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 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

Books, Papers & Publications

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

Articles, Interviews, Blogs, Presentations, Videos

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 Calls and Opportunities

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/

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

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

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/

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, Open Calls, Festivals and Conferences

Auriea Harvey, Year Zero | March 6–April 17 2021 | Opening Reception: Saturday, March 6 | bitforms is pleased to announce Year Zero, Auriea Harvey’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Through a diverse mixed-media practice, Harvey creates sculpture, video games, drawing, and mixed reality works steeped in character creation and mythology. Year Zero introduces a new body of work nested within the legacy of Harvey’s solo and collaborative career. Working online from the beginning of net art’s history, the artist expertly combines her experience in video game and software development with a three-dimensional practice. Year Zero is a continuation of this coalescence, presenting early sketchbooks, webcam broadcasts, and multiplayer games alongside Harvey’s latest sculptural installations and drawing. https://bit.ly/3bb8Nep

IPERCUBO presents an Online Exclusive Viewing Room dedicated to Axel Straschnoy’s The Permian Projects | 9–23 March 2021 | The Viewing Room is a preview of The Permian Projects, as well as a presentation of the recently published catalogue. The Permian Projects are two research projects by Axel Straschnoy on the natural history collection at the Perm Regional Museum, Perm Kray, Russia. The backdrop of the projects is the End-Permian Extinction (the biggest extinction ever to take place on Earth). The projects reflect on the Museum of Natural History and on the ongoing extinction process. The Dioramas of the Perm Regional Museum is a series of three-dimensional (lenticular) photographs presenting some of the stuffed animals in the collection in storage. https://bit.ly/2NOPeQ8

New Art City Festival: 2021 | A community celebration of Internet Art: March 15–26 2021 | March 26, 2021, is the one-year anniversary of New Art City’s domain registration. d0n.xyz chose the URL the way he always does for his art projects: by searching keywords and picking the coolest free one. A prototype grew into a tool, and a tool grew into a community. Since then, more than 30,000 people in 120 countries have visited galleries in New Art City. As an organization, we are proud to display artists who show in museums on the same level as art students and to show digital art in its native format alongside traditional media – https://bit.ly/2MG8ZJb

THE Q IN QONSPIRACY: QAnon as a Paradigm for Future Social-media-driven Conspiracism | Disruptive Fridays #19 | March 12 2021 |LIVE: Friday 5 pm | Berlin | Roberto Bui/Wu Ming 1 and Florian Cramer, moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli | In this conversation between Wu Ming 1 and Florian Cramer, QAnon is discussed as a template for contemporary social-media-driven conspiracy fantasies that work simultaneously as games and a new kind of cults. By focusing on the mutation of conspiracy myths from countercultural phenomena to contemporary meme and influencer culture, they will focus on three conspiracy narratives: “The Great Replacement” (from Renaud Camus to Charlottesville), QAnon (from Pizzagate to the Capitol storming), and “The Great Reset” (as a set of pandemic-inspired variations on the old New World Order trope). The conversation is centered around Wu Ming 1’s forthcoming book La Q di Qomplotto [The Q in qonspiracy], to be published end of March by Edizioni Alegre, which describes how conspiracy fantasies help legitimize systems of control. https://bit.ly/2OcAoTx

Bread and Roses: Gender and Class Under Capitalism, with Andrea D’Atri | Free  · Online event | Wednesday March 17 2021 7:00 pm–8:30 pm GMT| Is it possible to develop a radical socialist feminism that fights for the emancipation of women and of all humankind? Housmans is proud to welcome Andrea D’Atri to discuss her new publication with Pluto Press, Bread and Roses: Gender and Class Under Capitalism. Join us for a passionate journey through the history of feminism. Using the concrete struggles of women, Andrea traces the history of the women’s and workers’ movement from the French Revolution to queer theory. She analyses the divergent paths feminists have woven for their liberation from oppression and uncovers where they have hit dead ends. https://bit.ly/3uHW6zA

(re)programming: Infrastructure | With Benjamin Bratton | Event by Aksioma, Kino Šiška and KonS | Online with Facebook Live | Monday 15 March 2021 at 6pm UTC | For the 10th anniversary of Tactics & Practice, Aksioma presents (re)programming – strategies for self-renewal a “festival of conversations” with world-class thinkers debating key issues, from infrastructure and energy to community and AI, curated and conducted by writer and journalist Marta Peirano. The festival consists of 8 streaming events taking place every third Monday of the month throughout the year. https://bit.ly/3b0Hu6l

The DAOWO Sessions: Artworld Prototypes | A new set of experimental projects to reinvent the future of arts with blockchain | A partnership between Goethe-Institut, DECAL@Furtherfield, and Serpentine Galleries. The DAOWO Sessions: Artworld Prototypes series of online events ran 28 January – 4 March 2021. The series explores the possibilities for the future of the art world with blockchain by investigating what can be learned from DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations) working with Others (-WO). Each recorded session is an eye-opening presentation and conversation around active experimentation that aims to hack, deconstruct and reinvent the arts in the emerging crypto space in response to people and their local contexts. This is a unique opportunity for cultural practitioners, representatives of arts, technology organisations, communities, and anyone interested in blockchain’s potential to come together and question the future of art and society. https://bit.ly/37YllUg

Virtual Reality Residency | Program OPEN CALL until March 29 | Museums Without Walls is seeking proposals for its virtual reality residency program. Residencies will take place through April and May in different versions of the Espírito Santo Art Museum – MAES hosted in the Mozilla Hubs plataform. Four participants will be selected to occupy and recreate this environment based on their artistic and/or curatorial visions. The selected proposals will receive specialized mentorship and a development fee of CAD $ 600. The residency outcomes will be presented in the Museum Without Walls program in late May. https://bit.ly/3qbGMru

Pick Me Up (& hold me tight) | Compass festival | 19–28 March 2021 | An invitation for collective listening, experienced through public pay-phones across Leeds. Through an invitation to answer a public payphone, Pick Me Up (& hold me tight) is a mass act of contemplation about the relationship between mental health and modern life. Created by award-winning theatre and digital art company ZU-UK in response to rising suicide rates across the country, Pick Me Up (& hold me tight) is an audio event where every phone box in Leeds rings at the same time. Pick up the phone to participate in a gentle but thought-provoking audio experience that explores contemporary loneliness, and exposes the edges of our humanness. It’s an invitation to pause, take stock, and explore what kind of listeners we are. https://bit.ly/3kAcLAj

MoneyLab Berlin: Disaster Capitalism | From 26–28 March 2021| MoneyLab Berlin will shine a light on emerging communities that are starting to organize themselves around sustainable finance, inclusive tech, community-based currencies, and progressive monetary systems. Now for the first time in Berlin, the 11th edition of MoneyLab aims at creating space for utopias, experiments, and radical ideas around an economy for the people and for the planet. Over the course of this event we will present creative coping strategies, answers to the problems of data capitalism, platform monopolies and online surveillance, and modes of resistance. Free – online event. https://bit.ly/3dTaPkZ

Ecology and the Anthropocene Art-Game Commission | Phoenix Art-Game Commission Opportunity | LocationEast Midlands | We are seeking to commission an artist, group or studio to create an art-game exploring ecology and the Anthropocene, responding to the Daisyworld Simulation. We are open to proposals that use gaming as a medium in its widest sense, however, it is important to consider how the work could be exhibited in a gallery setting and published online, using platforms such as Steam and Itch. £4000 Commission fee to cover the production of work. Development support during the production of the work. Deadline – midnight on Sunday 28th March. Shortlisted applicants will be contacted by Monday 5th April – https://bit.ly/2MAnLBb

Center and Periphery: Marxism and Postcolonial Theory | Instructor: Nara Roberta Silva | Online event and Course Schedule 6–27 April 2021 | Brooklyn Institute for Social Research | £229.61 Registration Open | Marxism and anti-colonialism were once deeply intertwined in national liberation and other movements, from Vietnam to Angola to Algeria and beyond. However, by the end of the 20th century, Marxist and other socialist thought often seemed dated in a world with a waning Soviet bloc and an emerging neoliberal consensus. Postcolonial theory, itself often in conversation with Marxist thought, offered new understandings of liberation and emancipation. https://bit.ly/3b2JATe

Radical Kinship: Solidarity & Political Belonging | Free  · Online event | Apr 22, 2021 12:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada) | By Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at NYU and Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU | a panel discussion with Lisa Duggan, Che Gossett, Shellyne Rodriguez, & Helga Tawil Souri, & moderated by Layal Ftouni | This panel explores contemporary debates on solidarity and coalitional politics that are instrumental to conceptualizing political subjectivity, collectivity and belonging in our current political conjuncture. Engaging with questions of intersectionality, afro-pessimism, and Marxism, this session invites speakers to address the urgency of political affinities (comradeship, radical kinship) that can activate new socio-political imaginaries and envision alternative foundations and horizons for coalitional politics. Register for this free Zoom webinar. https://bit.ly/3swngY2

