A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.
Events, Exhibitions, Open Calls, Festivals and Conferences
UNDER THE VIRAL SHADOW: Networks in the Age of Technoscience and Infection | 28 August – 10 October 2021 | Anna Dumitriu, Alex May, Benjamin Bacon, Gene Kogan, Sarah Grant and Vivian Xu. Under the Viral Shadow explores various networks – biological, cybernetic, and social – as part of the COVID-19 pandemic. A group exhibition, symposium, performances, and workshops with artists whose research and media are either in the life or computer sciences. Artworks explore biological networks, digital networks, and social networks under the pressure of new technologies. Art Laboratory Berlin, Prinzenallee 34, 13359 Berlin – https://bit.ly/3jkG6Q0
Illiberal Arts | Exhibition at HKW | Sep 11 – Nov 21, 2021, | The liberal capitalist world order that prevailed after 1989 is today in a stage of advanced disintegration. The collapse of this order exposes the illiberal core of its freedoms and forms of ownership shaped by the market: the violent unfreedoms of the dispossessed as well as the willingness of the propertied to use violence. Art, too, reveals itself as the venue of these forces and their exclusions: Through the downfall of liberality, the modern institution of “veranstaltlichte Kunst” (“institutionalized art”, Arnold Hauser) and its social legitimacy are also increasingly called into question – https://bit.ly/3yjUg8n
Judith Butler and Mel Y. Chen on Gender Politics and Pandemic Time | 6:30pm in Pacific Time (US and Canada) Sep 20, 2021 | Free · Online event | Judith Butler and Mel Y Chen extend their exhibition catalogue conversation Gender in Time to the evolving temporalities of the Covid-19 pandemic. They will discuss a range of concerns that the pandemic has highlighted, including shifting challenges for women and racialized queer, trans, and disabled communities; queer and crip time; differing valuations of productivity, and the transformations of regimes and cultures of care in the pandemic – https://bit.ly/3sKVFDS
Tales from Cyber Salon: a series of interdisciplinary technology and policy investigations through science-fiction writing | 6.30 pm BST September 20 2021 Zoom/Hybrid Event. Panel guests are: Lead: Rachael Armstrong, Edward Saperia and Yen Ooi, Chair Eva Pascoe (Cybersalon.org) | Spanning four events across the year, it features newly commissioned, speculative short stories written for the exploration of healthcare, the high street, digital communities and political representation. book here – https://bit.ly/3mA2zL9
Archive.org are celebrating ‘From Wayback to Way Forward: The Internet Archive at 25’ | 6pm PT (9pm ET) Thursday, October 21 | As the Internet Archive turns 25, we invite you on a journey from way back to the way forward, through the pivotal moments when knowledge became more accessible for all. Come celebrate with us, no matter where you are in the world. A virtual journey with the builders and dreamers who have reached for the stars. – https://bit.ly/3zeRUZP
Articles, Interviews, Blogs, Presentations, Videos
Podcast: News From Where We Are # 5 – The Radical Friendship Podcast Series | Filippo Florenzin interviews Angela Washko and Rosa Menkman. Marc Garrett interviews Cornelia Sollfrank. Music includes AGF (poem producer), and other audio delights. Washko is an artist who creates new forums for discussions about feminism in spaces frequently hostile toward women, femmes, and non-binary people. Menkman’s work focuses on noise artefacts that result from accidents in both analogue and digital media (such as glitch and encoding and feedback artefacts). Sollfrank is currently working as an associate researcher in the project “Creating Commons.”- https://buff.ly/3fK5iO2
Site-Specific Software: A Conversation with Sarah Friend | SPEAKERS: Sarah Friend and Charlie Robin Jones | The crypto world is awash in protocols that have for better and worse given us many new forms to make sense of. Friend’s body of work is a sustained critique of these new typologies and lays bare how these new mechanics of generating wealth and ascribing value work. Rather than take this new vernacular—mining, minting, owning—for granted, we need to interrogate these new ways of relating and interacting – https://bit.ly/3ydUQol
Reality in the Real | Photographer Gilbert Hage speaks to Lebanese artists in the aftermath of the explosion in the Port of Beirut. A living archive of individual human experience in the face of a large-scale tragic event. In the series of videos presented—the first moving image work executed by celebrated Lebanese photographer Gilbert Hage—Lebanese artists relate their private encounters with the explosion in the port of Beirut on August 4th, 2020. This archive sees the many signifying processes that are involved in an event that escapes any simple definition—an occurrence of what Lacan defines as ‘the Real’. https://bit.ly/3zoanmW
An Artificial Intelligence Helped Write This Play. It May Contain Racism | Article by Billy Perrigo | AUGUST 23, 2021 | In a rehearsal room at London’s Young Vic theatre last week, three dramatists were arguing with artificial intelligence about how to write a play. Tang is the director of AI, the world’s first play written and performed live with artificial intelligence, according to the theatre. The play opens on Monday for a three-night run. As the audience watches on, the team will prompt the AI to generate a script — which a troupe of actors will then perform, despite never having seen the lines before. The theatre describes the play as a “unique hybrid of research and performance.” – https://bit.ly/3jk9QfT
GOING AWAY.TV LIVE – JUDGEMENT DAY | Performance curated by Marc Blazel, with performances from Gal Go Grey, Skye Chai, Dank Collective, and Adam Paroussos. Hosted by Meg Jenkins & Marc Blazel. Part of arebyte Net Works, 2021 programme Realities, it invites and commissions artists, curators and international galleries working in digital arts to develop projects to be presented on AOS. Artists, Independent curators and galleries are encouraged to experiment with the platform and how they present their projects in relation to the yearly theme of the gallery – https://bit.ly/3jibHly
Lynn Hershman Leeson: ‘I had to wait 30 years for the millennials to be born’ | In Conversation with Vivian Chui, Ocula magazine | While virtual reality, augmented reality, and NFTs have edged contemporary art towards new technologies in recent years, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s practice has relished in the digital frontiers for over five decades. The San Francisco-based artist’s wide array of installations, performances, videos, sculptures, photographs, and works on paper have addressed the complicated relationship between humans and their inventions, as well as the constraints and biases that women are forced to contend with in modern society – https://bit.ly/2Wkcj0Y
“A Veil Was Broken”: Afrofuturist Ytasha L. Womack on the Work of Science Fiction in the 2020s | By Ytasha Womack | The Afrofuturism movement within sci-fi may be equal to this moment, in part because it grows out of a history of displacement, atrocity, and instability. One task of science fiction is to knock us off-kilter — to transport us to altered times and places, the better to question our own world. But sci-fi has renewed competition in that department from reality itself. The quickening storm of events in America in the last half-decade, culminating in 2020 in the Covid-19 pandemic and the uprisings against systemic racism, has unmoored us from old norms and expectations with a suddenness that societies witness perhaps once or twice per century – https://bit.ly/3kxcgHw
Podcast: Men, war, capitalism and conspiracy – with Jack Bratich (CGCG10) | The ReImagining Value Action Lab | We are caught between two wars of restoration: the far-right, seeking to return us to a fabled past and a liberal capitalist “centre” demanding more business as usual. Between these two, dark new “conspiracy theories” breed, especially among men, which reinforce the worst of patriarchy, with deadly effect. Jack Bratich is a professor of Journalism and Media Studies at the Rutgers School of Communications and Information. His research focuses on themes including the interface of political culture and popular culture, conspiracy panics, surveillance, journalism, activism, and the production of truth. He is the author of Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture (2008) | Soundcloud – https://bit.ly/3ktrCga
Are privacy and antitrust on a collision course? Harmful dominance, democratic privacy controls, interop and illegitimate greatness | Cory Doctorow | In “The New Antitrust/Data Privacy Law Interface,” Temple Law’s Erika M Douglas presents a fascinating look at the tensions between privacy and competition. It’s only fitting that Douglas published her paper in the Yale Law Journal, as that’s the same journal that kickstarted the modern antitrust revolution when it published Lina Khan’s “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” while she was a law student – https://bit.ly/2WfTIDP
How AI-powered tech landed man in jail with scant evidence | Williams was jailed last August, accused of killing a young man […] But the key evidence against Williams didn’t come from an eyewitness or an informant; it came from a clip of a noiseless security video showing a car driving through an intersection, and a loud bang picked up by a network of surveillance microphones. Prosecutors said technology powered by a secret algorithm that analyzed noises detected by the sensors indicated Williams shot and killed the man | By Garnace Burke, Martha Mendoza, Juliet Linderman and Micheal Tarm | August 20, 2021 – https://bit.ly/3sLzkWD
Books, Papers & Publications
Earth and Beyond in Tumultuous Times: A Critical Atlas of the Anthropocene | Edited by Réka Patrícia Gál and Petra Löffler | A critical exploration of the Anthropocene concept. It addresses the urgent geopolitical and environmental questions raised by the new geological epoch. How are we to rethink landscapes, such as river deltas, oceans, or outer space? How can we create spaces for resistance and utopic dreaming? This volume confronts these questions by charting how space and place are constructed, deconstructed, and negotiated by humans and non-humans under conditions of globally entangled consumption, movement, and contamination. The essays in this volume are complemented by artistic interventions that offer a poetics for a harmed planet and the numerous worlds it contains | Meson Press – https://bit.ly/3zGeVVE
The Landscape of Utopia: Writings on Everyday Life, Taste, Democracy, and Design | By Tim Waterman | February 21, 2022, Forthcoming by Routledge | A collection of short interludes, think pieces, and critical essays on landscape, utopia, philosophy, culture, and food, all written in a highly original and engaging style by academic and theorist Tim Waterman. Exploring power and democracy, and their shaping of public space and public life; taste, etiquette, belief and ritual, and foodways in community and civic life, the book provides a much-needed critical approach to landscape imaginaries. It discusses landscape in its broadest sense, as a descriptor of the relationship between people and place that occurs everywhere on land, from cities to countryside, suburb to the wilderness – https://bit.ly/3gUCGSF
Distant Early Warning: Marshall McLuhan and the Transformation of the Avant-Garde | By Alex Kitnick | Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) is best known as a media theorist—many consider him the founder of media studies—but he was also an important theorist of art. Though a near-household name for decades due to magazine interviews and TV specials, McLuhan remains an underappreciated yet fascinating figure in art history. His connections with the art of his own time were largely unexplored, until now. In Distant Early Warning, art historian Alex Kitnick delves into these rich connections and argues both that McLuhan was influenced by art and artists and, more surprisingly, that McLuhan’s work directly influenced the art and artists of his time – https://bit.ly/3DqdCfK
Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge | An ambitious research project based on the premise that performance art can be conserved. The project reviews and systematises emerging approaches to the newly established subfield of the conservation of performance-based artworks. It also explores new methods for conserving performance-based works through (a) forms of documentation and archives, (b) material residues, and (c) the transmission of knowledge. The project reflects on conservation as a knowledge-generating activity and tests its potential contribution to broader discourses in performance studies, anthropology, art history and aesthetics. Bern University of the Arts, Institute Materiality in Arts and Culture – https://bit.ly/3zwCtw0
Explorations in Digital Cultures | by Mary Shnayien, Marcus Burkhardt and Katja Grashöfer | Digital media are transformative: they (re)shape the ways of communicating, relating, doing, knowing, and living as much as they are themselves subject to continuous transformation. The contributions in this volume explore these contemporary shifts in and of digital cultures by analyzing a wide range of topics: from data, infrastructures, algorithms, logistics, economies, politics, identities, collectives to modes of critique and digital practices. Drawing from and contributing to ongoing debates in media culture studies, all contributions share a sensitivity for the multilayered histories of digital media technologies as well as their own discourses – https://bit.ly/3ta1uer
All Art Is Ecological: Penguin Green Ideas | By Timothy Morton | Provocative and playful, All Art is Ecological explores the strangeness of living in an age of mass extinction and shows us that emotions and experience are the basis for a deep philosophical engagement with ecology. According to the reviews of dermrefine, this face treatment is one of the most popular in the UK. Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement. Together, these books show the richness of environmental thought and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world – https://amzn.to/38hLBsB
Living in Data: A Citizen’s Guide to a Better Information Future | By Jer Thorp | Jer Thorp’s analysis of the word “data” in 10,325 New York Times stories written between 1984 and 2018 shows a distinct trend: among the words most closely associated with “data,” we find not only its classic companions “information” and “digital,” but also a variety of new neighbours from “scandal” and “misinformation” to “ethics,” “friends,” and “play.” Punctuated with Thorp’s original and informative illustrations, Living in Data not only redefines what data is but reimagines who gets to speak its language and how to use its power to create a more just and democratic future. Timely and inspiring, Living in Data gives us a much-needed path forward – https://bit.ly/3gCTbCx
Image: Constantina Zavitsanos. Tests for Visa Dove Pan, 2021. Courtesy of the artist. Illiberal Arts. HKW. 2021, Sep 11, Sat — 2021, Nov 21, Sun.
The FurtherList Archives – https://www.furtherfield.org/the-furtherlist-archives/
A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.
Events, Exhibitions, Open Calls, Festivals and Conferences
SOUL KALEIDOSCOPE | A 2-day course about the I Ching | Maria Lusitano | Soul Artist, Healer, Teacher | Sat & Sun 10 to 1 pm 11th, 12th, July 2021 | This workshop will explore the I Ching through drawing. The I Ching, or the Book of Changes, is an ancient Chinese Text that has served for thousands of years as a philosophical taxonomy of the universe. Each hexagram is composed of 2 trigrams that represent respectively, heaven, a lake, fire, thunder, wind, water, a mountain, and earth. These are the building blocks of the cosmos and through their interaction, all aspects of civilization and human behaviour are developed – https://bit.ly/3xkgF5G
SENSITIVES STREAM | Arts Catalyst presents an online project by Matterlurgy that highlights the importance of river-dwelling organisms | Tue 18 May 2021 – Tue 31 August 2021 | How do water organisms register and reveal complex meaning in relation to river health? How can environmental data be both sensible and sensuous? What fieldwork is required when you cannot access, see or hold that which is being studied? Sensitives Stream is an online project by Matterlurgy (Helena Hunter and Mark Peter Wright) that shares research and practice from their residency with Arts Catalyst as part of Test Sites. The project highlights the importance of river-dwelling organisms and how their presence or absence indicates broader stories in relation to ecosystems, environmental stress and human activity – https://bit.ly/3jwG882
The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 | Furtherfield and The New Design Congress, supported by CreaTures Creative Practices for Transformational Futures | August 2021. “Catapulted several years into the future where all the species of the park have risen up to demand equal rights with humans. A new invention – The Sentience Dial – allows humans to tune into all the flora and fauna of Finsbury Park.” This series of immersive games played from more-than-human perspectives depicts the story of the dawning of interspecies democracy – a new era of equal rights for all living beings. All species come together to organise and shape the environments and cultures they inhabit for bountiful biodiversity in Finsbury Park, urban green spaces across the UK, the world, and beyond. The Interspecies Assemblies Need YOU! https://www.furtherfield.org/the-treaty-of-finsbury-park-2025/
Secrets of Soil | By Henry Driver | An interactive journey that explores the hidden world of soil and its role in combating climate change. Your journey will take you to a microscopic world, witnessing the essential life forms that live there. It is freely available as a 360-degree video accessible on most devices, as well as on Steam as a fully interactive experience. Henry Driver’s new interactive journey, Secrets of Soil, was inspired by his family’s attempts to make their farming practices carbon negative. He presents a visually striking view of the world beneath our feet and explores his thoughts around how it would be possible to better care for and preserve it. The project was commissioned by BBC Arts and ACE as part of New Creatives. Steam Page – https://bit.ly/3qBsmT0 360-degree video direct link – https://bit.ly/3xkk3NW
Based on a Tree Story | Hervisions x Ayesha Tan Jones | Live in June and August 2021 | As part of Peoples Park Plinth at Furtherfield Gallery | A sonic augmented reality encounter with a digital tree sprite. Dubbed the Trunk Triplets Tree, situated in Finsbury Park and the soils from which they grew, this tree is part of the now-extinct ancient woodland, Hornsey Woods. From the medieval history to sci-fi futures, their stories are told through an augmented reality and audio experience, giving viewers an insight into the past, while arming them with inspiration and knowledge to help protect the trees into the future. The project activates a digital tree sprite that shares a fable crafted through local research, site visits and discussion with Ricard Zanoli, the Park Ranger. For this first iteration of the artwork for the People’s Park Plinth revealed in June, we are sharing the stories of the London Plane tree. If this work is selected in a public vote in August 2021, the audience will be invited to follow a magical trail of clues to find other tree sprites and experience their stories. – https://peoplesparkplinth.org/
Moment 48 > Now&Here = Everywhere | Event by Iceberg Fernandez and Quantum Filmmaking | Online event | Free for anyone on or off Facebook | 10th July 2021 at 6 pm BST for international video art collaboration | A Quantum Filmmaking project which entangles people internationally into co-creation through the camera-phones For the Arts’ Sake. In the video art project, we co-create and re-create simultaneous moments happening in different points of Planet Earth while celebrating and inter-connecting cultural diversity. To participate make a 30-second film with your mobile phone of the situation, a detail or the place you are at that precise date and time, and send it as soon as you can, along with the name of the city – https://bit.ly/2TkvzdC
Black| White ::: Online Dance/Music Performance Workshop | Free · Online event | 15 July 2021 | Third Space Network (3SN) and the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company present Black|White, an online dance/music performance workshop on Thursday, July 15th, 6 pm EDT. The workshop showcases Los Angeles tenor and performance artist Charles Lane, along with dancer/choreographer Daniel Charon, artistic director of the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company in Salt Lake City. The two artists, performing live from their home studios, will be united live & online in the Deep Third Space Performance Lab. Register & Save Your Spot – https://www.crowdcast.io/e/black-white
Tuned Circuits, the 2021 edition of Oscillation Festival | It borrows its title from Daphne Oram, the early electronic composer and instrument inventor. Oscillation — Tuned Circuits takes place over 4 days as a live broadcast from MILL, Brussels and additional locations. The festival will mix talks, performances and works for radio. Each day focusses on a sub-thematic: attuning, as a movement of convergence; feedback, as a circular movement which amplifies itself; detuning, as a movement of unlearning and a condition for regeneration. The opening evening we dedicate to Daphne Oram, whose research thematic we take as our own: “to follow curiosities without flinching”. For dates – http://www.q-o2.be/en/
Artists Talk: Caroline Sinders with Tamiko Thiel | Photographers Gallery | 6:30 pm, 20th July 2021 – 8:00 pm | To mark Caroline Sinders new Media Wall commission, hear her in conversation with artist Tamiko Thiel. Caroline Sinders Racialised Disinformation | Using performance, design, activist-based research and machine-learning, artist Caroline Sinders looks at digital human rights and the technical infrastructure that perpetuates hate speech and violent misinformation. In this new talk with artist Tamiko Thiel, we will look at the intersections of their two practices to investigate the deceptive terms and conditions of platforms like YouTube — at the responsibility they have for the content they host and the influential role they have in shaping public opinion – https://bit.ly/3qy0AHe
Overground Resistance | Q21 exhibition space in the Museums Quartier in Vienna | Curator: Oliver Ressler | 2021-06-29 | Extreme weather conditions have become the global norm. Forests are burning, permafrost soils are thawing, polar ice and glaciers melt, drought strikes once-fertile regions, plant and animal species are becoming extinct on a massive scale. Yet even as the impact of climate breakdown comes to be felt everywhere, government climate policy worldwide is woefully inadequate to the urgency of the crisis. On one day, states declare a climate emergency; the next day they still sponsor fossil-fueled energy, building freeways, airports and gas pipelines, enclosing territory on whatever scale the projects demand. „Overground Resistance“ brings together artists who produce their works in dialogue with the climate justice movements in which they consider themselves participants – https://bit.ly/3y8rUyl
Books, Papers & Publications
Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover | Authors: Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, with Jennie Klein | The story of the artistic collaboration between the originators of the ecosex movement, their diverse communities, and the Earth. In 2008, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens married the Earth, which set them on the path to explore the realms of ecosexuality. Assuming the Ecosexual Position describes how the two came together as lovers and collaborators, how they took a stand against homophobia and xenophobia, and how this union led to the miraculous conception of the Love Art Laboratory | 29 Jun. 2021 – https://bit.ly/2U6ZXIo
Dark Academia: How Universities Die | By Peter Fleming | There is a strong link between the neoliberalisation of higher education over the last 20 years and the psychological hell now endured by its staff and students. While academia was once thought of as the best job in the world – one that fosters autonomy, craft, intrinsic job satisfaction and vocational zeal – you would be hard-pressed to find a lecturer who believes that now. Fleming delves into this new metrics-obsessed, overly hierarchical world to bring out the hidden underbelly of the neoliberal university. He examines commercialisation, mental illness and self-harm, the rise of managerialism, students as consumers and evaluators, and the competitive individualism which casts a dark sheen of alienation over departments | Pluto press – https://bit.ly/3x6NbbG
Tactical Entanglements: AI Art, Creative Agency, and the Limits of Intellectual Property | By Martin Zeilinger | How do artistic experiments with artificial intelligence problematize human-centered notions of creative agency, authorship, and ownership? Offering a wide-ranging discussion of contemporary digital art practices, philosophical and technical considerations of AI, posthumanist thought, and emerging issues of intellectual property and the commons, this book is firmly positioned against the anthropomorphic spectacle of “creative AI.” It proposes instead the concept of the posthumanist agential assemblage, and invites readers to consider what new types of creative practice, what reconfigurations of the author function, and what critical interventions become possible when AI art provokes tactical entanglements between aesthetics, law, and capital. Published by meson press – https://bit.ly/3jKPNZ0
The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World | By Benjamin Bratton | The future of politics after the pandemic. COVID-19 exposed the pre-existing conditions of the current global crisis. The Revenge of the Real envisions new positive biopolitics that recognizes that governance is literally a matter of life and death. We are grappling with multiple interconnected dilemmas—climate change, pandemics, the tensions between the individual and society—all of which have to be addressed on a planetary scale. Even when separated, we are still enmeshed. Can the world govern itself differently? What models and philosophies are needed? Bratton argues that instead of thinking of biotechnologies as something imposed on society, we must see them as essential to a politics of infrastructure, knowledge, and direct intervention. In this way, we can build a society based on new rationality of inclusion, care, and prevention – https://bit.ly/3qDavLO
Prologue to the Sky River | Elise Misao Hunchuck, Marco Ferrari & Jingru (Cyan) Cheng | The Avery Review | The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is often called the water tower of the world. As the source of most of Asia’s significant rivers—the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong, Yangtze, and Yellow Rivers—the plateau provides water for more than two billion people downstream. In the Yellow River’s catchment, traditional—if extraordinary—water management techniques are reaching their upper limits. Severe stress on available water in the North China Plain, nearly half of which comes from Qinghai-Tibet, is tied to burgeoning consumption, water-intensive agricultural production, and industrial activities. Fears over its future scarcity due to climate change and the depletion of glacial reserves in the Himalayas have led the Chinese government to implement water precipitation enhancement technologies at a dramatically increasing scale – https://bit.ly/3A9ujL7
The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value | By Seb Franklin. Locates the deep history of digitality in the development of racial capitalism Seb Franklin shows how the promises of boundless connection, flexibility, and prosperity that are often associated with digital technologies are grounded in racialized histories of dispossession and exploitation. Vital and far-reaching, The Digitally Disposed reshapes such fundamental concepts as cybernetics, informatics, and digitality. Ultimately, The Digitally Disposed questions the universalizing assumptions that are maintained, remade, and intensified by today’s dominant digital technologies. Vital and far-reaching, The Digitally Disposed reshapes such fundamental concepts as cybernetics, informatics, and digitality. University Of Minnesota Press, 22 Jun. 2021 – https://bit.ly/3d9yHzV
Would you like to share your daily walk? | 25th July 2021 | Australian artist Anita Bacic is looking for contributors for artwork based on hundreds of ‘described walks’. Every day she/her/ will add text versions of the walks received on her blog and on social media. Bacic explores media old and new, with a focus on interactive experiences. Bacic is fascinated with the construction of stories, images and experiences and how we as individuals can actively contribute and interact in these processes. She continues to explore works that encourage curiosity, participation, personal connections and self-reflection that in turn can potentially challenge our perceptions and how we see and interpret the world around us – anyone can take part – https://bit.ly/3x9gevd
Articles, Interviews, Blogs, Presentations, Videos
In Conversation with Casey Reas | One of the most influential figures of modern generative art, and co-founder of Processing and the Processing Foundation, as well as the online gallery Feral File. Casey is both an artist and an educator, teaching at UCLA and working out of his studio in Inglewood. I had the honour of speaking with Casey in advance of his upcoming Art Blocks project CENTURY. https://beta.cent.co/artblocks/+z8kf0r
with/in languages – a pretty pathetic | An artist talk by Annie Abrahams | Hybrid – Journal of arts and Human Mediations | This article is the “archive” of a performance reading presented by Annie Abrahams at the Languages INTER Networks conference at Lancaster University on June 21, 2019. It talks about languages, people, identities, words and silence, through languages, images, sounds and movements. Annie Abrahams is a Dutch performer specializing in performance-based video and internet installations, often using collaborative and interactive writing techniques. Her performances address the question of the limits and possibilities of communication between Internet users through new media such as cyberformance – https://bit.ly/3h7RMF2
Photographing Thatcher’s Britain | By Ravi Ghosh | Tribune | 17.06.2021 | In the 1980s, documentary photographer Paul Graham used his camera to capture the bleakness of Social Security and Unemployment Offices, painting a stark image of life under neoliberalism. Graham had received several public grants for his work, but had, like roughly three million others in the UK at the time, been classified as unemployed for extended periods. He came to prominence in 1983 with the publication of his first photobook, A1: The Great North Road, a survey of transit and transience from the City of London to Edinburgh. Months after Margaret Thatcher won her second parliamentary term and with the Miners’ Strike looming, Graham was again given free rein to document the nation – https://bit.ly/2TKidHz
Polish Politicians Sue Artist-Activists for Mapping “Atlas of Hate” | Six local governments sued four artist-activists who created the Atlas of Hate, an interactive map charting the country’s anti-gay zones | Hakim Bishara |Hyperallergic | A group of local governments in Poland that had declared themselves as “free from LGBT ideology” are waging a battle in court against four artist-activists who created the Atlas of Hate, an interactive map charting the country’s anti-gay zones. If convicted, they would stand liable for at least 165,000 PLN (~$43,500) – https://bit.ly/3jnTYJY
How Chinese Food Fueled the Rise of California Punk | Words by Madeline Leung Coleman | In the late 1970s, Chinatown restaurants started booking some unlikely dinner entertainment: the rowdy young bands of the nascent West Coast punk scene. It was 1979, and LA was struggling. The entire country had plunged into a deep recession just a few years prior, and now Chinatown and the city’s downtown areas were falling into disrepair. More recent Chinese immigrants had started moving to suburban enclaves like the San Gabriel Valley, bypassing Chinatown and its businesses completely; the non-Chinese customers who used to flock to the neighbourhood for exotic chow mein dinners were now avoiding downtown altogether – https://bit.ly/3qzBQOK
Bad Apples or a Rotten Tree? How Britain Brought its Colonial Policing Home | Hardeep Matharu and Peter Jukes | Byline Times | As the Metropolitan Police is judged to be institutionally corrupt, Hardeep Matharu and Peter Jukes explore how some of the biggest problems still plaguing British policing are embedded in the soil of British colonialism. According to Alastair’s partner, Kirsteen Knight, who has spent the past 25 years joining his campaign for justice, the sense of British – or English – exceptionalism is key to the cover-up, and the failures of the authorities to dig deeper into the allegations of police corruption around the murder. Obsessed with a grandiose, but fragile, sense of national greatness, the British state is very bad at reflecting accurately on itself – https://bit.ly/3dr7PLE
V&A insists it has a responsibility to tell truth about collections | Museum responds to government letter urging alignment with its stance on ‘contested heritage’ | Ben Quinn | 28th June 2021 | The Victoria and Albert Museum has responded to government pressure to align with its stance on “contested heritage” by insisting that it has a responsibility to accurately explain the nature of its collections, including items it said were looted by British forces. The V&A was responding to a controversial letter from the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, in which he suggested that bodies could lose government funding if they fail to toe the line and warned against “actions motivated by activism or politics” – https://bit.ly/3w7HicE
E53: The Gwangju uprising, 1980 | Working Class History | Podcast | WCH have just released a new podcast episode about the May 18 uprising in Gwangju, South Korea, in 1980 against the US-backed military dictatorship of Chun Doo Hwan. We speak with participants in the events as well as researcher Kap Su Seol. Part 1 out now for early listening for Patreon supporters. Sign up today to listen! Part 1: Background, and the beginning of the revolt – currently available for early listening for Patreon supporters. Parts 2 onwards: coming soon – E51: Jeon Tae-il and Lee So-sun – Episode about two important South Korean labour organisers, which contains background information to the political situation in the country in the run-up to the Gwangju uprising. Gwangju Diary: Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age – Lee Jae-eui – The best history of the Gwangju uprising, translated by Kap Su Seol. 29th June 2021 – https://bit.ly/363qjOo
How the Banning of Joyce’s Ulysses Led to “The grandest Obscenity Case in the History of Law and Literature” | By Barbara Barbas | 22nd June 2021 | Morris Ernst knew he could win the case to “liberate” Joyce’s famously banned novel. So he found a publisher, took a cut of the royalties and had a copy sent by boat to America. In the early 1930s, James Joyce’s Ulysses was the most notorious banned book in the United States. Using a stream-of-consciousness style to describe twenty-four hours in the life of a lower-middle-class Dubliner named Leopold Bloom, Joyce’s classic, published in 1922, was brilliant, dense, convoluted, complex, and legally obscene. Ulysses was the “only volume of literary importance still under a ban” in the country, Morris Ernst declared. He set out to “liberate” it, and the celebrated case, resolved by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 1934, was not only a landmark in the law of literary censorship but also a turning point in Ernst’s career – https://bit.ly/3xb1Nqn
Image from: Moment 48 > Now&Here = Everywhere. Event by Iceberg Fernandez and Quantum Filmmaking. Online event. 10th July 2021 – https://bit.ly/2TkvzdC
The FurtherList Archives – https://www.furtherfield.org/the-furtherlist-archives/
A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.
