a major platform that is supposed to be able to pay better fees to the workers. Also, a platform co-op is often associated with “lower failure rate”; 80% of them survive the first five years when only 41% of other business models do (Scholz 2018). While embracing the positive aspects of platform co-ops, I have this question stuck in my head: can you not make a platform co-op based on a new idea rather than copying existing ones?
Most platform co-ops seem that they are looking at already successful and established concepts such as rental marketplaces for rooms and ride hailing services. As a result, platform co-ops are considered more to be a social movement than an innovation. Why not just run a business right at the centre of Capitalism without being motivated by profit? Many platform co-ops challenge the main stream services such as Airbnb or Uber, however those services operate based on scale; if they have the largest user base, it will be very difficult to take them on, unless they die themselves like Myspace… Moreover, more hardware side of development can be happening around co-ops, but I don’t hear anything except for Fairphone. When can I stop using my ThinkPad with Linux on it?
After reading the MoneyLab Reader 2: Overcoming the Hype, now I’m thinking of how I should design my own currency. Of course whether cryptocurrencies are actually currencies is up to debate; depending on who you ask, Ethereum is a security (SEC), a commodity (CFTC), taxable property (IRS) or a currency (traders).
MoneyLab 2 authors overall suggest that we should not limit our imagination to fit in the existing finance systems, but think beyond. You don’t necessarily need to cling to cryptocurrencies but they may help you shape your ideal financial system.
Our times are characterized by the accelerating collapse and redrawing of multiple borders: between nation states, personal identities, and the responsibilities we have for each other. Also between the old distinctions, work and pleasure.
Some leaders as part of the new world order, tell us through their political actions and their fashion accessories, that they “Just Don’t Care”. This “political art-form”1 of not caring permits an insidious spread of hatred online and on the ground. In recent times, the digital condition has lent it’s networks and platforms to this poisonous, rhetorical hyperbole, turning against immigrants, and others who do not fit into the framework of a western world, oligarch orientated vision. Mass extraction and manipulation of social data has facilitated the circulation of fake news and the production of fear, anxiety and uncertainty. Together these fuel the machine of structural violence adding to the already challenging conditions created by Austerity policies, growing debt and poverty.
In the face of these outlandish difficulties our digital tools and networks – taken up with a spirit of cultural comradeship. More inspiring narratives are emerging from across disciplines and backgrounds, to experiment with new solidarity-generating approaches that critique and build platforms, infrastructures and networks, offering new possibilities for reassessing and re-forming citizenship and rights.
The exhibition and labs for Playbour – Work, Pleasure, Survival, have created new contexts for collaboration. Artists (from the local area and internationally), game designers and architects, come together with researchers from psychology and neuroscience addressing the data driven gamification of life and everything.
In her interview, the curator Dani Admiss discusses how they reassess the power relationships of the gallery, park users and the local authorities, asking who owns the cultural infrastructure and public amenities – and so create a polemic to open up questions of public value. The exhibition is open every weekend through 14 July to 19 August 2018.
The artists featured in Transnationalisms exhibition curated by James Bridle address the effect on our bodies, our environment, and our political practices of unstable borders.
“They register shifts in geography as disturbances in the blood and the electromagnetic spectrum. They draw new maps and propose new hybrid forms of expression and identity.”2
“Thiru Seelan, a Tamil refugee who arrived in the UK in 2010 following detention in Sri Lanka during which he was tortured for his political affiliations, dances on an East London rooftop. His movements are recorded by a heat sensitive camera more conventionally often used to monitor borders and crossing points, where bodies are identified through their thermal signature.”3
The show opens at Furtherfield from September 14th to October 26th 2018, touring as part of State Machines the EU cooperation which investigates the new relationships between states, citizens and the stateless made possible by emerging technologies.
We have another interview with artist and activist Cassie Thornton, where we discuss her current project Hologram, which examines health in the age of financialization, and works to reveal the connection between the body and capitalism. Her interview focuses on a series of experiments that actively counter the effects of indebtedness through somatic – or body – work including her focus on the way in which institutions produce or take away from the health of the artists and workers they “support”.
“In my work for the past decade, I have been developing practices that attempt to collectively discover what debt is and how it affects the imagination of all of us: the wealthy, the poor, the indebted, financial workers, babies, and anyone in-between.” Thornton
Finally I interview Tatiana Bazzichelli, artistic director and curator of the Disruption Network Lab, in Berlin, questions about art as Investigation of political misconducts and Wrongdoing. Since 2015, the Disruption Network Lab has cultivated a stage and a sanctuary for otherwise unheard and stigmatised voices to delve into and explore the urgent political realities of their existence at a time when the media establishment has no investment in truth telling for public interest.
“When the speakers are with us and open their minds to our topics, I feel that we are receiving a gift from them. I come from a tradition in which communities, networks and the sharing of experience were the most important values, the artwork by themselves.” Bazzichelli.
The programme creates a conceptual and practical space in which whistleblowers, human right advocates, artists, hackers, journalists, lawyers and activists are able to present their experience, their research and their actions – with the objective of strengthening human rights and freedom of speech, as well as exposing the misconduct and wrongdoing of the powerful.
To conclude, all one needs to say is…
“Whether in the variety of human, backgrounds and perspectives, biodiversity or diversity of technologies, coding languages, devices, or technological cultures. Diversity is Proof of Life.” Ruth Catlow, 2018.
Recently I was approached to conceive and run an outreach project to accompany a solo show of work by Eduardo Kac at Furtherfield Gallery in North London’s Finsbury Park.
Among the works on show was one of Kac’s Lagoogleglyphs, large scale stylised representations of rabbits (something of a signature obsession for him) painted in some sort of sportsground emulsion directly onto a section of the park and allegedly of a scale which make it harvestable by the satellites Google rents for its various mapping activities.
Being completely frank, I have to say I entertained a degree of scepticism about Kac’s work—some of it falling within, in my view, one or both of two entertainment based metaphors—the ‘one-liner’ and the ‘theme park’—neither particularly positive elements of my critical lexicon.
Be that as it may, some of the work, particularly the less grandiose pieces (that delicate bunny flag flapping above the gallery!) were touched enough with real poetry to make me want to take up the challenge.
I say ‘challenge’ advisedly for I’m only ever interested in doing anything which in some sense challenges me and I also felt that my ambivalence about Kac would result in anything I ended up making containing a return element of ‘challenge’ or, perhaps more gently put, practical critique.
The word challenge also described the sense I had of wanting to counterpose collaboration, the collective, the everyday, to the artist with a capital ‘A’; of going some way to claiming art as a way of seeing and feeling and thinking together for All ( also with a capital ‘A’).
Reaching back in memory I pondered two remix/homage projects from the noughties which somehow straddled, in a pleasantly clunky fashion, practices both cutting edge digital (at least in their original moment) and time honoured too.
Apposite and practical stimuli for my 2018 purposes, they suggested elegant pathways to both honour previous work and to gently…um… stress-test it.
Both evinced rich humour, a warmth and a concomitant refusal to take themselves too seriously, qualities lacking in much contemporary art and both had a kind of performative klutziness I found entirely engaging.
Both were made in the first years of this millennium when digital and particularly online art was a wild west with a few fragile homesteads scattered here and there and not the orderly space it is today colonised almost entirely by the mainstream art world or commerce or both.
I recalled first a project by Nathaniel Stern where he hired South African billboard sign writers to paint physical representations of various, mostly art related, web pages.
The second was artist duo MTAA’s remix of Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance project, an endurance piece where Hsieh had forced himself to punch a timeclock on the hour, every hour for a whole year.
Reversing the premise MTAA’s Whid and River posted a database of video clips of themselves sleeping, eating, inhabiting the space and left it to the online viewer to watch these being digitally assembled (by Flash—remember that?) into a simulacrum of the original over the assumedly continuous period of a year.
Armed, fortified, prepared thus, I set to work—but I still needed a concrete plan and methodology.
Being a keen runner and the project taking place in a London Park in which I had run a 10k not long before (and now having endurance floating near the top of my mind) I felt some kind of park related physical activity would be an element and this would be a way of coming closer to those who loved the park but for whom the art gallery might not be their first association.
But still I lacked the concrete rabbit themed activity which would offer genuine practical, meaningful and autonomous artistic engagement and creation to participants.
I did not want to control what those participants would do but give them a clearly defined (clearly defined enough that all inputs from three separate days of activity could be brought together into a final unified work) and interesting task within which they would need to deploy creativity, focus and skill.
The fad for exercise related GPS devices had previously passed me by but one day whilst running with my daughter, who uses her phone and GPS enabled software to document her running in data and map form, I had a small epiphany—here there (might) be rabbits.
Rabbits, giant GPS rabbits, first planned and sketched by participating teams in marker pen over a satellite image of the park—ears, eyes, paws, body, fluffy tails emergent within its various paths and trails and features and obstructions.
And then, using these maps, we would carefully and attentively walk-out each monster rabbit trapping and freezing it as a succession of data, a series of co-ordinates in the memory of the GPS watch I would wear, finally to be reconstitututed as a continuous line drawing in turn fed back into a fresh satellite view of the park.
