2022-01-24, Bruder, Johannes, Sobecka, Karolina, Halpern, Orit

2021-11-29, Belantara, Amanda, Drabinski, Emily, Engels, Sven, Groten, Anja, Diakrousi, Aggeliki, Burato, Anita, Morandi, Martino, Mugrefya, Élodie, Bruder, Johannes, Sobecka, Karolina, Schmidt, Nora, Snelting, Femke, Bühler, Karin K., Früh, Roland, Lütolf, Julia, Kolb, Lucie, Weinmayr, Eva

Für die letzte Lektion von «Teaching the Radical Catalogue – A Syllabus», ein Studienprogramm das im Rahmen der Ausstellung «Reading the Library» im Sitterwerk St.Gallen entwickelt wurde werden Bibliothekar:innen, Künstler:innen, Programmierer:innen, Forschende und Dozierende eine «friendly peer review» des Lehrplans vornehmen. Was fehlt im Lehrplan, der im während der Ausstellung entwickelt wurde? Wo sind eventuelle blinde Flecken der Verfasser:innen? Wie sollte oder könnte das Studienprogramm erweitert werden? Nicht zuletzt soll zudem gefragt werden, wie es weitergeht? Wie und wo kann der Lehrplan angewandt werden?

2019-05-20, Sobecka, Karolina

This project demonstrates what we are calling a Socio-Technical Rehearsal – a method for examining how scientific experiments constitute mechanisms of ‘steering’ of emerging technologies, and how the organization of mediation can be operationalized towards certain futures. A three-act teleplay, depicting a story of an aborted 2012 geoengineering experiment, is written by an artist, and then continuously amended, annotated and split into new narratives by people portrayed in it, as well as people external to it. The original events are mediated and remediated through forms of re-search, re-narrativizing and re-representation. The multiplying narratives contradict, contaminate and react to each other. Each way of telling the story is anticipatory, predisposing one to particular projection of the future dependent on the model derived from the past. Each narrative presents one version of a fragmented and limited understanding of the situation. Through the iterations of scripting, rehearsing, performing and revising; assumptions about the technological management of the environment are probed and ruptured in new ways. The circuitous communication process is always anticipatory, steering the narrative turns toward utopian or dystopian futures as possible worlds proliferate. Our cybernetic and cyberneticizing method exposes the process of knowledge circulation and the ways that narratives are naturalized into a common understanding of “geoengineering.” We hope to expose the multiple narratives of geoengineering – what it is, what it is for and how it re-mediates and modulates existing material ensembles and epistemological frameworks. We ask – how is the process of mediation integral in the normalization of ‘fringe’ scientific ideas, such as geoengineering proposals, within mainstream science?

2019, Allen, Jamie, Sobecka, Karolina

Conference of the Public: CoCreating Article 6 is a workshop taking place prior to the COP 25 Santiago Climate Change Conference in December 2019. Developed collaboration with Karolina Sobecka, and with workshop participants, a collective reconstitution of Article 6, one of the most contentious parts of the Paris Climate Agreement, was variously performed. These recreations which take various forms, including use of the central document in protest signs for the autumn 2019 Friday for Futures demonstration in Basel, Switzerland. The workshop is held as part of the CoCreate programme at the Academy of Art and Design, FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, focusing here on the role of artists, designers, students and non-experts, as an exercise of 'civic epistemology' applying contextual, embodied, and trans-disciplinary knowledge to reasonings about how cooperation on climate action should be organized between countries, individuals and other parties.

2022-01-24, Bruder, Johannes, Sobecka, Karolina, Halpern, Orit

2021, Bruder, Johannes, Sobecka, Karolina, Suess, Solveig, Kolb, Lucie, Kolb, Lucie, Weinmayr, Eva

2019-05-05, Sobecka, Karolina

In the summer 2018, The California Air Resources Board (CARB) issued an open call for public art proposals. This call propelled long-standing beliefs in the power of public art to prefigure and culturally situate the programmes of institutions. CARB, part of California’s government, a department in the California Environmental Protection Agency, is charged with implementing policies to maintain healthy air quality and reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, and has been instrumental in driving innovation by defining emission standards. Sobecka and Allen’s submission, a response to this call, was an expression of interest, proposing the construction of an active carbon capture and storage system, as public artwork. The project effects stakeholders through the carbon material, transport and infrastructure markets, and entails support and collaborative effort from diverse fields — art, design, engineering, governance and policy, along with all things living within Earth’s atmospheric canopy. This proposal document, “Public Carbon Capture Request for Qualifications & Expressions of Interest (RFQ)”, issued by Sobecka and Allen, is a means of further involving project partners and the commissioning body, as well as consolidating context, project focus and developing further public stakeholders. By elaborating Carbon Capture and Sequestration actions, actors and stakeholders, flows, sources and sinks, as well as the rudiments of capture and storage systems, it is hoped that such a proposal will garner further interdisciplinary collaborations, substantiation, sponsorship and stewardship. It is the beginning of a story about carbon capture as a rich space for public discussions in and on atmospheric and planetary commons.

2022, Bruder, Johannes, Engelmann, Sasha, Aquije, Gabriela, Sobecka, Karolina, Bazdyrieva, Asia, Williams, Rhys, Krzykowski, Matylda

2020, Lee Hallman, Jeffrey, Julian, John, Allen, Jamie, Sobecka, Karolina

Ecology has become a master discipline, a primary lens through which we see and manage the world. In this performance lecture, we meet two of its co-founders, the American brothers E. P. and H. T. Odum, personalities recomposed in an exposition to ask how system ecological schemes have precipitated contemporary consciousness and networks of nature. The ecosystem, a meta-mechanical political ecology that gives us nature as interconnected entities and relational subcomponents, is intimately tied to the Odum brothers’ history, their lives, research, and diagrammatic endeavors. The lecture revisits this history of networked, relational biology: a sibling narrative, mirrored in diagrams; a duplexed to-and-fro between conservation and innovation, the familiar and the esoteric, economy and ecology, systems and chaos, Eugene and Howard. The participants thank all those who made the Odum Oration endeavour possible. The Odum brothers’ family, friends, colleagues, students, critics and researchers. The Odumite community, generously sharing their experiences, memories and knowledge, and facilitated access to sites and materials. For your enthusiasm, openness and assistance—thank you! transmediale, for giving us the opportunity to develop and present this project at transmediale 2020, and for your their patience, trust, and support along the way—thank you!  Daphne Dragona, Amelie Buchinger, Lane Peterson, Donna Haraway, Vicky Sutton-Jackson, Amy D. Rosemond, Dorinda G. Dallmeyer, Katherine M. Stein, Terry Camp, Robert Hamlin Jackson & Family, Paul Boshears & Family, James W. Porter, Christopher S. Childs, Katherine M. Stein, Mark T. Brown, Elisabeth (Betty) C. Odum, Mary Odum, Robert T. Walker, Madison Jones, Sharlynn Sweeney, Karin E. Limburg, Dennis P. Swaney, Stewart A. W. Diemont

2019-02-11, Sobecka, Karolina, Allen, Jamie

It is that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and no’s, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy, guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one. – Primo Levi, “Carbon,” from The Periodic Table (1975) If there is a universe in every word, each atom also creates its own narrative. In this performance lecture spanning a contemporary history of its composition, markets and capture, a literary cycle of Carbon is developed in moving image, text and diagram. The use and abuse of cycles as models of exchange and circulation are examined for their appropriateness and applicability, and new models are proposed for our relationship to this building block of life, petrocultures and capitalism. Karolina Sobecka and Jamie Allen present a cyclical discussion in six elements for element number six.