2023, Allen, Jamie, Bolen, Jeremy

There are efforts being made, and forced upon us, to grapple with the earth as an entity, object, and force. Under the guise of “planetarity,” these efforts span pursuits in the natural sciences of atmospheres, environments, and geologies, the biologies of living and ecologies of nonliving things, and the human knowledge practices that chart social, geopolitical, logistical, and infrastructural globalism. In their video essay project, “The Impossibility of a Planet,” artists and researchers Jeremy Bolen and Jamie Allen engage in dialogues with those who seek to compose planetary-scale images, thinking, narratives, and models. In a companion essay to the video segments, an inquiry into the media and methods of such compositions provides complement. Where do planetarities come from, and where are they taking us?

2018, Allen, Jamie, Ibach, Merle

Depuis des millénaires, les vertus préservatrices et thérapeutiques des distillats de pétrole ont donné lieu à d’étranges pratiques corporelles: embaumer les morts de goudron, baigner les vivants de naphtalène, et enduire les nouveaux-nés de vaseline. De manière similaire, la plupart des traitements pharmaceutiques à prise entérale (interne) dérivent de matières premières d’origine pétrochimique. À travers la fabrication de produits d’application cutanée à partir de substances pétrolières, ce workshop proposé par Shift Register (shiftregister.info/) observera l’empreinte mutuelle des matières fossiles terrestres et des corps humains. Il permettra de discuter le paradoxe suivant lequel les combustibles fossiles, d’origine naturelle et organique, retournent aux corps pour alimenter leur régénérescence, leur santé et sublimation.

2016, Howse, Martin, Taipale, Ulla, Keski-Korsu, Mari, Berger, Erich, Vesala, Timo, Allen, Jamie

The Earth Observation Source (EOS) workshop at Helsinki University Hyytiälä Forestry Field Station sets out to bother and to complicate the linear stories of deep-time, geology and anthropocenic discourse. EOS seeks to re-jig the history of the bones and stones with a vitalist writing of the earth and peat, of whiskies, bogs and tree sap, of mycelium and the blinded imaginaries of all earthly, airy and extraterrestrial creatures. We wish to untether planetary futures from an auto-destructive laboratory planet, exploring in the process how linear histories and geologies inform instrumental sciences and industries which are implicated in the initiating of this destroyed planet through effects such as global warming and technologies of resource management and extraction.   Within the context of the exciting work of the Hyytiälä Forestry Field Station in forest and atmospheric studies and peat-based measurements, the workshop will explore a more actively aesthetic relation to planetary phenomena such as climate change and to the measurements and research which inform the study of these large-scale objects. Through action and discussion we will ask questions such as: -How can we imagine other non-linear terracentric histories and geologies informed by re-cyclings and recursions? -What kinds of event impact on, for example, tree ring formation and how could we have a bodily experience of these instances and events? -How can we immerse ourselves in natural-technical-industrial cyclings such as of tree fluids, and carbon cycles, sinks and sources?   The workshop will be hosted by Jamie Allen, Martin Howse and Ulla Taipale with special guests Erich Berger, Mari Keski-Korsu, and Timo Vesala as part of Shift Register and Climate Whirl.   The workshop forms part of the Shift Register Earth Observatory Array series in cooperation with Climate Whirl by Department of Physics and Division of Atmospheric Sciences at University of Helsinki, and Capsula. Shift Register investigates and renders legible the material evidence of human activities on earth, registering these not as indicators of human achievement, but as ambiguous negotiations and signposts of planetary exhaustion. Shift Register is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Embrace confusion - the bog experience As a part of the Shift Register Workshop artist Mari Keski-Korsu lead the participants to a Siikaneva peatland. The bog running and bog sensing experience provoked a great range of reactions, that were discussed in the evening, after a sauna session by the fire at "kota".

2020, Sinders, Caroline, Allen, Jamie

The workshop, Trace Carbon, is an online discussion and workshop, framed around the markets and techniques for carbon measurement and management currently proposed and underway in environmental, ecological, governmental, industrial and technological contexts. Participants of the 2020 Art Meets Radical Openness festival (in 2020 AMRO was 100% online) were given space for discussion, a few short assignments and provided with an extensive collection of published resources through the Trace Carbon Reader. A collaboration with artist, designer, writer and researcher Caroline Sinders, the workshop features presentations of ongoing related work as part of the Cycles of Circulation project. The activities involves recording, sharing and collecting ‘carbon traces’ — stories and narratives recounted by and with participants.

2018, Howse, Martin, Allen, Jamie, Kemp, Jonathan

Located all over the world, each EOA is composed through workshop formats, feld sites, textual resources, and the active construction of an EOA. Each workshop is locally resonant with the physical environment where each EOA is installed, and each EOA remains distinct to any other. Tus EOA's are designed to perform as part of a network of 'subaltern' obser- vation stations that generate aesthetic knowledge that escapes formal instrumentation and analysis such that each attempts to elude indexical and colonial epistemologies – for example, 'samples' are not gathered in centralised labs or institutions, but relations are set up and played out, in situ, extemporised and disaggregated. Each EOA provides a mediation and medi- tation on climate, atmospheric, cosmological and/or geophysi- cal science, using parasitic techniques for gathering an uneven, localised, inconsistent impression of the earth.

2015, Allen, Jamie

What is a metaphor for? We might first assume that these unassuming little devices are fixers against incomprehension. They are often translative, mnemonics tricks, linguistically metamorphosing the unknown of a murky, muddy idea into to the crystalline clarity of the familiar. Language itself functions analogously — ”that is a chair” solidifies reference, subtended by tradition, culture and practice, from a concrete object to a gaseous concept, and sublimating back again. “No ideas but in things,” wrote W.C. Williams. (Duffey, Litz, & MacGowan, 1987) Karan Barad inverts this relation with her own rejoinder: “Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter.” (Micciche, 2014)

2018, Allen, Jamie

Archeology and geology are presumed to be "pure" knowledge practices, curiosity-driven investigations of the material histories of humankind and the Earth. Underwritten by Enlightenment techniques and tropes like clarity, organisation, cleanliness and illumination, there is in all the sciences a similar drive and imaginary toward a valuation of purity, against application, in all the sciences. These practices of observation, sampling, inscribing, analyzing and publishing are, of course, much more untidy than we sometimes imagine. What other sciences might be possible, were we more sensitive to the complicity of specific material practices as collusive affairs, amalgams of the pure and the applied, the clean and the messy, the ecological and the infrastructural, of light and shadow, of overground and underground?

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.”