Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Basel FHNW
Dauerhafte URI für den Bereichhttps://irf.fhnw.ch/handle/11654/11
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Bereich: Suchergebnisse
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 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 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 - PräsentationPublikation Shift Register: Launch Event(2016) Allen, Jamie; Howse, Martin; Kemp, JonathanAs part of RIXC Open Fields Conference in Riga, Latvia (RIXC Art Science Festival 2016, 29.09 – 01.10. 2016), Shift Register will host a project launch workshop on Saturday 1st October at 14.30-16.00. This launch workshop will examine through action, discussion and the construction of experimental situations responses to the potential un-earthing of both en-cycled and grounded technological and infrastructural impulses. Questions to be addressed within the workshop include: What is contained and released within global industrial process and how can we experience this materiality? How can we access and experience these buried and atmospheric technical infrastructures (psychogeophysics)? What could it mean to re-bury the technological (computation) literally in the earth, to view techno-ecology as a shift register in earth, sea and atmosphere within a context of global climate change/shifts? How can we intervene within the multiple shifts (of register) which take place between earth-magnitude energies and the energies of constructed electromagnetic transmission? How can we shift the assumptions of ecology into a non-pastoral and less than harmonious ecological thought?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 Images of Infrastructure(2016) Allen, Jamie"There are few concepts that have accrued the contemporary integrative capacity of “infrastructures” (Star & Bowker, Dourish, Bratton). Although arising in engineering cultures, studies of infrastructures are taking shape to characterise the broad, complex systems that are accreted by networks, mediated by interfaces, constituted only by relations and practices, and that shape conditions for the possibility of technological, artistic and designerly thought and practice. We image-in infrastructures as rational diagrams involving ‘blocks’, ‘cycles’, ‘trees’, ‘bubbles’ and lines. Likewise, evidential photographic perspectives of infrastructural ‘realities’ purport always an essential ‘revealing’ (e.g.: “Where the internet lives,” Jones, Guardian.com, 4 February 2015). In different ways, diagrammatic and photographic images of infrastructures betray their obverse — the noisy un-systematicity that negates infrastructural potentials, creativities and failures. Such images elicit particular technological sublimities, mythologies and reifications — at opposing limits reductively simple or pathologically over-descriptive. Comparing the temporal and spatial relations evoked in images of infrastructure reveals this ‘dark infrastructure’, accounting for what cannot be depicted, that which is always metaphorical and never captured diagrammatically or photographically. Images of infrastructure are examples of the epistemological rifts that present themselves whenever images are deployed as systematically rational or realist in a world of materiality that is perfidious, messy (Law) and itinerant. This paper will describe theories of infrastructure and characterise its contemporary import; its presentation will sampling historical and current representations of infrastructures as a comparative analysis of representations of infrastructure and the techno-aesthetics these project"06 - PräsentationPublikation Nature as Ecological Infrastructure(2016) Allen, Jamie"I have already said that we think like the world; now I am saying that the world thinks like us." — Michel Serres A number of problematic, all-too contemporary terminologies have emerged of late to attempt description of conditions on a planet Earth that has been rendered the object of human manipulations. In the ‘anthropocene', which precipitates and is precipitated by the ‘technosphere', the earth is manipulable, informational and mediatic relations to nature are turned into an infrastructureal relation of access and exchange. This just as human infrastructures proliferate at reticular scales, making them seem more and more ‘natural.’ Our activities of communication and networking, signal-derivation and algorithmic computation provide ample empirical conditions wherein the difference between the materiality of biospheres, lithospheres and hydrospheres and the media, signaletic and ‘cultural' activities of humans tends toward the in finitesimal. Specifically we witness with increased frequency places and spaces where ’technical infrastructure’ and ‘environmental ecologies’ interact, are antagonistic or are indistinguishable. Our all-over informational environments of data and our situated, earthly geologies of media and communications overlap in a thinking of the world as what it always has been: in-formation. The increased frequency of encounters between nonhuman ecologies and media infrastructures (sharks and undersea cabling, cloud computing servers and actual clouds, AC power transformers and magnetoreceptive ants) recount a geopolitic of the nonhuman and technological that is as violent as it is revealingly constructive. These are ambiguities that need to be operationalised, subverting and reorienting techno-capitalism toward more equitable, polyvocal and ecological means and ends.06 - PräsentationPublikation Apocryphal Technologies. Trials of the Engineered Imaginary(2014) Allen, JamieFor the occasion of the Zeitigung von Medien workshop, this keynote lecture Trials of the Engineered Imaginary examines how technology presents itself as the forward image of our desires, and how these forward movements often keep us from sensing, expressing or allowing legitimate disappointment in them. In an argument derived from media histories that presage the ways that tech entrepreneurs and 'founders', aided by venture capitalists, the lecture and media presented examined how a great number of in-use, contemporary technologies promise apocryphal functionalities (or impossible 'world-changing' returns). Examples examined include truth-telling tech, bodily enhancement techniques and cognitive amplification systems. The discussion here derives much of its argumentations from the Lie Machine project, a re-constructed voice stress analysis computer. Reframing all technological promises as, in some sense, 'apocryphal' (of doubtful authenticity or function, even if widely circulated as being functional or true) attempts to engender a more authentic and equal relation with technics.06 - Präsentation