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

THE ATMOSPHERICS 9 (A Blue Million Miles) | Jeremy Welsh & Trond Lossius,Aug 23 – Sept 29, 2019 | The Atmospherics is one of the ongoing collaborative projects of Trond Lossius and Jeremy Welsh. Through field recordings they capture unique qualities from different natural landscapes and urban areas. The recorded audio and video material is then filtered, edited, modified and mixed to highlight some characters or to mute others. The intention is not to document the sites, but rather to build a database of audiovisual material that is combined in different ways in their installations, where each assembly becomes a “temporary place”, constructed of impulses from different geographical areas. https://teks.no/event/atmospherics-9/

XEN – Assemblage #10 Technoshamanism | Hosted by XenoEntities Network, Aug 31st 2019 | Panel discussion about INDIGENOUS HEALTH / BRAZIL: “Mutirão Pataxó: Task Force for Health!” with Fabiane M. Borges & Rafael Frazão in conjunction with XEN presents: Anti-hijacking Dream Lab presented by XenoEntities Network in collaboration with Maria F. Scaroni | The invitation is extended to anyone interested in what is happening now to the indigenous population in Brazil | free entry – Uferstudios Für Zeitgenössischen Tanz, Studio 11 | Berlin, Germany | FB – Link – http://tiny.cc/9dlibz

The Old Waterworks Relaunch | Hosted by The Old Waterworks | Reopening our doors and kicking off with a relaunch event on Saturday 31 August, 12-6pm! “Throughout the day our new library is accessible to browse, a collaboration with GRRRL ZINE FAIR and The Agency of Visible Women. TOW’s risograph printer will be up and running for you to print your own poster, and a drop in zine making workshop will be running on the day too.” Southend-on-Sea, Essex, UK | FB link – http://tiny.cc/smkibz

Sonic Electronics with Territorial Gobbing / High Pit / LauraNetz | Hosted by Laura Netz and Theo Gowans | Sonic Electronics is an experimental event which happens 1st Wednesday monthly The Others – Stoke Newington. “We propose an anti-techno-capitalist approach to music genres like ambient, drone, techno, experimental, electronics, acousmatic, live coding, noise, vaporwave, glitch, …..” Sonic Electronics is an inclusive event to the LGBT community, female artists, no discrimination on gender, races, MH, disability | FB link – http://tiny.cc/6llibz

Jan Robert Leegte – Clear Obscure | 07.07–​01.09.2019 | Jan Robert Leegte’s ex­hi­bi­tion Clear Obscure fills the Ge­nieloods with draw­ings and per­for­mances. The draw­ings refer to the prac­tice of chiaroscuro from the Re­nais­sance pe­riod. The com­puter per­for­mances range from doc­u­ment per­for­mances and syn­thetic wilder­nesses to recita­tions from be­hind the wall of the black box. As ar­chi­tec­ture the in­stal­la­tion mir­rors the en­vi­ron­ment of Fort bij Vijfhuizen, cre­ating an im­mer­sive land­scape of mul­tiple per­spec­tives, frag­ments and times – http://tiny.cc/4ojibz

Opening: The Underlying by Ami Clarke | Exhibition hosted by arebyte gallery | The Underlying, a new body of work by London based artist Ami Clarke, including Derivative (Virtual Reality, 6 mins), Lag Lag Lag (video interface with live sentiment analysis), and The Prosthetics (prosthetic optics, blown glass). The contractual condition of both finance, and insurance, reveals the negative effects of capitalism on the environment, through a relationship with the past, that indicates that the future is coming up increasingly short. Thursday, 19 September 2019 | FB link – http://tiny.cc/ou8jbz