But that succession of co-ordinates, actuated by the actual movements of the human body (like a giant pencil lead or nib or brush) will resolve itself into something ancient—line, preconceived and then drawn out by human beings.
Being, together, both the very oldest form of mark making and something blink-of-an-eye recent too (well, as recent as the noughties efflorescence of so-called locative media which I shamelessly pillaged here.)
Inaccuracy in some measure a feature of both ancient and modern—the error margin of even GPS and GLONASS together, two sets of four satellites working in concert; the mix of will and skill and the fallibility and triumph too of flesh and bone and sinew which is part of what thrills and moves us in the arts.
This is what I had in mind.
Repeatedly outlining then co-performing an activity which I learned to summarise simply and precisely, almost automatically, one might have thought boredom or a dozy, parroted, routine might threaten.
And how anxious I was each time as to whether and in what way each new team would engage with—buy into—adopt as theirs, as ours—the task.
But how striking the variation both in the simple, basic act of depicting in continuous line each new rabbit-of-the-imagination and the forty minutes lively sociability surrounding that initial sketching and subsequent walking-out.
Balancing the competing claims of making something serious, something with some kind of weight, some satisfying end product, whilst making space for others’ fun and dreams and and will and whimsy is neither easy nor is it trivial.
In the end people seemed to have a good time, they seemed at ease, went at it with a will and—it seems to me—something rich and affecting emerged.
Thanks to all at Furtherfield and thanks—no, not thanks, but credit—to my fellow artists: Alessandra, Anna, Candy, Chris, Elliot, Evgenia, Franc, George, Grace, Henry, Jade, Lenon, Léonie, Lucian, Luka, Martin, Matthew, Maya, Negev, Niyah, Pryle, Rémi, Rosalie, Sara, Shiri, Stefan, Thea and Tyler.
Part of The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025
⏳ Saturday 28 and Sunday 29 September 2024
🏡 Furtherfield Gallery, at the McKenzie Pavilion, Finsbury Park, London N4
🐕🌳Exhibition and Treaty Signing activities 11 – 4pm
🎟️🐿️ Multi-species Meditation sessions – DAILY at 11am, 2pm and 3pm.
Join us for fun with family and friends in Finsbury Park to connect with park life in fantastical new ways.
Biodiversity is crucial in reducing the harmful effects of climate change, and city parks have a huge part to play. But it’s not all about us humans! Think like a dog, bee or even grass and help change the way we all see and participate in our local urban green spaces forever!
It’s time to spark new ways of being, feeling and acting together!
🎟️🐿️ Book your free place for a Multi-species Meditation session led by Scirius the cockney squirrel, played by Human artist Max Dovey. Use your imagination to transform into another species with a totally different sense of what is important. Sessions daily at 11am, 2pm and 3pm.
🌳Use the magical new Finsbury Park Sentience Dial app to tune into all flora and fauna! Scan the park and meet up to 7 local park species representatives, then make your pledge for bountiful biodiversity!
⇨ Watch Tracy Kiryango’s short docu-fiction film The Interspecies Festival of Finsbury Park 2023 celebrating the cultures and talents of ALL Finsbury Park’s species, and using camera, lighting and post-production effects to convey multi-species-perspectives of the festival events.
⇨ Join the Multisensory Mystery Tour to see, hear and smell the old forest through the sensory superpowers of squirrels, trees, and dogs…
⇨ Hear the squeaks, squawks, howls and honks of the Multispecies Choir and their “songs” of lament, celebration and protest…
⇨ Sample delicacies from Pass-The-Poop-Parcel, the multi-species gastronomy game…
Help shape the first-ever interspecies treaty of cooperation for bountiful biodiversity!
Don’t worry! From October 2024, you can scan the hoardings that wrap Furtherfield Gallery in Finsbury Park to watch highlights from the 2023 Interspecies Festival. You can also access the the magical Finsbury Park Sentience Dial app to make a pledge that advances interspecies justice and blooming biodiversity!
The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 depicts the story of the dawning of interspecies democracy. It’s a new era of equal rights for all living beings, where all species come together to organise and shape the environments and cultures they inhabit – in Finsbury Park, and urban green spaces across the UK, the world, and beyond!
Based around a set of live action role play games – or LARPs – the Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 is played from more-than-human perspectives to encourage the blooming of a bountiful biodiversity and interspecies political action.
Like many urban parks, Finsbury Park is fraught with environmental issues from noxious gases and traffic noises to governance struggles and financial sustainability. The pledges are based on research collaborations and prioritised with participants. Find out more about the story so far, the research, and the importance of biodiversity in urban green space by visiting our FAQs.
The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 is a major collaborative project led by Furtherfield, exploring new ways to build empathy pathways to non-human lifeforms through play.
It represents a major undertaking to do long-term work exploring how an arts organisation based in the heart of an urban green space can support a deeper understanding of that green space and ALL its inhabitants. Beginning in 2020 and spanning a minimum of 5 years, the work was originally developed in collaboration with The New Design Congress. The first 3 years are being supported by CreaTures (Creative Practices for Transformational Futures). CreaTures project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 870759. The content presented represents the views of the authors, and the European Commission has no liability in respect of the content.
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Welcome to This Coastal Town Reimagined: 200 Years Of Change!
For adults of all ages. If you are a resident, worker, regular visitor, or if you just love Felixstowe, this is for you! Join us for a fun morning or afternoon with your friends and neighbours, time-travelling into the future of this coastal town.
FREE – but booking is essential as places are limited
A chance to explore 200 years of change in Felixstowe!
🚢The port was founded in 1875. Looking back 150 years, we can see the changes it made in this town. In 50 years, how will we look back on this time with all the changes we know are coming, including new developments and shifts in climate?
🌞Felixstowe is a place that radiates healthful living and wellbeing. The land and sea support livelihoods, leisure and blooming biodiversity. The port, the largest in England, provides crucial national infrastructure and contributes to a healthy local economy. In the summer holidaymakers flock here.
🌬️But things are always changing here and in the wider world. In May, we invited local residents to chat about the futures we want. In July, we shared what we discovered with three creative practitioners from the region: Mimi Doncaster and Frazer Merrick, and Kirsty Tallent. Together we created an immersive future fiction. That is the basis of the event we are inviting you to here. Come and work on the future together! ⏳
⏰We start with a timeline of Felixstowe since the port was founded in 1875 and an invitation to add events of historic or personal significance.
Then we choose our time-travelling characters. Will you start as a young person, or an elder? What does your character care about? ✨
We will travel all the way to 2075, the year the Multispecies Port of Felixstowe opens.
This event is hosted by The Alex Brasserie, with views of the sea and a cafe bar where you can buy any refreshments around the event. Please tell us about any access needs you may have.
Participants need no prior knowledge or experience to join this event. However, if you are unsure about sustainable futures and are someone who likes to come prepared, we think these links offer a good starting point: What is climate change? A really simple guide, from the BBC, and Sustainable Development Goals from the UN.
Ruth Catlow is co-founder and director of Furtherfield and an artist and organiser interested in how different creative processes can unleash community imaginations to open up new more mutualistic futures in places.
Prof Ann Light is a researcher studying to what extent people can be transformed by encounters with the arts.
Please note that the event is being included in a research project on the effect of immersive experiences. A researcher will be there to observe the event. Although the researcher will not be observing individuals, there is an opportunity on the day for you to decide if you wish to be part of the research or not. If you would like to know more about the research project before the event, please email Professor Ann Light at the University of Sussex (ann.light@sussex.ac.uk) and she will send you an information sheet.
This event has been co-devised by Ruth Catlow, Mimi Doncaster, Ann Light, Frazer Merrick, and Kirsty Tallent. Thanks to Hamilton MAS for hosting the co-creation workshop and to Cuppa for hosting the community conversation that inspired and informed our work.
🙋Please contact Ruth by email ruth.catlow@furtherfield.org if you have any questions, or come early to talk to us.
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Saturday 11th November
A Free All Day Event in Finsbury Park
Future Machine creates rituals for when the future comes. It will next appear in Finsbury Park on Saturday 11th November 2023.
When the Future Comes is a series of artist’s interventions each witnessed by a mysterious and mystical device – the Future Machine, led by Rachel Jacobs. A newly formed ritual or special occasion will emerge as the Future Machine appears in Oxfordshire, Nottingham, Cumbria, Somerset and London every year – until 2050 the year scientists predict will be a watershed for more extreme climate and environmental change.
From 10.00 am
Future Machine will meander around the park, meeting people along the way.
11.00 am
Join Future Machine and artists Esi Eshun & Rachel Jacobs for a guided walk to seven trees.
Gather outside Furtherfield Gallery (by the playground, close to the lake at the top of the hill).
From 2.00pm
Meet Future Machine and speak to the future at Furtherfield Commons (between the Seven Sisters Road & Finsbury Park Gates).
Celebrate the weather with musicians from around the world and take part in family activities including drumming and dancing.
Listen to live West African fusion music performed by the group, Zantogola!