Events, Exhibitions, Open Calls, Festivals and Conferences
Auriea Harvey, Year Zero | Bitforms Gallery | March 6–April 24, 2021, | Harvey’s first solo exhibition presenting a diverse mixed-media practice of sculpture, video games, drawing, and mixed reality works steeped in character creation and mythology. A new body of work nested within the legacy of Harvey’s solo and collaborative career. Working online from the beginning of net art’s history, the artist expertly combines her experience in video game and software development with a three-dimensional practice. Year Zero is a continuation of this coalescence, presenting early sketchbooks, webcam broadcasts, and multiplayer games alongside Harvey’s latest sculptural installations and drawing – https://bit.ly/3cHXZFv
Trans Aesthetics: McKenzie Wark & Shola von Reinhold in conversation with Susan Stryker | April 8 2021 | Price: free – Anyone on or off Facebook | Please join host Susan Stryker, Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women’s Leadership, for a conversation between media theorist McKenzie Wark of the New School for Social Research (The Hacker Manifesto; Reverse Cowgirl) and novelist Shola von Reinhold (LOTE), about Black and femme trans cultural production and world-making. Co-hosted by the Mellon-funded We Are the Voices public arts and humanities series and the Mills College Trans Studies Speakers Series – https://bit.ly/3lU7DHP
Nitro Casino für Österreichische SpielerRaw Hope of Humanity Rising – Public Dialogues for 2021 | April 14 2021, 6-7:30 pm | Event by Third Space Network, American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center. The third upcoming panel in the series is The Internet as a Medium for Activism & Social Change, exploring the Internet as a platform for political action through social media collaboration, virtual community, alternative journalism, and digital forms of artistic media. The panellists include: Jeff Gates, DC artist and writer, founder of the Chamomile Tea Party; Makia Green, Core Organizer, DC Black Lives Matter; Randall Packer, Artist & Creative Director, Third Space Network. Moderated by Monica O. Montgomery of MuseumHue – https://bit.ly/2NYXkWy
Anthropology Lecture: Arturo Escobar – Against Terricide | Free · Online event | April 14, 2021, | This talk discusses transition design, broadly speaking, as a praxis for re-weaving the web of life on the basis of pluriversality and relationality, from the perspective of current Latin American theoretico-political debates and struggles. Presented by the Anthropology Department at The New School for Social Research. Cosponsored by Critical Perspectives on Democratic Anti Colonialism – https://bit.ly/3lRq7bY
Social Codes | Curated by Casey Reas | March 24 onwards | An exhibition of software art, also called generative art. All of the work consists of code written by artists to create visual experiences. Some works in the exhibition relate to the visual histories of drawing, painting, animation, and video, but all of it is native digital art, in that each artwork is a performance of code choreographed by the artist. Artists have been working with code since the 1960s, and within that time frame, code has evolved from languages written by engineers to run on room-sized computers to artist-created coding languages running inside a web browser. In 2021, artists are writing code in many languages and environments. Each programming language is like a different material to work with – https://bit.ly/2NYTnRI
Open Call: Resident, Art Tech Nature Culture List | The CreaTures project | Deadline for submissions is April 22, 2021. A curatorial & creative residency for an individual with a creative spirit and a passion for community-building to take the lead in nurturing the Art Tech Nature Culture – a global community of practice for creative practitioners across disciplines (from art, architecture and design to community organising and digital development) who care about social and ecological transformation. The selected applicant will nurture ATNC network as it expands beyond a discussion list, into a series of ongoing initiatives that distribute leadership and foster co-creation. Anywhere on Earth Time. Details available here in standard and large format (for people with a visual impairment) – https://bit.ly/3cC1RYq
Call for Applications: Anthropocene Campus Venice 2021 | Water Politics in the Age of the Anthropocene | Deadline: April 25, 2021 | Venice, Italy, October 11-16 2021 | Join a one-week educational event around the theme of Water Politics in the Age of the Anthropocene, organized by Ca’ Foscari University, the Center for the Humanities and Social Change and the Max Planck Partner Group The Water City in the framework of the Anthropocene Curriculum, a long-term collaborative project initiated by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin) and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin). Over the span of a full week, this forum will provide a space for co-learning, interdisciplinary collaborations, and comparative studies, bringing together environmental scientists, artists, historians of science and technology, geologists, environmental humanities scholars, archaeologists, and architects – https://bit.ly/3uhdJoP
Call for Contributors | A New AI Lexicon: Responses and Challenges to the Critical AI discourse | AI Now Institute | Critical thinking in AI has moved beyond examining specific features and biases of discrete AI models and technical components to recognize the critical importance of the racial, political, gendered and institutional legacies that shape real-world AI systems as well as the material contexts and communities that are most vulnerable to the harms and failures of AI systems. National and transnational, political, economic and racial contexts of production and deployment are integral to the questions of how such AI will operate, and for whose benefit – https://bit.ly/3cwMS23
Symposium: Between Techno-Euphoria and Regimes of Surveillance | Free · Online event | May 1–3 2021 | Berlin, Zentrum für Netzkunst | Calculating Control: (Net)Art and Cybernetics / (Netz)Kunst und Kybernetik Symposium: Between Techno-Euphoria and Regimes of Surveillance. The location and architecture of Haus der Statistik demonstrates the two-sided nature of the science of cybernetics: On the one hand, the potential of a new organizational model, and on the other, the risks associated with its use as a powerful instrument for surveillance and control – https://bit.ly/3sFrOfa
Critical AI Manifestation in Gent | KIOSK in Gent hosts a Critical AI Manifestation May 8, 2021, | The United Intelligence Lab considers AI to be the most transformative technology of our time that shapes the way we interact, create and think. With C.AI.M we want to study and exploit AI, unmasking its impact. UIL is an ever-growing group of people cooperating on the Critical AI Manifesto exploring the impact of machine learning on culture and society. UIL members are from all walks of life. Whether AI-dominion is something you secretly yearn for or desperately hope to escape from, one thing is for certain, the old vantage points on AI will for nobody suffice anymore. Join us in writing C.AI.M. Anyone is welcome, except if you are an AI – https://bit.ly/31nzbfb
Roger Robinson: Cities Imaginaries Lecture 2021 | The Actuality of Gentrification | May 20 2021 | Writer and T.S. Eliot Prize winner Roger Robinson will deliver this year’s Cities Imaginaries lecture at UCL Urban Laboratory | This event is free | The danger with gentrification is that it breaks up long-held communities and bonds and histories without acknowledging and valuing them. Brixton has resisted gentrification before and it will again but a lot of energy and resources are being placed into the process of its gentrification, far more than the resources that were available to support it’s long time inhabitants – https://bit.ly/31yM4Ds
Call For Papers: In the limits of what is possible: art, science and technology | Artnodes | We are now receiving original work for our 28th issue (July 2021). Deadline for submissions: April 20 2021. When we talk about the intersections between art, science, technology and society (ACTS) we are referring to a set of practices that tend to challenge disciplinary boundaries, entering hybrid territories between the possible and the impossible, the real and the imaginary. Sometimes multidisciplinary, sometimes interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary, and often directly a-disciplinary in an indefinite territory in which what is at stake is the eternal composition of knowledge, of what is yet to be delimited, limited or disciplined in a tremendously fertile magma – https://bit.ly/2Pt3i2m
Books, Papers & Publications
Vera Molnar. Pas Froid aux Yeux | By Francesca Franco | Catalog of the monographic exhibition at the Espace de l’Art Concret from January 30 to May 31, 2021, and then at the Musée des Beaux-arts de Rennes from October 9, 2021, to January 9, 2022, this book presents the work of the artist, Vera Molnar. This exhibition is the first collaboration between two French cultural institutions which have in common a true speciality in the field of abstract art after 1945 and concrete art in particular. A prolific artist still active at the dawn of her 97th birthday, Vera Molnar places her practice between concrete art, constructed art and conceptual art. She is also considered a pioneer of computer drawing, having contributed to the digital art movement since the 1960s – https://bit.ly/2PqnRMZ
Hyperemployment – Post-work, Online Labour and Automation | !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Felix Stalder, Silvio Lorusso, Luciana Parisi, Domenico Quaranta | Co-published by NERO and Aksioma | 24/7. Algorithmic sovereignty. Anxiety. Artificial intelligence. Automation. Crowdfunding. Data extraction. Entreprecariat. Exploitation. Free labour. Free time. Gig working. Human-in-the-loop. Logistics. Machine vision. Man-machine complexity. Micro-labour. No future. Outsourcing. Peripheral work. Platform economy. Post-capitalism. Post-work. Procrastination. Quantification. Self-improvement. Social media fatigue. Time management. Unemployment – https://bit.ly/3wf8ms4
A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain | Novel by Gary Hall | Two-fifths of Britain’s leading people were educated privately: that’s five times the amount as in the population as a whole, with almost a quarter graduating from Oxford or Cambridge. Eight private schools send more pupils to Oxbridge than the remaining 2894 state schools combined, making modern Britain one of the most unequal places in Europe. In A Stubborn Fury, Gary Hall offers a powerful and provocative look at the consequences of this inequality for English culture in particular. Focusing on the literary novel and the memoir, he investigates, in terms that are as insightful as they are irreverent, why so much writing in England is uncritically realist, humanist and anti-intellectual – https://bit.ly/3u7AR94
Vegetal Entanglements: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture | Edited by Giovanni Aloi | Download Issue 53 – Spring 2021 | The contributions gathered in the third volume of ‘Vegetal Entanglements’—a tryptic entirely dedicated to plants in art and culture—focus on the inextricable, actual, and metaphorical links that bind plants, ecosystems, and humans. In this issue, the interconnectedness that characterizes plant lives is explored through a variety of media and approaches designed to foreground vegetal alterity. What role does anthropomorphism play in human-plant relations? How can we approach plant alterity in ways that bypass objectification? How can plants help us build fairer and more sustainable futures? These are only some of the many questions addressed in this issue – https://bit.ly/3djnko9
Punk & Post-Punk (Journal): Volume 10 issue 1 | Editors Russ Bestley, Pete Dale, Matthew Worley, Mike Dines | A peer-reviewed journal for academics, artists, journalists and the wider cultural industries. Placing punk and its progeny at the heart of interdisciplinary investigation, it is the first forum of its kind to explore this rich and influential topic in both historical and critical theoretical terms. Punk & Post-Punk is a Scopus-indexed journal for academics, artists, journalists and the wider cultural industries – https://bit.ly/2QV6jZZ
Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism | By Lauren Fournier || Autotheory—the commingling of theory and philosophy with autobiography—as a mode of critical artistic practice indebted to feminist writing and activism. Fournier provides a long-awaited account of autotheory, situating it as a mode of contemporary, post-1960s artistic practice that is indebted to feminist writing, art, and activism. Investigating a series of works by writers and artists including Chris Kraus and Adrian Piper, she considers the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of autotheory. Fournier argues that the autotheoretical turn signals the tenuousness of illusory separations between art and life, theory and practice, work and the self—divisions long blurred by feminist artists and scholars | MIT publishing – https://bit.ly/3wnin6D
Art and Care, Reflections on the To Mind Is To Care Exhibition | Free PDF Download at V2.nl | Authors: Dora Vrhoci & Florian Weigl | Editor: Michel van Dartel | Design: Jelle Koper | Photography: Fenna de Jong | Art and Care: Reflections on the To Mind Is To Care Exhibition reflects on the curatorial research that has been undertaken by Dora Vrhoci and Florian Weigl in the run-up, but especially during the To Mind Is To Care exhibition and peripheral programming. An exhibition Florian Weigl curated with a strong focus on ‘Caring for’. To Mind Is To Care is an ‘interdisciplinary study of care’ defined as everything we do to maintain and restore our world so that we can live in it to the best of our ability – https://bit.ly/2PtTEMX
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 | MIT Publishing – https://bit.ly/2O6SZ3s
Articles, Interviews, Blogs, Presentations, videos
Buen Vivir. Interview with Penny Travlou on collaborative practices in emerging networks | Framed by her long-standing research on collaborative practices, geographer and ethnographer Penny Travlou introduces two projects she has been involved lately: Platohedro, a space, a platform and community based in Medellín, Colombia, and the Feminist Autonomous Research Center in Athens (FAC). Platohedro refers to the indigenous concepts of Buen Vivir and Buen Conocer and works and adapting them to the contemporary living conditions in urban societies, while FAC puts an emphasis on community-based autonomous knowledge production. Both are concerned with forms of thinking and working together that allow for creating alternatives to extractivist, colonial, racist and anti-feminist modes of (knowledge)production – https://bit.ly/2PKMML5
Indigenous rituals and music | We Make Money Not Art | Sébastien Robert is an artist and researcher whose practise presents a rare combination of visual and sound art, technology, science and ethnographic research. A few years ago, he embarked on a research project called You’re no Bird of Paradise which studies indigenous music and rituals in danger of disappearing. Based on a collaborative and experimental approach, Robert’s projects attempt to translate sounds and rituals into tangible works of art that directly echo the traditions of the communities he meets – https://bit.ly/3sEcVcV
Herbert Marcuse and the Student Revolts of 1968: An Unpublished Lecture | By Herbert Marcuse | Jacobin Mag | In May 1968, the neo-Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse visited Paris and Berlin at the height of the student movements that were making news around the world. The text presented here is the transcript of a two-hour talk about those events that Marcuse delivered on May 23, 1968, shortly after his return to the United States, while the outcome of the May movement in France was still very much in doubt. It offers unique insights into the way a thinker often credited with providing the European student movements of 1968 with much of their ideological energy viewed them as they unfolded – https://bit.ly/3wh6QWi
Taxi Studio Visit: Marcel·lí Antúnez | Art matters Blog | In the context of Ars Electronica 2020 we visited Marcel·lí Antúnez’s studio, today we retrieve the interview. The artist – whose work can be understood mainly in terms of performativity – began his artistic career with the internationally renowned group ” La Fura dels Baus “, with whom he worked for 10 years. In the 90s his interest in the study of technological complexity materialized for the first time with a robot called Joan l’home de Carn created in collaboration with the physicist, musician and programmer Sergi Jordà. Since then, Antúnez’s artistic production has delved into the idea of utopia in relation to a holistic ideal provided by technology, rethinking the barriers that are no longer so solid that separate the body from the machine – https://bit.ly/31kTLNl
On the Paris Commune: Part 1 | Stathis Kouvelakis | 29 March 2021 | The first instalment of a new text by Stathis Kouvelakis on the development, events and legacy of the Paris Commune, published in three parts across the week. Any perspective on the past tells us at least as much about the subject doing the looking, and the historical moment in which their perspective is situated, as about the object they are looking at. Editing a collection of Marx and Engels’s texts on the Paris Commune of 1871 is a quite different prospect today to what it would have been in decades past, separated from us by a deep historical rift even if they are not ever so remote in purely chronological terms. Half a century ago, upon the 1971 centenary of the Commune, it would have been almost self-evident that delving into these texts was a useful endeavour – https://bit.ly/3fuHX3e
Re-enchanting Our Art, Cultures and Everyday Lives | By Stephen Pritchard | A transcript of Pritchard’s talk, called ‘Cultural Democracy, Community Development and the Old/New Normal’ presented at the Imagine Belfast Festival on 28 March 2021. It’s about re-enchanting our art, cultures and everyday lives. Sheelagh Colcough, David Boyd, Conor Shields and Pritchard had a great conversation after the talk which could have gone on a lot longer. The talk will be published by Imagine Belfast soon – https://bit.ly/3wpmqPM
Is the Music Over at Mills College? | By Geeta Dayal | new York Times | A hotbed of experimental sound for nearly a century, this school in Oakland, Calif., is preparing to close its doors. Now that program and the electronics-focused Center for Contemporary Music, together with the most distinguished havens for experimental work in America over the past century, are facing possible closure. On March 17 the college, founded in 1852, announced that ongoing financial problems, exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, would mean the end of its history as a degree-granting institution made up of an undergraduate women’s college and several coeducational graduate programs – https://nyti.ms/39wzF7h
Bill Gates Can’t Save the Planet | Grace Blakeley | Can Bill Gates save the world from capitalism? Gates’s new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, lays out his plan for achieving net-zero. With all the fanfare around the book’s release — his face was splashed on the cover of multiple magazines this week — this plan is depressingly familiar. Climate change, Gates and many economists argue is an example of a market failure. Markets have failed to adequately “price” carbon emissions, meaning we produce too much of them. If governments could only assign the correct price to these emissions, the market failure would be corrected and the planet would be saved – https://bit.ly/3u92X3J
Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to long-term Android support | Ron Amadeo | Qualcomm ended support for the phone after Android 6, but Fairphone is still going. The most interesting part of this news is a video from Fairphone detailing the update process the company went through, which offers more transparency than we normally get from a smartphone manufacturer. To hear Fairphone tell the story of Android updates, the biggest barrier to longer-term support is—surprise!—Qualcomm – https://bit.ly/3ss8XnL
Smashing the Patriarchy: Exposing Culture | Lilith Magazine | We’ve started an awesome collaboration with the amazing Wiam. At Lilith, we love the way she’s breaking taboos. Whether it is about sexuality, relationships or rap music. For Lilith, she will be making a series of videos on smashing the patriarchy. In this first episode, she is discussing the taboo that is shame culture. The past few weeks there has been a lot of online talk about exposers exposing young girls and queer folks for behaviour that is perfectly healthy. Wiam opens up about her own experience with being exposed and gives you the lesson of lessons on what helped her break the cycle – https://bit.ly/3wbR7I6
Image from: Installation shot. Auriea Harvey, Year Zero, exhibition at Bitforms Gallery. March 6 – April 24, 2021.
The FurtherList Archives
A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology, and social change.