Computer Mouse Conference | Presented by CultureHub | 29 & 30 April 5pm EDT | Through lectures, live performances, discussions, and more, conference participants explore the question: what does the computer mouse see? The Computer Mouse Conference 2021 will take place on a website. Organized and moderated by Emma Rae Bruml & Ashley Jane Lewis. With support from The Processing Foundation, The Media Archaeology Lab, and The Coding Train. All ticket sales directly support CultureHub and the conference participants. https://bit.ly/3rdGvWe

Call for Proposals: Digital Matters: Designing/Performing Agency for the Anthropocene. 25th annual conference of the DRHA (Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts), Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany, 5-7.09.2021. Taking place from September 5-7, 2021 in Berlin, the 25th Digital Research in Humanities and Arts conference invites contributions and interventions that focus on such transfers and interactions between digital and natural environments. Digital Matters takes on the challenge to explore new material and multi-species agencies, forms of embodiment, and interactions between the performing arts, the humanities, and the natural sciences that engage the sense of relationality and expanded scale that the Anthropocene affords. http://www.drha.uk/2021/call-for-paper/

Books, Papers & Publications

Aesthetics of the Commons | By Shusha Niederberger , Cornelia Sollfrank and Felix Stalder | What do a feminist server, an art space located in a public park in North London, a ‘pirate’ library of high cultural value yet dubious legal status, and an art school that emphasizes collectivity have in common? They all demonstrate that art can play an important role in imagining and producing a real quite different from what is currently hegemonic; that art has the possibility to not only envision or proclaim ideas in theory, but also to realize them materially. They are art in the sense that they place themselves in relation to (Western) cultural and art systems, developing discursive and aesthetic positions, but, at the same time, they are ‘operational’ in that they create recursive environments and freely available resources whose uses exceed these systems | Published by Diaphnes. https://bit.ly/3r4OFjr

Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies | By Winnie Soon and Geoff Cox | Aesthetic Programming explores the technical as well as cultural imaginaries of programming from its insides. It follows the principle that the growing importance of software requires a new kind of cultural thinking — and curriculum — that can account for, and with which to better understand the politics and aesthetics of algorithmic procedures, data processing and abstraction. It takes a particular interest in power relations that are relatively under-acknowledged in technical subjects, concerning class and capitalism, gender and sexuality, as well as race and the legacies of colonialism. Open Humanities Press. https://bit.ly/2ZYduBV

Some Ways of Making Nothing: Apophatic Apparatuses in Contemporary Art | By Curt Cloninger | What if all works of art were better understood as functioning apparatuses, entangling their human audiences in experiences of becoming? What if certain works of art were even able to throw the brakes on becoming altogether, making nothings rather than somethings? What would be the ethical value of making nothing, of stalling becoming; and how might such nothings even be made? Punctum Books. https://bit.ly/3b3tDMN

The Routledge Guidebook to Paine’s Rights of Man | By Frances A Chiu | Upon publication in 1791-92, the two parts of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man proved to be both immensely popular and highly controversial. An immediate bestseller, it not only defended the French revolution but also challenged current laws, customs, and government. The Routledge Guidebook to Paine’s Rights of Man provides the first comprehensive and fully contextualized introduction to this foundational text in the history of modern political thought, addressing its central themes, reception, and influence. Routledge. https://bit.ly/3b2Bees

Anthropocene islands: There are only islands after the end of the world | By David Chandler and Jonathan Pugh | Dialogues in Human Geography | Published March 1, 2021 | Many Anthropocene scholars provide us with the key take-home message that they are writing ‘after the end of the world’. Not because they are writing about the apocalypse, but because they are engaging the Anthropocene after the profound crisis of faith in Western modernity which has swept across academia in recent decades. […] In this article, we examine how the figure of the island as a liminal and transgressive space has facilitated Anthropocene thinking, working with and upon island forms and imaginations to develop alternatives to hegemonic, modern, ‘mainland’, or ‘one world’ thinking. Thus, whilst islands, under modern frameworks of reasoning, were reductively understood as isolated, backward, dependent, vulnerable, and in need of saving by others, the island is being productively re-thought in and for more recent Anthropocene thinking. Sage. https://bit.ly/3rb36mb

Gut Feelings: The Microbiome and Our Health | By Alessio Fasano and Susie Flaherty | Why the microbiome—our rich inner ecosystem of microorganisms—may hold the keys to human health. We are at the dawn of a new scientific revolution. Our understanding of how to treat and prevent diseases has been transformed by the knowledge of the microbiome—the rich ecosystem of microorganisms in and on every human. These microbial hitchhikers may hold the keys to human health. In Gut Feelings, Alessio Fasano and Susie Flaherty show why we must go beyond the older, myopic view of microorganisms as our enemies to a broader understanding of the microbiome as a parallel civilization that we need to understand, respect, and engage with for the benefit of our own health. MIT Press. https://bit.ly/3kH8bjL

Reading ′Black Mirror′ – Insights into Technology and the Post–Media Condition (Media Studies (COL)) | By German Duarte and Justin Michael Battin | Very few contemporary television programs provoke spirited responses quite like the dystopian series Black Mirror. This provocative program, infamous for its myriad apocalyptic portrayals of humankind’s relationship with an array of electronic and digital technologies, has proven quite adept at offering insightful commentary on a number of issues contemporary society is facing. This timely collection draws on innovative and interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks to provide unique perspectives about how confrontations with such issues should be considered and understood through the contemporary post-media condition that drives technology use. https://bit.ly/3sDUEMB

The Politics of Dating Apps: Gender, Sexuality, and Emergent Publics in Urban China | By Lik Sam Chan | An examination of dating app culture in China, across user demographics—straight women, straight men, queer women, and queer men. The open-access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing. In this exploration of dating app culture in China, Lik Sam Chan argues that these popular mobile apps are not merely a platform for personal relationships but also an emerging arena for gender and queer politics. Chan examines the opportunities dating apps present for women’s empowerment and men’s performances of masculinity, and he links experiences of queer dating app users with their vulnerable position as sexual minorities. He finds that dating apps are both portals to an exciting virtual world of relational possibilities and sites of power dynamics that reflect the heteronormativity and patriarchy of Chinese society. MIT Press. https://bit.ly/2MK3R6R

AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams | By Joanna Zylinska | Can computers be creative? Is algorithmic art just a form of Candy Crush? Cutting through the smoke and mirrors surrounding computation, robotics and artificial intelligence, Joanna Zylinska argues that, to understand the promise of AI for the creative fields, we must not confine ourselves solely to the realm of aesthetics. Instead, we need to address the role and position of the human in the current technical setup – including the associated issues of labour, robotisation and, last but not least, extinction. Offering a critique of the socio-political underpinnings of AI, AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams raises poignant questions about the conditions of art making and creativity today. Open Humanities Press. https://bit.ly/3kyNg29

Articles, Interviews, Blogs, Presentations, videos

Beeple Brings Crypto to Christie’s | The artist’s brash riffs on the news have whipped up a frenzy of interest within the cryptocurrency scene | By Josie Thaddeus-Johns | Mike Winkelmann never used to call himself an artist. But that was before he made $3.5 million in a single weekend from selling his artworks. In December, he auctioned off multiple editions of three digital artworks, each priced at $969, and 21 unique works, most of which sold for about $100,000 each. It was only the second time he had put his art on sale. The digital artist, who goes by Beeple, has created a drawing every single day for the last 13 years. He started with pen and paper but now mostly uses computer software such as the program Cinema 4D. A two-week-long online auction of a composite of the first 5,000 days of the project at Christie’s, is the auction house’s first sale of solely digital artwork. It will also be the first time that Christie’s will accept payment in the cryptocurrency Ether – https://nyti.ms/300t4gj

On Language, Technology, and Power: Jennifer Chan in Conversation With Hiba Ali | New media artists Hiba Ali and Jennifer Chan discuss absurd performance, making artwork about work, and diasporic afterlives | Hyperallergic | They both talk about absurd performance, making artwork about work, and the challenges w/in diasporic communities in openly discussing the nuances of privilege and oppression. “Ali and I recently reconnected — we met six years ago while teaching sessionally at SAIC in Chicago, and stayed in touch — to discuss the motivations around absurd performance, making artwork about work, and the difficulties people of color face with openly discussing specific privileges and oppressions.” https://bit.ly/3rioCp4