Supported using public funding by Arts Council England, Furtherfield, Horizon (University of Nottingham) and in-kind support from Primary and the British Antarctic Survey
By taking into account the unique characteristics of your target audience and tailoring your chatbot names accordingly, you can enhance user engagement and create a more personalized experience. Kore.ai also focuses on security and compliance, crucial for sensitive sectors like banking and healthcare. Analytics and reporting tools provide insights for optimizing customer service strategies. The platform’s adaptability across different industries, from banking to healthcare, helps businesses streamline processes and enhance customer interactions. Kore.ai’s free trial option allows businesses to evaluate the platform’s fit with their specific needs. Overall, Kore.ai positions itself as a comprehensive solution for creating and managing AI-driven customer interactions, aiming to improve efficiency and customer satisfaction across various sectors.
But don’t let them feel hoodwinked or that sense of cognitive dissonance that comes from thinking they’re talking to a person and realizing they’ve been deceived. Tidio’s AI chatbot incorporates human support into the mix to have the customer service team solve complex customer problems. But the platform also claims to answer up to 70% of customer questions without human intervention. A good chatbot name will tell your website visitors that it’s there to help, but also give them an insight into your services. Different bot names represent different characteristics, so make sure your chatbot represents your brand.
Many advanced AI chatbots will allow customers to connect with live chat agents if customers want their assistance. If you don’t want to confuse your customers by giving a human name to a chatbot, you can provide robotic names to them. These names will tell your customers that they are talking with a bot and not a human. AI chatbot platforms are indispensable tools for modern businesses, providing a blend of automation, efficiency, and personalized customer experiences. The landscape of leading AI platforms offers a wealth of options catering to every business’s journey into the digital age. Recognized by industry authorities and backed by significant investment, Yellow.ai aims to deliver empathetic, human-like interactions, leveraging advancements in NLP and generative AI.
It can be used to offer round-the-clock assistance or irresistible discounts to reduce cart abandonment. Selecting a chatbot name that closely resembles these qualities makes sense depending on whether your company has a humorous, quirky, or serious tone. In many circumstances, the name of your chatbot might affect how consumers https://chat.openai.com/ perceive the qualities of your brand. However, naming it without considering your ICP might be detrimental. You may discover a helpful chatbot to help you on their website, social media, or any other channel, whether it be in the fields of healthcare, automotive, manufacturing, travel, hospitality, or real estate.
For example, New Jersey City University named the chatbot Jacey, assonant to Jersey. Try to use friendly like Franklins or creative names like Recruitie to become more approachable and alleviate the stress when they’re looking for their first job. For example GSM Server created Basky Bot, with a short name from “Basket”.
Being an AI recruitment chatbot, Ideal increases candidate interest, eliminates pointless phone interviews, and quickly qualifies candidates. You can streamline and prioritize candidate interviews by automating 70% of your top-of-funnel interactions. Like other AI chatbots, Ideal also recommends practical insights to streamline your hiring process. Featuring Live agent handovers and integration with social media platforms, Smartbots also aims to make the experience of automating HR as simple as possible.
Humans are becoming comfortable building relationships with chatbots. Maybe even more comfortable than with other humans—after all, we know the bot is just there to help. Many people talk to their robot vacuum cleaners and use Siri or Alexa as often as they use Chat PG other tools. Some even ask their bots existential questions, interfere with their programming, or consider them a “safe” friend. For example, a legal firm Cartland Law created a chatbot Ailira (Artificially Intelligent Legal Information Research Assistant).
The platform’s strength lies in its natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, allowing for human-like conversations in multiple languages. It also supports integration with SAP and third-party solutions, enhancing the user experience across various business applications. Built on Google AI, it supports rich, intuitive conversations and offers a development platform for chatbots and voicebots.
Being a simple and robust chatbot builder platform, Hubspot chatbot builder lets you expand and automate live chat conversations. Customers can navigate the website, look up answers to frequently asked questions, and make appointments. Your CRM will retain their responses, enabling you to qualify prospects and turn on automation. Workativ’s smart HR chatbot focuses on streamlining employee support leveraging conversational AI technology and workflow automation.
You can turn the brainstorming session into a competition if you like, incentivising participation and generating excitement. You could also involve your customers by running a competition to gather name suggestions, gaining valuable insights into their perception of your brand. Or create a shortlist of names you like and ask the public to vote for their favourite. Internally, the AI chatbot helped Stena Line teams with cost-analysis systems.
And if you did, you must have noticed that the names of these chatbots are distinctive and occasionally odd. Typically, HR helpdesk chatbots are implemented on a variety of platforms for communication, including workplace intranets, websites, messaging services, and mobile apps. Online business owners also have the option of fixing a gender for the chatbot and choosing a bitmoji that will match the chatbots’ names. Apple named their iPhone bot Siri to make customers feel like talking to a human agent. In a business-to-business (B2B) website, most chatbots generate leads by scheduling appointments and asking lead-qualifying questions to website visitors.
In this section, we have compiled a list of some highly creative names that will help you align the chatbot with your business’s identity. Let’s consider an example where your company’s chatbots cater to Gen Z individuals. To establish a stronger connection with this audience, you might consider using names inspired by popular movies, songs, or comic books that resonate with them.
The ProProfs Live Chat Editorial Team is a diverse group of professionals passionate about customer support and engagement. We update you on the latest trends, dive into technical topics, and offer insights to elevate your business. This list of chatbots is a general overview of notable chatbot applications and web interfaces.
We all know what happened with the Boaty McBoatface public vote, but you don’t have to take it that far unless you want the PR. Simply pull together a shortlist of potential chatbot names you like best and ask people to vote from those. You can run a poll for free using Survey Monkey, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and/or any other channel you choose. Gartner projects one in 10 interactions will be automated by 2026, so there’s no need to try and pass your chatbot off as a human member of your team.
The platform stands out with its unique voice flow feature, enabling real-time voice virtual assistants and Interactive Voice Response systems. Botpress’s active community, boasting over 15,000 members, further enriches the user experience with shared knowledge and support. Overall, Botpress is an excellent platform for both novices and professionals in creating customized, AI-driven chatbots. The likes of the Quebec Government, Windstream, Husqvarna, VR Bank, and many others have adopted Botpress to build conversational AI applications for their customers or employees.
When customers first interact with your chatbot, they form an impression of your brand. Depending on your brand voice, it also sets a tone that might vary between friendly, formal, or humorous. When customers see a named chatbot, they are more likely to treat it as a human and less like a scripted program. This builds an emotional bond and adds to the reliability of the chatbot.
That’s the first step in warming up the customer’s heart to your business. One of the reasons for this is that mothers use cute names to express love and facilitate a bond between them and their child. So, a cute chatbot name can resonate with parents and make their connection to your brand stronger.
You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. For travel, a name like PacificBot can make the bot recognizable and creative for users. The mood you set for a chatbot should complement your brand and broadcast the vision of how the pain point should be solved. That is how people fall in love with brands – when they feel they found exactly what they were looking for. It’s true that people have different expectations when talking to an ecommerce bot and a healthcare virtual assistant.
Innovation can be the key to standing out in the crowded world of chatbots. From innovative, unique identities to playful cute names and even technologically-inspired options, there’s a world of ideas to set your creative juices flowing. Start with a simple Google search to see if any other chatbots exist with the same name. So you’ve chosen a name you love, reflecting the unique identity of your chatbot. This could be the perfect way to show off your chatbot’s capabilities, manage user expectations, and ensure they know they are interacting with AI. Remember, the name of your chatbot should be a clear indicator of its primary function so users know exactly what to expect from the interaction.
The nomenclature rules are not just for scientific reasons; in the digital age, they can play a huge role in branding, customer relationships, and service. Therefore, a good chatbot name can significantly ai chatbot names enhance your customer relationship, engendering loyalty and encouraging repeated visits. The positive impact of a well-chosen chatbot name on customer relationships can’t be underestimated.
It presents a golden opportunity to leave a lasting impression and foster unwavering customer loyalty. So far in the blog, most of the names you read strike out in an appealing way to capture the attention of young audiences. But, if your business prioritizes factors like trust, reliability, and credibility, then opt for conventional names. A 2021 survey shows that around 34.43% of people prefer a female virtual assistant like Alexa, Siri, Cortana, or Google Assistant. To truly understand your audience, it’s important to go beyond superficial demographic information. You must delve deeper into cultural backgrounds, languages, preferences, and interests.
A name that accurately embodies your chatbot’s responsibility resonates with your customer personas and uplifts your brand identity. A chatbot may be the one instance where you get to choose someone else’s personality. Create a personality with a choice of language (casual, formal, colloquial), level of empathy, humor, and more.
Gemini has an advantage here because the bot will ask you for specific information about your bot’s personality and business to generate more relevant and unique names. If you want a few ideas, we’re going to give you dozens and dozens of names that you can use to name your chatbot. You want to design a chatbot customers will love, and this step will help you achieve this goal. If it is so, then you need your chatbot’s name to give this out as well. Read moreCheck out this case study on how virtual customer service decreased cart abandonment by 25% for some inspiration. Let’s have a look at the list of bot names you can use for inspiration.