Events, Exhibitions, Open Calls, Festivals and Conferences
Auriea Harvey, Year Zero | March 6–April 17 2021 | Opening Reception: Saturday, March 6 | bitforms is pleased to announce Year Zero, Auriea Harvey’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Through a diverse mixed-media practice, Harvey creates sculpture, video games, drawing, and mixed reality works steeped in character creation and mythology. Year Zero introduces a new body of work nested within the legacy of Harvey’s solo and collaborative career. Working online from the beginning of net art’s history, the artist expertly combines her experience in video game and software development with a three-dimensional practice. Year Zero is a continuation of this coalescence, presenting early sketchbooks, webcam broadcasts, and multiplayer games alongside Harvey’s latest sculptural installations and drawing. https://bit.ly/3bb8Nep
IPERCUBO presents an Online Exclusive Viewing Room dedicated to Axel Straschnoy’s The Permian Projects | 9–23 March 2021 | The Viewing Room is a preview of The Permian Projects, as well as a presentation of the recently published catalogue. The Permian Projects are two research projects by Axel Straschnoy on the natural history collection at the Perm Regional Museum, Perm Kray, Russia. The backdrop of the projects is the End-Permian Extinction (the biggest extinction ever to take place on Earth). The projects reflect on the Museum of Natural History and on the ongoing extinction process. The Dioramas of the Perm Regional Museum is a series of three-dimensional (lenticular) photographs presenting some of the stuffed animals in the collection in storage. https://bit.ly/2NOPeQ8
New Art City Festival: 2021 | A community celebration of Internet Art: March 15–26 2021 | March 26, 2021, is the one-year anniversary of New Art City’s domain registration. d0n.xyz chose the URL the way he always does for his art projects: by searching keywords and picking the coolest free one. A prototype grew into a tool, and a tool grew into a community. Since then, more than 30,000 people in 120 countries have visited galleries in New Art City. As an organization, we are proud to display artists who show in museums on the same level as art students and to show digital art in its native format alongside traditional media – https://bit.ly/2MG8ZJb
THE Q IN QONSPIRACY: QAnon as a Paradigm for Future Social-media-driven Conspiracism | Disruptive Fridays #19 | March 12 2021 |LIVE: Friday 5 pm | Berlin | Roberto Bui/Wu Ming 1 and Florian Cramer, moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli | In this conversation between Wu Ming 1 and Florian Cramer, QAnon is discussed as a template for contemporary social-media-driven conspiracy fantasies that work simultaneously as games and a new kind of cults. By focusing on the mutation of conspiracy myths from countercultural phenomena to contemporary meme and influencer culture, they will focus on three conspiracy narratives: “The Great Replacement” (from Renaud Camus to Charlottesville), QAnon (from Pizzagate to the Capitol storming), and “The Great Reset” (as a set of pandemic-inspired variations on the old New World Order trope). The conversation is centered around Wu Ming 1’s forthcoming book La Q di Qomplotto [The Q in qonspiracy], to be published end of March by Edizioni Alegre, which describes how conspiracy fantasies help legitimize systems of control. https://bit.ly/2OcAoTx
Bread and Roses: Gender and Class Under Capitalism, with Andrea D’Atri | Free · Online event | Wednesday March 17 2021 7:00 pm–8:30 pm GMT| Is it possible to develop a radical socialist feminism that fights for the emancipation of women and of all humankind? Housmans is proud to welcome Andrea D’Atri to discuss her new publication with Pluto Press, Bread and Roses: Gender and Class Under Capitalism. Join us for a passionate journey through the history of feminism. Using the concrete struggles of women, Andrea traces the history of the women’s and workers’ movement from the French Revolution to queer theory. She analyses the divergent paths feminists have woven for their liberation from oppression and uncovers where they have hit dead ends. https://bit.ly/3uHW6zA
(re)programming: Infrastructure | With Benjamin Bratton | Event by Aksioma, Kino Šiška and KonS | Online with Facebook Live | Monday 15 March 2021 at 6pm UTC | For the 10th anniversary of Tactics & Practice, Aksioma presents (re)programming – strategies for self-renewal a “festival of conversations” with world-class thinkers debating key issues, from infrastructure and energy to community and AI, curated and conducted by writer and journalist Marta Peirano. The festival consists of 8 streaming events taking place every third Monday of the month throughout the year. https://bit.ly/3b0Hu6l
The DAOWO Sessions: Artworld Prototypes | A new set of experimental projects to reinvent the future of arts with blockchain | A partnership between Goethe-Institut, DECAL@Furtherfield, and Serpentine Galleries. The DAOWO Sessions: Artworld Prototypes series of online events ran 28 January – 4 March 2021. The series explores the possibilities for the future of the art world with blockchain by investigating what can be learned from DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations) working with Others (-WO). Each recorded session is an eye-opening presentation and conversation around active experimentation that aims to hack, deconstruct and reinvent the arts in the emerging crypto space in response to people and their local contexts. This is a unique opportunity for cultural practitioners, representatives of arts, technology organisations, communities, and anyone interested in blockchain’s potential to come together and question the future of art and society. https://bit.ly/37YllUg
Virtual Reality Residency | Program OPEN CALL until March 29 | Museums Without Walls is seeking proposals for its virtual reality residency program. Residencies will take place through April and May in different versions of the Espírito Santo Art Museum – MAES hosted in the Mozilla Hubs plataform. Four participants will be selected to occupy and recreate this environment based on their artistic and/or curatorial visions. The selected proposals will receive specialized mentorship and a development fee of CAD $ 600. The residency outcomes will be presented in the Museum Without Walls program in late May. https://bit.ly/3qbGMru
Pick Me Up (& hold me tight) | Compass festival | 19–28 March 2021 | An invitation for collective listening, experienced through public pay-phones across Leeds. Through an invitation to answer a public payphone, Pick Me Up (& hold me tight) is a mass act of contemplation about the relationship between mental health and modern life. Created by award-winning theatre and digital art company ZU-UK in response to rising suicide rates across the country, Pick Me Up (& hold me tight) is an audio event where every phone box in Leeds rings at the same time. Pick up the phone to participate in a gentle but thought-provoking audio experience that explores contemporary loneliness, and exposes the edges of our humanness. It’s an invitation to pause, take stock, and explore what kind of listeners we are. https://bit.ly/3kAcLAj
MoneyLab Berlin: Disaster Capitalism | From 26–28 March 2021| MoneyLab Berlin will shine a light on emerging communities that are starting to organize themselves around sustainable finance, inclusive tech, community-based currencies, and progressive monetary systems. Now for the first time in Berlin, the 11th edition of MoneyLab aims at creating space for utopias, experiments, and radical ideas around an economy for the people and for the planet. Over the course of this event we will present creative coping strategies, answers to the problems of data capitalism, platform monopolies and online surveillance, and modes of resistance. Free – online event. https://bit.ly/3dTaPkZ
Ecology and the Anthropocene Art-Game Commission | Phoenix Art-Game Commission Opportunity | LocationEast Midlands | We are seeking to commission an artist, group or studio to create an art-game exploring ecology and the Anthropocene, responding to the Daisyworld Simulation. We are open to proposals that use gaming as a medium in its widest sense, however, it is important to consider how the work could be exhibited in a gallery setting and published online, using platforms such as Steam and Itch. £4000 Commission fee to cover the production of work. Development support during the production of the work. Deadline – midnight on Sunday 28th March. Shortlisted applicants will be contacted by Monday 5th April – https://bit.ly/2MAnLBb
Center and Periphery: Marxism and Postcolonial Theory | Instructor: Nara Roberta Silva | Online event and Course Schedule 6–27 April 2021 | Brooklyn Institute for Social Research | £229.61 Registration Open | Marxism and anti-colonialism were once deeply intertwined in national liberation and other movements, from Vietnam to Angola to Algeria and beyond. However, by the end of the 20th century, Marxist and other socialist thought often seemed dated in a world with a waning Soviet bloc and an emerging neoliberal consensus. Postcolonial theory, itself often in conversation with Marxist thought, offered new understandings of liberation and emancipation. https://bit.ly/3b2JATe
Radical Kinship: Solidarity & Political Belonging | Free · Online event | Apr 22, 2021 12:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada) | By Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at NYU and Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU | a panel discussion with Lisa Duggan, Che Gossett, Shellyne Rodriguez, & Helga Tawil Souri, & moderated by Layal Ftouni | This panel explores contemporary debates on solidarity and coalitional politics that are instrumental to conceptualizing political subjectivity, collectivity and belonging in our current political conjuncture. Engaging with questions of intersectionality, afro-pessimism, and Marxism, this session invites speakers to address the urgency of political affinities (comradeship, radical kinship) that can activate new socio-political imaginaries and envision alternative foundations and horizons for coalitional politics. Register for this free Zoom webinar. https://bit.ly/3swngY2
Computer Mouse Conference | Presented by CultureHub | 29 & 30 April 5pm EDT | Through lectures, live performances, discussions, and more, conference participants explore the question: what does the computer mouse see? The Computer Mouse Conference 2021 will take place on a website. Organized and moderated by Emma Rae Bruml & Ashley Jane Lewis. With support from The Processing Foundation, The Media Archaeology Lab, and The Coding Train. All ticket sales directly support CultureHub and the conference participants. https://bit.ly/3rdGvWe
Call for Proposals: Digital Matters: Designing/Performing Agency for the Anthropocene. 25th annual conference of the DRHA (Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts), Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany, 5-7.09.2021. Taking place from September 5-7, 2021 in Berlin, the 25th Digital Research in Humanities and Arts conference invites contributions and interventions that focus on such transfers and interactions between digital and natural environments. Digital Matters takes on the challenge to explore new material and multi-species agencies, forms of embodiment, and interactions between the performing arts, the humanities, and the natural sciences that engage the sense of relationality and expanded scale that the Anthropocene affords. http://www.drha.uk/2021/call-for-paper/
Books, Papers & Publications
Aesthetics of the Commons | By Shusha Niederberger , Cornelia Sollfrank and Felix Stalder | What do a feminist server, an art space located in a public park in North London, a ‘pirate’ library of high cultural value yet dubious legal status, and an art school that emphasizes collectivity have in common? They all demonstrate that art can play an important role in imagining and producing a real quite different from what is currently hegemonic; that art has the possibility to not only envision or proclaim ideas in theory, but also to realize them materially. They are art in the sense that they place themselves in relation to (Western) cultural and art systems, developing discursive and aesthetic positions, but, at the same time, they are ‘operational’ in that they create recursive environments and freely available resources whose uses exceed these systems | Published by Diaphnes. https://bit.ly/3r4OFjr
Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies | By Winnie Soon and Geoff Cox | Aesthetic Programming explores the technical as well as cultural imaginaries of programming from its insides. It follows the principle that the growing importance of software requires a new kind of cultural thinking — and curriculum — that can account for, and with which to better understand the politics and aesthetics of algorithmic procedures, data processing and abstraction. It takes a particular interest in power relations that are relatively under-acknowledged in technical subjects, concerning class and capitalism, gender and sexuality, as well as race and the legacies of colonialism. Open Humanities Press. https://bit.ly/2ZYduBV
Some Ways of Making Nothing: Apophatic Apparatuses in Contemporary Art | By Curt Cloninger | What if all works of art were better understood as functioning apparatuses, entangling their human audiences in experiences of becoming? What if certain works of art were even able to throw the brakes on becoming altogether, making nothings rather than somethings? What would be the ethical value of making nothing, of stalling becoming; and how might such nothings even be made? Punctum Books. https://bit.ly/3b3tDMN
The Routledge Guidebook to Paine’s Rights of Man | By Frances A Chiu | Upon publication in 1791-92, the two parts of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man proved to be both immensely popular and highly controversial. An immediate bestseller, it not only defended the French revolution but also challenged current laws, customs, and government. The Routledge Guidebook to Paine’s Rights of Man provides the first comprehensive and fully contextualized introduction to this foundational text in the history of modern political thought, addressing its central themes, reception, and influence. Routledge. https://bit.ly/3b2Bees
Anthropocene islands: There are only islands after the end of the world | By David Chandler and Jonathan Pugh | Dialogues in Human Geography | Published March 1, 2021 | Many Anthropocene scholars provide us with the key take-home message that they are writing ‘after the end of the world’. Not because they are writing about the apocalypse, but because they are engaging the Anthropocene after the profound crisis of faith in Western modernity which has swept across academia in recent decades. […] In this article, we examine how the figure of the island as a liminal and transgressive space has facilitated Anthropocene thinking, working with and upon island forms and imaginations to develop alternatives to hegemonic, modern, ‘mainland’, or ‘one world’ thinking. Thus, whilst islands, under modern frameworks of reasoning, were reductively understood as isolated, backward, dependent, vulnerable, and in need of saving by others, the island is being productively re-thought in and for more recent Anthropocene thinking. Sage. https://bit.ly/3rb36mb
Gut Feelings: The Microbiome and Our Health | By Alessio Fasano and Susie Flaherty | Why the microbiome—our rich inner ecosystem of microorganisms—may hold the keys to human health. We are at the dawn of a new scientific revolution. Our understanding of how to treat and prevent diseases has been transformed by the knowledge of the microbiome—the rich ecosystem of microorganisms in and on every human. These microbial hitchhikers may hold the keys to human health. In Gut Feelings, Alessio Fasano and Susie Flaherty show why we must go beyond the older, myopic view of microorganisms as our enemies to a broader understanding of the microbiome as a parallel civilization that we need to understand, respect, and engage with for the benefit of our own health. MIT Press. https://bit.ly/3kH8bjL
Reading ′Black Mirror′ – Insights into Technology and the Post–Media Condition (Media Studies (COL)) | By German Duarte and Justin Michael Battin | Very few contemporary television programs provoke spirited responses quite like the dystopian series Black Mirror. This provocative program, infamous for its myriad apocalyptic portrayals of humankind’s relationship with an array of electronic and digital technologies, has proven quite adept at offering insightful commentary on a number of issues contemporary society is facing. This timely collection draws on innovative and interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks to provide unique perspectives about how confrontations with such issues should be considered and understood through the contemporary post-media condition that drives technology use. https://bit.ly/3sDUEMB
The Politics of Dating Apps: Gender, Sexuality, and Emergent Publics in Urban China | By Lik Sam Chan | An examination of dating app culture in China, across user demographics—straight women, straight men, queer women, and queer men. The open-access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing. In this exploration of dating app culture in China, Lik Sam Chan argues that these popular mobile apps are not merely a platform for personal relationships but also an emerging arena for gender and queer politics. Chan examines the opportunities dating apps present for women’s empowerment and men’s performances of masculinity, and he links experiences of queer dating app users with their vulnerable position as sexual minorities. He finds that dating apps are both portals to an exciting virtual world of relational possibilities and sites of power dynamics that reflect the heteronormativity and patriarchy of Chinese society. MIT Press. https://bit.ly/2MK3R6R
AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams | By Joanna Zylinska | Can computers be creative? Is algorithmic art just a form of Candy Crush? Cutting through the smoke and mirrors surrounding computation, robotics and artificial intelligence, Joanna Zylinska argues that, to understand the promise of AI for the creative fields, we must not confine ourselves solely to the realm of aesthetics. Instead, we need to address the role and position of the human in the current technical setup – including the associated issues of labour, robotisation and, last but not least, extinction. Offering a critique of the socio-political underpinnings of AI, AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams raises poignant questions about the conditions of art making and creativity today. Open Humanities Press. https://bit.ly/3kyNg29
Articles, Interviews, Blogs, Presentations, videos
Beeple Brings Crypto to Christie’s | The artist’s brash riffs on the news have whipped up a frenzy of interest within the cryptocurrency scene | By Josie Thaddeus-Johns | Mike Winkelmann never used to call himself an artist. But that was before he made $3.5 million in a single weekend from selling his artworks. In December, he auctioned off multiple editions of three digital artworks, each priced at $969, and 21 unique works, most of which sold for about $100,000 each. It was only the second time he had put his art on sale. The digital artist, who goes by Beeple, has created a drawing every single day for the last 13 years. He started with pen and paper but now mostly uses computer software such as the program Cinema 4D. A two-week-long online auction of a composite of the first 5,000 days of the project at Christie’s, is the auction house’s first sale of solely digital artwork. It will also be the first time that Christie’s will accept payment in the cryptocurrency Ether – https://nyti.ms/300t4gj
On Language, Technology, and Power: Jennifer Chan in Conversation With Hiba Ali | New media artists Hiba Ali and Jennifer Chan discuss absurd performance, making artwork about work, and diasporic afterlives | Hyperallergic | They both talk about absurd performance, making artwork about work, and the challenges w/in diasporic communities in openly discussing the nuances of privilege and oppression. “Ali and I recently reconnected — we met six years ago while teaching sessionally at SAIC in Chicago, and stayed in touch — to discuss the motivations around absurd performance, making artwork about work, and the difficulties people of color face with openly discussing specific privileges and oppressions.” https://bit.ly/3rioCp4
Reimagining Black Art and Criminology: A New Criminological Imagination | By Martin Glynn | It is time to disrupt current criminological discourses which still exclude the perspectives of black scholars. Through the lens of black art, Martin Glynn explores the relevance black artistic contributions have for understanding crime and justice. Through art forms including black crime fiction, black theatre, and black music, this book brings much-needed attention to marginalized perspectives within mainstream criminology. Refining academic and professional understandings of race, racialization, and intersectional aspects of crime, this text provides a platform for the contributions to criminology which are currently rendered invisible. Bristol University Press. https://bit.ly/2Pez1nC
Episode IV. Arcadian Dreams: AI-Generated Worlds from the Sublime to the Beautiful | By Filippo Lorenzin | “The Uncanny Valley” is Flash Art’s new digital column offering a window on the developing field of artificial intelligence and its relationship to contemporary art. When artists ask an AI to build an entirely digital world, implicit is the demand that it be appreciable to a human public. In the process, the AI discards variables that are unsuitable — elements that won’t be detectable to human senses or that don’t fulfil the narrative demands of its makers. Landscapes generated by AI are thus affected by the requirement for public enjoyment and cannot entirely recapture nature’s unpredictability. https://bit.ly/3uKjsEm
Reset or rewild: perspectives on future arts infrastructures | By Dr. Susan Jones | Pandemic conditions have shaken the foundations and functions of the art infrastructure to the core, illustrating the baked-in flaws while exposing the polar perspectives on conditions for a healthy, productive arts ecology in future. There was little emergency funding or practical support for individual freelance artists, and an apparent failure to acknowledge their dire situation after being hit by a dual economic and emotional tsunami. Although ensuring equality in the workforce is a beacon principle for the funded arts, staffers in art institutions were able to benefit from furlough while compounding the precarity of freelance artists was somehow socially acceptable to funders and most arts funded institutions. https://bit.ly/2O702ca
The model of an “inverted tree” for researching subcultures | By Frederick Lawrence. Expert with over 40 years of experience in investigating subcultures. Subcultures as a phenomenon are not unvarying, subcultures have changed and retransformed in fluctuating environments; some of them disappeared, but new forms arose or became a synthesis of pre-existing ones. Any study of social development requires a particular model first, that could guide the researcher in his work by acting as a “navigation system” in the course of his intellectual work. https://bit.ly/3r3P1Hg
Podcast – News From Where We Are # 3 – The Radical Friendship Series | In 2021 Furtherfield celebrates 25 years of radical friendship. We revisit and open up conversations with some of the fascinating and radical people with whom we have worked and collaborated through the years from the Internet to post-digital contexts. They are changing culture, their lives, and the lives of their communities. Filippo Florenzin interviews artist and independent, Mexican Curator, Doreen Rios. Ruth Catlow reads her foreword for the DisCO manifesto publication, edited by Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel. Marc Garrett interviews artist Kate Southworth about her work with Art and Witchcraft. Stewart Home reads from his recent book edited by Home – Denizen of the Dead published by Cripplegate Books. Experimental, Avant-Folk by artists Alan Sondheim & Azure Carter, from their latest, excellent album Plaguesong. And more… http://bit.ly/3tuCIp6
Poly Styrene documentary: Celeste Bell on her mother’s incredible, complex legacy | The daughter of multi-layered punk icon Poly Styrene hopes her new film will give her mum the respect she deserves. As Bell says in a new, extraordinary documentary about her mother’s life and work, “it took an incredible amount of strength for my mum to walk away from X-Ray Spex,” a band at “the height of their success”. But as Bell adds: “Poly Styrene had to die so that Marianne Elliott could survive.” How she got to that point, and the various rebirths that followed, is all unpacked in the film, narrated by Bell, who co-directed it alongside Paul Sng. The Evening Standard. https://bit.ly/2ZZo1gc
The Secret Life of a Coronavirus | An oily, 100-nanometer-wide bubble of genes has killed more than two million people and reshaped the world. Scientists don’t quite know what to make of it | By Carl Zimmer | At the same time, the pandemic etched a scar across humanity that will endure for decades. More than 2.4 million people have died so far from Covid-19, and millions more have suffered a severe illness. In the United States, life expectancy fell by a full year in the first six months of 2020; for Black Americans, the drop was 2.7 years. The International Monetary Fund predicts that the global economy will lose over $22 trillion between 2020 and 2025. UNICEF is warning that the pandemic could produce a “lost generation.” At the center of these vast shocks is an oily bubble of genes just about 100 nanometers in diameter. Coronaviruses are so small that 10 trillion of them weigh less than a raindrop. https://nyti.ms/2NIXktI
‘Ari Up just kicked the door down’ | Neneh Cherry and others reflect on the legacy of the Slits and New Age Steppers singer as previously unheard songs are released | By Helen Barrett | I’ll never forget the first time I saw Ari Up,” says singer-songwriter Neneh Cherry. “She had her locks tied up, this huge pillar on her head, and she was wearing a tutu and walking on ballet pointe shoes. I was barely 15, really impressionable, and it was instant love.” Less well-known is the music Up recorded alongside and afterward — early cross-cultural experiments in sound and genre, collaborations with reggae artists, and immersion in Jamaican music that would take her from south London to Kingston and the jungles of Indonesia and Belize. Financial Times. February – https://on.ft.com/3dSv56e
Main image by Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow 2020.
The FurtherList Archives
A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.
Events, Exhibitions, Open Calls, Festivals and Conferences
Upcoming event: Book launch |The Hologram <> You can’t cut THIS: without multiplying it | Online event | Friday, December 11th, 1:00-2:30 pm EST |
Organized in partnership with Eyebeam, Pluto Press, artists Cassie Thornton and Tina Zavitsanos will reflect on their shared attention around holograms, debt, and care and Thornton’s recently published pamphlet, The Hologram: Peer to Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future. Both artists consider Thornton’s central question, “In an era when capitalism leaves so many to suffer and to die, with neoliberal ‘self-care’ offering little more than a bandaid, how can we take health and care back into our hands?” The Hologram is developing with the ongoing support of Furtherfield, CreaTures (Creative Practices for Transformational Futures) and many other people and organisations. https://www.eyebeam.org/events/the-hologram/
Feminist International: How to Change Everything | Online event | Friday, 11 December 2020 from 20:00 UTC-21:30 UTC | Hosted by International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs and Verso Books. A conversation with Judith Butler, Susana Draper, Verónica Gago, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Moderated by Natalia Brizuela on Verónica Gago’s Feminist International, which draws on the author’s rich experience with radical movements to enter into ongoing debates in feminist and Marxist theory: from social reproduction and domestic work to the intertwining of financial and gender violence, as well as controversies surrounding the neo-extractivist model of development, the possibilities and limits of left populism, and the ever-vexed nexus of gender-race-class. https://tinyurl.com/yxkqx7u5
RGBFAQ | Alan Warburton | arebyte Gallery presents a new commission by UK based artist Alan Warburton. RGBFAQ comprises a research-led experiential exhibition in which the audience navigates a “black-box” set populated by gigantic geometric sculptures. Warburton’s ambitious new video essay will be projection mapped onto this sculptural background, expanding the form of his popular video essays (Goodbye Uncanny Valley, Fairytales of Motion) into an immersive 3D space, with a soundtrack by David Kamp. Until 19 December 2020, and from 5 – 23 January 2021. https://www.arebyte.com/alan-warburton-rgbfaq
Sign up for the DisCO Beat, a brand-new newsletter about the life and times of the DisCO project | The project furthers the ideas and practices put forth in the DisCO Manifesto with a comprehensive framework designed to support the worldwide development of “Distributed Cooperativism”. The project’s aim is to create and provide the following: comprehensive educational and legal resources for people to launch DisCOs, accessible software for value-sovereignty practices, pilot projects supported by hands-on mentorship guidance, participatory action research on distributed cooperativism. It explores and prototypes new and radical forms of ownership, governance, entrepreneurship, and value accounting meant to counteract pervasive economic inequality. https://disco.coop/newsletter/
Call for Submissions – NEoN is excited to be supporting Goethe-Institut Glasgow and Alliance Française Glasgow with their newly reframed residency programme. In response to the impact felt by the cultural sector as a result of the Covid-19 global health crisis, their initial residency project has transformed into a digital one. https://northeastofnorth.com/call-for-submissions/
Aksioma presents Hyperemployment STREAMING #2 | !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Felix Stalder #algoregimes | 7 December 2020 at 5 PM (CET) | The upcoming second event entitled #algoregimes is an informal discussion between artistic duo !Mediengruppe Bitnik and professor of Digital Cultures and Network Theory Felix Stalder. Touching upon topics such as the invisibility of institutional processes, the functioning of infrastructures and logistics, and freedom and control in the data economy. https://aksioma.org/streaming
THE DAOWO GLOBAL INITIATIVE | Announcing Artworld DAO Prototype breakfast meetings 2021 In February 2020, cultural practitioners and representatives of non-profit arts and technology organisations from around the world gathered to participate in a 52hr gathering focusing on Artworld DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations). Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty facilitated a programme hosted by Goethe Institute, London to discuss, analyse and map the obstacles, opportunities, and implications for progressive, decentralised artworld automation. Sign up for the DAOWO newsletter for information about showcase and discussion events with the teams creating Artworld DAO prototypes in Berlin, Hong Kong, Johannesburg and Minsk. Breakfast meetings are planned for January and February 2021. https://www.daowo.org/#daowo-global-initiative
VIDEO-TALKS | Berliner Gazette Winter School online program | Includes talks exploring labour struggles in California’s Silicon Valley, Germany’s Cyber Valley, and India’s AI sweatshops – and back again. The speakers include Sana Ahmad (India), Jose Miguel Calatayud (Spain), Luise Meier (Germany), Yonatan Miller (US), Peng! (Germany), and Katja Schwaller (Switzerland/US). You can access videos of their talks on this website by scrolling down to the TALKS section. https://bit.ly/36lElf5
Call for Proposals: INC Reader #15 – Critical Meme Research | By Chloë Arkenbout | Deadline 16th December | As they metastasized from the digital periphery to the mainstream, memes have seethed with mutant energy. From now on, any historical event will be haunted by its memetic double — just as any pandemic will have its own infodemic that will recursively act upon it — issuing in the kinds of cross-contamination that Baudrillard already prefigured in the 1980s: of the convoluted age of simulacra, of epistemological crises associated with postmodernity, and of a generalized informational obesity whose gravitational pull bends reality to whatever “program”, in the multiple senses of that term – https://bit.ly/39sb5oO
The Sir Terry Pratchett Memorial Scholarship | As part of his legacy beyond literature, the Discworld Foundation established by international bestselling author, the late Sir Terry Pratchett, has established a perpetual scholarship in his name through the University of South Australia. Applications are being sought from proven high achievers for this prestigious scholarship working in the areas of social theory, cultural studies, visual and literary studies and identity studies where the research proposed is inspired by Sir Terry Pratchett’s work – https://tinyurl.com/yxjvxkku
OPENING: Tend To It | Group show from TOMA 2019-2021 artists | Saturday, 23 January 2021 | TOMA Project Space, Unit 13, Royals Shopping Centre, Southend, SS1 1DG | The 2019-2021 TOMA (The Other MA) cohort present their end of year show: Tend to it. An instruction that doubles as a confession. How has it affected our art-making? Why do we make art? And what happens when we are faced with death? This show explores how even in a crisis we must tend to our needs to create. Raid the larder, stroke the euphoric parceltape, pass through the silky curtain, step onto the stage, go back in time, ooze into a queer new landscape, journey through screens, pause in isolation, ponder reused, reborn found objects. This exhibition shows how we tend to it. Opening: Saturday 23/01/21 12-6pm RSVP via Eventbrite (bookable slots to ensure social distancing) here – https://bit.ly/3qaIGtn
Books, Papers & Publications
Atlas of Anomalous AI | Edited by Ben Vickers & K Allado-McDowell | Like a snake eating its tail, artificial intelligence exists in a circular relationship with its human creators. The Atlas of Anomalous AI is a compelling and surprising map of our complex relationship to intelligence, from ancient to emerging systems of knowledge. A wildly associative constellation of ideas, stories, artworks and historical materials, the Atlas draws on art historian Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas — an image map of the “afterlife of antiquity” — to approach the defining concepts of AI from an imaginative, artistic and revitalising perspective – https://bit.ly/36lJcge
Coronavirus, Class and Mutual Aid in the United Kingdom | Authors: Preston, John, Firth, Rhiannon | This book considers how the UK government’s response to the recent COVID-19 pandemic disadvantages the working class, and how mutual aid, based on anarchist principles, can be used as a force for social change. The authors draw on Marxist and anarchist thought in class theory and social movement analysis to demonstrate that the virus and its material and discursive consequences are an active part of continuing class struggle and class interpolation. Preston and Firth examine how plans for quarantine and social isolation systematically work against the needs of the working class, and rely on classed assumptions about how markets and altruism operate. Publisher, Palgrave Macmillan – https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030577131
Retracing Political Dimensions: Strategies in Contemporary New Media Art | Edited by: Oliver Grau and Inge Hinterwaldner | De Gruyter | 2021 | At the beginning of the 21st century, new forms and dynamics of interplay are constituted at the interfaces of media, art and politics. Current challenges in society and ecology, like climate, surveillance, virtualization of the global financial markets, are characterized by hybrid and subtle technologies. They are ubiquitous, turn out to be increasingly complex and act invasively. New media art utilizes its broad range of expression in order to tackle the most urgent topics through multi-sensorial, participatory, and activist approaches. This volume shows how media artists address, with a political lens, the core of these developments critically and productively. With contributions by Elisa Arca, Andrés Burbano, Derek Curry, Yael Eylat Van Essen, Mathias Fuchs, Jennifer Gradecki, Sabine Himmelsbach, Ingrid Hoelzl, Katja Kwastek, José-Carlos Mariátegui, Gerald Nestler, Randall Packer, Viola Rühse, Chris Salter – https://bit.ly/37ieNic
Working Class History: Everyday Acts of Resistance & Rebellion | Edited by Working Class History, an international collective of worker-activists, foreword by Noam Chomski. This book presents a distinct selection of people’s history through hundreds of “on this day in history” anniversaries that are as diverse and international as the working class itself. Women, young people, people of colour, workers, migrants, Indigenous peoples, LGBT+ people, disabled people, older people, the unemployed, home workers, and every other part of the working class have organized and taken action that has shaped our world, and improvements in living and working conditions have been won only by years of violent conflict and sacrifice. https://bit.ly/3fQtD3j
Vol 19. Media Populism | Edited by Giuseppe Fidotta, Joshua Neves, & Joaquin Serpe | Culture Machine | Parasitical, unstable, excessive, corrupt, inexact, threatening—the intellectual history of populism is, to say the least, vexed. ‘Few terms have been so widely used in contemporary political analysis’, Ernesto Laclau famously observed, and ‘few have been defined with less precision’ (1977: 143). As populism has increasingly become ‘the preserve of political scientists’ (Rovira Kaltwasser et al., 2017: 10; Canovan, 1982), so too has its focus on political parties and movements become a default position in academic and popular thought. This orientation, today contested by many political scientists but nonetheless widespread, has the advantage of making populism visible, even measurable, through its analysis of speeches, polls, rallies, and electoral victories – https://bit.ly/3oapYAf
The Forest of Dean Miners’ Riot of 1831 | By Chris Fisher | Bristol Radical Pamphleteer | In June 1831, the free miners and commoners of the Forest of Dean rioted. This book considers the background to the uprising and the motives of the participants. Chris Fisher contends that the uprising was a clear expression of considerable and justifiable resentment towards the state and capitalists as they encroached on the customary rights of free miners. The Forest of Dean Miners’ Riot of 1831 places the events in the context of a social and economic transformation which favoured private property, the exchange of commodities for profit, and the accumulation of wealth for a few at the expense of the labouring many – https://bit.ly/3lpsb9o
Bank Job | Hilary Powell and Daniel Edelstyn | Art hacks life when two filmmakers launch a project to cancel more than £1m of high-interest debt from their local community. A white-knuckle ride into the dark heart of our financial system, in which filmmaker and artist duo Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn risk their sanity to buy up and abolish debt by printing their own money in a disused bank in Walthamstow, London. Tired of struggling in an economic system that leaves creative people on the fringes, the duo weave a different story, both risky and empowering, of self-education and mutual action. Behind the opaque language and defunct diagrams, they find a system flawed by design but ripe for hacking. This is the inspiring story of how they listen and act upon the widespread desire to change the system to meet the needs of many and not just the few. And for those among us brave enough, they show how we can do this too in our own communities one bank job at a time – https://bit.ly/3lpUSCU
Articles, Interviews, Blogs, Presentations, videos
Body and Digitality: From early experiments to theatre-making | Marco Donnarumma | Youtube | In this talk produced by Fronte Vacuo artists group, co-founder Marco Donnarumma discusses the relation of body and technology in the arts and how the body is at the centre of transdisciplinary avantgarde meshing media art, dance and theatre; a set of practices that made possible much of the art we see today. The first 30 minutes are dedicated to a historical overview of body and technology works and performances from the 1960s until 2010s, including Alvin Lucier, E.A.T, Stelarc Stelarc, Marcel.lí Antúnez Roca, #VNSMatrix, Seiko Mikami, Shulea Cheang, Santasangre Santasangre. The next 30 minutes are focused on my own work as well as on the collaborative works created with Fronte Vacuo co-founders #margheritapevere and Andrea Familari Fax – https://bit.ly/37lIP4P
The Invisible Hand | Thierry Fournier | Series of 8 digital images, fine art prints on dibond, variable dimensions, 2020 | Created from photographs and courtesy of NnoMan, Amaury Cornu, Benoît Durand, Anne Paq, Julien Pitinome, Kiran Ridley and Charly Triballeau.The Invisible Hand transforms eight photographs that witness police violence by completely erasing the police officers from the image. By raising the question of censorship and pretending to submit to it, the image now shows only the people under assault, surrounded by a spectral void that no longer has a body or face. The term “invisible hand” is one of the historical concepts of liberalism, which postulates that the sum of individual market actions would spontaneously lead to the common good – https://bit.ly/2VgJ6QS
Ambivalence, part 2: On the uneasy relationship between digital art and the environment | Regine Debatty | With considerable delay and only pitiful excuses to justify it, here’s the second part of the notes I scribbled down during the conference AMBIVALENCES #1 which took place in early October in Rennes in the framework of the Maintenant digital art festival. Part 1 of my report summed up Bénédicte Ramade’s overview of the History of Ecological Art. Today, I’m sharing the notes I took during the round table “Digital Arts and Environmental Awareness” that discussed the ambivalent relationship between digital artists and the environmental crisis. Contemporary art has a massive ecological footprint. Contemporary art that uses -and sometimes even champions- digital tools also relies on technologies that generate extractivism, e-waste, human misery and unbridled energy consumption – https://tinyurl.com/y6gb8nuq
Thinking the Unthinkable: The Idea of an Eco-state | David Garcia | If any serious individual in late February had argued that under conditions, other than war, that wealthy technologically advanced states were capable of shutting down 80% of the global economy… and in the process ending mass air transportation, the proposition would not just have been dismissed it would simply not even have been heard.” This forces us to ask how the same level of agency can be made available to address the far more profound threat of the climate emergency? And ask why in comparison with Covid the ecological crisis yields little more than a collective shrug of the shoulders? https://bit.ly/3moswu9
How an Algorithm Blocked Kidney Transplants to Black Patients | A formula for assessing the gravity of kidney disease is one of many that is adjusted for race. The practice can exacerbate health disparities. A new study of patients in the Boston area is one of the first to document the harm that can cause. It examined the effect on the care of a widely used but controversial formula for estimating kidney function that by design assigns Black people healthier scores. https://tinyurl.com/y56tyl9y
UNINVITED. A “horror experience by and for machines” | Regine Debatty | On 31 October, the Furtherfield Gallery in London launched an exhibition centered around “the world’s first horror experience by and for machines”. In true horror movie style, a pandemic is keeping the gallery closed and the human visitors locked up inside their home. Meanwhile, the machine is left undisturbed, using CCTV cameras to observe the world remotely and turn its understanding of it into a horror film for machines. UNINVITED, by Nye Thompson and UBERMORGEN, is a puzzling, disturbing but strangely seducing work. It rejects human viewers as much as it draws them in. A mix of dystopia, scifi and reality, the film echoes our confusion about the machines which intelligence (or utter stupidity) we sometimes fail to fully appreciate – https://tinyurl.com/yyfqat7x
DISRUPTION NETWORK LAB | Youtube Video Collection | Examining the intersection of politics, technology, and society, Disruption Network Lab exposes the misconduct and wrongdoing of the powerful. Disruption Network Lab is an ongoing platform of events and research focused on the intersection of politics, technology and society. Since 2014 the Berlin-based nonprofit organisation in Germany has organised participatory, interdisciplinary, international events at the intersection of human rights and technology with the objective of strengthening freedom of speech and exposing the misconduct and wrongdoing of the powerful – https://bit.ly/3lkvqyV
Nomadland: Mortality And Materialism In 21st Century America | Daniel Broadley | Quietus | Chloé Zhao’s majestic new film Nomadland is set to lead the 2021 awards season, but its power will last much longer by tapping into a fear and hope about metaphysical materialism, finds Daniel Broadley. “The last free place in America is a parking spot,” writes Jessica Bruder in Nomadland: Surviving America in the 21st Century, the book upon which Chloé Zhao’s stunning film Nomadland is based – https://tinyurl.com/y2powhc8
Future Machine Live Autumn 2020 – Creating Rituals for When The Future Comes | Artist Rachel Jacobs blogs about the stresses and uncertainties of creating a safe performance in Finsbury Park during lockdown.
