Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures
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Publikation Acoustic Infrastructure(Continent, 2016) Allen, Jamie; Khaikin, Lital; Linder, IsaacThe street-level sonic cultures, acoustic ecologies and personal interventions available to us have, during this long 20th Century, become proliferated by speakers, microphones, synthesised and recorded playbacks, beeps, buzzes and alarms. Roving gangs of indignant mobile-phone music-listeners disrupt the public transit experience. iPhones chirp out the sound of something called ‘crickets’, creatures many a listener may very well never encounter. Airlines pass on the extravagant levy of ‘noise charges’ to their customers, a kind of psychic and acoustic bandwidth fee. Microwave ovens, automobiles and authoritative ahuman voices chime out an acoustic ecology that is neither ‘natural’ nor ‘cultural’, neither ‘societal’ nor ‘technological’, but something that is a heterogeneous mixture of all of these sources, causes and categories. These are 'acoustic infrastructures', and although human-made, they are naturalised by their ubiquity and always-on-ness, along with our allover, everyday, experience of them.01A - Beitrag in wissenschaftlicher ZeitschriftPublikation Aeolian Technology(2022) Allen, JamieA talk for the "In the Wind" sessions of Anant National University Design programme, relating environmental art, design to principles and ideas of elemental media, ecological and material philosophy, and the history of infrastructure. Using the aeolian harp as a metaphor and actual designed instrument for the tracing of both human and natural actualities and histories, this session asked students to interrogate and reconfigure relationships between ecology and technology, technique and elemental flows.06 - PräsentationPublikation Apocryphal Technologies. Trials of the Engineered Imaginary(2014) Allen, JamieFor the occasion of the Zeitigung von Medien workshop, this keynote lecture Trials of the Engineered Imaginary examines how technology presents itself as the forward image of our desires, and how these forward movements often keep us from sensing, expressing or allowing legitimate disappointment in them. In an argument derived from media histories that presage the ways that tech entrepreneurs and 'founders', aided by venture capitalists, the lecture and media presented examined how a great number of in-use, contemporary technologies promise apocryphal functionalities (or impossible 'world-changing' returns). Examples examined include truth-telling tech, bodily enhancement techniques and cognitive amplification systems. The discussion here derives much of its argumentations from the Lie Machine project, a re-constructed voice stress analysis computer. Reframing all technological promises as, in some sense, 'apocryphal' (of doubtful authenticity or function, even if widely circulated as being functional or true) attempts to engender a more authentic and equal relation with technics.06 - PräsentationPublikation Approaches to audiovisual media in the scholarly body(2013) Verbruggen, Erwin; Allen, JamieForce11 (the Future of Research Communications and e-Scholarship) is a virtual community working to transform scholarly communications toward improved knowledge creation and sharing. The Beyond the PDF conference brings together scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers and research funders in a lively forum, not just to broaden awareness of current efforts across disciplines, but to define the future through discussions, challenge projects, demonstrations and seeding new partnerships and collaborations. CIID’s Head of Research, Jamie Allen is co-organising a satellite session with Erwin Verbruggen (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision): ‘Approaches to audiovisual media in the scholarly body’ This session proposes to discuss the improvement of ways in which audiovisual media can be used in online scholarly publications. We intend to discuss the topic from two different angles: audiovisual media as original sources for research and as a means of expressing scholarly thought. Of interest here is the way that digital medias, and the opportunities posed to ‘manifestations of thought in all its forms’ wrought through have or have not been fully taken into the prospect of scholarly, academic and practice-oriented research culture.06 - PräsentationPublikation Archive Earth. Ambiguous Conversations and Conversions(Cantonal and University Library Fribourg, 15.04.2021) Allen, JamieFor the journal Roadsides, Archive Earth is a visual and textual essay that explores Earth as a home, a resource for industry and markets, a repository for traces of conjoined natural and human histories, and a laboratory for the measurement of planetary phenomena. The essay explores the social, cultural and political life of infrastructure through aphoristic text, global fieldwork