Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures
Dauerhafte URI für die Sammlunghttps://irf.fhnw.ch/handle/11654/19
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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 Planetary Intimacy(29.11.2021) Allen, JamiePlanetary Intimacy is a contribution to the Anthropocene Curriculum and COURSES platform "On Curricula". The essay text addresses the seemingly opposed notions of distance and proximity with intimacy and planetarity to call for new kinds of intimacy, not closeness global grid but as an interconnected network of locales. Through such an approach, Allen suggests, the multiple distances—in terms of both geography and understanding—at play within the Anthropocene might be better apprehended. Planetary Intimacy features an excerpt of Soot Breath // Corpus Infinitum by Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman, courtesy of the artists, and links to a COURSES entry on the topic of Distance Learning referencing archival and curricular materials from the Anthropocene Curriculum archives and beyond.10 - Elektronische-/ WebpublikationPublikation 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 Technogenesis(Onassis Foundation, 2021) 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 SammelbandPublikation We will: Futurological propositions(Critical Media Lab Basel, IXDM, HGK, FHNW, 2021) Allen, JamieWhat you are now reading are Futurological Propositions — a collected and edited experimental publication on the subject of ‘proposals as a creative practice’. This physically and digitally distributed volume emerges from discussions surrounding the ways that proposals, as a future-form of writing, comprise real and imagined aspects, and possibilities of hope for futures. When we put forward suggestions, we take a risk, putting ideas up for evaluation. We engage, when proposing, in a particular creative mode of thinking — projecting, speculating, making things up and then (possibly) making them real. Chapters by: Ina Bandixen; Viktor Bedö; Samuel Bron; Manuel Justo; Matilde Martins; Martha Kapfhammer; Till Langschied; Adrian Pirlet; Joseph Popper; Jennifer Scherler03 - SammelbandPublikation The Earth is an Art, Like Everything Else(Osage Publications, 2020) Allen, Jamie; Merewether, Charles; Zielinski, SiegfriedThe contributed chapter The Earth is an Art, Like Everything Else takes the the poem Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath and the related essay by Michael Taussig as a starting point for developing the ways in which digital art, media and creative practices might 'reattach' us to the earth. Fujihata's Masaki (literally) groundbreaking 1992 project, "Impressing Velocity (Mount Fuji)", in which the artist packed a rucksack with what then a rather large and heavy kit-of-parts — a serial GPS module, a laptop computer and a (then, not-commercially-available) head-mounted video camera — and climbed up the side of Mount Fuji, serves to example knowledge practices in the future in art, science, research and experience, that might ground and attach us more intimately to the planet and its processes.04A - Beitrag SammelbandPublikation 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 This cycle, here, this one(2019) Allen, Jamie; Sobecka, Karolina"It is that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and no’s, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy, guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one. – Primo Levi, “Carbon,” from The Periodic Table (1975) If there is a universe in every word, each atom also creates its own narrative. In this performance lecture spanning a contemporary history of its composition, markets and capture, a literary cycle of Carbon is developed in moving image, text and diagram. The use and abuse of cycles as models of exchange and circulation are examined for their appropriateness and applicability, and new models are proposed for our relationship to this building block of life, petrocultures and capitalism. Karolina Sobecka and Jamie Allen present a cyclical discussion in six elements for element number six. The lecture will include a hands-on element: we will ask the audience to re-draw the carbon cycle, based on their personal experiences."06 - Präsentation