“The rules of the Future Machine compares the data to the monthly averages for the place where the machine is and then the algorithm decides if it is cold, mild, warm, hot, breezy, windy etc… and if the climate is expected, unexpected or extreme. In the live performance the machine plays the algorithm, the musicians play their feelings, their emotional, creative, reflective, experiential (and incredibly skilled) ability to translate the being-ness of this place and time, with the wind, rain, air, the smells, the sensations of moisture and dryness, warmth, coldness, prickling our skin.” Read the blog and watch and listen to the performance https://www.whenthefuturecomes.net/2020/12/03/future-machine-live-autumn-2020/
Image by Cassie Thornton from, The Hologram <> You can’t cut THIS: without multiplying it | Eyebeam December 2020.
The FurtherList Archives
https://www.furtherfield.org/the-furtherlist-archives/
On May 29, 2020, the Disruption Network Lab opened its 19th conference, “Evicted by Greed: Global Finance, Housing & Resistance”. The three-day-event was supposed to take place in Berlin in March, on the days of the global call for the Housing Action Days. Instead, it took place online due to ongoing safety concerns relating to the coronavirus pandemic.
Chaired by Tatiana Bazzichelli and Lieke Ploeger, programme and community director of the Disruption Network Lab, the interactive digital event brought together speakers and audience members from their homes from all over the world to investigate how speculative finance drives global and local housing crises. The topic of how aggressive speculative real-estate purchases by shell companies, anonymous entities, and corporations negatively impacts peoples’ lives formed the core conversation for the presentations, panel discussions, and interactive question and answer sessions. The conference served as a platform for sharing experiences and finding counter-strategies.
In her introductory statement, Bazzichelli took stock of the situation. As the pandemic appeared, it became clear worldwide that the “stay-at-home” order and campaigns were not considering people who cannot comply since they haven’t got any place to stay. Tenants, whose work and lives have been impacted, struggle to pay rent, bills, or other essentials, and in many cases had to leave their homes or have been threatened with forced eviction. People called on lawmakers at a national and local level to freeze rent requirements as part of their response to the pandemic, but very few measures have been put in place to protect them. However, scarce and unaffordable housing is neither a new, nor a local problem found in just a few places.
Christoph Trautvetter, public policy expert and German activist of
Netzwerk Steuergerechtigkeit (Network for Tax Justice) and Wem gehört
die Stadt (Who Owns the City) of the Rosa-Luxemburg Foundation, and Manuel Gabarre de Sus, Spanish lawyer and activist from the Observatory Against Economical Crime, delivered the opening keynote “Anonymous & Aggressive Investors: Who owns Berlin & Barcelona?” moderated by Eka Rostomashvili, advocacy and campaigns coordinator at Transparency International.
In the last decade waves of private equity real estate investments have reshaped the rental housing markets in cities like Berlin and Barcelona. Housing and real estate have been deformed by global capital markets and financial excess, treated as a commodity, a vehicle for predatory investment and wealth rather than a social good reflecting a human right. This led to evictions, discriminations in the housing sphere, and lack of access to basic housing-related services, all put in place by aggressive real estate investors.
Trautvetter is co-author of a recent study tracing the ownership of 400 companies owning real estate in Berlin. He explained that in the city, where about 85% of the population are renters, exploding house prices and rentals have been guaranteeing investors returns far beyond 10% per year after the financial crises of 2009. Here the emergence of corporate landlords changed the city. They are entities that own and operate rental housing on a massive scale, replacing the traditional “gentle old lady” landlord. At 17.5%, Berlin has a law proportion of direct investors renting out their properties.
Activists, politicians, and organisations of tenants are trying to fight unlawful evictions and speculative investments reshaping the German capital, but often face anonymity. Almost half of the city is in the hands of listed companies, professional investors, or indirect investors shielded by property management firms and lawyers that operate on their behalf. International private equity companies are one of the most obscure and greedy embodiments of policy failure in this context.
Gabarre de Sus focused on the problem of the opportunistic investment funds that appeared in Spain due to strong deregulation. After the global financial crisis of 2009, the rescue of the Spanish financial system ensured that hundreds of thousands of households were indirectly under public control. But the European Union and the Spanish Government decided in 2012 to sell these properties to opportunistic investors. Many say that if public ownership of these real estates had been maintained for social renting, the rent bubble of recent years would not have occurred. As a result, many vulture funds, particularly from the United States like Blackstone, Hayfin, TPG, and millionaires like the Mexican Carlos Slim, made huge profits. Since then, rent prizes have increased of more than the 50% in the main Spanish cities, more than 30 times faster than wages.
Whilst describing this process, Gabarre de Sus focused on the political and legal ties of big investment funds that invest in real estate. There are structures of political and economic interest that allow companies like Blackstone Group Inc. — one of the largest real estate private equity and investment management firms in the world declaring $140 billion of real estate assets under management, 25% of its total assets — to scale business models in which properties are bought, renovated, and then put back on the market at rents that tenants cannot afford. These actors are influential, with economic partners at international level, including banks from the world’s largest economies.
In many cases, real estate registers do not contain any information on beneficial owners or there is no way to link legal and beneficial owners, so that both authorities and citizens know very little about who owns their cities. EU legislation obliges information on real estate holders to be available to authorities and specifies that the general public shall receive access to beneficial ownership information of EU based companies. The problem is that such registers are usually maintained under self-disclosure principles based on data internally identified by the reporting entity. Access to data is often difficult and expensive. Once you get the information, it can take time to check it and find out contradictory data. Moreover, an articulated system of international shell companies, secrecy legislation, and strategic financial loopholes provides immunity and contributes to global inequality, consolidating the incessant shift of wealth from the poor to the rich.
In Berlin nearly half of the real estate investors remain anonymous and there is no certainty of how much dirty money hides behind their investments, which is something common to many places around the world. The current situation — revealed also by the Panama Papers investigation — shows that governments profit from illegal wealth from transnational money-laundering, hosting international criminal enterprises within their territories and capital cities, thus providing a grey area for illegal practices where false or inappropriate identification represents the other face of fraudulent records and corruption.
The panel “Foggy Properties & Golden Sands: Money Laundering in London & Dubai” moderated by Rima Sghaier, outreach and research fellow at the Hermes Centre for Transparency and Digital Human Rights, made clear how easy and common it is for global elites and organised criminality to open offshore companies, move assets, and buy real estate in big capital cities, with investments that integrate illegal funds into the financial system and legitimate economy.
Sam Leon, data investigations lead at Global Witness, referred to the relations between satellite fiscal havens such as the Virgin Islands, the Cayman, and the Channel Islands, and the City of London. These countries are linked through commercial and legal ties with high probabilities for dark money to flow through the UK’s Overseas territories and Crown Dependencies undetected.
The UK has a public land registry, but it is difficult to effectively scrutiny data. Companies are obliged to file good quality information, but many do not and authorities are not able to check it accurately. Britain is defined by detractors as the world’s greatest enabler of corporate tax avoidance. Considering real estate, Leon explained that tens of thousands of tenants in England and Wales are in the hands of unscrupulous owners, who hide behind anonymous companies and trusts.
One loophole real estate investors use is acquiring shares in a company that owns real estate, rather than the real estate itself; the property can be then sold by selling the shares in the company with no UK corporate tax. If the company is registered in a country that guarantees secrecy and free hands, no name appears. According Global Witness in England and Wales 87,000 properties with an estimated value of more than 1 billion pounds are owned by companies incorporated in secrecy jurisdictions, which keep secret the information about the real owners. Scotland suffers from the same problem, and in this context Scottish Limited Partnerships are a major concern too.
Companies avoid inheritance tax and capital gain tax, riding fiscal loopholes. The use of firms based in countries which are known tax havens to purchase property is being observed all around the world, with concerns about how much property is owned by unaccountable offshore entities.
The analyses of Leon introduced topics covered by the second panellist Karina Shedrofsky, who presented her work as head of OCCRP’s research team “Dubai’s Golden Sands.” Recently leaked datasets of property and residency details were obtained by the non-profit group C4ADS, and provided to the international investigative journalists of the OCCRP as part of the Global Anticorruption Consortium, in collaboration with Transparency International.
International criticism of governments and independent organisations pointed out that Dubai has become an open market for money laundering and a safe haven for the corrupt at a global level, due to the lack of controls along with very profitable conditions. The United Arab Emirates are accused of weakly regulating the financial sector, guaranteeing secrecy, and offering the world’s criminals a range of services. The country’s land registry is not open to the public and a lack of enforcement and oversight in the property sector is ideal to stash vast amounts of dirty money.
Shedrofsky pointed out that Dubai is an absolute monarchy ruled as a business. Several transnational investigations show that its laws seem to be a facilitator for international money laundering, corruption, and other financial crimes.
The emirate has been attracting secretive real estate purchases by foreign companies and individuals for years. Construction and real estate sector represents 20% of the country’s gross domestic product (2016). In the country it is possible to move money with very little regulatory scrutiny, cash-based transactions are incentivised, and the volume of gold trafficked accounts for around 25% of global trade, with almost no questions about its origins. Wealthy investors are offered a property investment visa by an investment in real estate of minimum $272,000 dollars, and get the benefits of light financial regulation, anonymity, and banking secrecy.
Shedrofsky explained how researchers from 8 countries worked on thousands of spreadsheets maintained by real estate professionals, in an accurate cross-border investigation that led to the publication of a hundred names of wealthy people, who have invested millions in Dubai. The non-official records from the years 2014-2016 provided more than 129,000 owner’s data, which the team organised per country and verified, revealing only information that could be proven beyond doubt. A website hosting an interactive map with the detected properties is online, and anyone can check it (occrp.org/en/goldensands/).
The first day of the conference closed with filmmaker and journalist Fredrik Gertten and Leilani Farha, former UN Special Rapporteur on the right to housing, in a live conversation moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli. Gertten’s latest documentary investigates the factors that push people out from their own city, turning it into an unaffordable place that is more and more difficult to live in due to the extreme difference between housing prices and wage development.
From New York to Barcelona “Push: The Film” narrates how corporations and financial elites are speculating on people’s lives. Renters worldwide are drowning in a sea of self-doubt, with feelings of inadequacy and fears, because they think they are unable to keep up with life. But the documentary shows that this condition is the consequence of a system intended to harm, marginalise, and discriminate them. Even if residents should be able to afford to live in their own cities, this process inexorably condemns them to move away.
The work of the speakers on the first day of the conference reinforced the idea that crowd-based and data-driven research projects, together with independent and cross-border investigations, can allow a glimpse behind the curtain of the real estate market. Anonymity and secrecy in juxtaposition to openness and transparency, obtained through collective mobilisation, collecting, sharing, and analysing data.
A depressingly similar pattern emerges in countries all over the world. Housing has been financialised and turned into an investment vehicle, which has caused an oversupply of luxury estates and empty buildings in many cities, and a chronic shortage of adequate housing for the least advantaged, for the working class, and often for the middle class too. A process often encouraged by governments.
In this context, “financialisation” refers to tendencies within the economic system characterised by the expansion and proliferation of financial markets penetrating into a range of both economic and social sectors, and consequently affecting human rights related goods — such as housing, pensions and healthcare — making huge profits out of basic needs and human sufferings.
With regard to the financialisation of housing, not just banks, corporations, and big investment funds play this ruthless game. Fraudsters, money launderers, and organised crime are very active internationally, and look for weak financial systems and a moment of crisis to speculate on the property market.
Ela Kagel, digital strategist and founder of Supermarkt Berlin, discussed collective solutions to tackle housing, social, and economic injustices with the sociologist Volkan Sayman, promoter of the campaign “Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co!”. This movement is an example of how residents can involve themselves to determine and achieve their own objectives, acting on their rights to create a space for their perspectives and needs within an urban context.
After a majority of citizens were found to be in favour of the initiative in early 2019, a city-wide referendum could be now called on the expropriation of private housing companies with more than 3,000 housing units. Local political parties have not managed to find agreement yet and, as a result, the effects of the referendum in Berlin are likely to be minor if people do not keep on supporting it. The expropriation would put 240,000 flats under public control.
As outlined, investors from the international capital market made huge purchases in Berlin’s residential and commercial real estate: the company Deutsche Wohnen alone owns 111,500 apartments in the city. Together with Vonovia, BlackRock, Akelius, Blackstone, Carlyle, Optimum Evolution, and others, these companies own almost one fourth of the city. In the early 2000s Berlin’s government sold many public housing units and areas to these companies, instead of offering them to residents as development project to focus on local communities and their needs. The Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co! community has forced large real estate companies and politicians from all parties to address the issue and successfully raised awareness among Berliners who engaged in it.
In Berlin exasperated renters successfully came together and organised themselves in several ways. They are also appealing to the local council to stop the sale of their homes, and the “Rent Price Cap,” a new policy in force since 2020, has frozen rents on around 1.4 million homes in the German capital. The “Mietendeckel” is supposed to last for 5 years. Twelve constitutional complaints have already been filed against it.
The keynote on the second day “The Human Rights Solution: Tackling the housing crisis” focused on the work of Leilani Farha, UN former Special Rapporteur on adequate housing, in conversation with Justus von Daniels, Editor-in-Chief of CORRECTIV, non-profit newsroom for investigative journalism. Opening the keynote Von Daniels presented the German crowdsourced project he runs — Who owns the city? — which is based on community-powered investigations collecting data to gain a better understanding of the German housing market.
Farha recalled that international human rights law recognizes everyone’s right to an adequate housing and living conditions. Global real estate today represents nearly 60% of the value of all global assets; with housing comprising nearly 75%. That´s more than twice the world’s total gross domestic product. The aspect to consider is that such a vast amount of wealth seems to have left governments accountable to real estate investors rather than to their international human rights obligations.
Farha criticised Blackstone Group Inc. and its subsidiaries for a practice she also confirms has become common throughout the industry in many countries around the world. These companies are targeting multi-family residences in neighbourhoods deemed to be “undervalued,” so a building or several buildings from an area of poor and low-income tenants. The former UN rapporteur described how Blackstone purchases a building, undertakes repairs or renovation, and then increases the rent driving existing tenants out, and replacing them with higher income ones.
As the speakers pointed out, there has been little attention given to the impact of financialisation on housing, which has caused displacement and evictions, changing urban areas forever. Until the massive financial deregulation of the 1980s, housing was built and paid for locally. Governments, local savings, and loan institutions were supposed to provide the bulk of financing for housing up. Due to an ideological shift, determined by the impact of the dominance on financial markets of big investment funds, banks and corporations, housing is increasingly intertwined with flows of global capital. Housing markets are now more responsive to these flows than to local conditions becoming a global industry.
With roots in the 2008 financial crisis, the recent massive wave of investments by international corporations, banks, and big investment funds completed the shift from housing as a place to build a home, to housing as an investment, with devastating consequences for millions of people. The current real-estate cycle started in 2009 and led to significant price increases for residential property in many cities all over the world. Among several factors, the proliferation of predatory equity funds sifting through the world searching for undervalued investment opportunities and finding them in housing.
The global goal is to guarantee everybody legal security and protection against unlawful forced evictions, harassment and other threats, to make sure that personal or household financial costs associated with housing do not threaten or compromise the attainment and satisfaction of other basic needs. We see instead that the needs of disadvantaged and marginalized groups are not taken into account at all. In urban areas public spaces and social facilities disappear together with the expression of cultural identities and ways of life of the original residents.
Statistics show that many of the less advantaged are renters, not owners. And rents have increased even faster than housing prices in many metropolitan areas. Some call for more expansion at the urban peripheries with sustainable and modern public housing projects and better infrastructures. Others call for empowering neighbourhoods and local communities to reverse the financialisation process and to improve the conditions of the areas, that are most affected by this process, building more housing for themselves, and distributing those empty ones.
The conclusive panel on the second day was moderated by Iva Čukić, cofounder of the urban development organisation Ministry of Space, set up to occupy abandoned and neglected urban spaces and fill them with projects, workplaces, housing, or alternative art galleries, to enhance everyone’s right to the city. The panel brought into dialogue different modalities of fighting property speculation, and sharing tactics of resistance in the political and media landscape, and presented concrete alternatives for the urban territory.
The first panelist to speak, Marco Clausen, is the co-founder of the Prinzessinnengarten in Berlin, an island of collective gardening in Moritzplatz. The garden represents an open space to share and develop new forms of urban life, where to practice ideas of social-ecological positive transformation, in the context of privatisation and financialisation of real estate in the city.
In the 2000s Berlin was still a city with vast empty areas, dismissed military facilities and many old empty buildings. In the last 20 years over 3,000 sites in Berlin owned by public housing societies have been privatised. The garden started as a temporary project in 2009 and has been struggling since 2012 against private investors and speculation. Back then activists mobilised 30,000 people to stop the selling process to an investor, and obtained a new contract until 2018. The area around the garden was first in the hands of a Goldmann Sachs fund, and later to Deutsche Wohnen. A small group fought for two years to keep the garden a collective project, managing to prolong the contract for another six years and receiving public funding to rebuild the garden as an open learning and cultural centre.
Always in Berlin, another group of activists has been mobilising to fight the Amazon tower, that is to be completed in 2023 in the area of Berlin-Friedrichshain. Yonatan Miller, tech-worker and activist from the coalition “Berlin vs. Amazon,” talked about the movement that opposes the big tech company’s project, that will reshape the area and impact many people’s lives. On one side, over the last five years Berlin has already seen the fastest increase in housing prices globally, on the other big tech corporations are known for getting into real-estate market and make things worse for local residents, gentrifying the area. Miler discussed the challenges of the activists, presenting their strategy for the struggle ahead to replicate the success story of New York’s ousting of Amazon in 2019.
The panel proceeded with the StealThisPoster collective and their online archive “stealthisposter.org” maintained by artists and activists part of a network formed around the right to housing movements of London and Rome. The group presented the practice of subvertising, the artistic hacking of corporate and political advertisements to make counter-statements by disrupting lucrative communication of induced desires and needs and parodying of them. Inside urban areas subvertising (portmanteau of subvert and advertise) is an act of reappropriation of those public spaces that have been turned into a vehicle for intrusive and harmful commercial communications.
StealThisPoster recently supported with various guerrilla actions a community fighting against the eviction of the “Lucha y Siesta,” a space of social housing and the first inhabited by an all-female squat in Rome. Their evocative pictures of Roman monuments lit at night by the words “on sale” became viral and helped the cause. However, the existence of this independent legendary social space is still at risk. Lucha Y Siesta was put on auction by the city council of Rome on April 7 this year. The short film premiere “StealThisPoster: Artivism & the Struggle of Lucha Y Siesta” that StealThisPoster created in occasion of Evicted By Greed, focuses on this experience and introduces the practice of subvertising.
A video contribute by Penny Travlou from the University of Edinburgh concluded the panel. Travlou talked about the housing crisis in Athens and the local activists of the AARG collective, Action Against Regeneration & Gentrification, born to fight against eviction, financial speculation, and to support the rights of the refugees.
Alongside the main conference sessions, a workshop on the third day enriched the programme.
The virtual tour “Visiting the Invisible” by Christoph Trautvetter discovers the anonymous and aggressive real estate investors of Berlin, drawing on the findings of the project “Wem gehört die Stadt” of the Rosa-Luxemburg Stiftung, and including further recent studies from other collectives.
The conference “Evicted by Greed” presented experts working on anti-corruption, investigative journalists, artists and activists, who met to share effective strategies and community-based approaches to increase awareness on the issues related to the financialisation of housing and its negative effects. Here bottom-up approaches and methods that include local communities in the development of solutions appear to be fundamental. Projects that capacitate collectives, minorities, and marginalized groups to develop and exploit tools to combat systematic inequalities, injustices, and speculation are to be enhanced.
Ghostly shell companies and real estate speculators evict real people from their homes. It is not possible to state that all of these companies are acting illegally, or indeed avoiding paying taxes by being based in tax havens, but it is proven that opaque offshore firms are routinely used by criminals for systemic tax evasion, to buy property as a means to launder or stash dirty money, as well as to dodge taxes.
Open registers and open debate about these issues are very important, and not just for possible judicial outcomes. It is important to find out who the owners of real estates are and give a name to the landlords. Sometimes they might not be speculation oriented individuals and might not be aware of the consequences of their investments, but have delegated ruthless intermediates, lawyers, and investment consultants. There could be hundreds of workers who invested in a pension found without knowing that their profit is based on aggressive speculation.
Equal and non-discriminatory access to public spaces and adequate housing is not possible without an appropriate and effective regulation. The researches, the projects and the investigations presented in this conference are all worthwhile experiences with proven benefits, but ultimately, they may not be enough to alter the structural forces in play. The pandemic has shown that speculators all over the world wait for moments of crisis to purchase new real estates for a lower price, taking advantage of the financial difficulties that many people are experiencing. A growing number of property investors are preparing for what they believe could be a once-in-a generation opportunity to buy distressed real-estate assets at bargain prices. The system facilitates the concentration of real states in the hands of big international landlords and governments remain inert.
