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

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