However, there are some drawbacks to using a neutral name for chatbots. These names sometimes make it more difficult to engage with users on a personal level. They might not be able to foster engaging conversations like a gendered name. Giving your chatbot a name helps customers understand who they’re interacting with. Remember, humanizing the chatbot-visitor interaction doesn’t mean pretending it’s a human agent, as that can harm customer trust.
Giving such a chatbot a distinctive, humorous name makes no sense since the users of such bots are unlikely to link the name you’ve picked with their scenario. In these situations, it makes appropriate to choose a straightforward, succinct, and solemn name. If we’ve aroused your attention, read on to see why your chatbot needs a name. Oh, and just in case, we’ve also gone ahead and compiled a list of some very cool chatbot/virtual assistant names. Ideal is an AI chatbot that leverages the power of AI to quickly and accurately shortlist thousands of new applications.
It helps HR organizations engage talent at scale, automate time-consuming HR tasks easily, and efficiently collect more data. Companies can improve employee lifecycle management with conversational AI-powered HR chatbots, from hiring to onboarding to career development. In this blog, we would like to draw your attention to the top 20 HR chatbots that are redefining employee support and experience in and beyond. However, you can resolve several common issues of customers with automatic responses and immediate solutions with chatbots. Now that you have a chatbot for customer assistance on your website, you must note that they still cannot replace human agents. Consider creating a dedicated day for brainstorming with your support teams to come up with a list of names.
The names can either relate to the latest trend or should sound new and innovative to your website visitors. For instance, if your chatbot relates to the science and technology field, you can name it Newton bot or Electron bot. For instance, you can implement chatbots in different fields such as eCommerce, B2B, education, and HR recruitment. Online business owners can relate their business to the chatbots’ roles. In this scenario, you can also name your chatbot in direct relation to your business.
Siri is a chatbot with AI technology that will efficiently answer customer questions. Online business owners use AI chatbots to reduce support ticket costs exponentially. Choosing a chatbot name is one of the effective ways to personalize it on websites. If you feel confused about choosing a human or robotic name for a chatbot, you should first determine the chatbot’s objectives. If your chatbot is going to act like a store representative in the online store, then choosing a human name is the best idea.
This chatbot is on various social media channels such as WhatsApp and Instagram. CovidAsha helps people who want to reach out for medical emergencies. In the same way, choosing a creative chatbot name can either relate to their role or serve to add humor to your visitors when they read it. Chatbots should captivate your target audience, and not distract them from your goals. We are now going to look into the seven innovative chatbot names that will suit your online business.
These names are a perfect fit for modern businesses or startups looking to quickly grasp their visitors’ attention. When choosing a name for your chatbot, you have two options – gendered or neutral. Setting up the chatbot name is relatively easy when you use industry-leading software like ProProfs Chat. Figuring out this purpose is crucial to understand the customer queries it will handle or the integrations it will have. A chatbot serves as the initial point of contact for your website visitors.
Keep in mind that the secret is to convey your bot’s goal without losing sight of the brand’s fundamental character. Phia can retrieve answers to your questions without the need to load FAQs when combined with the power of PeopleHum driving it or integrated with any backend HCM or HRMS platform that you prefer to use. Phia can intelligently search through instructions, procedure manuals, and other sources for schematic matches to find the most pertinent response to the query being asked.
ManyChat offers templates that make creating your bot quick and easy. While robust, you’ll find that the bot has limited integrations and lacks advanced customer segmentation. They can also recommend products, offer discounts, recover abandoned carts, and more. Tidio relies on Lyro, a conversational AI that can speak to customers on any live channel in up to 7 languages.
A study found that 36% of consumers prefer a female over a male chatbot. And the top desired personality traits of the bot were politeness and intelligence. Human conversations with bots are based on the chatbot’s personality, so make sure your one is welcoming and has a friendly name that fits. Creative names can have an interesting backstory and represent a great future ahead for your brand. They can also spark interest in your website visitors that will stay with them for a long time after the conversation is over.
A well-chosen name encourages more customer interaction and creates positive associations. The name should match your brand’s values, tone, and style to deepen the connection with your brand. Now you know how to name it too, you can transform your customer experience in no time at all. Since you can name your customer support chatbot whatever you like, deciding what to call it can be a daunting task. We’ve seen AI assistants called everything from Shockwave to Suiii and Vic to Vee. This digital adventure unfurled the significance of choosing the perfect chatbot name and opened doors to boundless ideas, strategies, and steps to achieve the same.
AI chatbots show bias based on people’s names, researchers find.
Posted: Fri, 05 Apr 2024 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Brevity, pronounceability, and relevant uniqueness are your maps to circumvent the mountain of complexity and the maze of unusualness, leading you toward a user-friendly and engaging chatbot name. While creating a unique and captivating chatbot name is essential, treading the fine line to avoid excessively complex or unusual names is equally significant. Better yet, perhaps you are inspired to carve out a path that uniquely mirrors your chatbot’s identity and offerings. Tech-inspired names are undeniably cool but don’t forget to factor in your end-users’ tech-savviness, so they can relate to and appreciate your chatbot’s innovative name. An innovative chatbot name can not only pique the interest of your users but also mark an impression on their minds, enhancing brand recall. This process promises an engaging chatbot name that aligns with your bot’s purpose, echoes with your audience, and upholds your brand image.
Do you remember the struggle of finding the right name or designing the logo for your business? It’s about to happen again, but this time, you can use what your company already has to help you out. Also, remember that your chatbot is an extension of your company, so make sure its name fits in well. Read moreFind out how to name and customize your Tidio chat widget to get a great overall user experience.
Woebot, for example, is a chatbot for the healthcare industry that can converse with patients, check on their mental health, and even provide tools and tactics to aid them in their present predicament. Ex-Google Technical Product guy specialising in generative AI (NLP, chatbots, audio, etc). Through Understandbetter.co, your HR department can capture, manage, and respond to employee feedback directly from Slack or Microsoft Teams. Employees are free to express their opinions to management at the company without worrying about discrimination. It also goes by the name of a personalized employee feedback system and provides managers with useful information about their direct reports.
Fictional characters’ names are an innovative choice and help you provide a unique personality to your chatbot that can resonate with your customers. When you are planning to name your chatbot creatively, you should look into various factors. Business objectives play a vital role in naming chatbots and online business owners should decide the role of chatbots in a website. For instance, if you have an eCommerce store, your chatbot should act as a sales representative. Since you are trying to engage and converse with your visitors via your AI chatbot, human names are the best idea. You can name your chatbot with a human name and give it a unique personality.
The same is true for e-commerce chatbots, which may be used to answer client questions, collect orders, and even provide product information. Eightfold is a modern talent management platform that specializes in assisting multinational corporations with recruiting and retaining a diverse workforce of workers, candidates, and contractors. Powered by deep-learning AI, Eightfold shows you what you need, when you need it. Eightfold gives people a better understanding of their career potential and gives businesses a better understanding of the potential of their workforce.
Additionally, it’s possible that your consumer won’t be as receptive to speaking with a bot if you can’t make an emotional connection with them. Make human-like interactions that encourage conversions and experiences. When users can answer multiple-choice and open-ended questions through the chatbot customization dashboard, you generate qualified leads and expand your sales pipeline. Rezolve.ai is a modern HR helpdesk that works within MS Teams to offer employees automated and personalized HR support via GenAI Sidekick HR Chatbot.
There are different ways to play around with words to create catchy names. First, do a thorough audience research and identify the pain points of your buyers. This way, you’ll know who you’re speaking to, and it will be easier to match your bot’s name to the visitor’s preferences. A good rule of thumb is not to make the name scary or name it by something that the potential client could have bad associations with. You should also make sure that the name is not vulgar in any way and does not touch on sensitive subjects, such as politics, religious beliefs, etc. Make it fit your brand and make it helpful instead of giving visitors a bad taste that might stick long-term.
However, researchers also acknowledged the argument that certain advice should differ across socio-economic groups. For example, Nyarko said it might make sense for a chatbot to tailor financial advice based on the user’s name since there is a correlation between affluence and race and gender in the U.S. It’s crucial to keep in mind that your chatbot name should ideally mirror your business’s identity when using one for brand messaging. A healthcare chatbot may be used for a variety of tasks, including gathering patient data, reminding users of upcoming appointments, determining symptoms, and more. In fact, one of the brand communications channels with the greatest growth is chatbots. If the COVID-19 epidemic has taught us anything over the past two years, it is that chatbots are an essential communication tool for companies in all sectors.
Frankenstein Reanimated explores the monstrous products of our ‘advanced’ technological moment through the lens of contemporary art practice. Join co-editor, Marc Garrett, for an introduction to the book. This will be followed by a series of provocations from artists Mary Flanagan and Anna Dumitriu, both of whom feature in the book, and an audience Q+A moderated by Ruth Catlow.
“This collection shines a light on artists as critically engaged citizens providing a kaleidoscopic view on our unevenly distributed future. These are the Frankensteins we need!” –
Felix Stalder,
Professor of Digital Culture, Zurich University of the Arts
Order advance copies of the book here.