Reimagining Black Art and Criminology: A New Criminological Imagination | By Martin Glynn | It is time to disrupt current criminological discourses which still exclude the perspectives of black scholars. Through the lens of black art, Martin Glynn explores the relevance black artistic contributions have for understanding crime and justice. Through art forms including black crime fiction, black theatre, and black music, this book brings much-needed attention to marginalized perspectives within mainstream criminology. Refining academic and professional understandings of race, racialization, and intersectional aspects of crime, this text provides a platform for the contributions to criminology which are currently rendered invisible. Bristol University Press. https://bit.ly/2Pez1nC

Episode IV. Arcadian Dreams: AI-Generated Worlds from the Sublime to the Beautiful | By Filippo Lorenzin | “The Uncanny Valley” is Flash Art’s new digital column offering a window on the developing field of artificial intelligence and its relationship to contemporary art. When artists ask an AI to build an entirely digital world, implicit is the demand that it be appreciable to a human public. In the process, the AI discards variables that are unsuitable — elements that won’t be detectable to human senses or that don’t fulfil the narrative demands of its makers. Landscapes generated by AI are thus affected by the requirement for public enjoyment and cannot entirely recapture nature’s unpredictability. https://bit.ly/3uKjsEm

Reset or rewild: perspectives on future arts infrastructures | By Dr. Susan Jones | Pandemic conditions have shaken the foundations and functions of the art infrastructure to the core, illustrating the baked-in flaws while exposing the polar perspectives on conditions for a healthy, productive arts ecology in future. There was little emergency funding or practical support for individual freelance artists, and an apparent failure to acknowledge their dire situation after being hit by a dual economic and emotional tsunami. Although ensuring equality in the workforce is a beacon principle for the funded arts, staffers in art institutions were able to benefit from furlough while compounding the precarity of freelance artists was somehow socially acceptable to funders and most arts funded institutions. https://bit.ly/2O702ca

The model of an “inverted tree” for researching subcultures | By Frederick Lawrence. Expert with over 40 years of experience in investigating subcultures. Subcultures as a phenomenon are not unvarying, subcultures have changed and retransformed in fluctuating environments; some of them disappeared, but new forms arose or became a synthesis of pre-existing ones. Any study of social development requires a particular model first, that could guide the researcher in his work by acting as a “navigation system” in the course of his intellectual work. https://bit.ly/3r3P1Hg

Podcast – News From Where We Are # 3 – The Radical Friendship Series | In 2021 Furtherfield celebrates 25 years of radical friendship. We revisit and open up conversations with some of the fascinating and radical people with whom we have worked and collaborated through the years from the Internet to post-digital contexts. They are changing culture, their lives, and the lives of their communities. Filippo Florenzin interviews artist and independent, Mexican Curator, Doreen Rios. Ruth Catlow reads her foreword for the DisCO manifesto publication, edited by Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel. Marc Garrett interviews artist Kate Southworth about her work with Art and Witchcraft. Stewart Home reads from his recent book edited by Home – Denizen of the Dead published by Cripplegate Books. Experimental, Avant-Folk by artists Alan Sondheim & Azure Carter, from their latest, excellent album Plaguesong. And more… http://bit.ly/3tuCIp6

Poly Styrene documentary: Celeste Bell on her mother’s incredible, complex legacy | The daughter of multi-layered punk icon Poly Styrene hopes her new film will give her mum the respect she deserves. As Bell says in a new, extraordinary documentary about her mother’s life and work, “it took an incredible amount of strength for my mum to walk away from X-Ray Spex,” a band at “the height of their success”. But as Bell adds: “Poly Styrene had to die so that Marianne Elliott could survive.” How she got to that point, and the various rebirths that followed, is all unpacked in the film, narrated by Bell, who co-directed it alongside Paul Sng. The Evening Standard. https://bit.ly/2ZZo1gc

The Secret Life of a Coronavirus | An oily, 100-nanometer-wide bubble of genes has killed more than two million people and reshaped the world. Scientists don’t quite know what to make of it | By Carl Zimmer | At the same time, the pandemic etched a scar across humanity that will endure for decades. More than 2.4 million people have died so far from Covid-19, and millions more have suffered a severe illness. In the United States, life expectancy fell by a full year in the first six months of 2020; for Black Americans, the drop was 2.7 years. The International Monetary Fund predicts that the global economy will lose over $22 trillion between 2020 and 2025. UNICEF is warning that the pandemic could produce a “lost generation.” At the center of these vast shocks is an oily bubble of genes just about 100 nanometers in diameter. Coronaviruses are so small that 10 trillion of them weigh less than a raindrop. https://nyti.ms/2NIXktI

‘Ari Up just kicked the door down’ | Neneh Cherry and others reflect on the legacy of the Slits and New Age Steppers singer as previously unheard songs are released | By Helen Barrett | I’ll never forget the first time I saw Ari Up,” says singer-songwriter Neneh Cherry. “She had her locks tied up, this huge pillar on her head, and she was wearing a tutu and walking on ballet pointe shoes. I was barely 15, really impressionable, and it was instant love.” Less well-known is the music Up recorded alongside and afterward — early cross-cultural experiments in sound and genre, collaborations with reggae artists, and immersion in Jamaican music that would take her from south London to Kingston and the jungles of Indonesia and Belize. Financial Times. February – https://on.ft.com/3dSv56e

Main image by Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow 2020.

The FurtherList Archives

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.

Exhibitions, Open Calls, Courses and Conferences

RGBFAQ by Alan Warburton | For 2021 arebyte Gallery has extended the online exhibition until 13 February 2021. Book your slot online today | “My process is like a comedian developing a set, but without the laughs,” says Warburton, “a cross between a software tutorial and a ghost train ride that channels an episode of late 80s Tomorrow’s World.” RGBFAQ comprises a research-led experiential exhibition in which the audience navigates a “black-box” set populated by gigantic geometric sculptures. Warburton’s ambitious new video essay will be projection-mapped onto this sculptural background, expanding the form of his popular video essays (Goodbye Uncanny Valley, Fairytales of Motion) into an immersive 3D space, with a soundtrack by David Kamp – http://bit.ly/2XeZJgB

MediaFutures OPEN CALL | Closing 28th of January. We are looking for artists and start-ups from the media field, who work with data and want to develop artworks or products (or both) to reshape the media value chain. This is the first of three open calls and includes four challenges focusing on the coronavirus infodemic, as well as an open challenge for other topics. Successful applicants will join a dedicated support program, and receive up to 80,000€ of funding, both over the course of six months. More information and details on how to apply are available on our website – https://mediafutures.eu/opencall/

Who cares for the caregivers? | New Hologram course! | Online, for six consecutive Tuesdays: February 2nd to March 9th 2021, from 6-9 PM GMT | Applications are open for people who do care work and who need help organizing their own care. This course will help us answer the question “who cares for the caregivers?” and will be aimed at – though not exclusively for – people who identify as caregivers. We know from our first two courses that many people who provide the most care find it difficult to organize care for themselves. We hope that we can offer a space and time for people who do support work to develop long term support systems for themselves and their pals for now and into the future . The Hologram is developing with the ongoing support of Furtherfield, CreaTures (Creative Practices for Transformational Futures) and many other people and organisations. http://thehologram.xyz/course/

Protest and Resist: Stories of Uprising and Resistance with Maxine Peake | Event by Housmans Radical Booksellers and Comma Press | Wednesday, February 10, 2021 at 7 PM GMT – Free | Housmans Bookshop and Comma Press are delighted to host two online events with renowned British actors Christopher Eccleston and Maxine Peake reading from protest-inspired stories published in Comma’s History-into-Fiction series, Protest and Resist. The two events will take place on two consecutive dates, with Christopher reading on the 9th of February and Maxine on the 10th. Both readings will be followed by a conversation between authors and historians discussing the events depicted in the stories read by Christopher and Maxine – Tickets available here>> https://housmans.com/events/

Bridges for Communities | The Path Leads to Bristol | 4 Dec 2020 – 28 Feb 2021 | Arnolfini Gallery approached Bridges for Communities to create a local response to Hassan Hajjaj’s exhibition The Path, and Bridges, in turn, invited a number of people involved in their work to take part in a photoshoot exploring themes of culture, identity, and story. These images were captured by Bridges volunteers and graphic designers Safia and Samira Belhaj, sisters whose own journey has included life in Libya, the United States, and now Bristol – http://bit.ly/3bbGInI

Conference alert! ‘(In)Visibility and the Medical Humanities’ | Call for Papers: NNMHR 4th Annual Congress, 21st-23rd April 2021, online | Open to scholars, health professionals, and creative practitioners at all career stages. “The global and local health inequalities revealed and perpetuated by the Covid-19 pandemic require us to reflect upon how we do medical humanities research. We ask participants to consider the ways in which our work renders some aspects of health and illness visible while leaving others out of sight. We hope to think more carefully about what sort of experiences the medical humanities has become adept at bringing to light, whilst reflecting on the ways in which theoretical methodologies, research priorities and funding structures have left other voices unheard. Durham University – http://bit.ly/2LpskNv