footages from Chile, Canada, Finland, and elsewhere, and perspectival voices: “I have already said that we think like the world; now I am saying that the world thinks like us”, as Michel Serres wrote in 2017.01A - Beitrag in wissenschaftlicher ZeitschriftPublikation An Art and Technology of Understanding(Vice Publishing, 2011) Allen, JamieThose of us active in the work of art and technology seem a comparatively anxious, self-critical bunch. It has been pointed out elsewhere and often that communities engaged with "new media," "art and technology," and "multimedia" are rife with artist-researchers, craftsman-critics, and technologist-theorists. These people are in the business of simultaneously employing and critiquing the material and social complexes we call "technology" in ways more emphatic than other artistic methods, aesthetics and histories (Criticalengineering.org provides an encouraging and exciting recent example of these kinds of practical motivations). Why all this questioning of form, of motivation, of intention? What's with all the talk of context, architectures and infrastructures? Why continue to bother with the work of fusing and conjoining fields and conventions separated by historical, cultural, and institutional silos, misunderstandings and discords? In short: Why not just relax, and paint yourself a nice watercolour landscape?01B - Beitrag in Magazin oder ZeitungPublikation The Art of Instituting(Intellect, 2019) Allen, Jamie; Garnicnig, Bernhard; Toft Ag, TanyaThe authors examine a digital dynamic within a networked sense of collectivity, and how this has influenced and enabled institutional experimental sites of thinking and production. They locate a tendency to organize oneself in collective groups as particularly evident in the Nordic context, reflecting a cultural history of ‘instituting’ (i.e. the formation of associations and unions) and today forming sites of hacker spaces, DIY technology groups, and artist-run project studios that hover between science, art and technology. These sites are necessary, the authors argue, as institutional forms to diversify responsibility across collectives, while simultaneously helping to equalize agencies, energies and temporal resilience, and exert post-capitalist influence.04A - Beitrag SammelbandPublikation Being Eaten(2022) Allen, JamieOf the concerns of the project of Western, modern design, archi- tecture and culture, procuring food for ourselves and keeping ourselves from becoming food for other creatures, is central amongst them. How we eat and avoid being eaten, keeping our- selves on top of the food chain(s), constitutes metabolic anthro- pocentrism, or metabolic privilege, that also clouds and trauma- tizes the communal act of consume(ation). Yet the acts of eating and being eaten can help understand life «as in circulation, as a gift from a community of ancestors... flowing on into an ecological and ancestral community of origins» (Val Plumwood). The whole planet is conceived as a giant stomach, pre-preparing photosyn- thetic energies and unpalatable materialities so they can be ab- sorbed into our digestive system, our bloodstreams, our organs and neural tissues. «Plants and the space they occupy are just as much a part of man as his mouth, his teeth or his stomach... The whole globe in splendid flight around the sun is a part, an organ, of every individual human» (Silvio Gesell) As ecologically related and embodied beings, we also exist as food for other beings, even as «the human supremacist culture of the West makes a strong effort to deny [...] that we humans can be positioned in the food chain in the same way as other animals.» (Val Plumwood) Thinking and connecting anew with our own eco- logical intimacy couples the «gut-level intimacy» human beings have with deep-time planetary processes and with the globally systematized, mediated, infrastructural existence. These are imaginaries with potentials, as Huiying Ng writes, to «metabolize hope».06 - PräsentationPublikation Beyond the Media Reveal(26.06.2020) Allen, JamieThe ‘media reveal’ is a perspective and gesture of art and media-making, theory and writing. It is a staging of continuous surprises – reveals – that always attempt to denature and remove supposed myths and illusions from or behind media technologies and their infrastructures, often highlighting materiality or materialist function, and political economies. Beyond the Media Reveal is a keynote lecture, given at the 2019 RE:SOUND Media Arts Histories conference in Denmark, hosted by Aalborg University's RELATE Research Laboratory for Art and Technology. It is also the title of a peer-reviewed, published article derived from the lecture for the Seismograf journal of art and sound media. Beyond the Media Reveal attempts to characterize the media reveal narrative as it appears in media art, along with the stories media artists tell themselves through critical theory and thinking. Does this gesture