The solution cannot be found in one simple formula, or by asking people to buy real estate and become direct investors and new owners, in a deregulated system based on speculation, where most of the individuals struggle to make a living. The global economic system is based on banks holding massive amounts of loans to companies based in tax havens, speculative real estate investments and a small economic elite that makes and escapes rules, defending financial deregulations and feeding social injustice.
Videos of the conference are also available on YouTube.
In-depth video contributes by the speakers recorded before the conference are available here: https://www.disruptionlab.org/evicted-videos
For details of speakers and topics, please visit the event page here: https://www.disruptionlab.org/evicted-by-greed
The 20th conference of the Disruption Network Lab curated by Tatiana
Bazzichelli & Mauro Mondello is DATA CITIES: SMART TECHNOLOGIES,
TRACKING & HUMAN RIGHTS. It will take place on September 25-27 at Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin. More info: https://www.disruptionlab.org/data-cities
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A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.
Events, Exhibitions, Open Calls, Festivals and Conferences
News From Where We Are: The Furtherfield Podcast | First broadcast Friday 10th April 2020 | We may be confined to our homes by the Coronavirus emergency but we still have access to thriving networked cultures from around the world. ‘News From Where We Are’ is the Furtherfield podcast hosted by co-founder and co-artistic director Marc Garrett, a conversation with many voices from the ground | Coming soon in April | Join us and send 90-second audio updates | Interviews with Cassie Thornton, Cade Diem & Joseph DeLappe. Contributions from Jaya Klara Brekke, Régine DeBatty, Jeremy Height, and more. More info at https://buff.ly/33C3kYG | Every 2nd Friday, on Soundcloud – https://soundcloud.com/furtherfield
Upcoming: Art & Animals in the Age of AI and Bio-Engineering | Next month, Regine DeBatty will be giving online classes on the theme of Art & Animals in the Age of AI and Bio-Engineering with the School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe | How do artists, designers and activists use artificial intelligence, virtual reality, robotics, synthetic biology, the blockchain or gaming to probe and communicate techno-scientific developments? To investigate the shifting paradigms of the living, thinking world? To make us accept that time has come to co-evolve in a more sympathetic and mutually beneficial way with other living entities, whether “natural”, lab-grown or hybrid? | Mon, Apr 6, 2020, 7:00 PM – Mon, May 4, 2020, 9:00 PM CEST – https://tinyurl.com/w9y6d2v
Distant Movement(s) | A series of performances experimenting with online togetherness and the possibility to experience dance in front of a screen, while we close our eyes. Exploring, being attentive and dancing together are the key concepts of this artistic experience. The project originated in 2018 from a combination of two different approaches, both anchored in exploring bodily sensation. Daniel Pinheiro and Annie Abrahams are interested in the limits and possibilities of online collaboration and communication and use telematic performance as a tool to understand more about it – https://distantmovements.tumblr.com/dm
Peoples Bank of Govanhill | Join us for remote exchange and collective imagining | Drawing Workshop | Monday 13th April 3pm | Join artists Raman Mundair and Ailie Rutherford to collectively imagine a post-capitalist future DRAWING WORKSHOP | This moment of global crisis and the Covid pandemic is likely to transform capitalism as we know it. While this is a difficult time for all of us, times of crisis can also open up space for new possibilities to emerge. It is in these times that large collective shifts in consciousness are possible and major shifts in political and economic structures can happen. We are already seeing lower pollution levels, reduced consumption and new mutual care networks. What else do we imagine happening that didn’t seem possibly before? https://tinyurl.com/wzua7vu
OPEN CALL FOR ART! In response to COVID-19 | Amplifier is launching an emergency open call for artwork around the themes of Public Health & Safety or Mental Health & Well-being. Throughout the month of April, 30 artists will be selected to receive $1k awards, starting next week! I’ll be one of the guest curators for this project, alongside Nancy Spector and Hank Willis Thomas. You can submit and vote on artwork here: bit.ly/globalopencall. These symbols will stand long after the virus is gone as a testament to our resilience, join Amplifier in this historic moment by submitting! – https://tinyurl.com/yx3v3nmb
Michael Szpakowski | Visit his latest phtographs on Flicker. An artist, composer & writer. His music has been performed all over the UK, in Russia & the USA. He has exhibited work in galleries in the UK, mainland Europe & the USA. His short films have been shown throughout the world. He is a joint editor of the online video resource DVblog – https://www.flickr.com/photos/szpako/
#Covid Creatives Toolkit: Mutual aid for digital spaces | Set up by Kat Braybrooke | A set of carefully-curated mutual aid resources, ideas and pathways for creative practitioners (including artists, makers, curators, designers, hackers, educators, facilitators, etc) who find themselves needing to migrate their practice onto digital spaces and places. The kit’s 7 sections are intended to support different aspects of this journey, from digital gathering to digital well-being – https://tinyurl.com/reakdoz
Books, Papers & Publications
Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age | Brian Jefferson | Brian Jefferson explores the history of digital computing and criminal justice, revealing how big tech, computer scientists, university researchers, and state actors have digitized carceral governance over the past forty years. He shows how digital technology has expanded the wars on crime and drugs, enabling our current state of mass incarceration and further entrenching the nation’s racialized policing and punishment. Brian Jefferson is associate professor of geography and geographic information science at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign | University of Minnesota Press – https://tinyurl.com/ugkj2dq
Museums Inside Out: Artist Collaborations and New Exhibition Ecologies | Mark W. Rectanus | Rectanus investigates how museums are blurring the boundaries between their gallery walls and public spaces. He examines how artists are challenging and changing museums, taking readers deep into new experiments in exhibition making while also offering insights about how museums currently exemplify the fusion of the creative and digital economies. Museums Inside Out introduces a new vocabulary to understand the place of artists in redefining and contesting the museum in the context of globalization and the creative economy | University of Minnesota Press – https://tinyurl.com/tbwmgmq
Embodied Computing: Wearables, Implantables, Embeddables, Ingestibles | Edited by Isabel Pedersen and Andrew Iliadis | Practitioners and scholars explore ethical, social, and conceptual issues arising in relation to such devices as fitness monitors, neural implants, and a toe-controlled computer mouse. The contributors examine technologies that range from fitness monitors to neural implants to a toe-controlled mouse. They discuss topics that include the policy implications of ingestibles; the invasive potential of body area networks, which transmit data from bodily devices to the internet; cyborg experiments, linking a human brain directly to a computer; the evolution of the ankle monitor and other intrusive electronic monitoring devices; fashion tech, which offers users an aura of “cool” in exchange for their data; and the “final frontier” of techno-supremacism: technologies that seek to read our minds | MIT Press – https://tinyurl.com/s6bjrt6
The filth and the fury: punk graphics – in pictures | Guardian | Andrew Krivine has been collecting punk memorabilia since 1977. His book Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die contains over 650 posters, flyers, record sleeves and adverts, charting a DIY ethos that changed graphic design for ever | The book is published on 2 April by Pavilion Books – https://tinyurl.com/ut4aqn4
Articles, Interviews, Blogs, Presentations, videos
Is Accelerationism a Gateway Aesthetic to Fascism? On the Rise of Taboo in Contemporary Art | By Dorian Batycka | What does cancel culture have to do with the rise of techno-futurism and accelerationist ideas in contemporary art? Art critic Dorian Batycka analyzes the recent uptick in accelerationist inspired artworks, examining their manifestation in exhibitions such as the 6th Athens Biennale and the 9th Berlin Biennale, asking to what extent ideas inspired by the accelerationist philosopher Nick Land, have led to proto-fascist ideas percolating within the realm of contemporary art. Download PDF – https://tinyurl.com/rxusqrk
Tales of a DisCO, Straight from the Dancefloor | By Timothy McKeon and Sara Escribano | Guerilla Translation | DisCOs are a commons-oriented, feminist, cooperative way for people to work together. A set of ideals and criteria for ensuring that patterns of oppression and violence that permeate our society are not replicated within intentional, cooperative spaces. DisCOs systematize fairness and the recognition of care work. They help to keep projects geared towards the common good, towards the Commons. DisCOs are essentially a system, but systems are best understood when implemented and that’s where Guerrilla Translation comes in. Our small translation collective is the first DisCO—the pilot project – https://t.co/foEgIV4C2I?amp=1
Excursion to an Alien World | Living with Plan B | Blog post by Aileen Deirig disussing life since living in a commune in Spain | “Calafou has been described as giving the impression of a post-apocalyptic scene, and post-capitalist is one of the self-descriptions. As I have been living in Calafou since the end of last August, this has become so normal that it can feel quite jarring to go to other places and find that they are still pre-apocalyptic and apparently haven’t got the memo yet that capitalism is dying. When I stepped out of a train last Monday evening and found myself in the midst of a brightly illuminated shopping mall, I felt I had landed uncomfortably on the wrong planet.” Read on – https://tinyurl.com/wxzozao
Mutual aid for those who have lost work | Pirate Care Network | pirate.care.syllabus ▒▒▒ 🐙 | Outlined forms of mutual aid to help those who are precarious and currently have no source of income, those who are being laid off, and in general those who have not enough money. It includes propositions where to start if you want to mutualise money, resources and labour — a solidarity fund, a common wallet, shared purchases, a library of things, common.coin, time bank and labour related legal and union support. All this assumes strikes at the point of production, circulation and care work, rent strikes, and demands for a universal sick pay and a quarantine universal basic income – https://tinyurl.com/vgehfbm
Ann Pettifor on Coronavirus Capitalism | Interview with author and campaigner Ann Pettifor, getting her take on the economic consequences of Coronavirus. I specifically ask Ann about the prospects of a debt write down, and whether we may be able to achieve lasting change from the embers of this crisis to capitalism. Hope & Action’s new Vodcasts, explore the need for urgent economic change. Join filmmakers Dan Edelstyn & Hilary Powell as they debate ideas of how to attack the financial crisis with leading thinkers | Youtube – https://tinyurl.com/roctuw4
Ideas to resist | CCCB Lab | Some inspiration to lift our mood during the days of confinement we’re experiencing in certain parts of the world. A couple of weeks before confinement started we asked some of our collaborators to send us inspiring texts to offset the wave of bad news about the current state of the world. We wanted to publish a plural post to inspire hope and optimism, with essential questions, bright ideas and simple solutions. This is the result, in the midst of the global pandemic with consequences and lessons that will define the near future | Víctor Recort Berta Gómez Santo Tomás Albert Lloreta João França Joana Moll Tania Adam Lucas Ramada Prieto Toni Navarro Míriam Hatibi – http://lab.cccb.org/en/ideas-to-resist/
This Is Not the Apocalypse You Were Looking For | Laurie Penny | Pop culture has been inundated with catastrophe porn for decades. None of it has prepared us for our new reality. For years, angry young idiots have fantasised about a shit-hits-the-fan collapse of civilisation scenario, where men would be real men again, and women would be grateful. But in this crisis, our heroes are not soldiers -they are healers and carers | Wired – https://tinyurl.com/uoswgws
Socialism in a time of pandemics | International Socialism | Joseph Choonara’s analysis of the Covid-19 crisis looks at the history of epidemics, the origins of the coronavirus in capitalist development and agriculture, what the outbreak means for the world economy and how the left can respond. “Above all, a pandemic on this scale intensifies the pre-existing fault lines of capitalism. At the most basic level it poses a choice: defend profits or save lives. The indications, thus far, are that the former has been the overriding priority for those presiding over the system. This article explores how pandemics enmesh with the logic of capital and offers some potential responses from the left | https://tinyurl.com/r6owqay
The Political Possibility of Sound. Interview with Salomé Voegelin | By Leandro Pisano | Digicult | What are the political potentials of listening? How does sound define the crossing of the territories of contemporaneity, of the differences in race, gender, social belonging? How can we, in the invisible depth of sound, define our belonging to the contemporary world, taking an active position in issues that concern ethics, subjectivity, the principles of collective and individual living? After attempting to define a series of possible philosophical and post-phenomenological approaches to sound art in the previous two books – Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (Continuum, 2010), and Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound (Bloomsbury, 2014) – the Swiss writer and artist Salomé Voegelin continues her analysis on listening practices, in a new book entitled The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening (Bloomsbury) whose themes juxtapose and which reflects on the encounter between political processes and the sounds we are constantly immersed in – https://tinyurl.com/t9xzszo
Pandemic Inequalities, Pandemic Demands | By weareplanc | We need to recognise that ‘staying at home’ doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. For some, homes are a sanctuary. For others, the home is another place of work, where cooking, cleaning and childcare take up the majority of their time and energy. There are many for whom the home is a place of danger, with time outside, if possible, being a respite from abuse. For people with mental or physical illness, for the elderly and disabled, the isolation they may face through being confined to the home can be deeply unhealthy, at times terrifying. Some people don’t have homes at all; being shunted from one sofa to another, sleeping in night shelters or out on the streets are dangerous “options” during this pandemic for those that have few already – https://bit.ly/2wJnynq
Is This a Dress Rehearsal? | Bruno Latour | The unforeseen coincidence between a general confinement and the period of Lent is still quite welcome for those who have been asked, out of solidarity, to do nothing and to remain at a distance from the battle front. This obligatory fast, this secular and republican Ramadan can be a good opportunity for them to reflect on what is important and what is derisory. . . . It is as though the intervention of the virus could serve as a dress rehearsal for the next crisis, the one in which the reorientation of living conditions is going to be posed as a challenge to all of us, as will all the details of daily existence that we will have to learn to sort out carefully. I am advancing the hypothesis, as have many others, that the health crisis prepares, induces, incites us to prepare for climate change. This hypothesis still needs to be tested – https://tinyurl.com/s2y9hcp
Image: An assemblage from an excellent collection of photographs taken by Michael Szpakowski. https://www.flickr.com/photos/szpako/
The FurtherList Archives
https://www.furtherfield.org/the-furtherlist-archives/
A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.
Events, Exhibitions, Festivals and Conferences
TransLocal Cooperation Exhibition | 13 March – 19 April | An exhibition of works born of cooperation and knowledge exchange between Turkish, Greek, Serbian and British artists seeking translocal solidarity in a hyper-connected world. As our world has become hyper-connected it has enabled us to simultaneously occupy or travel through numerous physical and virtual locations. A result of this is that we increasingly each identify with more than one place or culture. This social and cultural aspect of globalisation is often described in terms of ‘translocality’, where the events, conditions, and attachments of one location can rapidly influence and connect with another | Furtherfield Gallery | Finsbury Park, London | Opening Event | Thur, 12 Mar, 18:00 – 20:00 | Booking Essential – https://cutt.ly/ntwYrtw
Cassie Thornton presents The Hologram: Collective Health as a “Beautiful Art Work” | A series of talks from the Love Machines season | Artist Cassie Thornton, of the Feminist Economics Department (the FED), will discuss The Hologram, a mythoreal collective peer-to-peer health project currently incubating at Furtherfield Gallery in London. The Hologram, based on the understanding that all our crises are connected and everyone is a little sick, is a viral four-person health monitoring and diagnostic system practiced from couches all over the world. This health distribution system is based on the experimental care models developed in the Social Solidarity Clinics in Greece during the height of the financial and migration crisis. The result is the construction of a robust network of multi-dimensional health, collectively oriented social practices, and trust that can outlive racial capitalism as an act of resistance. Furtherfield Commons, Finsbury Park London, UK | 10 March 2020, Tues 18 March 2020, Weds 13:30 – 17:00 | Booking Required – https://cutt.ly/ntwYddK
Dawn of the Transhuman Era | Tuesday, 17 March 2020 | Transhumanism argues that we should preserve and extend the unique properties that make us human by radically altering ourselves and the environment around us. Recently transhumanist thinking has seen a resurgence thanks to new technological developments that point towards the possibility that many of its promises will be realised. This raises a number of challenging issues that aspiring transhumanists must soon face: from how they will choose to manipulate or upgrade their body; to how they will approach the taboo of death – especially if, in principle, you could live forever | Join transhumanist Prof. Steve Fuller and bioethics researcher Francesca Minerva for FUTURES Podcast LIVE, Hosted by The Truman Brewery, FUTURES Podcast, Schwabe Verlag, Experimental Thought Co, and Luke Robert Mason – Eventbrite – https://bit.ly/2TBEOT0
Deffffffficiency | Solo exhibition by Joana Moll | 18 March 2020 – 04 April 2020 | Panke gallery, Berlin | Joana Moll is a Barcelona/Berlin based artist and researcher. Her work critically explores the way post-capitalist narratives affect the alphabetization of machines, humans and ecosystems. Her main research topics include Internet materiality, surveillance, social profiling and interfaces – https://cutt.ly/ctekvX2
Workshop: Subvertising for the Right to Housing | Hosted by Disruption Network Lab | Thursday, 26 March 2020 | With Steal This Poster (Subvertising Collective IT/UK) and Kunstblock And Beyond (DE) | Subvertising is the combination between subvert and advertising. During this workshop we will work with Steal This Poster (Rome/London), and Kunstblock (Berlin) to learn tactics and techniques of subvertising related to aggressive corporations in the context of housing eviction.Part of the Disruption Network Lab 19th conference: “EVICTED BY GREED: Global finance, Housing & Resistance” (27-28 March, 2020, Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien). Location: Supermarkt Berlin, Mehringplatz 9, 10969 Berlin – https://pretix.eu/disruptionlab/evicted/
The Festival of Alternative Art Education | Festival of Alternative Art Education, London | Sat 21st March | Fuelled by economic crisis, austerity and the liberalisation of higher education, the landscape of alternative art education features a multitude of diverse organisations that offer free or affordable art education. Bringing together alternative art schools, peer-support groups and collectives in a range of events, performances, discussions, installations, stalls and workshops on education, pedagogy, peer-support, co-operation, self-organisation, labour and precarity. Come along to participate, learn, play and meet representatives from the schools to find out what they do, how to get involved or how to start your own art school – https://bit.ly/3ai94ZF
Zanele Muholi | Tate Modern presents the first major mid-career survey of visual activist Muholi in the UK | 29 April – 18 October 2020 | Born in South Africa, Muholi came to prominence in the early 2000s with photographs that sought to envision black lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and intersex lives beyond deviance or victimhood. Muholi’s work challenges hetero-patriarchal ideologies and representations, presenting the participants in their photographs as confident and beautiful individuals bravely existing in the face of prejudice, intolerance and, frequently, violence. Muholi’s striking portraits will be on display in their upcoming exhibition at Tate Modern – https://bit.ly/2VEU97B
Books, Open Calls, Papers & Publications
Call Out | Let’s Create An Artist in Every Community (and let’s create it now)… | Stephen Pritchard | This article sets out how we could easily and relatively cheaply employ artists in everyday community and how such a simple, yet radical system would create just the sort of transformative cultural change that is at the heart of Arts Council England’s new 10-year strategy, Let’s Create. Create a working group to develop this idea and hopefully trial it as a participatory action research project somewhere. So get in touch if you’re interested – https://cutt.ly/5twO1Uy
Control Shift | Call out open for artworks, workshops and provocations | Deadline 15th March | An exciting new arts programme coming to Bristol (UK) in June 2020 exploring creative and critical approaches to technology, rooted in embodiment and materiality. Control Shift asks how we can reframe and rethink our relationships with technology. How could we conceive of new possibilities beyond neoliberal versions of computing? What might happen if there was more space for poetic or tactile engagements with the digital? Can we reconsider our connections, responsibilities and embodied entanglements with technology? – https://www.control-shift.network/
Call Out: Piet Zwart Institute Experimental Publishing (XPUB) | A two-year master focussed on the acts of making things public and creating publics in the age of post-digital networks. Calling all AI hiding blockchain comics, adults screaming hyper-binary screensavers, governments designing multi-DIWO architectures, viruses disrupting top-down traditions, hobbyists sending non-industrial software, teachers seeing copyrighted blogs, whistleblowers spamming shared files, celebrities criticizing homemade synthesizers, judges demanding AI carpets, individuals showing inter-anarcho-capitalist corruption, more here – https://www.pzwart.nl/experimental-publishing/
Applications Deadlines: 06.03.2020: NON-EU + EU priority | 24.04.2020: Final EU deadline
The new Neural issue | (co-edited with Nicolas Maigret, Maria Roszkowska) is hot from the press. Subscribe now! Because only subscribers will get a free extra Post-Growth Toolkit by Nicolas Maigret and Maria Roszkowska. You can also subscribe to the magazine Digital Edition accessing all issues since #29. Or you can buy the magazine from the closest of the almost 300 stores stocking it. A back issues pack is available – http://neural.it/issues/neural-64-post-growth/
Mycelium Network Society | An open, living, organic network. Observing the concept of nature’s distributed network in self-expanding mode, we seek your participation as a node, a node that cultivates locally and connects globally. Interlacing mosaics of mycelium infuse habitats with information-sharing membranes. The mycelium stays in constant molecular communication with its environment, devising diverse enzymatic and chemical responses to complex challenges. To become a node join Mycelium Network Society – http://mns.stwst.at/
Open Call: Summer Sessions 2020 | V2_Lab for Unstable Media | The Summer Sessions are short-term international art and technology residencies for emerging artists and designers. A network of cultural organizations all over the world sponsors and hosts the residencies. Every summer we offer early-career artists and designers support so they can take part in production residencies abroad. If selected, you will gain an opportunity to work in a highly productive atmosphere with support, feedback and expert supervision. Each Summer Sessions residency lasts approximately eight weeks and takes place between June and September. During this period you will develop your project from concept to presentable work, ready to show – https://cutt.ly/1twSy99
A Course in: Feminist Art and Exhibitions: History and Challenges | Online Course by Node Center, Berlin | By Anja Foerschner | Duration: Apr 08 – Apr 29, 2020, Enroll before: Apr 4, 2020 | This course will look at how feminist thinking has influenced the arts since the 1960s, both in Western as well as selected non-Western contexts. It will present the foundational feminist theories that furthered the radicalization of female artists and trace their manifestation in the visual arts. Due to its strong political content and often taboo-breaking visuality, feminist art continues to present its own set of challenges to curators and museum professionals. The course will introduce students to the most important exhibitions of feminist art and discuss their strategies, premises, and criticism. In addition, the course will present curatorial practices and exhibition formats that follow feminist premises – https://nodecenter.net/course/feminist-art
A DAO of One’s Own? Feminist strategies for P2P Organisations | White paper by Denise Thwaites | On P2Pmodels | Experiments in building and deploying Decentralized Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) have proliferated, marking a transition (in many cases) from software design and development towards alpha and beta testing stages. From a technical perspective this is a key moment in the evolution of such systems, as communities of users test and provide feedback on the functionality of these products. For those interested in the potential social impact of DAOs, the stakes of this moment are even higher: it is the period where community needs are defined beyond the theoretical user. It provides opportunities to challenge the form and functionality of these decentralized socio-technical infrastructures while they are still relatively plastic. For this reason, we must look closely at the composition of participants at this stage of DAO development, to consider whether their engagement can lay foundations for alternative social configurations, or further entrench existing social biases – https://cutt.ly/PtwYbcL
The Ghost In You by Jeremy Hight | On WTBC Radio | Is your life like a ghost… or is a ghost living in your life? Would either of you know it? In this novel, a teacher comes to grips with the emptiness of her life, while a ghost attempts to do the same. This novel explores the places where many of us live, inside and outside of our heads. Limited to 100 Print copies, with a translucent cover. Get yours today – https://cutt.ly/itri9Xs
Women Warriors: An Unexpected History | By Pamela D. Toler | Who says women don’t go to war? From Vikings and African queens to cross-dressing military doctors and WWII Russian fighter pilots, these are the stories of women for whom battle was not a metaphor. The woman warrior is always cast as an anomaly—Joan of Arc, not GI Jane. But women, it turns out, have always gone to war. In this fascinating and lively world history, Pamela Toler not only introduces us to women who took up arms, she also shows why they did it and what happened when they stepped out of their traditional female roles to take on other identities | Published by Beacon Press – https://cutt.ly/2twwAqO
Articles, Interviews, Presentations, videos
Silvia Federici: The joyful militancy of feminism | By Julius Gavroche | Interview conducted by Victoria Furtado and Mariana Menéndez | While throughout the world the fourth feminist strike is being prepared in hundreds of meetings, activities and assemblies, listening to Silvia Federici is inspiring. In a stop in her travelling about the world, sharing keys of understanding and giving courage, Silvia met with us at her home in New York to discuss current feminist struggles, the popular revolts of recent months, the tensions of feminism with the left and the highlights of her latest book – https://cutt.ly/utwOPn5
B-hind. Celebrating the internet of anal things| Regine Debatty reviews the product launch performance of B-hind: intimate innovation by Dani Ploeger | V2_, the Lab for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam, and In4Art, an organisation dedicated to “art-driven innovation”, challenged artists to select one of the works realised at V2_ over the course of its 40 year old history and to reimagine, reengineer and reenact it today. The first experiment in the series is by Dani Ploeger. The artist and cultural critic decided to revisit Stelarc’s Amplified Body, a performance that took place in 1994 and engaged with the relationship between humans, machines and the surrounding space and ultimately the role and functioning of the body – https://cutt.ly/EtwYJkz
Oceans between Sound | An album from intercultural tele-improvisation internet based music ensemble Ethernet Orchestra. A selection of live improvisations by the internet based music ensemble, Ethernet Orchestra. The album was recorded during located venue performances and online sessions between 2014-2019, featuring musicians from a diverse range of cultures, performing across international time-zones and physical locations in Brazil, the USA, Canada, UK, Germany and Australia. The music was inspired by the ebb and flow of network data as a metaphor for the world’s oceans and waterways separating the members of the ensemble, and their geographically dispersed lives | Published on the Pueblo Nuevo Netlabel – https://cutt.ly/7tebPQ6
For sale: Sponsored Influenza Pandemic Evacuation Rehearsal booklet by Heath Bunting & Kayle Brandon 2005/6 | “A flu pandemic would inevitably take the Cube Microplex and other entertainment venues out of business. We intend to sow the seeds of rebirth by preserving the values and methods embodied within our workers by providing effective advice and procedures for their physical survival. This report is a developmental first step in this DIY health programme.” Price 200.00 eur (plus packaging and postage)
Artist signed booklet from 2005 Pandemic Evacuation Rehearsal. http://duo.irational.org/siper/report/siper_document01.pdf
http://duo.irational.org/siper/
Bus Regulation: The Musical | Ellie Harrison | Video of performance | Inspired by the 1980s hit musical ‘Starlight Express’, the new performance / event re-enacts the history of public transport provision in Greater Manchester from the post-war period to the present day… on roller skates!Staged at Manchester Art Gallery for the closing celebration of the Get Together & Get Things Done exhibition on Saturday 28 September 2019, Bus Regulation: The Musical is produced in collaboration with the Better Buses for Greater Manchester campaign, the Association of British Commuters and local roller skaters – https://www.ellieharrison.com/busregulation/
The Smithsonian Puts 2.8 Million High-Res Images Online and Into the Public Domain | Open Culture | The Smithsonian has released 2.8 million images into the public domain, making them searchable, shareable, and downloadable through the museum’s Open Access platform. This huge release of “high resolution two- and three-dimensional images from across its collections,” notes Smithsonian Magazine, “is just the beginning. Throughout the rest of 2020, the Smithsonian will be rolling out another 200,000 or so images, with more to come as the Institution continues to digitize its collection of 155 million items and counting.” – https://cutt.ly/xtwY9Rm
Let’s Talk about Sex (and Race and Colonialism) | By Layla-Roxanne Hill | As Western societies continue to experience social, environmental and economic crises, our ideas and beliefs on what constitutes work and what kinds of work are valued are ever changing: whether it be the ways care and sexual labour are regarded, the role of exploitation and criminalisation, or imagining what a post-work terrain could look like. Combined with an ever-increasing awareness the impact automation technology like artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics will have on jobs, skills, and wages, the future of work continues to be one of the most debatable topics of 2019 – https://cutt.ly/ltwYNRX
Image: from Panke Gallery, Berlin, for Deffffffficiency. Solo exhibition by Joana Moll. 18 March 2020 – 04 April 2020.
