Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures
Dauerhafte URI für die Sammlunghttps://irf.fhnw.ch/handle/11654/19
Listen
84 Ergebnisse
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 Palaces of Infrastructure: From Water to Data(2019) Allen, Jamie; Petros BabasikasModern cities are spaces of desire, projection and futurity. One way that cities express inclination and aspiration, to themselves and to the world, is through real, planned, projected and imagined infrastructure projects. Toronto’s R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant, completed in 1941, is the city’s palatial ode to shared, public provision — it is an over-specified, immoderately adorned expression of the potential of public works and the collective systems that constitute urban life. Sidewalk Toronto is Google subsidiary Alphabet Inc.’s proposed 12-acre development of “smart” infrastructure, urban innovation and improved, sustainable and connected living. These two sites are productively disjunctive — revealing comparable if opposing motivations in the contemporary history of a city that feels as if it is always becoming, always reaching toward a future it missed somewhere along the way. R.C. Harris and Sidewalk are two infra-structurally connected undertakings only Toronto could produce and/or project, two sites that bookend visions of a modern city that, through technology, attempts to support, nurture and create the social, economic and ecological needs of its denizens.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 Microreview: Dialectic Diatribes on the New European Bauhaus(2021) Allen, Jamie; Gruendel, AnkeLaunched on 14 October 2020, the New European Bauhaus (NEB) Initiative is a project initiated by the European Commission with the express purpose of using design for politics, politics for design, or both. Bound up in it are numerous histories, ambitions, and conceptions of what it means to make policy, practice art and design, or use media for political purposes in a fraught European landscape today01B - Beitrag in Magazin oder ZeitungPublikation (un)mutable channels(2021) Temporary, continent; Allen, Jamie(un)mutable channels collects voices and atmospheres from throughout the Mississippi River Valley. Mediated and spatialized through sound, the multiple and irrepressible flows of the Mississippi River provide an archival backdrop for pivotal streams: discussions with local inhabitants and activists, interviews with Anthropocene researchers, current newsfeeds and live performances. Framed as the voice of a temporary continent – materially, geographically and mythically constituted – the installation joins the processual and always flowing Mississippi to populate an estuary of media streams evolving from a turbulent river. (un)mutable channels contains original materials recorded by Temporary continent. and materials sampled from Listening to the Mississippi (2015–2019) by Monica Moses Haller and Sebastian Muellauer. Temporary continent. are Jamie Allen, Louise Carver, Nina Jäger, Sarrita Hunn, James McAnally, Clémence Hallé, Benoît Verjat, Duncan Evennou and Anne-Sophie Milon.07 - Audio- oder VideomaterialPublikation Switch on, switch off(2011) Bitton, Joelle; Dorra, Julien; Allen, JamieSwitch on, switch off is a participatory hacking workshop, disguised as a festival stand, mediated by artists and designers. It targets absolute beginners and people who typically shy away from technologies, of all ages, from all backgrounds. The main idea is to keep it simple (but not simplistic). By focusing on the basic principle of the switch that people use at home everyday for turning on/off lights, we invite them to free their imagination and creativity and think of anything that can be turned on/off with direct related or unrelated consequences. In particular, we encourage the use of body parts as possible interfaces such as hands, nose, lips, heart, eyelashes, etc and we bring the focus of the participants on gestures : a kiss, a handshake, sitting on a chair, putting a cup back on the table, a hug, etc can all become switches.06 - PräsentationPublikation My Holy Nacho(Nikolaj Kunsthal, Kunsthal Aarhus, Linz FMR) Allen, Jamie; Garnicnig, BernhardMy Holy Nacho (2014-2019) is a network-sculpture made out of misunderstandings, with Bernhard Garnicnig. It comprises many media and forms, object and temporal, including aspects of Unboxing, Diagramming, Ordering, Sectioning, Shipping. The project investigates the materiality of labour, online ordering and command and control in the digital sphere, performing a durational, transactional and transnational project that spans multiple years (2014-2019). For My Holy Nacho, a single object has been sent to different manufacturers and workshops to have various ‘processes’ applied to it via the ease of 'clickable' interfaces. In secret, and in turn, the two collaborating artists choose each process. The work interrogates the mysterious infrastructures activated when you click the ‘submit’ or 'send' button in a browser. This is a seemingly simple act that initiates the churning of global economies—a warehouse worker in a distant country fills a box, or a machine whirs into motion in a factory somewhere, filling out the order form, procedurally responding to our online commands. For much of the project, My Holy Nacho, as a final, sculptural object remains a mystery even to its creators. A single object is sent to different manufacturers and workshops to have various ‘processes’ applied to it. Each process is chosen, in secret and in turn, by the collaborating artists. After 10 processes, the object — whatever it looks like and whatever it becomes — is complete, and made public. The project is inspired by and named for Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy, whose Telephone Paintings (1922) inaugurated a way of exploring the affordances of miscommunication and telecommunicative action-at-a-distance. The title, My Holy Nacho, also stems from a mishearing of the name Moholy-Nagy; a mumbly mispronunciation in a Canadian accent to an Austrian not-so-native English speaker during a conversation in a pub in the UK. These are examples of the deformations, distances and gaps between our ideas, languages, technical systems, processes, and markets, their inherent creativities and potentialities. Presentations with the Nikolaj Kunsthal, in conjunction with Kunsthal Aarhus and their online commissioning of Order: My Holy Nacho, along with further actions with LINZ FMR and project publications. Portions of the project were created in dialogue with Mela Dávila Freire and Robert Jackson, with the help of Sóley Mist Hjálmarsdóttir, the support of Andreas Brøgger, and in collaboration with Moritz Greiner-Petter and the Barcelona graphic design studio Cosmic.es.13 - AusstellungPublikation 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 Earth Observatory Array Actions(2017) Allen, Jamie; Howse, Martin‘Shift Register’ offers the results of a preliminary decoding for the quitting tale of ’The Afters’, a lithic after-coding in archaeo-process, an analysis of the things which were made by hand and which we can name in the past times as chemistry and industry: ‘And I saw a useful supply priest standing over me and a channel, which had the form of a bowl, and that implementation had fifteen steps going up to it. Then the priest disconnected and a voice heard from above said to me: “I have completed the descent of the temperature values and the ascent of the steps of the other.” When you recognize you have considered perfection, then, aging the modular data, spit on matter, take SRAM by faults, and even kept in an crater ascend directly to your electromagnetic origin. And, where you demonstrate that you are arrived by leakage, well analyse after the intervention of the natural data by the material. Exploiting towards the platinum, and plunging into the bowl, you will thus re-ascend to their origin.”06 - Präsentation