expose or depose the always present power structures and technocratic didacticism that often remain? If we sought to go beyond this 'media reveal', what new practices of knowledge should emerge?01A - Beitrag in wissenschaftlicher ZeitschriftPublikation Can Hope be Calculated? Multiplying and Dividing Carbon, before and after Corona(03.03.2021) Allen, JamieCan Hope be Calculated? Multiplying and Dividing Carbon, before and after Corona is a piece of writing for the A Nourishing Network publishing project that documents and circulates current research done by a network of artists, activists and programmers that collaborate with the Austrian net culture initiative servus.at. Written in collaboration with researcher, artist and writer Caroline Sinders, Can Hope be Calculated? is a short essay about the positive potentials of quantification, calculation, and technologies if they can be 'brought down to size' and made graspable. Can Hope be Calculated? was commissioned following a workshop "Trace Carbon" for the March 2020 Art Meets Radical Openness (AMRO) festival.10 - Elektronische-/ WebpublikationPublikation Capricious Characters of the Community: Let’s see how this plays out(04/2019) Kolb, Lucie; Garnicnig, Bernhard; Allen, Jamie06 - PräsentationPublikation China, Technology, Planetary Futures: Lessons for a World in Crisis?(2020) Allen, JamieTwo issues are set to become increasingly central in coming decades. First and foremost, amidst the Anthropocene, are issues of environmental crisis at planetary scale, and what this means for a global economy and associated model of science and innovation premised upon ever-accelerating exploitation of natural resources. Secondly, and in comparison a highly neglected issue in mainstream (still largely Western) social science, is the rise of China. But how these two issues will come together and shape the 21st century receives even less attention, even as their conjunction is likely to prove increasingly influential. This is both an increasingly problematic oversight and a missed opportunity for insights that do not merely confirm relatively established, i.e. Euro-Atlanticist and short-termist, readings of the state of the ‘world’. STS has much to contribute to the development of this missing analysis, not just because the construction of new environmental, infrastructural and technological (and, in particular, digital) innovations from and in China is already evident as a key dynamic. But also because of STS’s capacity to draw on empirical exploration that does not take theoretical categories as given but pursues development of new illuminating concepts adequate to a constantly changing socio-technical landscape of uncertain futures. This panel thus invites contributions studying Chinese socio-technical projects (in China or overseas, e.g. via the Belt Road Initiative (BRI)) for insights into how these two ‘mega-trends’ may be coming together; and what may be learned from China, positively or negatively, to confront the current apparent impasse(s) regarding global crisis.06 - PräsentationPublikation Civic Ecologies(2022) Allen, JamieCivic Ecologies is a workshop and research approach towards rendering more accessible, understandable and changeable the vast array of interconnected, material relations that underly modern urban life, cross-culturally and in global locales. In short, "making 'public works', public again." Cities dominate how critical components of global ecological systems flow and operate. Understanding how 'civic ecologies' can be democratically and ecologically managed is no longer just an infrastructural curiosity, but a planetary priority. Through fieldwork visits to energy, water, food, transport, and communication system sites, comparative studies of the infrastructure of global cities, ecologies, and natures in undertaken. In the context of the international, low-residency NYU Interactive Media Arts programme, these workshops have involved students from all over the globe, evolving projects that respond locally to the demands of global urbanization. Projects, designs and artworks created through the workshop test the possibilities and limits of public, accessible infrastructures and thriving environments for humans, and others, in always and increasingly globalised urban centres.06 - PräsentationPublikation Concerning Circulations: Cybernetic Stewardship & Planetary Engineering(2019) Allen, Jamie; Chatterjee, Sria; Sobecka, Karolina"Our age of climate crisis brings with it intimate, acute relations between informational environments and real ecologies. Technoscience has understood ecological change, environmental crisis, and human and non-human climate migrations through imagery — circulated through scientific publication, popular media, our devices, networks and imaginations as photographs of fieldwork, and an iconography of starving polar bears. Applied scientific powers attempt to regulate real, situated natures through inversions of this imagery as visual rubrics and illustrations. Pixels and CO2 molecules, data streams and jetstreams, abstract diagrams and engineering practices amalgamate. What results is a vision of elemental automation, planetary machinic worlding and technological care that authorises real conservation and geoengineering practices, growing green in Silicon Valley and explicitly trying to bring about »Gaia 2.0.