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FurtherList No.29 Dec 3rd 2021

03/12/2021
Marc Garrett

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/

Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director Marc co-leads on artistic and curatorial vision for Furtherfield and is the director of Furtherfield research and publishing. As an artist, curator and researcher Marc brings 25 years of experience from the intersection of arts and technology to emerging practices in art, decentralised technologies and the inequalities of race and class. He is currently completing a PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London.

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Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director Marc co-leads on artistic and curatorial vision for Furtherfield and is the director of Furtherfield research and publishing. As an artist, curator and researcher Marc brings 25 years of experience from the intersection of arts and technology to emerging practices in art, decentralised technologies and the inequalities of race and class. He is currently completing a PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London. Share: Twitter Instagram Facebook