Books, Papers & Publications

Aesthetics of the Commons | Editors, Cornelia Sollfrank, Felix Stalder, Shusha Niederberger.  What do a feminist server, an art space located in a public park in North London, a so-called pirate library of high cultural value yet dubious legal status, and an art school that emphasizes collectivity have in common? They all demonstrate that art plays an important role in imagining and producing a reality quite different from what is currently hegemonic and that art has the possibility to not only envision or proclaim ideas in theory but also to realize them materially. In Aesthetics of the Commons, the commons are understood not as a fixed set of principles that need to be adhered to in order to fit a definition, but instead as a thinking tool–in other words, the book’s interest lies in what can be made visible by applying the framework of the commons as a heuristic device | Diaphanes AG (20 Mar. 2021) – https://amzn.to/3rSkxsp

Groove is in the Heart: The DiSCO Elements | A friendly and carefully planned approach for organizations that want to create and share value in ways that are cooperative, commons-oriented and rooted in feminist economics. A DisCO (Distributed Cooperative Organisation) is an organisational model for cooperative groups that combines ideas and practices from cooperativism, the commons, P2P and feminist economics. It aims to prototype new and radical forms of ownership, governance, entrepreneurship, and value accounting meant to counteract pervasive economic inequality, and offers an alternative to the aims and outcomes of DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations) – https://elements.disco.coop/

SHADOW WOLF CYBERZINE issue#9 | I N T E R N E T ‘ S  U N D E R G R O U N D  C Y B E R Z I N E | ‘slaughtering your dystopian future’ | Lots of interviews, ASCII art, DIY articles, studio tips, a DJ Psychology test & also for the 1st time a COVER TAPE comp with artists from the ShadowWolf Cyberzine-o-sphere! “It was supposed to come out earlier in the summer but yeah things don’t go as planned, I had a lot of stuff to do so we have, like every year, the new issue at Christmas! I will spare you the corona covid ‘oh-what-did-we-have-a-though-year-talk’ because that is for most of you pretty obvious, you might not want to be reminded I reckon.” – http://bit.ly/3oiqsF9

The Oxford Handbook of Algorithmic Music | Edited by Alex McLean, and Roger T. Dean. With the ongoing development of algorithmic composition programmes and communities of practice expanding, algorithmic music faces a turning point. Joining dozens of emerging and established scholars alongside leading practitioners in the field, chapters in this Handbook both describe the state of algorithmic composition and also set the agenda for critical research on and analysis of algorithmic music. Organized into four sections, chapters explore the music’s history, utility, community, politics, and potential for mass consumption. Contributors address such issues as the role of algorithms as co-performers, live coding practices, and discussions of the algorithmic culture as it currently exists and what it can potentially contribute to society, education, and e-commerce – http://bit.ly/38bPlwt

Subvertising: on the Life and Death of Advertising Power | By Thomas Dekeyser | Get in-depth insight into the motivations and politics of subvertising with this 300-page doctoral study. It features some of the world’s key subvertisers, and shows how subvertisers can avoid getting co-opted by advertisers. Pdf – https://bit.ly/390WPlk

Technocrats of the Imagination: Art, Technology, and the Military-Industrial Avant-Garde | John Beck, Ryan Bishop | Art and Visual Culture > Art History, Cultural Studies, Media Studies | In Technocrats of the Imagination John Beck and Ryan Bishop explore the collaborations between the American avant-garde art world and the military-industrial complex during the 1960s, in which artists worked with scientists and engineers in universities, private labs, and museums. For artists, designers, and educators working with the likes of Bell Labs, the RAND Corporation, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, experiments in art and technology presaged not only a new aesthetic but a new utopian social order based on collective experimentation | Duke University Press – http://bit.ly/3ot9IuE

Articles, Interviews, Blogs, Presentations, Videos

The Hologram: You can’t cut THIS: without multiplying it | Video | Organized in partnership with Pluto Press, artists Cassie Thornton (Eyebeam Rapid Response Phase 1 Fellow) and Tina Zavitsanos on shared attention around holograms, debt, and care and Thornton’s recently published pamphlet, The Hologram: Peer to Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future, included in the Vagabonds series, edited by Max Haiven. Both artists consider Thornton’s central question, “In an era when capitalism leaves so many to suffer and to die, with neoliberal ‘self-care’ offering little more than a bandaid, how can we take health and care back into our hands?” | Recorded session moderated by Ruth Catlow from FurtherField – https://bit.ly/393XXV3

Ambivalence, part 3: the necessary dialogue between art and environmental sciences | Article| Regine Debatty | 3rd and final part of my report from the conference AMBIVALENCES #1 which took place in early October in Rennes in the framework of the Maintenant digital art festival. Part 1 outlined Bénédicte Ramade’s overview of the History of Ecological Art. Part 2 highlighted key moments from the round table “Digital Arts and Environmental Awareness” that discussed the ambivalent relationship between digital artists and the environmental crisis – http://bit.ly/2LjXFBm

What if care is the organizing principle of our society? | Blog post | By JM Wong | The South Seattle Emerald | What if care was the organizing principle of our society? Not profit, not white supremacist garbage masked as liberal paternalism in the form of “diversity” that would hire cops of color to continue to target Black and Brown folks on the street just living their lives. What if care was my people who are here finding home as guests on Turtle Island, shredding up the myths of american empire force-fed to us through aid packages and free trade agreements, with jobs that colonize our psyches and rob us of our life forces? http://bit.ly/3s2EeOf

Adversarial.io, subverting image recognition | Francis Hunger & Flupke | Neural.it | There is growing criticism of the widespread application of machine-based recognition and data processing, especially those involving visual technologies. The inaccuracy, tolerated as a minority, is second only to the political consequences of the applied criteria. Hunger & Flupke have developed a product that successfully implements this criticism at a technical level. Their “Adversarial.io”, is a webapp that alters images in order to make them machine-unreadable, while leaving them visually almost indistinguishable from the original. […] The declared mission of the duo is to “fighting mass image recognition” – http://bit.ly/3oio94K

David Graeber: A Celebration & Discussion of Ideas w/ Tony Vogt & Shane Capra | Laborwave Radio | Podcast & Full transcript | David Graeber was an anthropologist, proponent of anarchism, and participant in many movement struggles of the past two decades including the Alter-Globalization movement and Occupy Wall Street. Among his popular authored books includes Debt: The First 5,000 Years, The Utopia of Rules, Bullshit Jobs, and Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. He passed on September 2, 2020. “We discuss his ideas and celebrate his memory in this conversation with comrades Tony Vogt, member of the IWW and co-founder of the Anarres Project for Alternative Futures, and Shane Capra, an organizer and participant in the Institute for Advanced Troublemaking and member of the IWW” – http://bit.ly/3ncjekt

Amazon Capitalism | Podcast | Listen to an interview with Jake Alimahomed-Wilson & Ellen Reese LaborwaveRadio where they discuss their book about Amazon capitalism and workers’ resistance. With cutting-edge analysis, they discuss the many facets of the corporation, including automation, surveillance, tech work, workers’ struggle, algorithmic challenges, the disruption of local democracy, and much more – http://bit.ly/2X93N26

FoAM in 02020, on Flickr | This album weaves together FoAM’s trajectories through the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of 02020. Many thanks to all of you who accompanied us during the year as collaborators, supporters, followers and friends. We wish you a vigorous 2021! FoAM 02020, in a rearview mirror – https://bit.ly/3nkbPzI

ODI Fridays: How live action role play could fix real-world social problems | Presentation | Furtherfield’s Artistic Director Ruth Catlow talks about how participation in scenarios in live action role play (LARP) leads to powerful group-driven discovery, rich research data, and potential real-world answers. Digital media devices, platforms and services are designed for individual consumers, in competitive markets rather than for healthy societies. The increased transparency offered by DLTs and blockchain technologies promise to increase accountability in supply chains for instance. But how can we assess technical systems that are both invisible and hard to explain to everyday users? – https://bit.ly/38mahAT

Main image: Monopoly mix by Ricky Leong. New York. (February 2011). Originally used as the cover image for the article ‘Survival of the richest’ by Douglas Rushkoff 23 July 2020, via Guerilla Translation. https://bit.ly/3s0T4VL

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

Upcoming event: Book launch |The Hologram <> You can’t cut THIS: without multiplying it | Online event | Friday, December 11th, 1:00-2:30 pm EST |
Organized in partnership with Eyebeam,  Pluto Press, artists Cassie Thornton and Tina Zavitsanos will reflect on their shared attention around holograms, debt, and care and Thornton’s recently published pamphlet, The Hologram: Peer to Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future. Both artists consider Thornton’s central question, “In an era when capitalism leaves so many to suffer and to die, with neoliberal ‘self-care’ offering little more than a bandaid, how can we take health and care back into our hands?” The Hologram is developing with the ongoing support of Furtherfield, CreaTures (Creative Practices for Transformational Futures) and many other people and organisations. https://www.eyebeam.org/events/the-hologram/

