2022, Odunlami, Abbey, Allen, Jamie

The 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.

2022, Allen, Jamie

"The Ledger of the Sun investigates the sun as a medium, as technology and currency. We'll exchange in the currency of energy and experience the gifts, growth, plenitudes and enigmas that are brought to us by our star. In the lecture hall at the former Munch museum in Oslo, on one of its main walls, there's a shadow from a painting. This imprint is the negative space of a big painting entitled “The Sun,” by Edvard Munch in 1909, and which speaks to the ambiguity of our solar source, its intense beauty and brutality, its life-giving inhumanity. “The Ledger of the Sun” use this sun print as the starting point for a discussion on solar energy technologies, solar currencies and solar foods (are there any other kinds?). A walk and a specially designed canapé meal, created in collaboration with the Oslo Botanical Gardens and Oslo-based organic chef, gardener Kia Vulgaris: interventions and readings, media and moments will create experiences of solar pasts, and solar futures. “The Ledger of the Sun” is organised by artist-researcher Jamie Allen with contributions by Jan Nikolai Nelles, Carola Uehlken, Gary Zhexi Zhang, Louise Emily Carver and Thomas Turnbull. Collaborative writings by Dani Admiss, James Bridle and Catarina de Almeida Brito will be published as an Empyreal Ephmeride, which accompanies the event."

2022, Hajdas, Irka, Allen, Jamie

Die radiometrische Altersbestimmung von Stoffen ist nur scheinbar ein objektiver Vorgang. Tatsächlich verfügt sie über eine Vielzahl von Bedeutungsebenen, erweckt Assoziationen zum Kosmischen wie zum Politischen. Radionuklide und Radiokarbon, weit mehr als nur chronometrische Messmedien, verknüpfen die Geschichte und das Handeln der Menschen auf Engste mit materiellen Prozessen. Eingesetzt unter anderem in Klimaforschung, Umweltwissenschaften, Archäologie und Forensik, verbinden Methoden aus dem Feld der Geochronologie Fakt und Fiktion. Wie lässt sich durch sie eine Nähe zu zeitlich weit zurückliegenden Ereignissen herstellen? Und was ist das Verständnis der Geochronolog*innen und Geohistoriker*innen zu ihrer „response-ability“ gegenüber den materiellen Signalen aus der Vergangenheit?

2022, Allen, Jamie

A 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.

2022, Kellermeyer, Jonas, Allen, Jamie

As relations central to our own work, time, labour, identity and media practices, we attempt to trace how new media-aesthetics and -concepts (memes) are changing work, life and sleep. The pressing challenge of the present: the composition of a liveable, existential relation to infrastructures of work and their creative, or artistic, collaborative potentials. As with Albert Camus’ famous inversion — to regard Sisyphos as the prototype of a happy person, assured of certainty — the ways in which a ‘good life’ can be lead is also a matter of perspective: modern institutions and media render it virtually impossible to avoid (idealistic, ambiguous) contradictions, pressures and shame associated with "hustle" and grind" work ethics. #SleepNoMore? A presentation with Jonas Kellermeyer, Hustle, Grind & Flow elaborates these three concepts, wrought through online popular-cultural forms that are at once racialised and gendered, classist and sexist, as well as motivational and sustaining for many.

2022, Allen, Jamie

Dissimilarities 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.

2022, Allen, Jamie, Kellermeyer, Jonas

We 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.

2022, Allen, Jamie

Of 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».

2022, Allen, Jamie

Bordergrounds is an arrival conversation and discussion hosted in the context of the Crossings festival, a 7 day event of workshops and exchanges hosted by La Rivioluzione delle Seppie. Somewhere between centres, practices expand and migrate outside of capital(ist) locales… fringe fields, edges and borders, rural radicality making magic at the margins. Experiments and configurations of creativity, construction and community. Bordergrounds traces these conditions through mediated questioning and messaging with groups in France and Italy, at La Cuisine and La Rivoluzione delle Seppie, between the kitchen and the squid. The contradiction that resides in the provocative phrase “the middle of nowhere” speaks to the poetic potentials of places where infrastructures, resources and energies are more loosely distributed, places outside of capital cities that are less dense, locally concerned but globally in touch and radical in the sense of being ‘closer to roots’. Our question(s): What are the positions, potentialities and problems with creating with communities in places that are outside of but always in relation to centres of power, population and capital? Crossings is supported by the patronage of the Municipality of Belmonte Calabro, in collaboration with Orizzontale, Ex-Convento, London Metropolitan University and with the participation of Cheap Festival, Claudio Morelli (Editor of VD News), Collectif etc, Arts of the Working Class, Giulia Ricci (Domus), Calupso36o21, Jamie Allen, Fulu Miziki, Gaia Crocella (Interdine), Carlotta Novella (Public Work), Giuseppe Affinito, Dario Biancullo, Egeeno. Promoted by Erasmus+ and supported by Itaka Training e Sirius Training, Italia Patria della Bellezza Foundation."

2022, Allen, Jamie

Civic 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.