Mary Shelley’s classic gothic horror and science fiction novel, Frankenstein, has inspired millions since it was published in 1818. Today, we are witness to many different horrors and phantoms of our own creation. Chronic wealth and health inequalities, climate change, democratic collapse, and the spectre of nuclear apocalypse are among the diffuse, monstrous products of our “advanced” technological moment.
Frankenstein Reanimated: Creation & Technology in the 21st Century, edited by Marc Garrett and Yiannis Colakides, retraces and contextualises three international art exhibitions exploring themes within Frankenstein, and speculates on what Mary Shelley would think about the world today. The book offers a lens through which to look at our current situation, and how art practices shape, and are shaped by, contemporary society.
Frankenstein Reanimated presents a dynamic collection of artworks, essays, and conversations, addressing: surveillance, biohacking, viruses, colonialism, digital culture, and more with leading thinkers, artists and technologists, including: Alexia Achilleos, Zach Blas, Frances A. Chiu, Ami Clarke, Régine Debatty, Mary Flanagan, Carla Gannis, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Srecko Horvat, Salvatore Iaconesi, Olga Kopenkina, Marinos Koutsomichalis, Shu Lea Cheang, Gretta Louw, Joana Moll, Laura Netz, Eryk Salvaggio, Devon Schiller, Guido Segni, Gregory Sholette, Karolina Sobecka, Alan Sondheim, Michael Szpakowski, Eugenio Tisselli, Ruben Verwaal, Paul Vanouse.
Frankenstein Reanimated includes full-colour illustrations and is designed by Mark Simmonds. The book follows Furtherfield and Torque Editions previous collaborative publication Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain.
Marc Garrett
Dr Marc Garrett explores postdigital contexts as part of an intersectional enquiry. An artist, curator and researcher he co-founded Furtherfield and has curated over 50 contemporary media arts exhibitions and projects nationally and internationally. He has written many critical and cultural essays, articles, interviews, and contributed to books about art, technology and social change. He is co-editor of Artists Re:thinking Games and Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain.
Mary Flanagan
Mary Flanagan has a research-based practice that investigates and exploits the seams between technology, play, and human experience, exploring how data, computing practices, errors / glitches, and games reflect human psychology and the limitations of knowledge. Flanagan has exhibited internationally at venues such as The Guggenheim, the Whitney, Tate Britain, and cultural centres in Spain, Portugal, Germany, France, Cyprus, China, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and more.
Anna Dumitriu
Anna Dumitriu is an award-winning, internationally renowned British artist who works with BioArt, sculpture, installation, and digital media to explore our relationship to microbiology, synthetic biology, and emerging technologies. Exhibitions include ZKM, Ars Electronica, Künstlerhaus Wein, BOZAR, Picasso Museum, HeK Basel, MOCA Taipei, LABoral, and the 6th Guangzhou Triennial.
Ruth Catlow
Ruth Catlow is a recovering web utopian. An artist, curator and researcher of emancipatory network cultures, practices and poetics, she is co-founding co-director of Furtherfield, and co-editor of Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain (2017) and Radical Friends – Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts.
Frankenstein Reanimated follows a collaboration with exhibition partners LaBoral, Gijon (ES), Furtherfield, London (UK) and NeMe, Limassol (CY) and made possible through support of NeMe and Furtherfield.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent: Doron Golan and Michael Szpakowski
Collaboration is working together. Can two people work together without ever having met?
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent demonstrates that they can. The exhibition takes its title from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by the philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein. It explores a collaboration between two artists across geographical distance through the ineffable language of image. Israeli video artist and filmmaker Doron Golan and British artist, composer and educator Michael Szpakowski both make digital films, which they share through websites and email lists, exploring the mystery of everyday life and of being a human in this place and time. Over the years, the two artists have developed a dialogue and friendship by exchanging their work. Since 2005 they have collaborated to found and curate DVblog.org, a groundbreaking early platform for art films on the Internet. And yet they’ve never met face to face.
HTTP Gallery in North London is pleased to host the first meeting between Golan and Szpakowski and their art in real space. Making their online collaborative process physical, the central installation has three elements: a new silent film by each artist and a new musical composition by Szpakowski. Bearing their shared sympathies in mind, the artists have independently determined the length and subjects of their films. As a result, the correspondences and resonances between the works are as yet unknown and will change constantly. The collaborative installation will be accompanied by elements of their independent practices, including a new installation by Szpakowski utilising video and silver birch branches and a selection of Golan’s recent videos, engaging with elements of life in the Middle East and his native Israel to which he has returned after many years in New York City.
Doron Golan lives and works in Tel Aviv. He works primarily with digital video and computer animation. Golan has shown extensively internationally, including recently at the Haifa Museum of Art, Israel, ART BASEL – Miami Beach, USA, Museu da Imagem e do Som, São Paulo, Brasil, and The Academy of Electronic Arts, New Dehli, India. He is the founder of computerfinearts.com, an online collection of Internet art. Christiane Paul of the Whitney Museum of American Art wrote, “the ‘holdings’ of the Computer Fine Arts collection are a microcosm of Net art that perfectly illustrates the breadth of artistic practice on the Web.”
Michael Szpakowski has exhibited in galleries in Europe, the US and Australia, and his short videos have been screened worldwide. His music has been performed in Russia, the United States and the UK at venues including the Purcell Room on London’s South Bank and Birmingham Symphony Hall and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and the World Service. Szpakowski’s work in diverse educational and community contexts helps participants to engage with human and social content through tools, techniques and processes of media arts, often resulting in accessible and genuinely enjoyable works co-created by all participants.
For more information about the artists, please visit:
http://dvblog.org
Doron Golan: http://www.the9th.com, http://computerfinearts.com
Michael Szpakowski: http://www.somedancersandmusicians.com
In the digital age, relationships are increasingly formed through online platforms, and design plays a crucial role in shaping these interactions. From the first glance at a profile to the subtleties of navigating a conversation, every element of visual communication impacts how users connect. For multidisciplinary design studios, this intersection of human interaction and visual storytelling represents an exciting challenge—and an opportunity to redefine how we experience connection online.
One of the most critical elements in online dating is trust. Users want to feel secure while engaging with strangers on digital platforms, and visual communication is key to creating this sense of safety. Clean, intuitive interfaces with well-designed typography, color schemes, and iconography can subtly guide users and make interactions feel seamless and authentic.
For instance:
By focusing on these elements, designers can create environments where users feel confident and engaged—essential ingredients for forming meaningful connections.
The interaction design of an online dating platform https://www.milfsmap.com/ determines how users engage with one another. Smooth transitions, responsive animations, and intuitive navigation all contribute to a positive user experience. Interaction design isn’t just about aesthetics; it’s about creating a flow that mirrors real-life conversations.
Consider features like:
For designers, the challenge is to translate human behavior into digital interactions. This requires a deep understanding of both psychology and technology—a multidisciplinary approach that studios like Jons Jones Morris excel at.
An online dating profile is more than a collection of facts; it’s a user’s digital self-portrait. Every design choice, from the placement of photos to the structure of bios, contributes to how users perceive and interpret one another. This is where emergent visual communication shines.
When profiles are designed as storytelling tools, they encourage users to share their personality while sparking curiosity in others.
While online dating has come a long way, there’s always room for innovation. Multidisciplinary studios have the opportunity to push the boundaries of visual and interaction design to create platforms that are more inclusive, immersive, and emotionally resonant.
Emerging trends include:
By embracing these innovations, studios can lead the way in designing platforms that prioritize genuine human connection while leveraging cutting-edge technology.
At its core, online dating is about more than finding a match—it’s about forging meaningful connections. Design serves as the bridge between users, creating the environment where trust, curiosity, and affection can flourish. For multidisciplinary studios working at the intersection of graphic design, interaction, and emergent communication, the possibilities are endless.
As we continue to reimagine digital connections, one thing is certain: great design doesn’t just enhance experiences—it transforms them. For both users and creators, the future of online dating is an inspiring canvas waiting to be explored.
In 2021 we rolled out our new format for presenting accessible open-all-hours digital artworks in Finsbury Park called the People’s Park Plinth. In parallel, we launched our CultureStake collective cultural decision-making app.
Thousands of you showed up online and in the park to experience a set of interactive artistic proposals for larger artworks. Each one presented its own mini-experience in the park and online using web apps, free data, and AR technologies. Three times as many people got involved with our programmes and ultimately picked Based On A Tree Story for their summer 2022 art experience.
Since then we’ve been busy working with HERVISIONS and Bones Tan Jones, respectively the curator and artist behind Based on a Tree Story, to build the full digital art experience and install it in the park.
Now, we’re extremely excited to tell you that from 13th August the tree sprites of Finsbury Park will be ready for you to find them.
The trees of Finsbury Park bear witness to myriad happenings. Through deep time they wait, they watch, they grow – wiser, wilder…. In this new commission by HERVISIONS X Bones Tan Jones, the special stories of the trees are translated by three mystical sprites that live within the trees, becoming their voice. Use the map to locate clusters of trees and identify the amulet wearers among them. With the app open, scan the symbol to summon the sprite and release a cascade of tree wisdom – time travelling to the roots of their having-beens into the twiggy tips of their future-becomings. And as you crisscross the park, seeking out your next sprite, imagine the ley lines you draw onto and into the earth – and cast your own connective spell.