CITIZENS OF EVIDENCE: Independent Investigations for Change | Exploring the investigative impact of grassroots communities and citizens to expose injustice, corruption and power asymmetries. The Art of Exposing Injustice – Part 3. In the context of the debate about deliberate disinformation, fake news, and spreading of false facts, does it still make sense to speak about “evidence” as providing direct proof of the truth of facts? How can journalists, storytellers and activists provoke awareness by disclosing hidden information, when the boundary between the meaning of what is fake and what is real is becoming progressively blurred? Curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli. In cooperation with Transparency International |  #dnl17 #Citevidence · Berlin · september 20—21 · 2019 – http://tiny.cc/1a7jbz

RE: Infrastructures | Exploring the collective care and maintenance of alternative networking practices—new protocols, peer-to-peer connections, offline-first computing, and community-based governance. Our Networks is a conference about the past, present, and future of building our own network infrastructures. The event brings together enthusiasts, hardware and software hackers, researchers, organizers and more to collectively explore creative and critical engagements with the Internet and alternative infrastructures  September 20–22, 2019 Toronto Media Arts Centre, Toronto, Ontario – https://ournetworks.ca/

Books, Call for Papers & Publications

How to Make a Mask | By Pedro Barateiro | Edited by João Mourão and Luís Silva | How to Make a Mask borrows its title from a 2011 performance by the Portuguese artist Pedro Barateiro in which he reflects upon the role of the individual within the sociopolitical situations of the collective through references ranging from psychological tests to the history of theater. It is now apparent, after all these years, that such new forms of communication and interaction are easily manipulated, facilitating new forms of political control. Along with the artist’s own writings and visual material, this volume features new essays by Ana Teixeira Pinto and Anders Kreuger, an epilogue by Pieternel Vermoortel and Els Silvrants-Barclay, and an extended note by the editors João Mourão and Luís Silva | Sternberg Press – http://tiny.cc/6pnibz

Call for Papers! Reflecting Black: 400 Hundred Years of African American Life and History | Thursday, October 24, 2019 | The Symposium aims to promote cutting-edge research in Africana studies produced by scholars and emerging scholars. During the symposium, we will also discuss effective transdisciplinary pedagogical strategies and creative methods that faculty might employ to enrich the educational experiences of students of color, especially transfer and first-generation college students – http://tiny.cc/xtekbz

Peter Kennard: Visual Dissent | This fully illustrated anthology showcases key images from Peter Kennard’s work as Britain’s foremost political artist over the last fifty years. The book centres around Kennard’s images, photomontages and illustrations from protests, year by year, which provoked public outrage; including Israel/Palestine protests, anti-nuclear protests, responses to austerity, climate destruction, and more. Each image is accompanied by captions detailing not only the events in question, but Kennard’s approach to the work, including the genesis of the images and the techniques employed. Pluto Press – http://tiny.cc/6n9obzh

The Art of Direct Action: Social Sculpture and Beyond | Karen van den Berg, Cara M. Jordan, Philipp Kleinmichel (Eds.) | One of the most significant shifts in contemporary art during the past two decades concerns artists and collectives who have moved their artistic focus from representation to direct social action. This publication shows why this transition might change our understanding of artistic production at large and make us reconsider the role of art in society. The book gathers internationally recognized artists, scholars, and experts in the field of socially engaged art to reflect upon historical developments in this field and explore the role that German artist Joseph Beuys’s concept of social sculpture played in its evolution | SternbergPress – http://tiny.cc/ulpibz

Matter and Form, Self-Evidence and Surprise: On Jean-Luc Moulène’s Objects | By Alain Badiou | Foreword by Miguel Abreu | Translated by Robin Mackay | The eminent French philosopher “dialecticizes” five of the artist Jean-Luc Moulène’s objects with five conceptual formations from the history of Western philosophy. Badiou’s musings go on to pair a broken and repaired plastic chair with Victor Hugo; a terrible hand made of concrete with the Freudian unconscious; and a large-scale “red and blue monster” with rudimentary mechanisms of the Cartesian cogito, the famous “I think, therefore I am,” with unexpected inversions and variations – http://tiny.cc/e0nibz

