A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.
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
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
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 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 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.
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/
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