“We invite you to visit the tree, call forth the sprite and dance together. Let your feet connect to the soil and the movement of the sprite inspire your rhythms. Stomp on the ground and the layers of earth from years of life will reverberate with your sound! Hear their echoes!”
– Zaiba Jabbar, HERVISIONS
To celebrate this amazing news, we’ve invited you to join us for a magical sundown experience seeking out and – if they’ll let you – dancing with the tree sprites of Finsbury Park.
Furtherfield Gallery, Saturday 13th August 2022 from 5pm
HERVISIONS
Responsible for curating, commissioning, conceptualisation, and research HERVISIONS is a femme-focussed antidisciplinary curatorial agency supporting and promoting artists working across new and emergent technologies, and platforms with a strong focus on the intersection of art, technology and culture.
IG: @hervisions_
Bones Tan Jones
Responsible for conceptualisation, research, and artistic production, Bones Tan Jones’ work is a spiritual practice that seeks to present an alternative, queer, optimistic dystopia. They work through ritual, meditating through craft, dancing through the veil betwixt nature and the other. Bones weaves a mycelial web of diverse, eco-conscious narratives which aim to connect, enthral and induce audiences to think more sustainably and ethically. Traversing pop music, sculpture, alter-egos, digital image and video work, Bones sanctifies these mediums as tool’s in their craft.
IG: @yaya.bones
Studio Hyte
Responsible for the visual identity, 3D modelling and technical development, Studio Hyte is a South London-based design studio. Working between graphic design, interaction, and emergent communication. We specialise in forward-thinking, multifaceted visual identities and experiences within the arts and education sector. Our aim is to create meaningful, accessible and thought-provoking work.
IG: @studiohyte
We are building CultureStake, the world’s first collective cultural decision making app (using Quadratic Voting on the blockchain) because we want to enable all communities to choose the creative experiences they want to have in their own areas. The original idea was driven by an awareness that top down arts programming is increasingly problematic. We wanted to find a way to give more people more of a say in what art and culture gets produced in their neighbourhoods – and more opportunity to be the co-creators. In a nutshell, our mission is to put the public at the heart of public arts.
Communities
We want communities to explore and learn together what we all want to experience in our localities. For example how might a theatre audience cast a play differently or a park community curate a public art exhibition?
Cultural Organisations
We want deeper, richer and more open consultation with the communities cultural organisations work for. For example, how might a city council find out which new artwork should occupy a recently vacated public plinth. Or how might an arts organisation discover which artist on their shortlist should be next summer’s blockbuster?
For Everyone
We want a data commons that widens the conversation about how art is valued by different communities around the world. For example, how might our ideas about culture change if we can see what’s important to other people?
We are using Quadratic Voting because it takes us all from confusing numbers to nuanced feelings.
In QV voters receive a number of ‘vibe credits’ which they can allocate to different creative proposals to express their support. The quadratic function means that showing a strong preference comes at a credit cost. Or rather:
This means that QV is quite unlike any other voting process. Indeed, unlike a one person one vote system, in QV votes express not just what we care about but how much we care! This matters because one person one vote systems usually don’t present the reason why someone voted the way they did or how strongly they felt about it. Politics have taught us not to trust the way votes are interpreted. Voters’ intentions are often misrepresented and communities are polarised about the limited information. Whereas QV allows us to express the intensity of our convictions, giving each of us:
Plus we’ve designed CultureStake so vote organisers can weight the votes of those closest to the issues that matter. For example, in our use of CultureStake for the People’s Park Plinth, any votes cast inside Finsbury Park mean more overall. So those most affected get more of a say.
And we run all CultureStake votes on the blockchain because the blockchain is like a big indelible ledger. This means that a vote cannot be rigged and is always stored extra safely so what we can promise voters is that they can trust our system.
There are many ways to run a CultureStake vote. A theatre could develop an unfinished performance and ask communities to choose the next steps. An arts organisation might offer up a range of different events and invite communities to choose what they want to encounter. Either way, the voting system doesn’t rely on asking everyone to just pick their favourite, but rather explore their thoughts and feelings in relation to a set of questions. So the result is always knowing more about what communities think and feel. Plus, we never show what ranked 1st, 2nd, or 3rd, but rather what was selected and what thoughts and opinions drove people’s selections.
At Furtherfield we are using CultureStake to power our People’s Park Plinth initiative in Finsbury Park. The concept behind the People’s Park Plinth is that our Finsbury Park buildings and even the park itself will act as a plinth for public digital artworks chosen by our communities using our CultureStake app.
The Gallery building will therefore provide an interface where people can scan hoardings to access works which offer a range of XR-enabled experiences in the park. Annually there will be a set of ‘proposal’ artworks, which will give people a first glimpse at what can be created more fully later in the year. Everyone will have time to explore these proposals and then use CutlureStake to choose what they want.
In our pilot year we tripled local engagement and received amazing local feedback like this:
“I live nearby and I’ve been talking about this with my friends for months, it’s such a great idea, to give people a say!”
“[…]decentralisation allows people to have slower but more grassroots-based management of any decision making.”
“I think it’s good that we have a say as well. And I really love voting.”
“Usually I guess I choose art by going to a place and supporting it like that but I’ve never been involved so much in really deciding on what I will see next. And yeah it makes me actually feel good too.”
“[…] quite a lot of times actually […] art is reserved only for the higher echelons of society and I feel like this is really nice that anyone can come in and you vote for who you like or what art you like.”
“I do feel represented…”
We are now in the next phase of development and are actively looking for partners from different types of venues and communities to partner with us so we can explore their unique needs and ensure we have a robust system.
If you are a small, medium, large, networked, physical, touring, online or any other type of cultural entity that wants to deepen your community connections we would love to hear from you. We want to know how you would use CultureStake in your own context and what you would like to achieve. To find out more contact Charlotte and she’ll arrange a meet up.
Our new initiative in Finsbury Park, the People’s Park Plinth, cedes co-curational and co-creational control of our cultural activities to the people of the park. It’s your park, it’s your pick!
We believe that if there is more accessible cultural activity in the park, and more people have more of a say in those activities, then the activities will be more representative of local communities and issues, more people will participate, and more people will feel more of a sense of community and connection within the area.
We have therefore developed the People’s Park Plinth to operate as a dedicated place-shaping initiative bridging the histories, values, physical location, needs, and social practices of local communities. We aim to connect people to the park, surrounding areas, and each other, through free co-creational public digital arts activities which nurture and strengthen community cohesion alongside the biodiversity of the park itself.
We will work collaboratively via place-based partnerships to support and involve communities in ambitious high-quality cultural experiences and improve access to a range of cultural activities where people live, by:
Turning the whole of Finsbury Park into a plinth for free, open-all-hours, mobile-first, co-creational, digital visual art programmes curated and created by, for, and with the local community.
To do this we will invite local people to set the curatorial remit for the People’s Park Plinth as a public art project that starts with them and the natural habitat of Finsbury Park.
Every year we will:
In 2021 we ran our pilot year for the People’s Park Plinth and tripled our local engagement.
We will shortly unveil the park’s pick for 2022: Based On A Tree Story which allows everyone to explore the park looking for tree sprites which tell the histories of Finsbury Park trees and encourage you to dance with them.
In 2023/24 the People’s Park Plinth will take on the theme of local biodiversity. Working with local groups we have developed a project called the Interspecies Festival of Finsbury Park which imagines a a not too distant future where there has been unrest among all the species inhabiting Finsbury Park. After much protest it has been agreed that a treaty of cooperation will be drawn up. But first there will be an Interspecies Festival to ensure all the species understand each other’s cultures and needs. Therefore proposals for the plinth will take the form of video presentations by a range of Finsbury Park species each pitching for which park habitat and activities should feature in the forthcoming Interspecies Festival. We will facilitate voting and then support the artist(s) in producing a series of workshops to prepare for the Festival, before hosting the Festival itself in August 2023 and presenting a virtual exhibition of Festival activities and footage.
Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) offer unique tools for translocal peers to encode rules, relations and values into their joint ventures using blockchain technologies.
In recent years DAOs have been heralded as a powerful stimulus for reshaping how value systems for interdependence and cooperation manifest themselves in arts organising. Radical Friends. Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts consolidates five years of research into a toolkit for fierce thinking, as well as for new forms of radical care and connectivity that move beyond the established systems of centralised control in the art industry and wider financial networks.
At a time when so many are focused on NFTs, Radical Friends refocuses attention on DAOs as potentially the most radical blockchain-based technology for the arts in the long-term. Contributors engage both past and emergent methodologies for building resilient and mutable systems for mutual aid. Collectively, the book aims to evoke and conjure new imaginative communities, and to share the practices and blueprints that can help produce them.
Radical Friends includes contributions of essays, interviews, exercises, and prototypes from leading thinkers, artists and technologists across this emerging field. This book, follows Furtherfield and Torque Editions ground-breaking book Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain.