The FurtherList Archives
https://www.furtherfield.org/the-furtherlist-archives/
A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.
Events, Exhibitions, Festivals and Conferences
Data Dating | Exhibition Wednesday 15 January – Sunday 1 March 2020 | What does it mean to love in the Internet 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? Are the new means of connection shifting the old paradigms of adult life? The advent of the Internet and smartphones has brought about a split in the romantic lives of millions of people, who now inhabit both the real world and their very own “phone world” | Artists: Addie Wagenknecht & Pablo Garcia, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Ashley Madison, Angels at Work in London, VR Hug, Tom Galle, Moises Sanabria, John Yuyi, Antoine Schmitt, Olga Fedorova, Adam Basanta, Jeroen Van Loon, Thomas Israel | Watermans Art Centre, London – https://bit.ly/2unO6ZX
Querying the Archive | Hosted by MayDay Rooms | Thursday, 13 February 2020 | London | An on-going series of workshops around our archival platform leftove.rs, which will look at the different ways we can open up this online collection material and the technical processes between it. We want to think through that kind of strategies, queries and categories will help us navigate something that is both an database and resource of radical history. The first session we will be learning about the platform and mapping the collection by pooling our knowledge of radical histories of dissent to help us think about how we search, input and categories this large collection of material. https://leftove.rs
The Habitat of Time | Curated by Julie Louise Bacon | Arts Catalyst | Thu 20 February 2020 – Sat 14 March 2020 | The project focuses on the way that time as a medium shapes our perception of life, the structure of societies, and the vastness of the physical world. The artworks featured in the exhibition propose a rescaling of human time and expose its deep interrelations with the diversity of the more-than-human realm, moving through the geological, technological, biological and cosmic. In the 21st century, the instability of globalisation, the speed of digital technologies, and the transformation of knowledge are generating rapid shifts in time | Featuring: Eva Nolan, Thomson & Craighead, Robert Andrew, Lucy Bleach, James Geurts, Josh Wodak – https://bit.ly/2uo2Sjv
Pre-histories and Futures of Machine Vision | Friday, 28 February 2020 | V&A, London | How do machines see? From autonomous vehicles to deep fakes, machine vision is changing contemporary life. Join curators, artists and scholars to discuss the impact of AI technologies on the past, present and future of art. Explore early moments in the development of computer art and machine vision, from the mid-1960s onwards in the home of the UK’s most important historic computer art collection. Join contemporary artists, designers and curators considering the aesthetic and political implications of contemporary computer vision and machine learning technologies. Speakers include digital scholars Zabet Patterson (Stony Brook) and Joel McKim (Birkbeck), V&A curators Douglas Dodds and Natalie Kane, and contemporary artists Anna Ridler and Alan Warburton | 10.30 – 17.00 | Hochhauser Auditorium, V&A South Kensington – https://bit.ly/371PYVM
QUANTUM: IN SEARCH OF THE INVISIBLE | From March 5 until May 31, 2020 | An international art exhibition exploring the world of quantum physics, through works created by artists resulting from their encounters with researchers at CERN, Geneva | Featuring ten commissioned artworks by internationally renowned artists, which rethink scientific research and facts to explore states of being and the very possibilities of reality. These works question how much we really know about the world around us, and how we may begin to discover new aspects by taking a different perspective | Brussels, Belgium – https://www.imal.org/en
Three Acres And A Cow | Hosted by Three Acres And A Cow and 3 others | ‘Three Acres And A Cow’ connects the Norman Conquest and Peasants’ Revolt with current issues like Brexit, fracking, the housing crisis and food sovereignty movement via the Enclosures, English Civil War, Irish Land League and Industrial Revolution, drawing a compelling narrative through the radical people’s history of England in folk song, stories and poems. Part TED talk, part history lecture, part folk club sing-a-long, part poetry slam, part storytelling session… Come and share in these tales as they have been shared for generations. Featuring Robin Grey and Rachel Rose Reid | 12 March 2020 – http://threeacresandacow.co.uk
Workshop: Subvertising for the right to housing | March 26, 2020 @ SUPERMARKT BERLIN | With Steal This Poster (Subvertising Collective IT/UK) and others. These workshops show us how subvertising offers a creative way to rewrite the narrative about the housing market in the streets where gentrification operates. Outdoor advertising is the most emblematic form of consumerist propaganda. It privatises sections of public spaces with the purpose to conditioning mass behaviours imposing specific narratives. How can we untangle those narrations? And how can we take over those spaces subtracted from the public realm for private interests? | registrations open soon | sign up for the newsletter – https://bit.ly/2OqppD2
EVICTED BY GREED: Global Finance, Housing & Resistance | Uncovering how ghostly shell companies and real estate speculation evict real people from their homes – and what to do about it | Investigations on how how speculative finance drives the global and local housing crisis, and gathers experts & activists from around the world to share and find counter-strategies | The Conference, March 27-28, 2020, Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien | Disruption Network Lab – https://bit.ly/2S2SEya
Books, Open Calls, Papers & Publications
Open Call – Science Gallery London | Inviting expressions of interest for projects to become part of the forthcoming AI & Ethics season. Whether your application is art, scientific inquiry, or a combination of these, we are looking to work with individuals and groups who are critically exploring ethical issues around the development and implementation of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly (though not exclusively) within the context of healthcare | Open from 31st January 2020 to 23rd February 2020 – https://bit.ly/2Ut377q
Open Call – URgh! zine #1 on Alternative Art Education | DEADLINE Friday, 21 Feb 2020 | Submissions are open for the first issue of URgh! We welcome contributions that explore and document alternative art education within self-organised, DIY, peer-led art schools and collectives, to extend the existing research and amplify the movement. A new zine on precarious labour dreaming up alternative economies at the coalface of the art educational creative industrial complex. The first issue will be launched on Saturday, 21 March 2020 at the Festival of Alternative Art Education 2020 at Conway Hall. https://videomole.tv/urgh-zine/
Art Meets Radical Openness 2020 – OPEN CALL: Of Whirlpools and Tornadoes | 20th – 23rd of May 2020 | Deadline: Monday 24.02.2020 | AMRO is a biennial community festival in Linz that explores and discusses new challenges between digital culture, art, everyday life, education, politics and activism. The 2020 edition of the AMRO festival is characterized by reflections upon the “centripetal” and “centrifugal” dynamics of acceleration visible in contemporary society and the ways artistic practice, activism and radical thinking can engage with it – http://radical-openness.org/en
Technological Sovereignty: Democratising Technology and Innovation Green Paper | Within DiEM25, by crowdsourcing collective knowledge have identified three key ways to achieve Technological Sovereignty. They try to define the issues, and provide short, medium and long term solutions, based on two processes: Regulation and Renewal. And we need to establish the conditions for social innovation and democratic societal transformation – https://internal.diem25.org/en/vote/205/public
Culture, Technology and the Image: Techniques of Engaging with Visual Culture | Edited by Jeremy Pilcher | Culture, Technology and the Image explores the technologies deployed when images are archived, accessed and distributed. The chapters discuss the ways in which habits and techniques used in learning and communicating knowledge about images are affected by technological developments. The volume discusses a wide range of issues, including access and participation; research, pedagogy and teaching; curation and documentation; circulation and re-use; and conservation and preservation | Intellectbooks – https://bit.ly/2v9CFoF
Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures | By Christina Dunbar-Hester | Hacking, as a mode of technical and cultural production, is commonly celebrated for its extraordinary freedoms of creation and circulation. Yet surprisingly few women participate in it: rates of involvement by technologically skilled women are drastically lower in hacking communities than in industry and academia. Hacking Diversity investigates the activists engaged in free and open-source software to understand why, despite their efforts, they fail to achieve the diversity that their ideals support | Prince University Press – https://bit.ly/2SlvCBl
Call for Papers – Media Theory, Media Fiction, and Infrastructures Beyond the Earth | Today, established space agencies are struggling with national funding, and numerous countries are starting ambitious space programs, and private companies and individuals are building innovative space plans and technologies. The current socio-political configuration offers thinkers and practitioners new opportunities by which to intervene in how we envision and inhabit the cosmos. Media Theory, Media Fiction, and Infrastructures Beyond the Earth is a two-day workshop May 7-8, 2020 at University of Toronto, Mississauga that will investigate space exploration and inhabitation from the point of view of media studies | University of Toronto Mississauga, USA – https://bit.ly/383z623
Call for proposals – (Infra)Structures | 4 – 5 June 2020 | Centre for Postdigital Cultures annual conference | Coventry University, UK | Proposals for its 3rd annual conference on infrastructures | This conference takes interest in infrastructures as an invisible system of meaning-making and a mode of structuring people and knowledge, in the institutional contexts and conditions of this structuring, as well as in possible models of intervening in these very structures. By doing so, we hope to interrogate the potential of making infrastructure visible – remarkable – as a means of speaking to power. We are interested in exploring what new ways of understanding, developing, reconfiguring or hacking infrastructures might be possible if we focus on their radical potential – https://bit.ly/31rd1rC
Articles, Interviews, Presentations, videos
Poetry v. the Body Politic: writing a political movement | Excerpts from a dialogue on the relationship between poetry and politics in Iran today, between Poetry International Archives Iran editor Abol Froushan and Ali Abdolrezaei, a major Iranian poet and leader of a grassroots political movement that has been spreading in Iran since the uprising of January 2018, when the multimedia Colleges of Persian Poetry and of Fiction became a political movement. What incubated as a literary movement calling for democracy of the text and literary styles transformed into a movement for democracy and freedom from the Islamic Republic and its political and economic stranglehold on Iranians – https://bit.ly/2Sn6bPJ
Interview with Helen Knowles by Regine Debatty | Trickle Down, A New Vertical Sovereignty | A prison in Liverpool, an Ethereal Summit in New York city, a prestigious Russian art auction at Sotheby’s, a market in North Manchester. These places and the communities that spend time there have little in common. What is more, they sit at opposite ends of the spectrum of financial power. That’s exactly what appealed to Helen Knowles. Helen Knowles is currently exhibiting the result of this long research at Arebyte Gallery in London – https://bit.ly/2S16mkR
Rowland Atkinson reviews Thomas Piketty’s eagerly awaited new book Capital and ideology in the city | “In all nations and at all times societies require some system or series of defences of the disparities that exist within them. Different kinds of societies have achieved this in their own distinctive ways and in fact much of this more than 1,000 page work delves into the long history of such arrangements. Piketty calls these narratives and systems of thinking inequality regimes. There is power at work in the narratives, ideas and legitimising frameworks deployed by elites and which are shared more broadly within society as a whole.” https://bit.ly/2UtAE1j
OBIETTIVO BOLOGNA REPORTAGE BY ARIANNA FORTE | The itinerant tour of the project DATAPOIESIS runs into Bologna, historically one of the most active and aware Italian cities in urban policies. Datapoiesis in the city, took place from the 24 to 26 of January 2020, coordinated by Singlossa with local partner MaisonVentidue. Obiettivo, was the first datapoietic artwork, and trigger for reflecting on a new kind of processes capable of bringing awareness and social activation using public data in a conscious way and to face complex global phenomena such as poverty from different points of view – https://datapoiesis.com/home/?p=2348
Image from: Data Dating, Exhibition. Wednesday 15 January – Sunday 1 March 2020 at Watermans Art Centre, London.
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, Festivals and Conferences
Panel Discussion: My Mind, Your Weapon | Hosted by arebyte | Sat 11 Jan 2020 | Join artist Sarah Selby in a discussion around the impact of behavioural targeting on democracy, diversity and autonomy with panelists: Ves Popov, Laurie Love, Kadine James and Rod Dickenson. The panel will focus on fostering curiosity, facilitating discussion and provoking critical thinking around often inaccessible issues surrounding the processes and applications of big data – particularly with regards to data bias, the Internet of Things and Smart Cities – https://bit.ly/2tlGoyU
WILDBIYOO 2020 Artist Residency in the jungle, Goa, India | The tribe goa | 13 Jan 2020 – 2 Feb 2020 | Wildbiyoo is dedicating January 2020 to the arts to summon the world’s most progressive thinkers and creatives to join us in reckoning with the greatest existential crisis of our times. The mission of the month is to investigate how creatives can facilitate new dialogue, inspire social and political transformations and reimagine our relationship to nature in response to climate breakdown | More details on FB – https://bit.ly/2Qh4pA1
Afterall Journal Reading Group: Disobedient Video | Hosted by Arts Catalyst and Afterall | Wednesday, 22 January 2020 | Arts Catalyst hosts the second session in a new series of collaborative reading groups presented by Afterall, for which curator Lauren Houlton will lead a discussion of Afterall Journal article ‘Disobedient Video in France in the 1970s: Video Production by Women’s Collectives’. To mark each new issue of the journal, Afterall is inviting a UK-based reading group to identify a text from the current issue and pair it with external readings and films | FB link – http://tiny.cc/s3ghhz
Trickle Down, A New Vertical Sovereignty – Helen Knowles | Hosted by arebyte and FutureEverything | Thurs 23 Jan 2020, 18:00-21:00 | New Vertical Sovereignty, a new body of work by UK based artist Helen Knowles, is a tokenised four-screen video installation and generative soundscape attached to the blockchain, which explores value systems and wealth disparity. The artwork is composed of auction scenes, performances and choral interludes by different communities such as prisoners, blockchain technology employees, market sellers, and Sotheby’s auction bidders, looking to re-imagine our vertically stacked digital ecosystem to horizontally distribute wealth – https://bit.ly/2F7ThPt
Sonic Electronics with Fixateur Externe/Bubble People/Onin | Hosted by Laura Netz | Sat 25 Jan 2020 | Sonic Electronics is an experimental event | We propose an anti-techno-capitalist approach to music genres like ambient, drone, techno, experimental, electronics, acousmatic, live coding, noise, vaporwave, glitch, dark, new wave, postpunk,….. | Artists: Fixateur Externe / Bubble People (Per Jas) / Onin (James L Malone and Joe Wright) / Medial Ages (Laura Netz) | FB link – http://tiny.cc/n8ghhz
Soft Power 04: an exhibition in a spreadsheet | Hosted by Micheál O’Connell, Andrea Slater and Daniella Norton | Fri 31 Jan 2020, 18:30-23:59 | A fourth exhibition by the Soft Power people, this time in a spreadsheet. Look at it at home, or on your device, or wherever. Drink some wine and chat to friends about what you witness. The link will be supplied with those ‘GOING’ on the date (Thursday 31st October) at 7pm. “We will be limiting numbers Going to this (file) Opening event to a maximum of 60.” For updates sign up to Mocksim’s mailing list http://www.mocksim.org/contact.htm
Queer techno rave INFERNO take over the ICA’s Theatre, Bar and Cinema with an all-night programme of music, queer porn and performance art. Brought to you by performance artist and DJ Lewis G. Burton and producer and musician Sebastian Bartz under their DJ alter-ego Venice Calypso, INFERNO marries the camp with the underground, pop with techno, and the very good with the very bad | Fri, 31 Jan 2020 – https://bit.ly/2S0ntDT
Copy That? Surplus Data in an Age of Repetitive Duplication | Private view of the 2020 art exhibition from the Open Data Institute (ODI), Copy That? Surplus Data in an Age of Repetitive Duplication. The exhibition will be unveiled in the company’s Shoreditch offices on Tuesday 4 February 2020. Artists are Mr Gee, Alistair Gentry and Ben Neale, Edie Jo Murray & Harmeet Chagger-Khan
The evening kicks off with an in-conversation to celebrate the publication of Art Hack Practice: Critical Intersections of Art, Innovation and the Maker Movement, edited by Victoria Bradbury and Suzy O’Hara, which features a chapter on Data as Culture. The panel will be facilitated by Dr. Suzy O’ Hara. Participants are: Hannah Redler-Hawes (ODI), Marc Garett (Furtherfield), Inini Papadimitriou (FutureEverything) – https://bit.ly/39xkk4C
Books, Open Calls, Papers & Publications
Beyond Hashtags: Racial Politics and Black Digital Networks | Critical Cultural Communication | By Sarah Florini | Beyond Hashtags explores these everyday practices and their relationship to larger social issues through an in-depth analysis of a trans-platform network of black American digital and social media users and content creators. In the crucial years leading up to the emergence of the Movement for Black Lives, black Americans used digital networks not only to cope with day-to-day experiences of racism, but also as an incubator for the debates that have since exploded onto the national stage. Published by: NYU Press – https://bit.ly/2r1Bt5l
Networked Content Analysis: The Case of Climate Change | By Sabine Niederer | With a foreword by Klaus Krippendorff | Climate change is one of the key societal challenges of our times, and its debate takes place across scientific disciplines and into the public realm, traversing platforms, sources, and fields of study. The analysis of such mediated debates has a strong tradition, which started in communication science and has since then been applied across a wide range of academic disciplines | Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2019 – https://bit.ly/2SIZyZT
“V[R]erses”: An XR Story Series | A V[R]erse is a microstory. Each story consists of a storybox that can be experienced in 3D via a WebVR enabled mobile device, desktop PC and in Virtual Reality. Each V[R]erse is created by different digital literature authors [text] and Mez Breeze [development + design, model + concept creation, audio]. Designed and Developed by Mez Breeze Design, Supported by Mezangelle. Includes authors/artists: Annie Abrahams, Davin Heckman, Jeremy Hight, Mark Marino, Scott Rettberg | Online – https://bit.ly/343fFDH
The Memory Police (Fiction) | By Yolo Ogawa | “An elegantly spare dystopian fable . . . Reading The Memory Police is like sinking into a snowdrift: lulling yet suspenseful, it tingles with dread and incipient numbness . . . Ogawa’s ruminant style captures the alienation of being alive as the world’s ecosystems, ice sheets, languages, animal species and possible futures vanish more quickly than any one mind can apprehend.” The New York Times Book Review | Penguin Random House USA – https://bit.ly/35k16wp
Museums Inside Out: Artist Collaborations and New Exhibition Ecologies | By Mark W. Rectanus | An ambitious study of what it means to be a museum in the twenty-first century | In Museums Inside Out, investigates how museums are blurring the boundaries between their gallery walls and public spaces. He examines how artists are challenging and changing museums, taking readers deep into new experiments in exhibition making while also offering insights about how museums currently exemplify the fusion of the creative and digital economies. Expected publication: February 1st 2020 by University of Minnesota Press – https://bit.ly/2QdrEee
The Red Years: Forbidden Poems from Inside North Korea | Bandi | Translated by Heinz Insu Fenkl | Authored by one of North Korea’s most acclaimed dissident writers, this is the first collection of Bandi’s poetry to be published in English | Though North Korea holds the attention of the world, it is still rare for us to hear North Korean voices, beyond those few who have escaped. Known only by his pen name, the poet and author ‘Bandi’ stands as one of the most distinctive and original dissident writers to emerge from the country | Zed Books – https://bit.ly/2SNr88i
Liberal Arts Perspectives on Globalism and Transnationalism | Unabridged, 1 Jan 2020 | By Hyun Wu Lee, Mark van de Logt | As international trade and economic activities expand, online technologies spread, and restless populations shift across national boundaries, reactionary movements have sprung up around the globe. These reactionary forces, which include nationalism and populism, have exposed many blind-spots of ongoing globalization projects. To understand the frictions between transnational enterprises and local resistance more fully, as well as analyze the human cost of immigration and the threats posed by online technologies, scholars from around the world gathered in Doha, Qatar, for the Sixth Annual Liberal Arts International Conference (2018) | Cambridge Scholars Publishing – https://bit.ly/368xdjH
Articles, Interviews, Presentations, videos
BEYOND THE “BLOKECHAIN”: THE CRYPTOFEMINIST AGENDA | Video | This session aims to open your mind. Andy Morales Coto tickles your imaginative bones by offering visual prompts to help us redesign the world’s economic future. Ruth Catlow explores the spaces of convergence between the Commons and P2P movements along with the world of cooperatives and the Social and Solidarity Economy. Denise Thwaites offers a feminist analysis of DAO cultures and the emergent affective economies they instate. And Ailie Rutherford shows how feminist economics can be put into practice on a daily basis by presenting her real and existing The People’s Bank of Govanhill | Speakers: Andy Morales Coto, Ruth Catlow, Denise Thwaites, Ailie Rutherford | Moderator: Rachel Falconer | Institute of Network Cultures | https://vimeo.com/376668856
Only 2% of global art auction spending is on work by women, study finds (2019) | A new study has found that despite perceived signs of progress, the art world remains overwhelmingly male-dominated | According to a report assembled by In Other Words & artnet News, the last 10 years has found a lack of growth for female representation in art with just 2% of global art auction spending on work by women. This figure is also unevenly distributed, with five artists making up 40.7% of this figure and Yayoi Kusama in particular accounting for 25% alone. A new report finds women’s work still underrepresented in the art world, with only 11% of art purchased by institutions female-made | Guardian – https://bit.ly/39wDJCQ
CRISPR Cheat Sheet: The Most Important Gene Editing Stories of 2019: Human trials, bird flu, gene editing in space, and more | By Emily Mullin | Medium | On May 4, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched a Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station. Among its cargo was an experiment involving the CRISPR gene-editing system, which astronauts aboard the ISS used to successfully edit DNA in space. They made targeted cuts to the yeast genome that mimicked genetic damage caused by cosmic radiation, one of the biggest health risks that long-term spaceflight poses to humans. They say the ISS experiment could yield clues about how cells repair their DNA in space – https://bit.ly/2ZHZY4v
Raul Vaneigem: Here we are! At the beginning of everything! | Dec 24, 2019 | The sudden attacks of freedom on the suffocating capitalist hydra, constantly make the epicenter of the seismic disturbances fluctuate. The territories of the whole world, affected by the system of private benefits are exposed to the outburst of insurrectional movements. Consciousness is forced to run after successive waves of events, reacting to constant, paradoxically predictable and unexpected shocks. Two realities struggle against each other in the face of the violence. One is the reality of lying. Taking advantage of technological progress, you try to manipulate public opinion for the benefit of established power. The other is the reality of daily life of the population – https://bit.ly/2QdnanP
I believe Google fired me for organising – but tech workers won’t give up the fight | By Kathryn Spiers | 20 December 2019 | Last week I was fired by Google for informing my colleagues of their rights. I created a pop-up that appeared when Google employees visited the website of the union-busting firm the company recently hired, telling them they had the right to organise. Hours later, I was suspended. Google’s decision to retaliate against its own workers isn’t just an issue for Googlers, but for the entire tech industry, including other large companies like Amazon and Facebook – https://bit.ly/2sridPu
Image: Bring Me My Firetruck, by Mr Gee. Part of the Copy That? Surplus Data in an Age of Repetitive Duplication, exhibition at the Open Data Institute, London, Feb 2020.
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.
Permanent archive of all the FurtherLists.
