In partnership with AntiUniversity

Whether you smelt it, mine it, burn it, breathe it, or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.

Addiction is defined as a chronic, relapsing earthly disease that is characterized by compulsive seeking and use of earth products, despite harmful consequences. It is considered a brain disease because humankind changes the earth—they change its structure and how it works.

Soft Sickness is a one evening/one day workshop hosted by the research project Shift Register exploring the signs, symptoms, circulations, exchanges, consumptions, dependencies, and management implicit in the multifarious and pathological dependence on the earth which is now named by that word “Anthropocene”. Earthly addictions produce quantified-earth self-portraiture, GIS co-dependencies, and all other variants of planetary narcissism. Earth-scale sensor systems and media networks, swathing the planet in information about itself, are unveiled with media from on- and off-planet earth science field-stations and reflections thereupon. Dependencies bring anxieties about the impending doom of resource dearths to come. People manage these anxieties with new psychotropic medications, whereas artists represent and markets bet on them, against the health of the earth and its living bodies.

Soft Sickness divines the earth lines of the often contradictory ingestion of and repeating addiction to the earth and its productions, data, memory — its circulations, seasons and natures, to the plants, the mushrooms and the animals, to fossil fuels, metals, to liquid screens and smogged surfaces, to longevity and, finally, to the real. To the thing and things which we cannot help doing (things to). To compulsively consume (the earth) is to eat and subsequently to excrete ourselves, humankind, and this cycle can be termed addiction. We feed from the earth, feeding back to the earth a world and mind-changing chemistry.

During the workshop, participants and invited guests will discuss, map, extract, ingest and excrete relations of local earth manifested in Finsbury Park in North London. Plant and pharmaceutical toxicities/ psycho-pharmacologies, poison cures, geophagic gastronomics, esoteric pollution sensing and embrace, and the invention and embedding of folkloric and human to non-human ecologies constitute parts of this invitation. We will gather psycho-active dew, imagine tales for the mole people, bake bread for crows, and make the earthworlds flesh.

We wish to develop contemporary rituals articulating the polarised and overgrown junk-tions of shamanic spirit journeyings with addiction managements; cold kicking the earth habit or indulging absolutely in the (cannibal/capital) undergrounds and (fairie) overgrounds.

SHIFT REGISTER is a research project investigating how technological and infrastructural activities have made Earth into a planetary laboratory. The project maps and activates local dynamics and material shifts between human, earthly and planetary bodies and temporalities. Contemporary, mainstream science and technology are intersected with other knowledge systems to attempt a reconfiguration of relations between humans and the earth. SHIFT REGISTER is Jamie Allen, Martin Howse, Merle Ibach, Jonathan Kemp and Martin Sulzer at the Critical Media Lab, Basel.

Furtherfield in partnership with the antiuniversity and Radical Think Tank are proud to present this new 6-part course.

Aimed at people with an interest in radical social change, the course will apply concepts from complex systems theory to understanding (and creating) revolutions and social movements. 
The course is directed at a general rather than academic audience, although a desire for radical social change will be assumed.

6.30 – 8.30pm at Furtherfield Commons, inside the park near Finsbury Gate

Booking essential – Please book here 

Tue 27 Sept – Introduction to Complex Systems

Tue 4 Oct – Smash the System – Creating and Harnessing chaos

Tue 11 Oct – Erode the System – Building the New World in the Shell of the Old

Tue 18 Oct – Escape the System – Bodily Affect and Surviving Oppression

Tue 25 Oct – Tame the System – Reforms without Reformism

Tue 1 Nov – Bringing it All Together – A Trajectory for Revolution
 

Sessions will involves a mix of speaker presentation and participatory discussions/activities, covering subjects such as ecology, network theory and new materialist philosophy. 

Other familiar concepts will be re-examined through this framework, including the commons, chaos, structural oppression and reform. 

The ultimate goal is for this knowledge to be put into practice to create more effective activism, to contribute to better understanding the workings of contemporary society and to help inspire projects for building future utopian alternatives.

Graham Jones is an activist based in East London, working with groups such as Radical Assembly, Radical Housing Network and Radical Think Tank.

Pricing

For those unwaged or on low income the course is free (or donate what you can). Choose either the Free Ticket or Donation ticket in the links above.

For everyone else, individual sessions are £5 + booking fee. A prebooking of all 6 sessions is available for £25 + booking fee.