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 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 - Präsentation