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

RGBFAQ | Alan Warburton | arebyte Gallery presents a new commission by UK based artist Alan Warburton. RGBFAQ comprises a research-led experiential exhibition in which the audience navigates a “black-box” set populated by gigantic geometric sculptures. Warburton’s ambitious new video essay will be projection mapped onto this sculptural background, expanding the form of his popular video essays (Goodbye Uncanny Valley, Fairytales of Motion) into an immersive 3D space, with a soundtrack by David Kamp. Until 19 December 2020, and from 5 – 23 January 2021. https://www.arebyte.com/alan-warburton-rgbfaq

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

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

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

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

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

Call for Proposals: INC Reader #15 – Critical Meme Research | By Chloë Arkenbout | Deadline 16th December | As they metastasized from the digital periphery to the mainstream, memes have seethed with mutant energy. From now on, any historical event will be haunted by its memetic double — just as any pandemic will have its own infodemic that will recursively act upon it — issuing in the kinds of cross-contamination that Baudrillard already prefigured in the 1980s: of the convoluted age of simulacra, of epistemological crises associated with postmodernity, and of a generalized informational obesity whose gravitational pull bends reality to whatever “program”, in the multiple senses of that term – https://bit.ly/39sb5oO

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

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

Books, Papers & Publications

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Articles, Interviews, Blogs, Presentations, videos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

News From Where We Are: The Furtherfield Podcast | First broadcast Friday 10th April 2020 | We may be confined to our homes by the Coronavirus emergency but we still have access to thriving networked cultures from around the world.  ‘News From Where We Are’ is the Furtherfield podcast hosted by co-founder and co-artistic director Marc Garrett, a conversation with many voices from the ground | Coming soon in April | Join us and send 90-second audio updates | Interviews with Cassie Thornton, Cade Diem & Joseph DeLappe. Contributions from Jaya Klara Brekke, Régine DeBatty, Jeremy Height, and more. More info at https://buff.ly/33C3kYG | Every 2nd Friday, on Soundcloud – https://soundcloud.com/furtherfield

Upcoming: Art & Animals in the Age of AI and Bio-Engineering | Next month, Regine DeBatty will be giving online classes on the theme of Art & Animals in the Age of AI and Bio-Engineering with the School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe | How do artists, designers and activists use artificial intelligence, virtual reality, robotics, synthetic biology, the blockchain or gaming to probe and communicate techno-scientific developments? To investigate the shifting paradigms of the living, thinking world? To make us accept that time has come to co-evolve in a more sympathetic and mutually beneficial way with other living entities, whether “natural”, lab-grown or hybrid? | Mon, Apr 6, 2020, 7:00 PM – Mon, May 4, 2020, 9:00 PM CEST – https://tinyurl.com/w9y6d2v

Distant Movement(s) | A series of performances experimenting with online togetherness and the possibility to experience dance in front of a screen, while we close our eyes. Exploring, being attentive and dancing together are the key concepts of this artistic experience. The project originated in 2018 from a combination of two different approaches, both anchored in exploring bodily sensation. Daniel Pinheiro and Annie Abrahams are interested in the limits and possibilities of online collaboration and communication and use telematic performance as a tool to understand more about it – https://distantmovements.tumblr.com/dm

Peoples Bank of Govanhill | Join us for remote exchange and collective imagining | Drawing Workshop | Monday 13th April 3pm | Join artists Raman Mundair and Ailie Rutherford to collectively imagine a post-capitalist future DRAWING WORKSHOP | This moment of global crisis and the Covid pandemic is likely to transform capitalism as we know it. While this is a difficult time for all of us, times of crisis can also open up space for new possibilities to emerge. It is in these times that large collective shifts in consciousness are possible and major shifts in political and economic structures can happen. We are already seeing lower pollution levels, reduced consumption and new mutual care networks. What else do we imagine happening that didn’t seem possibly before? https://tinyurl.com/wzua7vu

OPEN CALL FOR ART! In response to COVID-19 | Amplifier is launching an emergency open call for artwork around the themes of Public Health & Safety or Mental Health & Well-being. Throughout the month of April, 30 artists will be selected to receive $1k awards, starting next week! I’ll be one of the guest curators for this project, alongside Nancy Spector and Hank Willis Thomas. You can submit and vote on artwork here: bit.ly/globalopencall. These symbols will stand long after the virus is gone as a testament to our resilience, join Amplifier in this historic moment by submitting! – https://tinyurl.com/yx3v3nmb

Michael Szpakowski | Visit his latest phtographs on Flicker. An artist, composer & writer. His music has been performed all over the UK, in Russia & the USA. He has exhibited work in galleries in the UK, mainland Europe & the USA. His short films have been shown throughout the world. He is a joint editor of the online video resource DVblog – https://www.flickr.com/photos/szpako/

#Covid Creatives Toolkit: Mutual aid for digital spaces | Set up by Kat Braybrooke | A set of carefully-curated mutual aid resources, ideas and pathways for creative practitioners (including artists, makers, curators, designers, hackers, educators, facilitators, etc) who find themselves needing to migrate their practice onto digital spaces and places. The kit’s 7 sections are intended to support different aspects of this journey, from digital gathering to digital well-being – https://tinyurl.com/reakdoz

Books, Papers & Publications

Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age | Brian Jefferson | Brian Jefferson explores the history of digital computing and criminal justice, revealing how big tech, computer scientists, university researchers, and state actors have digitized carceral governance over the past forty years. He shows how digital technology has expanded the wars on crime and drugs, enabling our current state of mass incarceration and further entrenching the nation’s racialized policing and punishment. Brian Jefferson is associate professor of geography and geographic information science at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign | University of Minnesota Press – https://tinyurl.com/ugkj2dq

Museums Inside Out: Artist Collaborations and New Exhibition Ecologies | Mark W. Rectanus | Rectanus 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. Museums Inside Out introduces a new vocabulary to understand the place of artists in redefining and contesting the museum in the context of globalization and the creative economy | University of Minnesota Press – https://tinyurl.com/tbwmgmq

Embodied Computing: Wearables, Implantables, Embeddables, Ingestibles | Edited by Isabel Pedersen and Andrew Iliadis | Practitioners and scholars explore ethical, social, and conceptual issues arising in relation to such devices as fitness monitors, neural implants, and a toe-controlled computer mouse. The contributors examine technologies that range from fitness monitors to neural implants to a toe-controlled mouse. They discuss topics that include the policy implications of ingestibles; the invasive potential of body area networks, which transmit data from bodily devices to the internet; cyborg experiments, linking a human brain directly to a computer; the evolution of the ankle monitor and other intrusive electronic monitoring devices; fashion tech, which offers users an aura of “cool” in exchange for their data; and the “final frontier” of techno-supremacism: technologies that seek to read our minds | MIT Press – https://tinyurl.com/s6bjrt6

The filth and the fury: punk graphics – in pictures | Guardian | Andrew Krivine has been collecting punk memorabilia since 1977. His book Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die contains over 650 posters, flyers, record sleeves and adverts, charting a DIY ethos that changed graphic design for ever | The book is published on 2 April by Pavilion Books – https://tinyurl.com/ut4aqn4

Articles, Interviews, Blogs, Presentations, videos

Is Accelerationism a Gateway Aesthetic to Fascism? On the Rise of Taboo in Contemporary Art | By Dorian Batycka | What does cancel culture have to do with the rise of techno-futurism and accelerationist ideas in contemporary art? Art critic Dorian Batycka analyzes the recent uptick in accelerationist inspired artworks, examining their manifestation in exhibitions such as the 6th Athens Biennale and the 9th Berlin Biennale, asking to what extent ideas inspired by the accelerationist philosopher Nick Land, have led to proto-fascist ideas percolating within the realm of contemporary art. Download PDF – https://tinyurl.com/rxusqrk

Tales of a DisCO, Straight from the Dancefloor | By Timothy McKeon and Sara Escribano | Guerilla Translation | DisCOs are a commons-oriented, feminist, cooperative way for people to work together. A set of ideals and criteria for ensuring that patterns of oppression and violence that permeate our society are not replicated within intentional, cooperative spaces. DisCOs systematize fairness and the recognition of care work. They help to keep projects geared towards the common good, towards the Commons. DisCOs are essentially a system, but systems are best understood when implemented and that’s where Guerrilla Translation comes in. Our small translation collective is the first DisCO—the pilot project – https://t.co/foEgIV4C2I?amp=1

