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 Echoes of Eco, Two Walks in Athens(2017) Allen, JamieEchoes of Eco is two walks in Athens during which a group of people gathers to witness, produce documents at, and annotate sites in Athens where the economy touches the ecology of the city. Economy and ecology, often presumed to be in opposition, echo a common root—oikos, a household or dwelling place—respectively through its management and the interrelation of its parts. Echoes of Eco is a set of walks in Athens that brings together an open group of researchers, activists, artists, onlookers, and passersby to visit and discuss local sites chosen due to their connections between economy and ecology. The invisible hand of the “free” market is visible in physical spaces; it is more apparent, tangible, and everyday. We witness, gather documents, think through, and annotate sites in Athens, dwelling places saturated by economic debates and repercussions, as well as reconfigurations. We visit sites in Athens, each day starting at 5 pm and lasting around four hours. We meet at A-Letheia kiosk Psyrri on day one (July 14), and at Kypselis kiosk on day two (July 15). Everyone is invited to suggest site locations, as well as documents (objects, artifacts, images, and texts) that address an experience of economic and ecological interactions. Echoes of Eco is hosted by the experimental publishing collective continentcontinent.cc.06 - PräsentationPublikation Fieldtalks, at the Anthropocene Campus Philadelphia(2017) continent, continent; Allen, JamieWhat would a conversation with a piece of asbestos, or a piece of plastic stranded on the shore of the Schuylkill River be like? And how could a conversation transpire, between things and researchers and other things, if they landed in the same place and found for themselves a common language? Imprinted by Philadelphia’s singular industrial and technological history, the soils, water systems, and infrastructures of the Delaware Valley tell a story of the Anthropocene, the contentious and debated terminology for this new and anthropocentric geological era in which human activities have forever altered the Earth. For the Anthropocene Campus Philadelphia (ACP), continent. attempts to listen to the material utterances of sites that voice intertwined economic, technological, and political histories of The Athens of America, a city, a factory, a riverbed, a valley, an escarpment. Collaborating with researchers, activists, scientists and student groups, continent. conducts a set of field walks and discussions that gather objects, samples, sounds, stories, and conversations. We might visit former asbestos production areas at Ambler, call on the developments around Philly’s harbour and waterfront developments, check out conditions along the Schuylkill River and will perchance examine archives at the Academy of Natural Sciences, amongst other areas of interest. Brought to the APC to constitute an anthropocenic evidence locker, a sample table for the technosphere, these artifacts will provide material interfaces and witnesses in the institutional ecosystem of the campus.Inviting more human and linguistic beings to think with and through these collected materials, continent. will issue a series of recorded audio interviews, subject and objects in discussion: Fieldtalks is a continent. podcast at the Anthropocene Campus Philadelphia. Based on observations and collections of materials at symptomatic and Anthropocenic sites, continent. hosted and recorded Fieldtalks in and around the Anthropocene Campus Philadelphia. Participants were invited to think about and bring along documents, objects, artifacts, images, texts that speak to their experience of industrial activity and ecological interactions in the region. Fieldtalks, at the Anthropocene Campus Philadelphia is a collaboration the ANTHROPOCENE CAMPUS PHILADELPHIA (ACP), Scott Knowles and his students preceding the annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology.06 - PräsentationPublikation These Flows Shall Not be Contained(Marebox, 2021) Carver, Louise; Odunlami, Abbey; Allen, Jamie; Bien, Cecilia; Diaw, BintaThese Flows Shall Not Be Contained is a three-channel video installation that conveys the continuous relationships between human beings, territories, seas, oceans, and maritime regions, linked through migration, governance, and food practices. It is a triptych, syncopated conversation about Nigerian migration, ecological policy, metabolism and food cultures between Africa and Southern Europe. It addresses how national and supra-national policies abstract and attempt to govern mobilities, borders, trade, movement, and commerce. The work features the voices of La Rivoluzione delle Seppie of Calabria, Italy: Rita Elvira Adamo, Precious Ehigie, Igbineweka Henry and Riccardo Calandro. It is a collaboration with Abbéy Odunlami and Louse Emily Carver, part of the Emergent Strategies from the Deep exhibition, in the framework of the Marebox EU Research programme. Many thanks for audio production help from La Rivoluzione delle Seppie's Riccardo Calandro, Elio Fortu and Vito Meola.14 - AusstellungsbeitragPublikation Refractive Index(FutureEverything, 2012) Allen, Jamie; Papadimitriou, IriniRefractive Index is a visual media essay and compositional about the environmental and ecological impacts of large scale media. Site-specific software creates a digital camera obscura, and in a series of late night screenings a programmed sequence of flashes, strobes and streaks, emit bursts of light and colour across the hue spectrum of large scale public displays. Outward facing CCTV cameras, part of each screen’s infrastructure, captures images throughout. Programmed algorithms examine the footage for slippages and incongruities of the screen-camera feedback system. Every pixel we light up, in turn illuminates the environment surrounding it. The light energies that impact city and