Allen, Jamie
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The Harvest of the Past That Awaits My Hunger
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.
Civic Ecologies
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.
Palaces of Infrastructure: From Water to Data
Modern 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.
Earth Observatory Array Actions
‘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.”
Hustle, Grind & Flow
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.
Techniques of North: Sitting on Top of the World
Louis-Edmond Hamelin, the Quebecois elder statesman of northern geographies, has worked for half a century on fertile concepts such as “winterity” and “nordicity” in order to juxtapose real, extreme environments of high-latitude regions with the rich and complex ways they are perceived, imagined, depicted, and talked about. Hamelin even developed a “nordicity” scale, used by governments to allocate infrastructure and environmental resources. He named it the VAPO, or valeurs polaires. The VAPO is a composite and somewhat subjective measure that tracks ten different aspects—things like “annual cold,” “types of ice,” as well as “accessibility by means other than air” and “degree of economic activity”—rating each on a scale between 0 and 100. The total score, out of a thousand, must be over 200 for a place to be consid- ered “in the North.” The North Pole itself has a theoretical value of 1000, as VAPO as possible.
The Art of Instituting
The authors examine a digital dynamic within a networked sense of collectivity, and how this has influenced and enabled institutional experimental sites of thinking and production. They locate a tendency to organize oneself in collective groups as particularly evident in the Nordic context, reflecting a cultural history of ‘instituting’ (i.e. the formation of associations and unions) and today forming sites of hacker spaces, DIY technology groups, and artist-run project studios that hover between science, art and technology. These sites are necessary, the authors argue, as institutional forms to diversify responsibility across collectives, while simultaneously helping to equalize agencies, energies and temporal resilience, and exert post-capitalist influence.
Moving Food
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.
On the Modes of Technical Extraction in Chile
The diagram and essay On the Modes of Technical Extraction in Chile is a visual essay on the historical and contemporary extractive regimes affecting the southwest South American nation of Chile. It is a depiction arising from a collective research visit to the Valparaíso port systems, copper mines and communities of Chile for the Logistical Worlds project in March 2017. It attempts to draw out "how the long, narrow strip of land between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean that is Chile is continuing its long history of infrastructural-becoming."
The Overgrounds and Undergrounds of Pure and Applied Science: Cosmic Collisions and Industrial Collusion
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?