Editors
Ruth Catlow & Penny Rafferty
Contributors
Ramon Amaro, Calum Bowden, Jaya Klara Brekke, Mitchell F. Chan, Cade Diehm, eeefff, Carina Erdmann, Primavera De Filippi, Charlotte Frost, Max Hampshire, Lucile Olympe Haute, Sara Heitlinger, Lara Houston, Cadence Kinsey, Nick Koppenhagen, Kei Kreutler, Laura Lotti, Jonas Lund, Massimiliano Mollona, MetaObjects, Rhea Myers, Omsk Social Club, Bhavisha Panchia, Legacy Russell, Tina Rivers Ryan, Nathan Schneider, Sam Skinner, Sam Spike, Hito Steyerl, Alex S. Taylor, Cassie Thornton, Suzanne Treister, Stacco Troncoso, Ann Marie Utratel, Samson Young
Publishers
Torque Editions
Design
Mark Simmonds
Cover and Inside Illustrations
Marijn Degenaar
“Radical Friends is an urgent book for the 21st Century and beyond. It shows us, in the spirit of the legendary poet and artist Etel Adnan, that the technology of the future needs to be about “togetherness, not separation. Love, not suspicion. A common future, not isolation.”
Hans Ulrich Obrist“How things are run is often more important than what is done. It may not be easy to establish alternative formats and infrastructures, but it’s certainly necessary… This collection shows that it is possible too.”
Sadie Plant“This book is about friendship, despair and hope — a beautiful, must-read for all people who are asking unanswerable questions about life, love and the end of the world.”
Franco “Bifo” Beradi“Web 3 diagonalises the principles of Web 1 and Web 2. Binaries are dead. Everything is both good and evil, emancipatory and oppressive, singular and infinitely replicable. Radical Friends navigates this confusing new terrain in a nuanced and accessible way that is liable to make you feel excited about the future of art, politics, and maybe even the world again.”
Amy Ireland“An instant seminal compendium for people who want to gain a deeper understanding of the radical potential of crypto tech for aesthetic institutions.”
Harm van den Dorpel
Join the discussion on Discord and share your questions with the speakers.
The Radical Friends Symposium discusses the value of and presents pathways to peer-produced decentralised digital infrastructures for art, culture and society – in particular through Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) for the cultural sector. The symposium takes as its inspiration the defining principles of friendship – sustained intimacy, fellowship and camaraderie – which, when applied to complex difficulties (particularly those that might otherwise be invisible to us), offers excellent design patterns for social infrastructure. To end gatekeeping and elitism in the artworld we therefore bring this spirit of deep and radical friendship as a way to build resilient and mutable systems for scale-free interdependence and mutual aid.
DAOs provide new digital governance infrastructures that allow people to pool resources, exchange economic value, and form joint-ventures, that defy national borders. DAOs enable people to agree on how risks and rewards should be distributed and to reap the benefits (or otherwise) of a shared activity now and in the future.
At a time when the mainstream artworld is focused on the personal wealth that can be amassed through NFTs, artworld DAOs offer the potential to diversify collaboration and to lower the cost of translocal self-organising, leading to new visions, vehicles and configurations for communally grounded projects. The open source artworld DAOs we do (and don’t) build now will have direct consequences for who owns the future and decides what this means for others.
So gather up your radical friends and grab your tickets for an expansive 8-hour program that includes: lectures; panel discussions; concerts; as well as hybrid talk and body-work formats. Throughout the event, participants are invited to analyse, discuss, and map the obstacles, opportunities, and implications of progressive, decentralised organisations and automation in the artworld. Plus, watch out for 4 prototype DAOs that will be unveiled during proceedings and take part in collectively awarding a 10,000 EURO development grant funded by the Goethe-Institut to 1 of them.
The Radical Friends Symposium is curated by Ruth Catlow (Furtherfield) and Penny Rafferty in dialogue with Sarah Johanna Theurer and Julia Pfeiffer (Haus Der Kunst, Munich). Participants include James Whipple (aka / M.E.S.H.), OMSK Social Club, Jaya Klara Brekke, Harm Van Den Dorpel, Cem Dagdelen, Aude Launay, Sarah Friend, Laura Lotti and Calum Bowden (Black Swan), Bhavisha Panchia and Carly Whitaker (Covalence Studios), Nicolay Spesivtsev and Dzina Zhuk (eeefff) and Massimiliano Mollona alongside Samson Young (Ensembl).
Radical Friends presents results from the DAOWO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations with Others) project, co-founded by the Goethe-Institut London and Furtherfield with the support of Serpentine Galleries. The award-winning DAOWO is a transnational collaborative network that has been bringing together leading international institutions and communities from the arts and technology for three years to question the advantages and disadvantages of blockchain technologies for art, culture and society from a local perspective. The summit is part of the Goethe-Institut project “Lockdown Lessons”. It searches for answers on what can be learned from the Covid-19 crisis on a global scale concerning social, technological, postcolonial and civil society concerns.
From inside the stillness of lockdown, we used The Hologram’s viral healthcare system to make a space for radical planning for the post-pandemic futures we wanted. In this Live Action Role-Play, or LARP, 12 people made contact with who they would become, individually and collectively, by 2050. In this immersive game participants played characters based on the most powerful and well-supported version of themselves. They time travelled 30 years in three weeks to enact their survival and thriving through multiple emergencies and crises. Human systems collapsed and reformed, in the wake of social upheavals borne of entrenched colonialism and racism and environmental crises. Capitalism ended.
We were made for this // 2050 Fugitive Planning
12 people participated in a series of 3 online events as part of a Live Action Role-Play.
The documentation will be used to generate a sci-fi trailer to inspire future Hologrammers
The Hologram LARP was co-created by Cassie, Lita, Ruth, Magda, Melanie, Shawn, Alessandra, Maggie, Lauren, Stella, Katrine, Darcey, Lyra, Lara and Tamara.
The Hologram is a viral four-person health monitoring and diagnostic system practiced from couches all over the world. Three non-expert participants create a three-dimensional “hologram” of a fourth participant’s physical, psychological and social health, and each becomes, the focus of three other people’s care in an expanding network.
The Hologram is supported by Furtherfield and CreaTures – Creative Practices for Transformational Futures. CreaTures project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870759. The content presented represents the views of the authors, and the European Commission has no liability in respect of the content.
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
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/
The voting period ends on August 31st, 2021 at midnight (BST). Register to vote here.
Come to Finsbury Park on 14th & 15th August and discover 3 digital artworks then decide which one you think belongs in the heart of Finsbury Park and we’ll work with the artist to make it bigger for Autumn 2021.
In 2019, we celebrated 150 years of Finsbury Park being the ‘People’s Park’ – a place where we can all do things together. In 2020, protests across the UK saw public artworks toppled from plinths, while the pandemic left us separated and isolated. Now we believe it’s time to re-explore our public spaces as vast platforms not just for shared experiences but shared choices we make together. That’s why we created the People’s Park Plinth, a project turning the whole of Finsbury Park into a platform for public digital artworks and asks you to decide which one you want to experience more of!
The People’s Park Plinth features 3 artworks:
Breath Mark x Lisa Hall & Hannah Kemp-Welch
HERVISIONS x Ayesha Tan Jones
Desree x Drumming School with Alex Dayo x Studio Hyte
All artworks are free to access and each will take you on an imaginative journey through different aspects of Finsbury Park’s life and history. On the 14th and 15th, you can meet with other community members, as well as the artists and curators, and talk together about the works and the ideas behind them. Tell us what you like and don’t like, tell us why having a say in the local culture is important to you.
Public art is often chosen by faceless committees behind closed doors. The People’s Park Plinth is about changing all that and giving everyone a say in what cultural experiences we want to have together. It’s part of Furtherfield’s commitment to ensuring art in the park is for the people. It’s your park, so it’s your pick!
We created an app called CultureStake which allows communities to make decisions together – while learning more about what is most important to us all in the places we care about. The app uses a special way of voting that asks you to express not just your opinion but how strongly you feel. Click here for more about CultureStake.
Enjoy exploring the artworks in your own time or if you’d like more help accessing them just ask us. When you are ready to vote, you can go ahead using your smartphone or our team will help you vote on one of our laptops. Voting is quick and easy – takes less than 5 minutes – and will allow us all to learn more about the types of experiences we want to have together in the park.
Come to the McKenzie Pavillion in the centre of Finsbury Park between 12.00 -17.00 h on Sat. 14th or Sun. 15th of August. Our team will be on hand to meet you and help you access both the artworks and the voting process.
These in-person and social-distanced events will take place outdoors, outside of Furtherfield Gallery, and under the current Covid-19 UK government advice.
Light snacks and refreshments will be provided. If you have any accessibility needs you’d like to discuss, please email: pita@furtherfield.org
For more details on the project, visit: peoplesparkplinth.org
Follow all the updates via @peoplesparkplinth
In 2019, we celebrated 150 years of Finsbury Park being the ‘People’s Park’ – a place where we can all do things together. In 2020 protests across the UK saw public artworks toppled from plinths, while the pandemic left us separated and isolated.
With this in mind, we launched the People’s Park Plinth this summer, as a way to re-explore our public spaces by turning Furtherfield Gallery inside out and expanding its digital arts programme beyond our walls and into the life of Finsbury Park.