Articles, Interviews & Presentations

UK’s first-ever permanent rainbow crossing unveiled in London | By Vic Parsons on Pink news | For the first time, a permanent rainbow crossing in solidarity with the LGBT+ community has been installed on a street in London. The crossing – which is actually four separate rainbow crossings, across four lanes of major roads – has been unveiled in Lambeth, a south London borough, and was officially opened on August 16 – http://tiny.cc/l4ekbz

India: Digital Platforms, Technologies and Data in the 2014 and 2019 Elections | When Tactical Tech’s Data and Politics research team began to investigate how personal and individual data was being utilised in modern, digitally-enhanced political campaigns, we were quickly struck by the unbalanced coverage, particularly in the media, of the methods and strategies of data acquisition, analysis and utilisation by political campaigns across countries and different political contexts – http://tiny.cc/zzekbz

A cycle of renewal, broken: How Big Tech and Big Media abuse copyright law to slay competition | Cory Doctorow | As long we’ve had electronic mass media, audiences and creators have benefited from periods of technological upheaval that force old gatekeepers to compete with brash newcomers with new ideas about what constitutes acceptable culture and art. Those newcomers eventually became gatekeepers themselves, who then faced their own crop of revolutionaries. But today, the cycle is broken: as media, telecoms, and tech have all grown concentrated, the markets have become winner-take-all clashes among titans who seek to dominate our culture, our discourse and our communications | Boing Boing – http://tiny.cc/t5iibz

I Am a Meme Now — and So Are You | By Timothy Kreider | Maybe wisdom is accepting that you don’t get to decide who you are | The culture of unabashed appropriation on the internet only makes more literal the loss of ownership to which any artist has to resign themselves. Any time you publish a piece of writing, or release a work of art into the world, you relinquish control over it. People get to interpret it however they want, projecting their experience and biases onto it, twisting it to fit their own history and issues, sometimes misunderstanding it entirely. Medium – https://humanparts.medium.com/i-am-a-meme-now-and-so-are-you-3bae8ecf9971

New evidence emerges of Russian role in Ukraine conflict | Forensic Architecture, a London-based research group, has collected and catalogued evidence of Russian military involvement in the battle of Ilovaysk in August 2014, including the presence of a model of tank used only by the Russian armed forces at that time. The evidence will be appended to a case to be ruled on by the European court of human rights (ECHR) and has been released on a publicly viewable online platform | Shaun Walker, Guardian – http://tiny.cc/1i4fbz

Market Forces video documentation | Film of the Market Forces event on Thursday 18th July 2019 hosted by Swap Market at Bike for Good, Govanhill, Glasgow | The event looked at the relationship of artists project to issues of gentrification and rent increase. With talks from Stepehen Pritchard, Raman Mundair, Peel Eezy, Living Rent and an introduction from artists in residence for Southside Central: Alex Wilde, Ailie Rutherford and Alaya Ang – https://vimeo.com/354722263

‘It’s an act of defiance’: the rise of all-female festival lineups | Sarah Marsh | Major music festivals such as Reading and Leeds continue to feature mostly male artists, but a number of events are fighting back by removing men from the billing altogether. This year, a number of festival organisers are attempting to redress the issue by having only women on stage. Those with all-female lineups include Native festival in Kent, Loud Women Fest in north London, and Boudica festival in Coventry | Guardian – http://tiny.cc/pziibz

Concrete Science Fiction Riot: Why Do We Ignore The 70s French Underground? | By Warren Hatter | English-speaking music fans don’t clumsily refer to “underground and progressive German music of the 70s”, because we have a handy shorthand: Krautrock. No such luck if you’re looking to refer collectively to a body of work that is just as challenging and impressive overall: the French avant-garde/progressive underground of the same period | The Quietus – http://tiny.cc/3j5fbz

Main image “Drawings” Jan Robert Leegte – Clear Obscure. Pastel on paper, 2019. Shown at Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen 2019.