«. »Concerning Circulations« is articulated through two media streams, one ongoing and the other summative, culminating at the end of the web residency. Collaborative, online-research recovers the image-ecosystem of new regimes of planetary scale management of nature, such as carbon markets. The project reposts, contextualises and critiques the circulation of images and diagrams of control, creating a visual archive of contemporary cybernetic attentions. This archive, continuously updated in instagram-like fashion, in turn creates materials for three, narrated short essay-films, confidentials of the stories that new ecological engineering and climate innovation propaganda propagates."06 - PräsentationPublikation Conference of the Public: CoCreating Article 6(2019) Allen, Jamie; Sobecka, KarolinaConference of the Public: CoCreating Article 6 is a workshop taking place prior to the COP 25 Santiago Climate Change Conference in December 2019. Developed collaboration with Karolina Sobecka, and with workshop participants, a collective reconstitution of Article 6, one of the most contentious parts of the Paris Climate Agreement, was variously performed. These recreations which take various forms, including use of the central document in protest signs for the autumn 2019 Friday for Futures demonstration in Basel, Switzerland. The workshop is held as part of the CoCreate programme at the Academy of Art and Design, FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, focusing here on the role of artists, designers, students and non-experts, as an exercise of 'civic epistemology' applying contextual, embodied, and trans-disciplinary knowledge to reasonings about how cooperation on climate action should be organized between countries, individuals and other parties.06 - PräsentationPublikation The Copenhagen Invitation(Continent, 2015) Allen, JamieWhat is a metaphor for? We might first assume that these unassuming little devices are fixers against incomprehension. They are often translative, mnemonics tricks, linguistically metamorphosing the unknown of a murky, muddy idea into to the crystalline clarity of the familiar. Language itself functions analogously — ”that is a chair” solidifies reference, subtended by tradition, culture and practice, from a concrete object to a gaseous concept, and sublimating back again. “No ideas but in things,” wrote W.C. Williams. (Duffey, Litz, & MacGowan, 1987) Karan Barad inverts this relation with her own rejoinder: “Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter.” (Micciche, 2014)01A - Beitrag in wissenschaftlicher ZeitschriftPublikation Could this Be What It looks like? Lifelike Art and Art-and-technology Practice (I si això fos el que sembla? Art que imita la vida i pràctica artística tecnològica)(Fundacio per la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, 2011) Allen, JamieFor more than ten years, a number of archival and curatorial projects have mapped out a trajectory of art-historical roots for the values and practices of new media arts, its conventions and institutions. These accounts are, as often as not, earnest attempts made by practitioners and theorists alike to “save” new media’s artists and works from the purported inevitability of becoming a ghettoized subculture, walled off from the resources and distribution channels associated with Western contemporary (and commercial) museum and gallery culture. Saving new media in this way purportedly holds the promise of improving critical discourse surrounding “the work”, developing audience and interest, stimulating economic potential, and securing new media its rightful detent as another lineal “movement” in histories of creative practice. The experimental, process-driven and often anti-professional outlook of the conceptual avant-garde of the latter half of the 20th century provides an oft-cited and somewhat contradictory framework for situating new media within a contemporary art system that has remained relatively formal. As well, the current proliferation, popularization and extension of abilities that only a decade ago were the exclusive purvey of self-proclaimed new media artists have resulted in a number of points of entry for non-specialists to access concepts in non-objective art, participatory performance, process and systems-art. Is the dream of the early techno-artistic avant-garde becoming a reality?01B - Beitrag in Magazin oder ZeitungPublikation Could This Be What It Looks Like? Lifelike Art and New Media Practice(2011) Allen, Jamie06 - Präsentation