We collaborated with incredibly talented artists, curators and local park members to create 3 ‘taster’ digital public artworks that speak about the park’s heritage and local stories. In May, June, and July we showcased a different digital art experience each month.
In August, the park made its pick! We will be launching a larger commission of Based on a Tree Story this Autumn, and to continue celebrating the heritage, artistry and local voices from Finsbury Park, all the ‘taster’ artworks will be available until January 2022.
If you are in Finsbury Park you can use the camera on your phone to scan the QR codes on the People’s Park Plinth (presented on the exterior of our Gallery building in the centre of the park). They are all free to access, any time, with any smartphone – but you might want to have some headphones handy too.
If you are somewhere else you can click the links on the People’s Park Plinth website to find the artworks.
It’s your park so it’s your pick!
Sign up here to get involved in choosing the artwork that most belongs in the heart of Finsbury Park next year.
Breath Mark x Lisa Hall & Hannah Kemp-Welch
Live until January 2022
A site-specific, interactive sound work creating moments of connection between strangers of all species.
Follow this sound work as it leads you across the park to meeting points for animals, plants and strangers. As you listen, consider the needs of all these inhabitants and our symbiotic relationship that is increasingly under threat. Between heartbeats, vibrations and the alignment of crossing paths, this work sounds out a shared existence, putting these moments of connectivity with strangers of all species on the People’s Park’s Plinth.
The work features interviews with volunteers at Edible Landscapes, a forest gardening group based onsite at Finsbury Park: David Berrie, Imogen Simmonds, Jo Homan, Juliette Ezavin and Theo Betts. The artists were commissioned by Breath Mark, a curatorial collective formed as a part of the Royal College of Art’s MA Curating Contemporary Art Programme Graduate Projects 2021 in partnership with Furtherfield’s People’s Park Plinth project.
Taster: In this first iteration of the artwork, one sound pathway ‘Close to the ground’ is presented.
Larger commission: If this work had been selected in the public vote in August 2021, a further two sound pathways and a trail to find them would have been revealed.
HERVISIONS x Ayesha Tan Jones
Live until January 2022
A site-specific, sonic augmented reality encounter with a digital tree sprite that tells tales of the tree’s past, present and future.
The trees of Finsbury Park are very old, and they have been witness to a lot of change and growth. If the trees had a voice, what would they share?
Based on a Tree Story brings to life Furtherfield Gallery’s nearby resident, a London plane tree dubbed the Trunk Triplets Tree, situated in Finsbury Park and the soils from which they grew, part of the now-extinct ancient woodland, Hornsey Woods. From 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.
Taster: In this first iteration of the artwork one tree story is presented.
Larger commission: This work was selected in the public vote in August 2021 and further two tree stories and a trail of clues to find them will be revealed this Autumn.
Desree x Drumming School with Alex Dayo x Studio Hyte
Live until January 2022
An augmented reality (AR) sci-fi zine comprising three stories that bring together writers, musicians, and local residents to explore alternative visions of a Finsbury Park of the future.
For this first iteration of the AR zine, released in July 2021 as part of the People’s Park Plinth programme, we present The Light and Dark: an audio-visual story about a fictional character, Isa, who wakes up in a home they don’t recognize, surrounded by land that feels as foreign as the sky they sit under. Isa does not know how they made it there, but they do know they have to make it home before the host finds them. With only the wisdom of Grandwa, and the feeling in their chest, Isa discovers the power of their historical connection to what was, their land.
The Light and Dark has been written by local spoken word artist and writer Desree, and is accompanied by a unique musical composition by musician Alex Dayo and his park-based Drumming School, in collaboration with David Kemp. The visual design, AR experience and animation have been developed by Studio Hyte.
Taster: In this first iteration of the artwork the start of one future fiction is presented.
Larger commission: Had this work been selected in the public vote in August 2021, this fiction would have been completed and two more would have been revealed.
In August, after experiencing all 3 digital artworks, we asked people to pick which one they thought belonged in the heart of Finsbury Park by either:
Or
The park’s pick is Based on a Tree Story, and we are working with HERVISIONS and Ayesha Tan Jones to make a bigger and better version of their digital art experience – and then we will launch it on the People’s Park Plinth this Autumn!
We wanted everyone to express an opinion – even if visitors were far away what they felt mattered too. But if voters lived locally what they felt mattered more for the vote count – so we weighted the vote for anyone using the CultureStake app within or near the park.
If you are an arts organisation you can find out more about how you can use CultureStake to drive collective cultural decision-making at your own digital and physical events.
Breath Mark is a curatorial collective initiated as a part of the Curating Contemporary Art Graduate Projects Programme 2021, Royal College of Art. Comprising six international members, Breath Mark’s curatorial practice responds to the challenges of curating remotely and explores the interconnectivity of physical and digital site-specific experiences.
Members: Kevin Bello, Jindra Bucan, Harriet Min Zhang, Soyeon Park, Yifei Tang and Yuting Tang.
As part of extended public engagement, Breath Mark has collaborated with design studio An Endless Supply, on a digital microsite acting as a reading room allowing audiences to further engage with the artwork’s themes. We encourage visitors to extend their experiences through the texts, sounds and videos here: spaces.rca.ac.uk
Lisa Hall is a sound artist exploring how environments are built-in sound, while Hannah Kemp-Welch is a socially engaged artist concerned with listening. Hannah and Lisa met at London College of Communication while studying MA Sound Arts in 2010. They share an interest in public and private spaces, and how sound and audio technologies build networks and tell stories that often can’t be seen. They have collaborated on sound art projects for performances and installations at Tate Modern, CRiSAP, and Sound Reasons Festival: New Delhi.
https://www.sound-art-hannah.com
HERVISIONS is a femme-focussed curatorial agency supporting and promoting artists working across new and emergent technologies, and platforms with a strong focus on the intersection of art, technology and culture. HERVISIONS partner with institutes, organisations and galleries to create antidisciplinary exhibitions and innovative commissions. Select partners include, LUX, Tate, bitforms and Google Arts and Culture.
IG: @hervisions_
Ayesha Tan Jones AKA YaYa Bones work is a spiritual practice that seeks to present an alternative, queer, optimistic dystopia. They work through ritual, meditating through craft, dancing through the veil betwixt nature and the other. Ayesha weaves a mycelial web of diverse, eco-conscious narratives which aim to connect, enthral and induce audiences to think more sustainably and ethically. Traversing pop music, sculpture, alter-egos, digital image and video work, Ayesha sanctifies these mediums as tool’s in their craft. Selected recent commissions/exhibitions include: Shanghai Biennale (2021) Athens Biennale (2021) Solo Show at Underground Flower Offsite (2020) Serpentine Galleries, London (2019) IMT Gallery, London (2019) Mimosa House, London (2018), ICA, London (2018-2020) Cell Project Space, London (2018) Gropius Bau, Berlin (2018) Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2016-17). Ayesha is represented by Harlesden High Street Gallery, London.
https://www.ayeshatanjones.com/
Desree is an award-winning spoken word artist, writer and facilitator based in London and Slough. Currently Artist in Residence for poetry collective EMPOWORD, Desree explores intersectionality, justice and social commentary. Producer for both Word Up and Word Of Mouth, finalist in 2018’s Hammer & Tongue national final and TEDx speaker, she has featured at events around the UK and internationally, including Glastonbury Festival 2019, Royal Albert Hall and Bowery Poetry New York. Burning Eye Publishers republished Desree’s first pamphlet, I Find My Strength In Simple Things, in May 2021.
Alex Dayo comes from Burkina Faso where his professional musical career started in the 1980’s, accompanying the National Ballet Kouledafourou on tour as well as playing for African Royalty and globally recognised dignitaries at private and public events and the Ensemble des Radios and Televisions of Burkina Faso, based in Bobo-Dioulasso. In 1985, he founded Wountey, a collective of musicians who created a new fusion of traditional and modern music called Plenguedey, and, for fifteen years, toured across Africa and Europe, spreading Burkina Faso’s cultural fusion to a wider audience. His musical collaborations include Ali Farka Toure, Femi Kuti and Salif Keita from Africa and traditional Master Griots from Burkina Faso/Mali/Guinea/Gambia. An accomplished arranger, Alex incorporates African traditional, Fusion, Jazz, Rock, Latin and Caribbean influences. Alex moved to London in 2007, where he set up a drumming school. A highlight of Alex’s career was being chosen to play at the Opening and Closing ceremonies at the London 2012 Olympics.
http://drummingschool.co.uk/zantogola
DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT
Studio Hyte is an award-winning design studio, working between graphic design, interaction, and emergent communication. Their work includes branding, print, website, installation, and exhibition design. Specializing in forward-thinking, multifaceted visual identities within the arts and education sector. Whether through commissioned or self-directed projects, they aim to create meaningful, accessible, and thought-provoking work.
Formed of a small group of individual practitioners, Studio Hyte is the middle ground where all of our interests and practices meet. Their collective practice and research cover a broad spectrum of topics including language, inclusion & accessibility, egalitarian politics & alternative protest, and technology & the human.
IG: @studiohyte
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