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, Allen, Jamie, Sobecka, Karolina

"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. The lecture will include a hands-on element: we will ask the audience to re-draw the carbon cycle, based on their personal experiences."