FurtherList No.28 Nov 5th 2021
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-28-nov-5th-2021/
FurtherList No.27 Oct 1st 2021
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-27-oct-1st-2021/
FurtherList No.26 Sept 3rd 2021
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-26-sept-3rd-2021/
FurtherList No.25 July 4th 2021
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-24-july-4th-2021-2/
FurtherList No.24 June 4th 2021
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-24-june-4th-2021/
FurtherList No.23 April 2nd 2021
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-23-april-2nd-2021/
FurtherList No.22 March 5th, 2021
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-22-march-5th-2021/
FurtherList No.21 January 8th 2021
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-21-january-8th-2021/
FurtherList No.20 December 4th, 2020
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-20-december-4th-2020/
FurtherList No.19 April 3rd 2020
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-19-april-3rd-2020/
FurtherList No.18 March 6th 2020
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-18-march-6th-2020/
FurtherList No.17 February 7th 2020
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-17-february-7th-2020/
FurtherList No.16 January 3rd 2020
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-16-january-3rd-2020/
FurtherList No.15 Nov 29th 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-15-nov-29th-2019
FurtherList No.14 Oct 26th 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-14-oct-26th-2019
FurtherList No.13 Sept 27th 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-13-sept-27th-2019
FurtherList No.12 Sep 20th 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-12-sep-20th-2019
FurtherList No.11 September 6th 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-11-september-6th-2019
FurtherList No.10 August 30th 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-10-august-30th-2019
FurtherList No.9 August 23rd 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-9-august-23rd-2019
FurtherList No.8 August 16th 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/furtherlist-no-8-august-16th-2019
FurtherList No.7 Aug 9th 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/the-furtherlist-future-fair-special-no-7-aug-9th-2019
FurtherList No.6 July 30th 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/the-furtherlist-no-6-july-30th-2019
The FurtherList No.5 July 5th 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/the-furtherlist-no-5-july-5th-2019
FurtherList No.4 June 21st 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/the-furtherlist-no-4-june-21st-2019
FurtherList No.3 June 14th 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/the-weekly-furtherlist-no-3-june-14th-2019
FurtherList No.2 June 7th 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/the-weekly-furtherlist-no-2-june-7th-2019
FurtherList No.1 May 31st 2019
https://www.furtherfield.org/the-weekly-furtherlist-no-1-june-3rd-2019
Main image: Bad Shibe. Story by Rhea Myers and Illustrations by Lina Theodoru. Wall installation. NEW WORLD ORDER exhibition, at Furtherfield 20 May – 25 June 2017. Photo by Pau Ros. https://www.furtherfield.org/new-world-order/
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 Big Four | Bob Bicknell-Knight and Rosa-Maria Nuutinen | Exhibition from 15th November – 14th December 2019 | Second Floor at Harlesden High Street, 60-72 Short’s Gardens, Holborn, London WC2H 9AH. The Big Four is an exhibition that considers the technological impact that humans have on the planet, considering the Big Four tech companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple) and how humans and new forms of technology continue to assist in major environmental change. The exhibition consists of new drawings, paintings and sculptural installations from Bob Bicknell-Knight and Rosa-Maria Nuutinen | FB page/link – https://bit.ly/2XWCQhA
Heath Bunting – Intimacy Encryption Workshop | ARTFUTURA 2019 – PROCESSING THE FUTURE – WORKSHOP (Festival of Digital Culture & Creativity) | Sun 1 Dec 2019 11:30 am – 1:30 pm | In a time of surveillance capitalism, privacy requires some radical methods. A workshop in how to communicate secretly over any media using nothing more than sharing some special time together. Used very effectively by former fluffy groups such as Irish Republican Army and Palestine Liberation Organization. Heath Bunting is a contemporary British artist and his work is based on creating open and democratic systems by modifying communications technologies and social systems. Location – IKLECTIK, Londond, SE1 7LG – https://bit.ly/2qUiJUI
Constitution for a co-operative art school | Tuesday 3rd December 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm | Come along to contribute your ideas to a draft constitution for a co-operative art school. Using a series of questions as guidelines, we will collectively generate, articulate, debate and decide the values, principles, processes and working methods of an art school that is organised, structured and governed along co-operative values of autonomy, democracy, equality and solidarity. https://bit.ly/37K3lv7
DISRUPT THE SYSTEM NOT THE CLIMATE: Surveillance, Climate Change & Global Conflict | Friday 6 December, 19:30 at ACUD MACHT NEU, Veteranenstr 21, 10119 Berlin (U8 Rosenthaler Platz) | DNL’s closing event of 2019, which wraps up the 2019 conference series ‘The Art of Exposing Injustice’, as well as the first year of the Activation community programme. The talks will address respectively counter-surveillance techniques and the right to privacy as well as how climate change is intertwined with political conflicts. After the talks, the privacy-electropunk band “Systemabsturz” will perform live! The programme of the evening is curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli & Lieke Ploeger. https://www.disruptionlab.org/meet-ups
Landscape Symposium 2019: Staying with the trouble: Critical and creative approaches to the climate and biodiversity crises | Friday 6 Dec 2019 | Our Symposium for 2019 will explore another of our Research Strategy themes, Critical and Creative Landscape Thinking. With a varied group of collaborators (see below), we will form a conversational space to apply this to the climate and biodiversity crises. The Symposium title is from Staying With the Trouble, Donna J. Haraway (c) 2016, Duke University Press – borrowed with very kind permission! – https://bit.ly/2Y47HZF
Opening: Raised by Google, by Sarah Selby | A new body of work by Bristol based artist Sarah Selby. Sarah was the final selected artist for hotel generation 2019, areyte Gallery’s annual young artist development programme. Raised by Google explores the impacts of current data practices on our seemingly autonomous lives, investigating to what degree our opportunities and experiences are influenced by the underlying systems of a data-driven society. Opening Thursday 5 December, 6-9pm | 6 Dec 2019 – 11 Jan 2020 | Part of arebyte’s 2019 programme home – https://bit.ly/34wYWcX
Surfing with: Dani Ploeger | Hosted by Art Claims Impulse (Berlin) | Monday, 9 December 2019 | ACI invites you to an exciting evening. Dani Ploeger, Media Performing Artist, who has set himself the goal of confronting the borders of high-tech consumption and their dynamics will accompany you for two hours into his “Internet world” *Also transmitted in livestream. Please check our website on 09.12.2019, 18:30h. https://bit.ly/2Dta3Yx
Paper Struggles & Public Library and the Property Form | Hosted by Post Office research group | AN EXHIBITION AND SEMINAR | EXHIBITION ‘PAPER STRUGGLES’ OPENING: Monday, 9 December, 18.30-21.00 | Continues: Tuesday 10 and Wednesday 11 December, 11.00-21.00 | SEMINAR ‘PUBLIC LIBRARY AND THE PROPERTY FORM’: Tuesday 10 December, 10.30-13.30, Guest speakers: Balász Bodó & Nanna Bonde Thylstrup | Seminar registration: http://tiny.cc/public_library **Post Office Research Group**, Centre for Postdigital Cultures | Coventry University | https://postoffice.media
Figurations: Persons In/Out of Data Conference | Panel Event 9.30am – 6pm, Monday 16 and Tuesday 17 December, 2019 | We’re drowning in an ocean of data, or so the saying goes. Data’s “big”: there’s not only lots of it, but its volume has allowed for the development of new, large-scale processing techniques. Our relationship with governments, medical organisations, technology companies, the education sector, and so on are increasingly informed by the data we overtly or inadvertently provide when we use particular services. This conference brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers to explore how the person—or persons, plural—are figured in/out of data. Our proposition is that it can help us think and study our increasingly datified present. Professor Stuart Hall Building, Goldsmiths, University of London – https://bit.ly/2R5tr5V
Trans\/code: Jonathan Reus Maya Fridman Marije Baalman Miri Lee | This evening we will present the outcome of a short-term “flash residency” period for developing performative work that explores the potential for livecoding practice to overlap with other performative disciplines. The event brings together livecoding performers/researchers with accomplished performance practitioners to prototype a new performance concept over the course of two workdays and to perform this work during an experimental concert evening | 11th Dec 2019 | Hosted by iii, The Hague, Netherlands | FB link – https://bit.ly/35M2mJ7
Books, Open Calls, Papers & Publications
Art Hack Practice: Critical Intersections of Art, Innovation and the Maker Movement | Editors, Victoria Bradbury, Suzy O’Hara | Bridging art and innovation, this book invites readers into the processes of artists, curators, cultural producers and historians who are working within new contexts that run parallel to or against the phenomenon of ‘maker culture’. The book is a fascinating and compelling resource for those interested in critical and interdisciplinary modes of practice that combine arts, technology and making. It presents international case studies that interrogate perceived distinctions between sites of artistic and economic production by brokering new ways of working between them. It also discusses the synergies and dissonances between art and maker culture, analyses the social and collaborative impact of maker spaces and reflects upon the ethos of the hackathon within the fabric of a media lab’s working practices | Publisher: Taylor & Francis Inc – https://bit.ly/33tLd5y
If I Only had a Heart: a DisCO Manifesto: Value Sovereignty, Care Work, Commons and Distributed Cooperative Organizations | The DisCO Manifesto is a deep dive into the world of Distributed Cooperative Organizations. Over its 80 colorful pages, you will read about how DisCOs are a P2P/Commons, cooperative and Feminist Economic alternative to Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (or DAOs). The DisCO Manifesto also includes some background on topics like blockchain, AI, the commons, feminism, cooperatives, cyberpunk, and more | http://disco.coop/manifesto/
The Beautiful Warriors. Technofeminist Praxis in the Twenty-First Century | Edited by Cornelia Sollfrank | The book brings together seven current technofeminist positions from the fields of art and activism. In very different ways, they expand the theories and practices of 1990’s cyberfeminism and thus react to new forms of discrimination and exploitation. Gender politics are negotiated with reference to technology, and questions of technology are combined with questions of ecology and economy. The different positions around this new techno-eco-feminism understand their practice as an invitation to take up their social and aesthetic interventions, to join in, to continue, and never give up | Contributions from Christina Grammatikopoulou, Isabel de Sena, Femke Snelting, Cornelia Sollfrank, Spideralex, Sophie Toupin, hvale vale, Yvonne Volkart – http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=976
The Critical Makers Reader: (Un)learning Technology | Editors: Loes Bogers & Letizia Chiappini | Copy editor: Luke Munn | A decade ago many gushed at the possibilities of 3D printers and other DIY tech. Today makers are increasingly shaking off their initial blind enthusiasm to numerically control everything, rediscovering an interest in sociocultural histories and futures and waking up to the environmental and economic implications of digital machines that transform materials. An accumulation of critique has collectively registered that no tool, service, or software is good, bad, or neutral—or even free for that matter. We’ve arrived at a crossroads, where a reflective pause coincides with new critical initiatives emerging across disciplines | Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2019 – https://bit.ly/2DryPZ7
The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World | By Linsey McGoey | An intriguing investigation, shattering the hackneyed notion that knowledge is power.Deliberate ignorance has been known as the ‘Ostrich Instruction’ in law courts since the 1860s. It illustrates a recurring pattern in history in which figureheads for major companies, political leaders and industry bigwigs plead ignorance to avoid culpability. So why do so many figures at the top still get away with it when disasters on their watch damage so many people’s lives? | Published by Zed books – https://bit.ly/2DsK2Zt
Vital Forms: Biological Art, Architecture, and the Dependencies of Life | Biological Art, Architecture, and the Dependencies of Life | By Jennifer Johung | Using numerous case studies, Jennifer Johung explores how art and architecture are reimagining life on cellular and subcellular levels. In the process, she maps the constantly evolving dependencies that exist between objects, bodies, and environments. From Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr’s Tissue Culture and Art Project, which developed “semi-living worry dolls,” to Patricia Piccinini’s imagined Still Life with Stem Cells, each chapter pairs a branch of contemporary biological inquiry with the artists who are revolutionizing it | Published Dec 2019, University of Minnesota Press – https://bit.ly/35JHEcJ
DIGITAL ART THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS: New strategies for archiving, collecting and preserving in Digital Humanities | Oliver GRAU, Janina HOTH and Eveline WANDL-VOGT(eds.) | With contributions by: Frieder Nake, George Legrady, José R. Alcalá Mellado /Beatriz Escribano Belmar, Anne-Marie Duguet, Howard Besser, Giselle Beiguelman, Wendy Coones, Sarah Kenderdine, Marianne Ping-Huang, Raphael Lozano Hemmer, Annet Dekker, Janina Hoth, Laura Leuzzi, Diego Mellado, Oliver Grau, Goki Miyakita/Keiko Okawa, Sabine Himmelsbach, Francesca Franco, Patricia Falcão | | NEW PUBLICATION (free e-book download on Academia) – https://bit.ly/35Js2G9
Deadly Biocultures: The Ethics of Life-Making | By Nadine Ehlers and Shiloh Krupar | Deadly Biocultures examines the affirmation to hope, target, thrive, secure, and green in the respective biocultures of cancer, race-based health, fatness, aging, and the afterlife. Its chapters focus on specific practices, technologies, or techniques that ostensibly affirm life and suggest life’s inextricable links to capital but that also engender a politics of death and erasure. The authors ultimately ask: what alternative social forms and individual practices might be mapped onto or intersect with biomedicine for more equitable biofutures? | Published Dec 2019, University of Minnesota Press – https://bit.ly/2DuV9kF
Articles, Interviews & Presentations
Investigation into Amazon Echo devices wins 2019 Beazley Design of the Year award | Written by Jacopo Prisco, CNN | The award and accompanying exhibition is held each year at London’s Design Museum to showcase original and innovative new designs in various fields. The all-digital winning investigation, created by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, looks at the amount of human labor, data and resources required to support the lifespan of a single Echo product, visually illustrating the real-world impact of voice assistants. https://cnn.it/2rAnRxS
Was Humanity Simply Not Ready for the Internet? A 1990s cyber enthusiast considers whether he’s to blame for our digital woes | By Douglas Rushkoff | Steve Jobs as much as told us we were making a pact with the devil. He knew perfectly well what he was doing when he named his company Apple: He was giving people access to the forbidden fruit—the tree of knowledge—and fully disclosing that fact. Thanks to computers and, soon after, the internet, regular people everywhere would have access to everyone and everything – https://bit.ly/2OwYhCO
Rereading Debord | A look at today’s hyperconnected society of social media, cognitive capitalism and algorithms through the lens of the work of Guy Debord | By Ingrid Guardiola | This preference for images as part of commodity fetishism has become accentuated with social media in a world of virtual realities connected through mobile technology. The proxy or representative on the screen has ended up usurping the place of the original. It is no longer a question of managing images, rather we organise our own image using the filters and facial contouring offered by an endless array of apps to tune ourselves up. Even the bodies used as the benchmarks for cosmetic surgery have shifted from a universal look (that of the stars of the moment) to the virtual self; people want to look like the face offered to them by Snapchat or Facetune, they want to show the best version of themselves in a selfie, to mummify their virtual self – http://lab.cccb.org/en/rereading-debord/
Extinction Rebellion Is Creating a New Narrative of the Climate Crisis | By Charlotte Du Cann | In London, activists are taking to the streets to eschew hopelessness in favor of repair. The shape of their rebellion is not the orderly stream of protesters flowing down the streets with placards. It’s a wild, impromptu mix — of circus performers and a funeral procession, of 400 trees left outside Parliament for legislators to plant and 40 “rebel writers” reading in Trafalgar Square, of a mothers and babies “nurse-in” outside Google’s headquarters. It’s a marriage, a game of cricket and a ceilidh (a gathering with dancing and music) on Westminster Bridge, and a singer in a baroque band singing Henry Purcell’s “Remember Me” at the end of Downing Street – https://nyti.ms/2CFzVQy
Image by Kelsey. arcade fire performs at starlight theatre on april 26th, 2014. Also, was the main image for You Say Decentralized, I Say Potato: The DisCO Manifesto, by Stacco Troncoso.
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
Playmode | Exhibition at MAAT Lisbon, Sep 2019 – feb 2020 | Curated by Filipe Pais and Patricia Gouveia | It is said that play has saved entire peoples, who, in order not to succumb to hunger, resorted to playing games for hours at a time. While the Lydians, that distant people from Anatolia, invented games as a mode of surviving, play from the beginning has been an invention linked to a vital need — to stay alive and withstand the darkness, immobility and extinction.
The artists understood early on the transformative power of play and began integrating it into their works for various purposes – escaping reality, social construction and transformation, subversion or as a criticism of game and play mechanisms themselves – https://www.filipepais.com/playmode
The Long Term You Cannot Afford. On The Distribution of The Toxic | At SAVVY-Contemporary, Berlin, Germany | 19 Oct 2019 – 1 Dec 2019 | This mixed exhibition unpacks the kaleidoscopic meanings of the toxic, both as matter and as metaphor: In his paintings, Boris Anje captures the essence of the excessive and toxic consumerism of a small minority of the world’s population | The toxic trade-off inherent in exploitative and abusive processes of extraction, production, and disposal lie at the heart of the changing nature of the ecosystems to which we now belong – with millions of metric tons of synthetic materials, pesticides, heavy metals, and chemicals released and circulated every year. Structural inequalities on a global scale permit for some lives to remain relatively untouched by toxic proliferation through systems of “externalisation” [2] whilst many reside in high concentrations and lethal exposure on a daily basis out of mere necessity of survival. The new age of toxicity is “a condition that is shared, but unevenly so, and which divides us as much as it binds us.” – http://tiny.cc/y8ryez
Soft Power 04: an exhibition in a spreadsheet | Hosted by Micheál O’Connell, Andrea Slater and Daniella Norton | Thursday, 31 October 2019 | A fourth exhibition by the Soft Power people, this time in a spreadsheet. Look at it at home, or on your device, or wherever. Drink some wine and chat to friends about what you witness. The link will be supplied with those ‘GOING’ on the date (Thursday 31st October) at 7pm. For updates sign up to Mocksim’s mailing list http://www.mocksim.org/contact.htm
24/7: A wake-up call for our non-stop world | 31 Oct 2019 – 23 Feb 2020 | Somerset House |Embankment Galleries, South Wing | An essential exhibition for today, exploring the non-stop nature of modern life. Many of us feel we’re working more intensively, juggling too many things, blurring our public and private lives, pushing the limits of our natural rhythms of sleep and waking.
24/7 takes visitors on a multi-sensory journey from the cold light of the moon to the fading warmth of sunset through five themed zones and contains over 50 multi-disciplinary works that will provoke and entertain | Inspired by Jonathan Crary’s book of the same name, and curated by Sarah Cook, 24/7& holds up a mirror to our always-on culture and invites you to step outside of your day-to-day routine to engage, reflect and reset – http://tiny.cc/44f7ez
Launch event for Rabbrexit – A Game of Chance / editions tdwm | Hosted by Cecilia Wee and YiMiao Shih | Thursday, 31 October 2019 (London) | On the date of the Brexit deadline, we’re having a little launch party for “Rabbrexit – A Game of Chance” and the birth of editions tdwm. Editions tdwm is delighted to present its first project: a limited edition set of playing cards “Rabbrexit – A Game of Chance”, featuring illustrations by YiMiao Shih, designed with Arjun Harrison-Mann.
Rabbrexit – A Game of Chance reworks images from YiMiao Shih’s exhibition Rabbrexit Means Rabbrexit at the House of Illustration in London (2019), where YiMiao created a parallel universe in which the UK voted not for Brexit but ‘Rabbrexit’: the expulsion of rabbits from the country – http://tiny.cc/p3oyez
Become Ungovernable 2: a day of resistance skill sharing | The Antiuniversity, as part of a coalition of autonomous left groups, invites you to a day of practical and informative workshops, where we will learn from each other simple visual intervention methods that anyone can pick up, grow confidence to use a variety of tools and learn about ways to stay safe when organising on the streets and online. In preparation for the planned attack on our city and communities on 31 Oct (Brexit day), we planned a day of practical resistance skill sharing.
The far right, bolstered by a racist and xenophobic government, is growing in confidence. The response to Boris Johnson’s hard-right vision for society and threat to our basic rights must be equally confident. Some actions will take place through whatever is left of the parliamentary mechanism, others will take place on the streets. Hosted by Antiuniversity, Green Anti-Capitalist Front, Plan C, Feminist Anti-Fascist Assembly, and Women’s Strike Assembly | FB page – http://tiny.cc/1qoyez
NEoN Digital Arts Festival. Multiple Venues in Dundee City, Scotland. Nov 6 – 8 2019. An expanded 3-day symposium entitled, Re@ct: Social Change Art Technology. NEoN Re@ct involves over 30 international speakers over three days addressing a diversity of issues and practices engaging activist digital art. Many artists involved in digital arts have historically been prompted to react and respond to local, national, global, social and political crises (i.e. around issues of environmentalism, gender equality, exploitation, colonialism, militarism, emancipation). Re@ct will be a platform to critically examine the relevance and impact of past and present practices, theories and strategies – to engage an uncertain future through an exploration of the creative potential of digital art. Reigister free to the full symposium – http://tiny.cc/y5lyez
Citizens of Nowhere | Alicja Rogalska: 2019 Stuart Hall Library Artist-in-Residence | Hosted by Iniva | 6 November 2019 | Join 2019 Stuart Hall Library Artist-in-Residence Alicja Rogalska for a screening and discussion about her work developed during the residency alongside two other videos. The three works are concerned with issues of citizenship, immigration and identity, viewed through the lenses of classification methods and systems, legal fictions in immigration law and the lived experiences of statelessness. The screening will be followed by a discussion with invited guests and a Q&A.
The works screened will include: What If As If (2017), The Aliens Act (2019) and Citizens of Nowhere (2019). Total running time of the videos will be 40 mins | Evenbrite bookings here – http://tiny.cc/uiqyez
Books, Open Calls, Papers & Publications
Expanded Internet Art: Twenty-First-Century Artistic Practice and the Informational Milieu By Ceci Moss | Charting the rise of a multidisciplinary approach to online artistic practice in the past decade, the text discusses recent currents in contemporary artistic practice that parallel the explosion of the internet through advances such as social media, smart phones, and faster bandwidth. Internet art is no longer determined solely by its existence on the web; rather, contemporary artists are making more art about informational culture using various methods of both online and offline means. It asks how artists, such as Seth Price, Harm van den Dorpel, Kari Altmann, Artie Vierkant and Oliver Laric, create a critical language in response to the persuasive influence of informational capture on culture and expression, where the environment itself becomes reorganized to be more legible as information | Bloomsbury Academic – http://tiny.cc/ktg7ez
The Cyborg Matrix | Open call for artists, is now online at http://theCyborgMatrix.com !! Make an account and create your own profile. Or type in your name or nickname for a short visit. Doe you want to add you art to the space, go to http://cyarco.com/theCyborgMatrix/ or send us an email at cyborgMatrix@cyarco.com. see you in cyberspace!!
Automation, Artificial Intelligence, and Labour Protection | Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2019 | A collection of articles on “Automation, Artificial Intelligence, and Labour Protection” edited by Valerio De Stefano (KU Leuven). This collection gathers contributions from several labour lawyers and social scientists to provide an interdisciplinary overview of how new technologies, including smart robots, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and business practices such as People Analytics, management-by-algorithm, and the use of big data in workplaces, far from merely displacing jobs, profoundly affect the quality of work. The authors argue that these issues depend, and can be affected by, policy choices – since they are not just the “natural” result of technological innovations – and call for adequate regulation of these phenomena. Contributing authors are Antonio Aloisi, Ilaria Armaroli, Fernanda Bárcia de Mattos, Janine Berg, Miriam Cherry, Emanuele Dagnino, Valerio De Stefano, Elena Gramano, Matt Finkin, Marianne Furrer, Frank Hendrickx, Parminder Jeet Singh, David Kucera, Phoebe Moore, Jeremias Prassl, and Uma Rani. This article introduces this collection and gives an overview of the issues discussed by the authors – http://tiny.cc/s4zyez
Digital Sociology: The Reinvention of Social Research | By Noortje Marres (2017) | This provocative new introduction to the field of digital sociology offers a critical overview of interdisciplinary debates about new ways of knowing society that are emerging today at the interface of computing, media, social research and social life.
Digital Sociology introduces key concepts, methods and understandings that currently inform the development of specifically digital forms of social enquiry. Marres assesses the relevance and usefulness of digital methods, data and techniques for the study of sociological phenomena and evaluates the major claim that computation makes possible a new ‘science of society’. As Marres argues, the digital does much more than inspire innovation in social research: it forces us to engage anew with fundamental sociological questions. We must learn to appreciate that the digital has the capacity to throw into crisis existing knowledge frameworks and is likely to reconfigure wider relations | Polity press – http://tiny.cc/pqg7ez
Articles, Interviews & Presentations
Future Cities as a Network of Waterholes connected by Songlines | Medium | By Steven Liaros | “Irene Watson provides a detailed discussion of the indigenous worldview in Raw Law: Aboriginal Peoples, Colonialism and International Law (2015). Also referred to as relational philosophy, Watson compares and contrasts this with non-indigenous philosophy. This comparison is summarised in Table 1 in which I have included additional descriptions in brackets that express this contrast using other common terms.” – http://tiny.cc/rywyez
Brexit Culture | Feature article on ArtRabbit | By Sandy Di Yu | “Research has been conducted by the Arts Council about the economic and operational impacts of Brexit, but the content of culture has yet to be formally surveyed. While we can only speculate like everyone else what the full-fledged impact of Brexit on cultural production will be in the coming years, the era since the 2016 referendum has already seen a flurry of events that indicate growing precariousness in our time. Right-wing populism has gained more than a foothold in political discourse. Conspiracies run rampant about celebrity sex traffickers and their ties to the global elite. Anxiety over climate change, although leading to inspiring global movements, is still being met with dismissal by political leaders.” – http://tiny.cc/ujtyez
Can Musical Machines Be Expressive? Views from the Enlightenment and Today? by Steven Kemper and Rebecca Cypess | October 2019, Leonardo 52:5 release | How can music produced by automated technologies be expressive? Transitive theories of expression dominated eighteenth-century ideas of automated music, and many contemporary designers of robotic instruments adhere to these ideas, increasing sonic nuance to make their instruments seem more like expressive human performers. A listener-centered understanding of expression—an “intransitive” perspective—allows us to see automatic instruments as capable of expression despite the fact that no human performer is present – http://tiny.cc/m9nyez
Media Art History: Berlin, Cyber City (1989-91) VR – MR installation by Monika Fleischmann & Wolfgang Strauss | Berlin, Cyber City (1989-91) commemorates the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall 1989. VIDEO. The performative VR city simulation system “Berlin – Cyber City” was created as a reaction to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The intention was the staging of an interactive space for debate on the future of the city. To do this, the VR paradigm – the real-time movement in an immersive environment for a single user – should be extended into a communication space for several users. A participative Mixed Reality table combined with a 3D environment and Virtual Reality tools invites people to discuss the past and the future of the former divided city – http://tiny.cc/q2nyez
Neural 63, Surveillance Surveyed | Issue #63, Summer 2019 | interviews with Pip Thornton, Joana Moll, Mendi and Keith Obadike, Owen Mundy | articles, Surveying Surveillance Capitalism, Decode: Data Cooperatives, Our voices granted to machines, and much more – http://neural.it/2019/10/neural-63-surveillance-surveyed/
Image by: Brad Downey. House of Cards #3. Public Work. 2007, Berlin, Germany. Duration: 4 days. Anonymous installation. Material: paving stones – http://tiny.cc/vkf7ez | Currently featured in Playmode exhibition, Lisbon.
A list of recommendations, reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of, straddling the fields of art, technology and social change.
Counting Craters on the Moon | Solo exhibition by Kyriaki Goni | Curated by Daphne Dragona | Aksioma | Project Space Komenskega 18, Ljubljana | 2–25 October 2019 | As a result of advances in machine learning, our understanding of today’s world is ever more mediated by machines. What challenges does deep learning bring to human-based knowledge? What do machines see and do differently than humans? How can artificial intelligence enhance new forms of experience and understanding? To address these questions, in Counting Craters on the Moon, Kyriaki Goni purposely turns her gaze to a distant and uncanny territory: the Moon and its surface. The Moon, according to the artist, constitutes a fascinating example and offers an interesting analogy. Lacking an atmosphere, it operates as a data center which stores in its body the memory of our solar system and allows predictions for the future – http://tiny.cc/cgabdz
Acts of Quiet Resistance | 5 October 2019 | Hosted by Foodhall / Sheffield and outsidefilm | Acts Of Quiet Resistance (Ian Nesbitt + Michael Ransley / 2019 / 70 mins) is a documentary steeped in the slow cinema tradition. Five years in the making, it continues a thread in Ian’s work of collaboratively made films, blurring the line between subject and filmmaker. “For fans of Shirley Collins, Richard Linklater, campfires and Robert Bresson, but this film is so beautifully sideways it sweeps away comparisons really.” Chiz Williams, Cube Microplex | FB link – http://tiny.cc/de5adz
Arts Lab Northampton and Liverpool Arts Lab team up to present ‘Howl’ | Northampton’s Alistair Fruish has taken on Allen Ginsberg’s classic poem, once subject to an obscenity trial, to address the major obscenity of our time; the destruction of the ecological systems that sustain our planet. Visceral, confrontational and very timely, ‘Howl’ was brought to life by the design work of Liverpool’s Slim Smith. Printed on A4 280gm textured cream card. http://tiny.cc/3sk9cz All proceeds will go to the Regenerative Agroforestry Impact Network – http://tiny.cc/77abdz
New Suns: A Feminist Literary Festival | 5 Oct 2019 | Barbican, London | A bookfair and day of talks, workshops and screenings, exploring contemporary feminism and technology. ‘For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ – Audre Lorde | Inviting audiences to explore new and continuing debates in feminist approaches to technology. This year’s festival takes inspiration from science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, which subverts the dominant narrative of technologically driven ‘progress’.
