Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures
Dauerhafte URI für die Sammlunghttps://irf.fhnw.ch/handle/11654/19
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Ergebnisse nach Hochschule und Institut
Publikation The Harvest of the Past That Awaits My Hunger(2022) Allen, JamieDissimilarities are often drawn between the “economy” and “ecology”, supposedly in conflict. Economics, “the dismal science”, it is said, abstracts human instinct and desires creating systems of value, accumulation and exchange. Ecologies are taken as domains of organic flows and fluxes, “natural” relationships and attachments that being, sustain, abate and end life. The adversarial relationship between capitalism and climate underlines the needful ways in which values outside of the monetary need to be protected and promoted. At the same time, the historical development of things like energy currencies and ecosystems services, as well as contemporary experiments in distributed governance and environmental and supply (block)chain technologies allows for new constellations and approaches to management and repair, some of which reinvigorate an age-old desire to re-integrate human and natural systems through technology. We have many precursors and references for such constellations to draw from. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1906–1994) espoused the “marginal utility of money” against energy and needful material exchange. The ecofeminisms of Val Plumwood, and feminist economics of the later 20th Century, underline how the hierarchical and individuous abstractions of capitalism cleave value from its provisioning and (re)productive significance. Customs of gift, which also acknowledge and enact solar abundance, were illegalized by institutions of European colonialism in the name of promoting more “civilized values” of accumulation and scarcity. Henry Ford proposed the creation of an “energy currency” and Charles Hall suggested the idea of an “energy return on investment” as a principle metric for returning the survival and the well-being of individuals, communities, neighbourhoods and ecosystems to economic exchange. It remains challenging to tie the metrics of energy and car- bon markets, and the motivations of things like the Regenerative Finance (#ReFi) movement, to the kinds of cultural experiences through which vital social values can be wrought; to reencounter one another in a metabolic field character that understands solar energy as the origin, datum and decider of all exchanges, limits, abundance, gifts. Part of what it is to be human, what is to be a living thing, is to be connected to the cosmological infrastructures of ecology and energy.06 - PräsentationPublikation Funky Fresh(2023) Allen, Jamie; Sharifullin, Stas"Fresh" and "funky" are words used to describe styles, aesthetics, music, art, and other contemporary creative productions. They are concepts primarily derived from cultures of food. "Fresh" is used to describe things that are new, not stale, unwilted and easy to consume - things that are, in effect, alive, almost, or recently dead. "Funky", on the other hand, responds to foods that are decomposed or decaying, making us furrow our brows and curl our upper lips. Musicians, of course, use the word "funky" in other ways. This class takes up investigations and experimentation of these two fundamental, even essential aesthetic categories through food and music, alimentation, and audition. With readings, media, arts, and culinary examples drawn from historic and contemporary social experiments and movements such as Afrofuturism, ruderal ecologies, and others, we will sketch together outlines of a culinary cosmopolitics that relates creative acts to survival, morality, the 'good life' and living well. With a particular focus on sonic experience, we examine and practice embodied experiences that immerse and envelope individuals, socialize, and cohere groups of humans and nonhumans in new rituals and ceremonies of ecological attachment.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 Of Metabolic Myth(2022) Allen, JamieThere are few areas of material culture from which people demand more authenticity, integrity and transparency than the techniques and materialities surrounding food. Foods materialise myths and imaginaries of nature and modernity, and entire regional economies and national cuisines rely on evolved and invented stories about where and how foodstuffs are prepared. At the same time, systems of provenance are challenging to establish, fakes common, and forgery rampant. Cultures and peoples the world over concern themselves with the genuineness of dishes and the pedigree of raw materials and preparations. Governance and policy structures attempt to snare those who wilfully or otherwise commit the deep offence of violating the economic sanctity or highly intimate significance of foods. Food processes are faked, adulterated, contaminated and stigmatised in ways that deeply revolt, pervert and reveal those things about which human beings care most deeply. The myths, materiality, media, systems and infrastructures of food are a metabolic imaginary that links seemingly simple alimentary processes to notions of truth-telling and authenticity. Our culinary techniques and performances of socialisation, story- telling and identity show, yet again, that “truth is a matter of the imagination”.10 - Elektronische-/ WebpublikationPublikation What on earth is the planetary?