Excursion to an Alien World | Living with Plan B | Blog post by Aileen Deirig disussing life since living in a commune in Spain | “Calafou has been described as giving the impression of a post-apocalyptic scene, and post-capitalist is one of the self-descriptions. As I have been living in Calafou since the end of last August, this has become so normal that it can feel quite jarring to go to other places and find that they are still pre-apocalyptic and apparently haven’t got the memo yet that capitalism is dying. When I stepped out of a train last Monday evening and found myself in the midst of a brightly illuminated shopping mall, I felt I had landed uncomfortably on the wrong planet.” Read on – https://tinyurl.com/wxzozao

Mutual aid for those who have lost work | Pirate Care Network | pirate.care.syllabus  ▒▒▒ 🐙 | Outlined forms of mutual aid to help those who are precarious and currently have no source of income, those who are being laid off, and in general those who have not enough money. It includes propositions where to start if you want to mutualise money, resources and labour — a solidarity fund, a common wallet, shared purchases, a library of things, common.coin, time bank and labour related legal and union support. All this assumes strikes at the point of production, circulation and care work, rent strikes, and demands for a universal sick pay and a quarantine universal basic income – https://tinyurl.com/vgehfbm

Ann Pettifor on Coronavirus Capitalism | Interview with author and campaigner Ann Pettifor, getting her take on the economic consequences of Coronavirus. I specifically ask Ann about the prospects of a debt write down, and whether we may be able to achieve lasting change from the embers of this crisis to capitalism. Hope & Action’s new Vodcasts, explore the need for urgent economic change. Join filmmakers Dan Edelstyn & Hilary Powell as they debate ideas of how to attack the financial crisis with leading thinkers | Youtube – https://tinyurl.com/roctuw4

Ideas to resist | CCCB Lab | Some inspiration to lift our mood during the days of confinement we’re experiencing in certain parts of the world. A couple of weeks before confinement started we asked some of our collaborators to send us inspiring texts to offset the wave of bad news about the current state of the world. We wanted to publish a plural post to inspire hope and optimism, with essential questions, bright ideas and simple solutions. This is the result, in the midst of the global pandemic with consequences and lessons that will define the near future | Víctor Recort Berta Gómez Santo Tomás Albert Lloreta João França Joana Moll Tania Adam Lucas Ramada Prieto Toni Navarro Míriam Hatibi – http://lab.cccb.org/en/ideas-to-resist/

This Is Not the Apocalypse You Were Looking For | Laurie Penny | Pop culture has been inundated with catastrophe porn for decades. None of it has prepared us for our new reality. For years, angry young idiots have fantasised about a shit-hits-the-fan collapse of civilisation scenario, where men would be real men again, and women would be grateful. But in this crisis, our heroes are not soldiers -they are healers and carers | Wired – https://tinyurl.com/uoswgws

Socialism in a time of pandemics | International Socialism | Joseph Choonara’s analysis of the Covid-19 crisis looks at the history of epidemics, the origins of the coronavirus in capitalist development and agriculture, what the outbreak means for the world economy and how the left can respond. “Above all, a pandemic on this scale intensifies the pre-existing fault lines of capitalism. At the most basic level it poses a choice: defend profits or save lives. The indications, thus far, are that the former has been the overriding priority for those presiding over the system. This article explores how pandemics enmesh with the logic of capital and offers some potential responses from the left | https://tinyurl.com/r6owqay

The Political Possibility of Sound. Interview with Salomé Voegelin  | By Leandro Pisano | Digicult | What are the political potentials of listening? How does sound define the crossing of the territories of contemporaneity, of the differences in race, gender, social belonging? How can we, in the invisible depth of sound, define our belonging to the contemporary world, taking an active position in issues that concern ethics, subjectivity, the principles of collective and individual living? After attempting to define a series of possible philosophical and post-phenomenological approaches to sound art in the previous two books – Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (Continuum, 2010), and Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound (Bloomsbury, 2014) – the Swiss writer and artist Salomé Voegelin continues her analysis on listening practices, in a new book entitled The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening (Bloomsbury) whose themes juxtapose and which reflects on the encounter between political processes and the sounds we are constantly immersed in – https://tinyurl.com/t9xzszo

Pandemic Inequalities, Pandemic Demands | By weareplanc |  We need to recognise that ‘staying at home’ doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. For some, homes are a sanctuary. For others, the home is another place of work, where cooking, cleaning and childcare take up the majority of their time and energy. There are many for whom the home is a place of danger, with time outside, if possible, being a respite from abuse. For people with mental or physical illness, for the elderly and disabled, the isolation they may face through being confined to the home can be deeply unhealthy, at times terrifying. Some people don’t have homes at all; being shunted from one sofa to another, sleeping in night shelters or out on the streets are dangerous “options” during this pandemic for those that have few already – https://bit.ly/2wJnynq

Is This a Dress Rehearsal? | Bruno Latour | The unforeseen coincidence between a general confinement and the period of Lent is still quite welcome for those who have been asked, out of solidarity, to do nothing and to remain at a distance from the battle front. This obligatory fast, this secular and republican Ramadan can be a good opportunity for them to reflect on what is important and what is derisory. . . . It is as though the intervention of the virus could serve as a dress rehearsal for the next crisis, the one in which the reorientation of living conditions is going to be posed as a challenge to all of us, as will all the details of daily existence that we will have to learn to sort out carefully. I am advancing the hypothesis, as have many others, that the health crisis prepares, induces, incites us to prepare for climate change. This hypothesis still needs to be tested – https://tinyurl.com/s2y9hcp

Image: An assemblage from an excellent collection of photographs taken by Michael Szpakowski. https://www.flickr.com/photos/szpako/

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

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.

Exhibitions, Events & Conferences

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

Books

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

Articles & Interviews

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

Freshly Squeezed (extra News…)

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.

Introduction.

We live in a world riddled with contradictions and confusing signals. Our histories are assessed, judged and introduced as fact yet there are so many bits missing. We accept what is given through soundbite forms of mediation and end up using the easy bits as our defaults, and build up these assumptions as our ‘imagined’ guidelines. This article examines how these accepted defaults are being challenged by contemporary artists. Each have expressed their own particular (unofficial and official) form of interventions at the Tate Gallery. Featuring art works produced by artists’ and art groups, such as Graham Harwood, Platform, IOCOSE and Tamiko Thiel, we explore their connected enactments and critiques of the existing conditions. Whether it is based on economic, ecological, historical, political or hierarchical situations, they are making others aware of their creative arguments in different ways.

You will not see them accepting an award at the Turner Prize. But, their work has become as equally significant (perhaps even more) than, the mainstream art establishment’s franchised celebrities. There is now wider art audience out there, connected to the Internet and they are aware of the issues of the day. Yet, this context is not reflected back by traditional art venues and art press. Instead, we receive more of the same. The mainstream version of contemporary art has found its allies within a global and corporate culture, where business dictate’s art value. Critical and imaginative contexts contrary to neoliberal demands, are left aside. We cannot trust the ‘official’ art world to produce a realistic vision of what contemporary art really is. It is up those who are not reliant on or diverted by these powerful frameworks and elusive economies, to bring about a different set of examples of an existing parallel world which is thriving, and so much more interesting and relevant.

“Art is subject to a double protection. In the market, it is shielded from unwarranted treatment through controlled ownership. In the museum world, experts decide what should be seen, alongside what, with what interpretation and in what circumstances. A wide public is courted but allowed no power over what it sees. The very ethos of this culture—of exclusivity, elitism and control—is now at odds with the culture people make themselves.” [1] (Stallabrass 2011)

Uncomfortable Proximity.

“From adolescence I had visited the Tate, read the Art books and generally pulled a forelock in the direction of the cult of genius, on cue relegating my own creativity to the Victorian image of the rabid dog. We know well enough that this was how it was supposed to be. The historical literature on ‘rational recreations’ states that, in reforming opinion, museums were envisaged as a means of exposing the working classes to the improving mental influence of middle class culture. I was being inoculated for the cultural health of the nation.”[2] (Harwood)

In 2000, Graham Harwood[3] received the first Net Art online commission from the Tate Gallery London for the creation of his art work ‘Uncomfortable Proximity'[4]. Viewing the visual images/collages created by Harwood; reminds one of the moment when Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray'[5] views his disfigured self portrait. Considered a work of classic gothic fiction with a strong Faustian theme. The facade of his own idealised beauty is revealed as something less attractive and deeply disturbing. Harwood’s approach in offering the viewer to click on the image to see what lies behind shows the people he represents, to be seen as lurking secrets, as ghosts, mutants, lepers and outsiders.

“Tate Britain stands on the site of Millbank penitentiary incorporating part of the prison within its own structure. The bodies of many of the inmates remain concreted into the foundations of the building. The drains that run from the building to the Thames, a stones through away, bleed this decay into the silt of the Thames.”[7] (Harwood 2006).