lived spaces, highlights the ways that media infrastructures effect nonhuman and human movement and behaviour in these spaces, as well as their luminous and aesthetic interactions with quotidian environments. Refractive Index inverts lines of synoptic-panoptic vision, showing us what our screens "see" when they peer out the night sky. The screens 'speak' with their own machine voices, in the language of technological, digital light. The work is shown as a collection of research media (photographs, site-specific films, interactive software, printed renders, screen-based video and projection), and has featured test-patterns screened overnight 9 cities in the UK as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad leadup to the 2012 London Olympics. Refractive Index was presented as part of Future Everything 2012 in Manchester, and as solo-exhibition at PH. Gallery, Newcastle, UK. The project was initiated through a commissioned by BBC Big Screens and the Olympic Cultural Foundation, UK. Dynamic, visual digital moving imagery increasingly blankets our public space and architecture. Their history can be traced to the late 19th C adaptation of magic lanterns to project “advertisements and election results on public buildings” (Huhtamo 2001). We still think of this media, these dynamic rectangles-of-light, as vehicles for transmitting messages — as ways of telling stories, delivering messaging, engaging people in linear or interactive content-rich experiences. At their best, these are valuable, creative and communicative platforms, and occasions for communities to meet and celebrate. The physicality, energetics, or thermodynamics, of these non-trivial systems is seldom discussed. Notable and inspiring exceptions include Blake Gordon's 2009 Cloud Projection project about uplightingfrom buildings casting light into overhead clouds, and Terraswarm's 2007 Color Shift project which took over a single large scale display in Brooklyn, bathing the burrough in coloured light. What is curiously elided from the critical picture of public digital screens is their massive architectural, ecological and infrastructural presence — the Olympic Big Screens used are at least 25 square metres in light-area, and necessitate a nearby server and control room the screens have significant, critical architectural impact. Where once there was shadow, glaring reflections appear, interrupting movement and traffic patterns, exposing once hidden places. Cladding, materials and paints turn into multicolored surfaces, glowing, reflecting and flickering with the energy of outdoor screens, their potency multiplied into the 3-dimensions around them. Turning 180 degrees from these screens, we see that the architectures of a city are continuously reshaped and remolded by the presence of media, in direct and immediate way. As important as the content on the screen, these are the effects of the screen on content of the city, architecture, space, human and nonhuman beings. Refractive Index was created with the grateful support of the wonderul Tom Schofield and David Gauthier, exhibited and supported by the Future Everything festival, Ph Space Gallery in Newcaslte, 2012 Cultural Olympiad in the UK, the BBC Big Screens engineers and programme, Culture Lab Newcastle University.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 Un-/Learning Archives in the Age of the Sixth Extinction(2022) Allen, Jamie; Basu, Priyanka; Becerra Valdez, Tamara; Bolen, Jeremy; Browne, Simon; Cahill, Susan; Hogan, Mél; Rowell, SteveThis workshop will deal with archives as related to overlapping sites of nature/culture, climate change, deep time and the built environment. Is the archive a viable repository of potential regenerative material for the future? Can it be an input in a positive feedback system of mutually assured destruction – an irrational fear response in the face of loss that condemns that which is not-yet-dead to the already-past?06 - PräsentationPublikation 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 Moving Food(2022) Odunlami, Abbey; Allen, JamieThe workshop analyses contemporary food trends, ecological and infrastructural food systems relations, toward the development of artistic consumption and serving concepts, media communications, physical designs and sustainability models. Workshop contents and activities examine what is gained and what is lost in trying to create balances, careful and respectful cross-cultural, intersectional and infrastructurally- and ecologically-minded consumption practices for globalized communities.06 - PräsentationPublikation Food Spectacles: Seeing Power, Eating Culture(2020) Odunlami, Abbey; Allen, JamieIn collaboration with conceptual artist and media-maker Abbéy Odunlami the workshop Food Spectacles: Seeing Power, Eating Culture takes up interests in artistic tactics for the redesign of urban metabolism, industrial agriculture and culinary cultures. We trace a history of food-art projects and trajectories that seek to change cultural norms and traditions, techniques and technologies of preparation, the design of spaces and places for eating, communications media, and other forms of metabolic meaning-making, narrative and poetry. The framing of the workshop critically examined Unesco’s SDG 11 (sustainable cities and communities). What relationships between foods, cultures and ecologies can be more explicit and so re-made? What are the intersections of politics and infrastructures that are created by the sourcing, preparation and consumption of what we eat? What are the conditions of food sourcing, cooking and eating in our globalized, hyperconnected, capital-driven world? Can we better understand how food cultures reflect and intervene in larger patterns of economic and ecological growth and crisis, such that we are better able to resist the "spectacle” of a contemporary mediascape that stylizes, glamorizes and alienates us from what we eat?06 - Präsentation