(2023) Allen, Jamie; Bolen, JeremyThere are efforts being made, and forced upon us, to grapple with the earth as an entity, object, and force. Under the guise of “planetarity,” these efforts span pursuits in the natural sciences of atmospheres, environments, and geologies, the biologies of living and ecologies of nonliving things, and the human knowledge practices that chart social, geopolitical, logistical, and infrastructural globalism. In their video essay project, “The Impossibility of a Planet,” artists and researchers Jeremy Bolen and Jamie Allen engage in dialogues with those who seek to compose planetary-scale images, thinking, narratives, and models. In a companion essay to the video segments, an inquiry into the media and methods of such compositions provides complement. Where do planetarities come from, and where are they taking us?10 - Elektronische-/ WebpublikationPublikation Histories of White Ecologies, Gratitudes for Black Ecologies(2022) Allen, JamiePrepared collaboratively with architectural historian Daniel A. Barber, Histories of White Ecologies, Gratitudes for Black Ecologies points to white supremacists tropes, histories and customs within the natural science of ecology, while drawing attentions and praise, gratttiude and appreciations, to the work of contemporary Black Ecologies and ecologists. The essay was prepared in the context of the MARCH journal of art & strategy's 2021 issue "Black Ecologies".01B - Beitrag in Magazin oder ZeitungPublikation Hustle, Grind and Sleep(2022) Allen, Jamie; Kellermeyer, JonasWe work endlessly. Whether it be justified by love,money, or both, it seems clear that the popular imaginary and contemporary conditions of the industrialised West are arranged such that there is always more work to do. We are always working — on ourselves, on others (things, relationships, people), presuming to understand its value and utility, and presuming that it will always increase the common good. Albert Camus’ famous inversion — to regard Sisyphus as the prototype of a happy person, always assured of work, always with something to do — is a seemingly benign allegory for microcultures in which continuous work is a must, a mantra, a mania and a meme; microcultures in which leisure is luxury, and sleep is optional.01A - Beitrag in wissenschaftlicher ZeitschriftPublikation The Impossibility of a Planet(Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2022) Bolen, Jeremy; D'Aguiar, Adrian; Allen, Jamie; Rossee, CarlinaThe Impossibility of a Planet is a collaborative, multichannel documentary, produced with artist and researcher Jeremy Bolen. Motion graphics by Adriano D'Aguiar. The project touches on the practices of people whose work, research, practice and thought default to 'planetary magnitudes'. The project canvases international contacts in communities of geoscience, geopolitics, anthropology and journalism, whose practices are necessarily and often in different ways ‘global’ in scope, asking, also through the experience of a pandemic, where and how do we continue this work? What motivates planetary-scale projects and work, as technologies increasingly mediate our relations to one another and the planet? How do we undertake and understand new lines of communication, trust and intimacy with our collaborators and peers? How do ‘empirical research’ and fieldwork change when access to the field, lab and locales of this research change often and in important ways? A write up of the project is included in The Whole Life: An Archive Project'sUn-/Learning Archives in the Age of the Sixth Extinction. A set of six video vignettes conjoin to form a contiguous film, to be screened online and in an offline exhibition installation. Initial presentations include an evening screening as part of the Collaborative Practice on a Changing Planet public events at HKW Haus der Kulturen der Welt The Impossibility of a Planet tells a story of how global science and knowledge are composed, and sometimes decompose. Interviews with 'planetary practitioners' are continually added to the work through multiple versions and public exhibitions. Current discussion partners include Tina Sikka, Jim Igoe, Will Steffen, Allison Stegner, Jan Zalasiewicz, Gabriela Barreto Lemos, Tim Lenton, Michael Mazarr, Jinnah Zubar, Peter Haff, Ron Milo, Ana Mizher, Manfred Laubichler, Simon Turner, Mark Williams, Friederike Otto and Cymene Howe, amongst many others.14 - AusstellungsbeitragPublikation 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 Reptile Brain(Onassis Foundation, 2022) Carver, Louise Emily; Allen, Jamie; Engelhardt, AnnaChimeras. Inventory of Synthetic Cognition is a collective glossary on Artificial Intelligence exploring the synthetic nature of cognition from a variety of perspectives: interspecies, crip, monstrous, feminist, distributed, and decolonial, amongst others. Contributions to the lexicographical compendium include entries on the "Reptile Brain" and "Technogenesis". The publication is edited by Anna Engelhardt and Ilan Manouach, produced with the Onassis Foundation in Athens, and forecasts into speculative terrains.04A - Beitrag Sammelband