Harwood brings to the fore the forgotten people. The lives of others, whose stories are now just distant markers of a past, dominated by a colonial history. These are the losers, the then ridiculed and exploited chavs of their day.

“‘Chav’ is an insulting word exclusively directed at people who are working class.”[8] (Jones 2012).

The first section of ‘Uncomfortable Proximity’ maps high society rituals of tastefulness and its inherent hypocrisy. The second, representations and histories of different people such as friends, family and others, who are unseen in terms of the institution’s remit of tastefulness. To do this he used the historically respected paintings (on-line images) on the Tate web site by artists such as Turner, Hogarth, Hamilton, Gainsborough, Constable and others.

“This work forced me into an uncomfortable proximity with the economic and social elite’s use of aesthetics in their ascendancy to power and what this means in my own work on the internet.”[9] (Harwood 2006) 

London’s Tate Britain area, before it was reconstructed into an art gallery, in the early 19th century was a national prison. The Millbank Penetentiary, was hailed as the greatest prison in Europe, at a cost of £500,000 it was finally built in 1821. It was Jeremy Bentham, the British philosopher and philanthropist who designed it using his pionering ideas creating the prison as a ‘panopticon’.

“At its centre was the Governor’s House, which allowed prison guards to keep watch over 1,500 transportation prisoners housed in separate cells in the surrounding pentagonal blocks. There were three miles of cold, gloomy passages: the turnkeys invented a code of chalked directions to stop getting lost in the maze!”[10]

Sentenced prisoners were processed in the prison each year and up to 4,000 would then be sent off to distant lands, such as Australia. Within the panopticon, prisoners would not know whether they were being watched or not.

“The panopticon Panoptic power built into the architecture of Benthams’ prison Prefigured what some refer to as the “electronic panopticon” or “surveillance society” which includes: the mass surveillance & collection of data by government on populations; the surveillance & collection of data on consumers for marketing purposes; the management surveillance & control of the workforce by industry.”[11] (Ballantyne)

Somehow Harwood manages to bite at the hand that feeds him, “the artist very deliberately used the work to question the role of digital media in promotion and collection. His Web site copied the Tate publicity site, with his own content inserted, causing substantial institutional disruption around the marketing department because the Tate’s Web site, in common with those of many art museums, was seen primarily as a marketing tool, then perhaps as interpretation, but never before then as a venue for digital art.[12] (Cook, 2001).

At his point it’s worth considering how some artists have experimented with the behaviour of parasites in order to explore their artistic autonomy at the edge of things. The rise of hacking and ‘art and hacktivism’ has brought about artists reimagining their creative intentions not in terms of existing within the frameworks of galleries and museums (although many do show their work in these types of venues as well). Many have chosen not to comply to the ‘official’ script of marketing demands and values imposed by mainstream art world hegemony, or concede to centralised web 2.0 structures dominating Internet culture and our mobile networks.

“The word ‘parasite’ comes from ‘para sitos’, meaning ‘beside the grain’, and refers to those animals that take advantage of grain stores to feed. […] they are not part of the restricted economy of exchange, profit, and return that is at the heart of capitalism, and to which everything else ends up being subordinated and subsumed. Thus they find an enclave away from total subsumption not outside of the market, but at its technical core.”[13] (Gere 2012)

Protest Becomes Art.

In June 2001, activist Brian Haw began his protest against the economic sanction on Iraq, opposite the Palace of Westminster in central London, until his death of lung cancer in June 2011. He earned himself a place in the history books for what he devoted ten years of his life doing, camping in a tent outside the Palace with numerous placards. First it started with only a few banners and then through the years the number of banners accumulated, with its content pointing out to the public and politicians, the huge suffering and killing of people in Iraq supported by the UK government. “Even as fresh attempts were begun to oust him, he won an award for being that year’s ‘most inspiring political figure’.”[15] (Stevenson 2011)

In 2006-7 British artist Mark Wallinger created an installation called State Britain, replicating all of the tents and banners at Parliament Square. Featuring it as his main entry for the Turner Prize at Tate Britain. “Faithful in every detail, each section of Brian Haw’s peace camp from the makeshift tarpaulin shelter and tea-making area to the profusion of hand-painted placards and teddy bears wearing peace-slogan t-shirts has been painstakingly sourced and replicated for the display.”[16] It also included copies of other people’s contributions, consisting of messages and banners amassed by Haw over the years, as a constant and dedicated daily protester, winning Wallinger the Turner Prize.

“…the larger hand-painted signs are defanged by their new context. “Beep for Brian,” once an irreverent call-to-arms taken up by many motorists plowing through the Westminster traffic, has become an absurdity, un-honkably sealed within the echoing marble box of the Tate. Never has the notion of the “lost original,” that timeworn legacy of Duchamp’s ready-mades, carried such a melancholic charge.” [17] (Street)

In contrast to his peers who also came out of the YBA (BritArt) movement in the late 80s and early 90s, which includes individuals such as Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread and Tracey Emin, Wallinger is a committed socialist. Damien Hirst was “the leading light in the YBA movement, is a famously good businessman and is now one of the richest men in England.”[18] (Shaw 2011)

“I did feel removed from the YBA thing. But it almost immediately raised people’s game. There was money and there was an audience. Or, to be strictly accurate, there was money – it really was a very targeted strategy to begin with – and the audience came along a bit later.”[19] (Wallinger 2011)

Wallinger’s comments about the audience coming along later rings true. The power of money and marketing created an audience that before,was not there, specifically for the YBA’s. Emerging artists at the time, who were not part of this elite where left out of the picture, not because of their art but because of their lack of connections with YBA circles. Many artists casted their creative intentions and values aside and re-invented their art in accordance to YBA themes, with a hope they would be accepted by this (then) new, mainstream art establishment. From the early 80s, and well into the 90s, UK art culture was dominated by the marketing strategies of Saatchi and Saatchi, a formidable force in the advertising world. The same company had been responsible for the successful promotion of the Conservative party (and conservative culture) that had led to the election of the Thatcher government in 1979. Saatchi and Saatchi Applied their marketing techniques and corporate power, with an accomplished parallel coup within the British art scene, creating an elite of artists who embraced the commodification of their personalities alongside depoliticized artworks.

Stewart Home proposes that the YBA movement’s evolving presence in art culture fits within the discourse of totalitarian art “the critics who theorise the yBa understand that by transforming art into a secular religion, rather than a mere adjunct of the state, liberalism imposes its domination over the ‘masses’ far more effectively than National Socialism. The focus, especially in the mass media, must be on the artists rather than the artwork.”[20] (Home 1996)

Platform and Liberate Tate.

“To be an artist is to contend with the present, and there are not many other careers that afford the freedom to radically examine life and society. To put it bluntly, if artists are studying and writing more about politics, culture, and education, it’s probably a reflection of the unprecedented dysfunctionality of the societies in which they live.”[21] (Deck 2005)

Every now and then something slips through the highly taught institutional web of marketed ideologies and it causes a state of ‘healthy’ unease. One such intervention is the recent collaborative project Tate à Tate.[22] It is a public intervention consisting of an audio guide that people can download onto their MP3 players or mobile phones. The material is accessible from http://tateatate.org – you download a selection of audio files and then take a physical tour to Tate Britain. It is best experienced if you take the Tate Boat to Tate Modern, or you can listen at home. The artists selected to make the sound works are Ansuman Biswas, Phil England, Jim Welton, Isa Suarez, Mark McGowan and Mae Martin.

Mark McGowan, through his daily and weekly online video broadcasts on Youtube and Vimeo, has gained a large Internet-based audience. His videos have appeared on the BBC and the Russia Today news channel. He is a performance artist and constant ‘angry’ critic of the UK government. He has never voted and, is equally critical towards whatever party happens to be in power at the time. Mcgowan’s antics have received interest because of the directness of his arguments. He speaks for and to those who do not have a voice. He reflects upon unjust situations happening in real life. He has become an alterantive force to a ‘politically’ corporate media, who offer no way in for those are not already connected with the elites of institutionalized power.

McGowan, has caused various controversies. In 2007, during Celebrity Big Brother when Jade Goody made what seemed to be racists remarks to her house-mate Shilpa Shetty; he publicised an event in support of Goody, which was a protest to burn an effigy of shetty. In the end did not take place.

His position, was that working class people were being used by the media as product to feed a machine, exploiting everyday people’s vulnerabilities. It is also an attack on the media invention of ‘Chavs’, a deliberate attempt to demonise the working classes of Britain. In retrospect, many viewed incident on Celebrity Big Brother as a clash of classes, and not necessarily a rascist issue. But, it was all too late, the media took control of what it saw as a chance to create a larger spectacle out of an already bleak situation.