The day will include workshops, talks and screenings exploring technofeminism, storytelling, sonic ritual, gender identity, reproductive justice and indigenous knowledge with writers, artists, mystics, poets and academics. In the spirit of the 1980s international feminist bookfairs, there will also be over thirty stalls to explore across Level G, and selected events for free – http://tiny.cc/d86adz
Genetic Automata, Larry Achiampong and David Blandy | 15th oct 2019 | Hosted by Site Gallery (Sheffield) and Arts Catalyst | Genetic Automata forms the first part of an ambitious new body of film-based works that attempt to address this complex history of classification and segregation. Referencing the history of the theory of evolution, and the relationship between Darwin and his taxidermy teacher John Edmonstone, a freed slave, the work takes the form of a video installation combining animation, spoken word and text interspersed with microscopic topographies of varied shades of skin, digital renditions of skin from video games, and film footage of taxidermied bird life from Darwin’s bird skin collection at the Natural History Museum – http://tiny.cc/m45adz
Open Call: Rot | In the midst of this hubris of humans becoming humus, we might find tools for living in a rotten age. Across the world, artists, activists, and academics are busy learning to give voice to the sympoetic; bat populations translate into flickering shadows, music composed for moth’s ears, an opera of 176 golden snails, a butoh dance about shrimp deranged by antidepressant medication overflowed into oceans. This is a genre of creative work interested in finding new ways to interrogate the underbelly of today’s ‘wicked problems.
Rot invites artists, scientists, activists, and writers with poorly disciplined curiosities to submit work that digs into this compost heap. We are especially interested in supporting dialogue around works in process; field notes, half-completed projects, the tangled, in-between moments where cross-contaminations and co-creations occur. We would especially like to hear from people who are underrepresented in the fields of art and arts publishing – in particular people who identify as BAME, disabled, LGBT, or low income – http://tiny.cc/5p3cdz
New Myths: Recordings from the Missing Channel, curated by Canan Batur | Conceived as a series of soundscapes/sonic think tanks to assess, develop and propose new social languages and methods to understand, and create unlikely relationships between; the systems of representation, the emancipatory aspect of sound and the social constructs of identity. It takes its foundation from the idea that music is a myth, and myths’ ability to suggest – with primal narrative power- the conflicting forces and ideas that lie at the foundation of society.
Over the course of five months, New Myths will upload contributions by Tarek Lakhrissi, markiscrycrycry, James Massiah, Momtaza Mehri, Harun Morrison, Precious Okoyomon, Claudia Pages, Hannah Perry, Tabita Rezaire and Rowdy SS to 1.1 Basel’s online platform and SoundCloud with the purpose of delving into the multitude of voices, the rhythm of erosion and emergence, and the collusion and contradiction – http://www.1-1.digital/show/new-myths/
Conflictual Aesthetics: Artistic Activism and the Public Sphere | Editor Oliver Marchart | A new wave of artistic activism has emerged in recent years in response to the ever-increasing dominance of authoritarian neoliberalism. Activist practices in the art field, however, have been around much longer. As Oliver Marchart claims, there has always been an activist undercurrent in art. In this book he traces trajectories of artistic activism in theater, dance, performance, and public art, and investigates the political potential of urbanism, curating, and “biennials of resistance.” What emerges is a conflictual aesthetics that does not conform with traditional approaches to the field and that activates the political potential of artistic practice | Sternberg Press 2019 – http://tiny.cc/z5bbdz
Call for Papers: Special Issue on Sound, Image and Interaction | EAI Endorsed Transactions on Creative Technologies | For the last two decades, there has been a growing interest in the study of sound from a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) perspective. This coincides with the shift to a third wave of HCI towards applications in broader cultural contexts. Researchers have paid special attention to the integration of other sensory modalities with sound. This Special Issue “Sound, Image and Interaction”, aims to address emerging issues in research related to the creation of interactive sonic experiences, particularly focusing on the role that image plays in these scenarios. We are interested in submissions related to connections between sound, image and/or interaction, and the topics of interest listed – https://escripts.eai.eu/publication/257
Climate Machines, Fascist Drives, and Truth | By William E. Connolly | Duke University Press Books (23 Aug. 2019) | In this new installation of his work, William E. Connolly examines entanglements between volatile earth processes and emerging cultural practices, highlighting relays among extractive capitalism, self-amplifying climate processes, migrations, democratic aspirations, and fascist dangers. In three interwoven essays, Connolly takes up thinkers in the “minor tradition” of European thought who, unlike Cartesians and Kantians, cross divisions between nature and culture. He first offers readings of Sophocles and Mary Shelley, asking whether close attention to the Anthropocene could perhaps have arrived earlier had subsequent humanists absorbed their lessons – http://tiny.cc/3t0cdz
Harness the Power of a Fluid Identity with 3 Simple Strategies | By Marloes de Valk September | Institute of Network Cultures | Why aren’t there stronger regulations protecting our privacy, our democracy? Seemingly off topic but very similar: why aren’t there stricter regulations protecting us from anthropogenic climate change? In an attempt to find answers to these questions, I’ve been looking into strategies used by different industries to delay regulation: democratic intervention in the private market in order to protect citizens and the world on which their lives rely – http://tiny.cc/o4rfdz
Feminism and the Social Solidarity Economy: a Short Call to Action | The following text is a translation of Marian Díez‘s impassioned closing speech at the recent convergence meeting of the World Social Forum for Transformative Economies. The closing event was filled with strong presentations, but we chose Marian’s for its overview of the sheer scope and variety of the Social Solidarity Economy in Spain and, secondly, to highlight the need for intersectional complementarity among post-capitalist movements. This article is also closely linked to our translation of A Charter for the Social Solidarity Economy – http://tiny.cc/gm4adz
David Olusoga: Blackness, Britishness + the Windrush Generation | 8 Oct 2019 | Hosted by Firstsite, Colchester, UK | To coincide with the opening of Super Black, an exhibition co-curated with members of Colchester’s Black African and Caribbean communities, David Olusoga OBE, a British-Nigerian historian, broadcaster, film-maker and award-winning author, is coming to Firstsite to give a unique talk about the history of British African-Caribbean people, and what it means to be black in Britain today.
Every ticket sold raises money to show free exhibitions of award winning artists, and helps Firstsite fund local creative community projects – including free lunches and activities for families during the school holidays. https://firstsite.uk/whats-on/david-olusoga-talk/
Video Doc: The Sex Pistols Riotous 1978 Tour Through the U.S. South: Watch/Hear Concerts in Dallas, Memphis, Tulsa & More | Open Culture | The Sex Pistols “started out as an elaborate Situationist-inspired performance art piece dreamed up by megalomaniac manager Malcolm McLaren,” wrote Jonathan Crow in a post here at Open Culture about one of the band’s storied, disastrous final shows in Dallas of 1978. After beginning as the creation of McLaren and partner Vivienne Westwood, however, they “evolved beyond just being a stunt.” The statement is objectively true by music history standards. The band’s earliest gigs were directly responsible for almost every major band that took British punk in subsequent post-punk, goth, new wave, dub, etc. directions, including the Buzzcocks, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Clash, Joy Division, Wire, and too many others to list – http://tiny.cc/rb8adz
Complexity, uncertainty & scalability: How Assemble’s Granby 4 Streets won 2015 Turner Prize | By Stephen Pritchard (originally written in 2016) | “Did Assemble really play such a big part in Granby 4 Streets? How ‘community-led’ was the project? What was the role of the Community Land Trust? How did Assemble come to win the Turner Prize 2015? Who were the private social investors and what did they do to help make the project happen? The intention here is to blow open the façade behind Granby 4 Streets, Assemble and the Turner Prize 2015 win. Pritchard argues that the media and art world picture of Assemble is overly simplistic and masks a far more complex and uncertain set of events that, ultimately, relied on ‘mystery’ private social investors to force local government to act in support of the project and to lever money from national grant funders.” http://tiny.cc/dqq4cz
Publishing and Administrative Assistant job at Ognota books | We are hiring for a Publishing and Administrative Assistant. Abilities to divine the future, travel in the astral plane and to write funding applications are a major advantage. We particularly welcome applicants with strong earth placements – http://tiny.cc/5potcz
Image credit: Leila Nadir and Cary Adams, from the series Microbial Selfie (2017)
On June the 16th Tatiana Bazzichelli and Lieke Ploeger presented a new Disruption Network Lab conference entitled “AI TRAPS” to scrutinize Artificial Intelligence and automatic discrimination. The conference touched several topics from biometric surveillance to diversity in data, giving a closer look at how AI and algorithms reinforce prejudices and biases of its human creators and societies, to find solutions and countermeasures.
A focus on facial recognition technologies opened the first panel “THE TRACKED & THE INVISIBLE: From Biometric Surveillance to Diversity in Data Science” discussing how massive sets of images have been used by academic, commercial, defence and intelligence agencies around the world for their research and development. The artist and researcher Adam Harvey addressed this tech as the focal point of an emerging authoritarian logic, based on probabilistic determinations and the assumption that identities are static and reality is made through absolute norms. The artist considered two recent reports about the UK and China showing how this technology is yet unreliable and dangerous. According to data released under the UK´s Freedom of Information Law, 98% of “matches” made by the English Met police using facial recognition were mistakes. Meanwhile, over 200 million cameras are active in China and – although only 15% are supposed to be technically implemented for effective face recognition – Chinese authorities are deploying a new system of this tech to racial profile, track and control the Uighurs Muslim minority.
Big companies like Google and Facebook hold a collection of billions of images, most of which are available inside search engines (63%), on Flickr (25%) and on IMdB (11 %). Biometric companies around the world are implementing facial recognition algorithms on the pictures of common people, collected in unsuspected places like dating-apps and social media, to be used for private profit purposes and governmental mass-surveillance. They end up mostly in China (37%), US (34%), UK (21%) and Australia (4%), as Harvey reported.
Metis Senior Data Scientist Sophie Searcy, technical expert who has also extensively researched on the subject of diversity in tech, contributed to the discussion on such a crucial issue underlying the design and implementation of AI, enforcing the description of a technology that tends to be defective, unable to contextualise and consider the complexity of the reality it interacts with. This generates a lot of false predictions and mistakes. To maximise their results and reduce mistakes tech companies and research institutions that develop algorithms for AI use the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) technique. This enables to pick a few samples selected randomly from a dataset instead of analysing the whole of it for each iteration, saving a considerable amount of time. As Searcy explained during the talk with the panel moderator, Adriana Groh, this technique needs huge amount of data and tech companies are therefore becoming increasingly hungry for them.
In order to have a closer look at the relation between governments and AI-tech, the researcher and writer Crofton Black presented the study conducted with Cansu Safak at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism on the UK government’s use of big data. They used publicly available data to build a picture of companies, services and projects in the area of AI and machine learning, to map what IT systems the British government has been buying. To do so they interviewed experts and academics, analysed official transparency data and scraped governmental websites. Transparency and accountability over the way in which public money is spent are a requirement for public administrations and they relied on this principle, filing dozens of requests under the Freedom of Information Act to public authorities to get audit trails. Thus they mapped an ecosystem of the corporate nexus between UK public sector and corporate entities. More than 1,800 IT companies, from big ones like BEA System and IBM to small ones within a constellation of start-ups.
As Black explained in the talk with the moderator of the keynote Daniel Eriksson, Transparency International Head of Technology, this investigation faced systemic problems with disclosure from authorities, that do not keep transparent and accessible records. Indeed just 25% of the UK-government departments provided some form of info. Therefore details of the assignments are still unknown, but it is at least possible to list the services those companies deploying AI and machine learning can offer governments: connect data and identify links between people, objects, locations; set up automated alerts in the context of border and immigration control, spotting out changes in data and events of interest; work on passports application programs, implementing the risk-based approaches to passports application assessments; work on identity verification services using smartphones, gathering real time biometric authentications. These are just few examples.
Maya Indira Ganesh opened the panel “AI FOR THE PEOPLE: AI Bias, Ethics & the Common Good” questioning how tech and research have historically been almost always developed and conducted on prejudiced parameters, falsifying results and distorting reality. For instance, data about women’s heart attacks hadn´t been taken in consideration for decades, until doctors and scientists determined that ECG-machines calibrated on the data collected from early ´60s could neither predict heart attacks in women, nor give reliable data for therapeutic purposes, because they were trained only on male population. Just from 2007 ECG-machines were recalibrated on parameters based on data collected from female individuals. It is not possible to calculate the impact this gender inequality had on the development of modern cardiovascular medicine and on the lives of millions of women.
As the issue of algorithmic bias in tech and specifically in AI grows, all big tech firms and research institutions are writing ethics charters and establishing ethics boards sponsoring research in these topics. Detractors often refer to it as ethics-washing, which Ganesh finds a trick to mask ethics and morality as something definable in universal terms or scale: though it cannot be computed by machines, corporations need us to believe that ethics is something measurable. The researcher suggested that in such a way the abstraction and the complexity of the machine get easy to process as ethics becomes the interface used to obfuscate what is going on inside the black box and represent its abstractions. “But these abstractions are us and our way to build relations” she objected.
Ganesh wonders consequently according to what principle it shall be acceptable to train a facial recognition system, basing it on video of transgender people, as it happened in the alarming “Robust transgender face recognition” research, based on data from people undergoing hormone replacement therapy, Youtube videos, diaries and time-lapse documentation of the transition process. The HRT Transgender Dataset used to train AI to recognize transgender people worsens the harassment and the targeting that trans-people already experience daily, targeting and harming them as a group. However, it was partly financed by FBI and US-Army, confirming that law enforcement and national security agencies appear to be very interested in these kinds of datasets and look for private companies and researchers able to provide it.
In this same panel professor of Data Science and Public Policy Slava Jankin reflected on how machine learning can be used for common good in the public sector. As it was objected during the discussion moderated by Nicole Shephard, Researcher on Gender, Technology and Politics of Data, the “common good” isn’t easy to define, and like ethics it is not universally given. It could be identified with those goods that are relevant to guarantee and determine the respect of human rights and their practice. The project that Jankin presented was developed inside the Essex Centre for Data analytics in a synergic effort of developers, researches, universities and local authorities. Together, they tried to build an AI able to predict within reliability where children lacking school readiness are more likely to be found geographically, to support them in their transition and gaining competencies, considering social, economic and environmental conditions.
The first keynote of the conference was the researcher and activist Charlotte Webb, who presented her project Feminist Internet in the talk “WHAT IS A FEMINIST AI?”
<<There is not just one possible internet and there is not just one possible feminism, but only possible feminisms and possible internets>>. Starting from this assumption Webb talked about Feminist Human Computer Interaction, a discipline born to improve understandings about how gender identities and relations shape the design and use of interactive technologies. Her Feminist Internet is a no profit organisation funded to make internet a more equal space for women and other marginalized groups. Its approach combines art, design, critical thinking, creative technology development and feminism, seeking to build more responsible and bias-free AI able to empower people considering the causes of marginalization and discrimination. In her words, a feminist AI is not an algorithm and is not a system built to evangelize about a certain political or ideological cause. It is a tool that aims at recognizing differences without minimizing them for the sake of universality, meeting human needs with the awareness of the entire ecosystem in which it sits.
Tech adapts plastically to pre-existing discriminations and gender stereotypes. In a recent UN report, the ‘female’ obsequiousness and the servility expressed by digital assistants like Alexa, the Google Assistant, are defined as example of gender biases coded into tech products, since they are often projected as young women. They are programmed to be submissive and accept abuses. As stated by Feldman (2016) by encouraging consumers to understand the objects that serve them as women, technologists abet the prejudice by which women are considered objects. With her projects, Webb pushes to create alternatives that educate to shift this systemic problem – rather than complying with market demands – first considering that there is a diversity crisis in the AI sector and in the Silicon Valley. Between 2.5 and 4% of Google, Facebook and Microsoft employees are black, whilst there are no public data on transgender workers within these companies. Moreover, as Webb pointed out, just 22% of the people building AI right now are female, only 18% of authors at major AI-conferences are women, whilst over 80% of AI-professors are men. Considering companies with decisive impact on society women comprise only 15% of AI research staff at Facebook and 10% in Google.
Women, people of colour, minorities, LGBTQ and marginalized groups are substantially not deciding about designing and implementing AI and algorithms. They are excluded from the processes of coding and programming. As a result the work of engineers and designers is not inherently neutral and the automated systems that they build reflect their perspectives, preferences, priorities and eventually their bias.
Washington Tech Policy Advisor Mutale Nkonde focused on this issue in her keynote “RACIAL DISCRIMINATION IN THE AGE OF AI.” She opened her dissertation reporting that Google´s facial intelligence team is composed by 893 people, and just one is a black woman, an intern. Questions, answers and predictions in their technological work will always reflect a political and socioeconomic point of view, consciously or unconsciously. A lot of the tech-people confronted with this wide-ranging problem seem to undermine it, showing colour-blindness tendencies about what impacts their tech have on minorities and specifically black people. Historically credit scores are correlated with racist segregated neighbourhoods and risk analyses and predictive policing data are corrupted by racist prejudice, leading to biased data collection reinforcing privileges. Without a conscious effort to address racism in technology, new technologies will replicate old divisions and conflicts. By instituting policies like facial recognition we just replicate rooted behaviours based on racial lines and gender stereotypes mediated by algorithms. Nkonde warns that civil liberties need an update for the era of AI, advancing racial literacy in Tech.
In a talk with the moderator, the writer Rhianna Ilube, the keynote Nkonde recalled that in New York´s poor and black neighbourhood with historically high crime and violence rates, Brownsville, a private landlord in social housing wanted to exchange keys for facial recognition software, so that either people accept surveillance, or they lose their homes. The finding echoes wider concerns about the lack of awareness of racism. Nkonde thinks that white people must be able to cope with the inconvenience of talking about race, with the countervailing pressures and their lack of cultural preparation, or simply the risk to get it wrong. Acting ethically isn´t easy if you do not work on it and many big tech companies just like to crow about their diversity and inclusion efforts, disclosing diversity goals and offering courses that reduce bias. However, there is a high level of racial discrimination in tech sector and specifically in the Silicon Valley, at best colour-blindness – said Nkonde – since many believe that racial classification does not limit a person’s opportunities within the society, ignoring that there are instead economic and social obstacles that prevent full individual development and participation, limiting freedom and equality, excluding marginalized and disadvantaged groups from the political, economic, and social organization. Nkonde concluded her keynote stressing that we need to empower minorities, providing tools that allow overcoming autonomously socio-economic obstacles, to fully participate in society. It is about sharing power, taking in consideration the unconscious biases of people, for example starting from those designing the technology.
The closing panel “ON THE POLITICS OF AI: Fighting Injustice & Automatic Supremacism” discussed the effect of a tool shown to be not neutral, but just the product of the prevailing social economical model.
Dia Kayyali, Leader of the Tech and Advocacy program at WITNESS, described how AI is facilitating white supremacy, nationalism, racism and transphobia, recalling the dramatic case of the Rohingya persecution in Myanmar and the oppressive Chinese social score and surveillance systems. Pointing out critical aspects the researcher reported the case of the Youtube anti-extremism-algorithm, which removed thousands of videos documenting atrocities in Syria in an effort to purge hate speech and propaganda from its platform. The algorithm was trained to automatically flag and eliminate content that potentially breached its guidelines and ended up cancelling documents relevant to prosecute war crimes. Once again, the absence of the ability to contextualize leads to severe risks in the way machines operate and make decisions. Likewise, applying general parameters without considering specificities and the complex concept of identity, Facebook imposed in 2015 new policies and arbitrarily exposed drag queens, trans people and other users at risk, who were not using their legal names for safety and privacy reasons, including domestic violence and stalking.
Researcher on gender, tech and (counter) power Os Keyes considered that AI is not the problem, but the symptom. The problem are the structures creating AI. We live in an environment where few highly wealthy people and companies are ruling all. We have bias in AI and tech because their development is driven by exactly those same individuals. To fix AI we have to change requirements and expectations around it; we can fight to have AI based on explainability and transparency, but eventually if we strive to fix AI and do not look at the wider picture, in 10 years the same debate over another technology will arise. Keyes considered that since its very beginning AI-tech was discriminatory, racialized and gendered, because society is capitalist, racist, homo-transphobic and misogynistic. The question to pose is how we start building spaces that are prefigurative and constructed on values that we want a wider society to embrace.
As the funder and curator of the Disruption Network Lab Tatiana Bazzichelli pointed out during the moderation of this panel, the problem of bias in algorithms is related to several major “bias traps” that algorithm-based prediction systems fail to win. The fact that AI is political – not just because of the question of what is to be done with it, but because of the political tendencies of the technology itself – is the real aspect to discuss.
In his analysis of the political effects of AI, Dan McQuillan, Lecturer in Creative and Social Computing from the London University, underlined that while the reform of AI is endlessly discussed, there seems to be no attempt to seriously question whether we should be using it at all. We need to think collectively about ways out, learning from and with each other rather than relying on machine learning. Countering thoughtlessness of AI with practices of solidarity, self-management and collective care is what he suggests because bringing the perspective of marginalised groups at the core of AI practice, it is possible to build a new society within the old, based on social autonomy.
What McQuillan calls the AI realism appears to be close to the far-right perspective, as it trivialises complexity and naturalises inequalities. The character of learning through AI implicates indeed reductive simplifications, and simplifying social problems to matters of exclusion is the politics of populist and Fascist right. McQuillan suggests taking some guidance from the feminist and decolonial technology studies that have cast doubt on our ideas about objectivity and neutrality. An antifascist AI, he explains, shall involve some kinds of people’s councils, to put the perspective of marginalised groups at the core of AI practice and to transform machine learning into a form of critical pedagogy.
Pic 7: Dia Kayyali, Os Keyes, Dan McQuillan and Tatiana Bazzichelli during the panel “ON THE POLITICS OF AI: Fighting Injustice & Automatic Supremacism”
We see increasing investment on AI, machine learning and robots. Automated decision-making informed by algorithms is already a predominant reality, whose range of applications has broadened to almost all aspects of life. Current ethical debates about the consequences of automation focus on the rights of individuals and marginalized groups. However, algorithmic processes generate a collective impact too, that can only be addressed partially at the level of individual rights, as it is the result of a collective cultural legacy. A society that is soaked in racial and sexual discriminations will replicate them inside technology.
Moreover, when referring to surveillance technology and face recognition software, existing ethical and legal criteria appear to be ineffective and a lack of standards around their use and sharing just benefit its intrusive and discriminatory nature.
Whilst building alternatives we need to consider inclusion and diversity: If more brown and black people would be involved in the building and making of these systems, there would be less bias. But this is not enough. Automated systems are mostly trying to identify and predict risk, and risk is defined according to cultural parameters that reflect the historical, social and political milieu, to give answers able to fit a certain point of view and make decisions. What we are and where we are as a collective, what we have achieved and what we still lack culturally is what is put in software to make those same decisions in the future. In such a context a diverse team within a discriminatory conflictual society might find ways to flash the problem of bias away, but it will get somewhere else.
The truth is that automated discrimination, racism and sexism are integrated in tech-infrastructures. New generation of start-ups are fulfilling authoritarian needs, commercialising AI-technologies, automating biases based on skin colour and ethnicity, sexual orientation and identity. They develop censored search engine and platforms for authoritarian governments and dictators, refine high-tech military weapons training them using facial recognition on millions of people without their knowledge. Governments and corporations are developing technology in ways that threaten civil liberties and human rights. It is not hard to imagine the impact of the implementation of tools for robotic gender recognition, within countries were non-white, non-male and non-binary individuals are discriminated. Bathrooms and changing rooms that open just by AI gender-detection, or cars that start the engine just if a man is driving, are to be expected. Those not gender conforming, who do not fit traditional gender structures, will end up being systematically blocked and discriminated.
Open source, transparency and diversity alone will not defeat colour-blinded attitudes, reactionary backlashes, monopolies, other-directed homologation and cultural oppression by design. As it was discussed in the conference, using algorithms to label people based on sexual identity or ethnicity has become easy and common. If you build a technology able to catalogue people by ethnicity or sexual identity, someone will exploit it to repress genders or ethnicities, China shows.
In this sense, no better facial recognition is possible, no mass-surveillance tech is safe and attempts at building good tech will continue to fail. To tackle bias, discrimination and harm in AI we have to integrate research on and development of technology with all of the humanities and social sciences, deciding to consciously create a society where everybody could participate to the organisation of our common future.
Curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli and developed in cooperation with Transparency International, this Disruption Network Lab-conference was the second of the 2019 series The Art of Exposing Injustice.
More info, all its speakers and thematic could be found here: https://www.disruptionlab.org/ai-traps
The videos of the conference are on Youtube and the Disruption Network Lab is also on Twitter and Facebook.
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Photocredits: Maria Silvano for Disruption Network Lab
Featured image: Photograph of a room being built upon
Dion Laurent’s website of The House that George Built contains three galleries of photographs which document a remarkable, satirical project in the grand tradition of doing exactly as you are told, to reveal and subvert the idiocy of national government.
The shelter that Laurent built in his home takes as its starting point instructions issued by the US Department of Homeland Security in their ‘Campaign for Citizen Preparedness’ . This revamp of the 1950’s ‘Duck and Cover’ campaign, (in which a hawkish US Government terrorized the population with lunatic, useless and blatantly alarmist civic defence schemes), takes the form of a duct- tape and plastic-covers initiative; another assalt on the psychological security of the American people.
Laurent playfully extrapolates the government blueprint for a home shelter against terrorist attacks. With an inventive reworking of utilities such as the Air Phone and the Air Pump, enthusiastically constructed from found objects and household materials that look like they’ve already had a lot of everyday use, he develops and explores the campaign’s appeal to a sweat-of-the-brow, do-it-yourself ethic. We intuit a certain Thoreau-like pride in his shelter and supplies, that sense of pioneering spirit, self-sufficiency, a capacity to home-make for one.
In the ongoing series of paintings and reliefs, the project becomes less lighthearted and less abstract, and the true horror of what is being proposed by the government unfolds. Descriptive titles like DaisyClusterFuck, YellowBlueExplosion, PeacefulMuslim and GulfFighters reveal a darker aspect of the artist as he takes on the persona of the “survivor”. The paintings indicate possible states of mind and obsessions for the isolated, sole inhabitant. They reflect his evolving values, religious beliefs and aspirations. In the paintings, land and nature merge with weaponry, perhaps to keep the thieving, murderous strangers out. So much for Flower Power.
This project exudes a fascination and exploration of a certain, very relevant masculine dysfunction with serious humour, commitment, care and craft.
*See the White House website http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/20030219-11.html
For further instructions on how to survive terrorist attacks of a biological and chemical nature or a nuclear blast and radiation.
http://www.ready.gov/
20 August 2003
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