“The media despised her. […] ‘Vote the pig out!’ demanded the Sun, which also referred to her as an ‘oinker’. Others taunted her as a vile ‘fishwife’ and ‘The Elephant woman’. As the campaign became a hysterical witch-hunt (indeed, one fo the headlines was: ‘Ditch the Witch!’), members of the public stood outside of the studios with placards reading: ‘Burn the Pig!’.” [23] (Jones 2012)

Dominant ideologies are cultivated hegemonically as part of the mainstream consciousness. And even though, the messages communicated through these channels do not accurately reflect real life, they do reflect stereotypes and easy packages of soundbite items on a cruder (lack of) understanding of what human values are, indivudally and collectively. These ‘mediated’ structures, socially re-construct according to ‘commercialised’ trends rather than looking at deeper resonances. Which should also include a necessary critique of their own roles and responsibilities, aksing what does it do to the psyche of a culture when you creating a spectacle out of the everyday; from fantasy into a permanant state of hyper-reality for profit?

Tate à Tate

“The poverty of the accepted culture and its monopoly on the means of cultural production lead to a corresponding impoverishment of the theory and manifestations of the avant-garde. But it is only within this avant-garde that a new revolutionary conception of culture is imperceptibly taking shape. Now that the dominant culture and the beginnings of oppositional culture are arriving at the extreme point of their separation and impotence, this new conception should assert itself.” [24] (Debord 1957)

In art, in politics, and in all avenues of power in our culture, the working classes have no voice. It seems that the only way to claim personal power is by submitting to the embarrassing scenario of applying as a contestant on what is ironically termed as reality TV. and, this involves singing someone else’s already ‘bland’, tedious songs, usually written by corporate music media. The divide of class is ever present as colonial systems prevail in exploiting not only foreign resources and the destruction of indigenous peoples’ histories and their ways of living; but also in the very states and countries where these corporate ‘friendly’ neoliberalist cults reside. In respect of oil and funding of the arts, Tate à Tate pulls these issues out from being hidden into a mainstream dialogue through their own interventions.

As the markets have gained an increasingly tighter hold on global economics and everyday people’s lives, a rise of international protests has also gained impetus. We have the Occupy protests which have spread from Wall Street to London to Bogota, in over 950 cities in 82 countries. We also have the UK Uncut protest movement challenging the government’s austerity cuts. The Internet has been a valuable medium, allowing people to connect and organise together. This has enhanced crossovers where artists have become activists and activists artists. New forms of ‘networked’ and ‘activist’ expression, exploiting the imaginative skills of artists (and others) has brought brought about a mix of ideas once used by the Situationists. If you are a typical gallery attendee or a purchaser of mainstream art magazines, awareness of current political and ecological issues through these cultural interfaces are rare. Interventionist art challenges this standard. Causing a social anomaly, fracturing the facade of what we are usually informed of as ‘national’ value.

Tate a Tate is a collaboration between the groups Platform, Liberate Tate and Art Not Oil. The work was a response to when BP was promoting its sponsorship activities in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics. Against the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Opera House and Tate Britain, aligning themselves with BP (British Petroleum). By receiving sponsorship from BP they say these institutions are “legitimising the devastation of indigenous communities in Canada through tar sands extraction, the expansion of dangerous oil drilling in the Arctic, and the reckless business practices that lead to the deaths of eleven oil workers on the Deepwater Horizon. BP’s involvement with these institutions represents a serious stain on the UK’s cultural patrimony.”[25]

Below extracts of an email interview with Mel Evens from Platform:

Mel Evans, Platform: “Tate à Tate began from a creative impulse to install something somehow immovable in Tate. Platform and Liberate Tate were collaborating on the publication ‘Not if but when: Culture Beyond Oil’, which features international artists work in response to the BP Gulf of Mexico catastrohpe, and sets out the key debates on oil sponsorship of the arts. We had noticed our critics were often alluding to a kind of inevitability of BP sponsorship.”

“Liberate Tate’s spectacular performances, although headline grabbing, had all been swiftly cleaned up by Tate staff. Although we knew tough questions were being asked by the Board of Trustees, and 8,000 members and gallery-goers had petitioned Director Nicholas Serota to drop the sponsorship, we also wondered to what extent Tate could absorb our efforts into its own politically savvy artistic persona. So the idea of an audio tour seemed the perfect way for us to create a permanent installation in Tate, challenging BP’s continued presence in the gallery, and recreated by every participant that takes the free download and goes ‘undercover’ in Tate.”

“The process began with a call out for proposals which received a terrific response. From this we came down to three proposals that we thought were equally fantastic and sufficiently different to all warrant exploration – which is where the three chapter journey was born, from Tate Britain to Modern via Tate Boat. From the launch in March 2012 onwards we quickly learned that participants were keen to pick a favourite of the three, their choices were hard to predict.”

“For some, the water related narratives in ‘This is Not An Oil Tanker’, created by Isa Suarez featuring Mae Martin, Mark McGowan and Jasmine Thomas, make the piece the most emotive experience. Others prefer the structure and highly informative content of ‘Drilling the Dirt (A Temporary Difficulty)’ by Phil England and Jim Welton, and likewise other tastes feel most comfortable in the more meandering and evocative ‘Panaudicon’ created by Ansuman Biswas. Panaudicon by Ansuman Biswas at the Tate Britain is by far the most successful… its interaction with and interpretation of its environment is a lot more complex. As initiators of a project with which we want to reach diverse audiences, we’re glad there’s something in there for everyone.”

Other Art Interventions on BP:

You can understand why questions around the Tate’s association with BP is of utmost importance. Especially, when considering the oil company has had as many as 8,000 oil spills in the USA alone. There is a long list of disasters and much information linking BP’s troubling courtships with oppressive regimes. Shell, BP, Exxon, Gazprom, Rosneft and other companies, as I write this, are engaged in a frenzied rush in the Arctic risking yet another oil spill and threatening us with even more climate change. And all this effort is for only three years worth of oil.

‘”For over 800,000 years, ice has been a permanent feature of the Arctic ocean. It’s melting because of our use of dirty fossil fuel energy, and in the near future it could be ice free for the first time since humans walked the Earth. This would be not only devastating for the people, polar bears, narwhals, walruses and other species that live there – but for the rest of us too.” [27] (Greenpeace 2012)

Recently in 2012, BP agreed to pay the largest criminal fine in US history for its corporate negligence, in causing the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. “This was a disaster for the record books: The offshore exploratory well was the deepest drilling ever, plunging more than 30,000 feet through ocean and seabed strata, and the spill was the largest in U.S. history, spewing 206 million gallons of oil — nearly 20 times what the Exxon Valdez had dumped into Prince William Sound in Alaska a decade earlier.” [28] (Schiffman 2012).

In 2011, the New Orleans, LA. Attendees of the ‘Gulf Coast Leadership Summit’ witnessed a positive statement from a representative of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as he announced to everyone’s surprise a ban on toxic dispersants, and a new free health care plan for spill and cleanup victims. Not just that, there was also another progressive announcement by the BP co-presenter that day who publicly expressed regret for his company’s past actions, he said the oil giant would also pay the bill for the new health care plan.

Of course, it was all to good to be true. it was a hoax by the Yes Men [29].

“…except for the audience, everyone was a fake. The impostors Dr. Dean Winkeldom and Steve Wistwil, both Gulf Coast residents, collaborated with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade[30], an organization whose goal is to create sustainable communities free from industrial pollution. The organization decided to create a hoax to publicize what should be happening in response to the emerging health crisis.” [31] (Flaherty 2011)

“The Louisiana Bucket Brigade action was supported by the Yes Lab, a project of The Yes Men that helps activist groups carry out media-getting creative actions on their own. Four years ago in New Orleans, The Yes Men impersonated an official from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to announce, among other things, that HUD would re-open public housing and make oil companies pay up for wetlands destruction.”[32] (ibid)

Selection of responses about Tate à Tate project in the UK Press:

Morgan Quaintance reviewed it for Art Monthly and found that “the Tate Britain and Tate Boat works suffer from a confused sense of purpose… on the other hand, England and Welton’s Tate Modern piece is a note-perfect subversion of the standard form.

Meanwhile Kate Kelsall reviewing for Don’t Panic online reported “There is something irresistibly subversive about slinking around an establishment with your headphones in, taking orders from a voice that resembles a TomTom or sleep aid recording…

Jonathan Jones, after the Tate had renewed its deal with BP wrote in an article in the Guardian “Oh, give me a break. The campaign to stop Tate, the National Portrait Gallery and other museums from accepting money from Britain’s controversial petroleum outfit is the stupidest and most misplaced of supposedly radical campaigns. Why not do something useful like join Occupy? While protests around the world this year, from Wall Street to Tahrir Square, have picked the right causes and enemies, the BP art campaign is mistargeted, misconceived and massively self-indulgent.”