Sobecka, Karolina
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Geoengineering Experiments as Socio-technical Rehearsals
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?
Concerning Circulations: Cybernetic Stewardship & Planetary Engineering
"Our age of climate crisis brings with it intimate, acute relations between informational environments and real ecologies. Technoscience has understood ecological change, environmental crisis, and human and non-human climate migrations through imagery — circulated through scientific publication, popular media, our devices, networks and imaginations as photographs of fieldwork, and an iconography of starving polar bears. Applied scientific powers attempt to regulate real, situated natures through inversions of this imagery as visual rubrics and illustrations. Pixels and CO2 molecules, data streams and jetstreams, abstract diagrams and engineering practices amalgamate. What results is a vision of elemental automation, planetary machinic worlding and technological care that authorises real conservation and geoengineering practices, growing green in Silicon Valley and explicitly trying to bring about »Gaia 2.0.«. »Concerning Circulations« is articulated through two media streams, one ongoing and the other summative, culminating at the end of the web residency. Collaborative, online-research recovers the image-ecosystem of new regimes of planetary scale management of nature, such as carbon markets. The project reposts, contextualises and critiques the circulation of images and diagrams of control, creating a visual archive of contemporary cybernetic attentions. This archive, continuously updated in instagram-like fashion, in turn creates materials for three, narrated short essay-films, confidentials of the stories that new ecological engineering and climate innovation propaganda propagates."
Cycles of Discussion, Circulation of Images
Karolina Sobecka (karolinasobecka.com) and Jamie Allen (jamieallen.com) are collaborating researchers, part of a research group interested in environmental humanities, art, design and science at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst FHNW in Basel, and associated with the media arts production facilities at the Critical Media Lab Basel. We are artist-researchers who often manifest our work as artworks, events and through mediums other than text-based publications, while writing and publications focus on the relationships between aesthetics, knowledge and environment (Allen 2017). Methodologically this work and research often encounters interdisciplinary collectives as a means of evoking, reflecting and understanding communities of practice (Allen et. al 2011) and attempts to devise alternative representations of these. Our current project and focus is on exploring the ways that climate science and planetary magnitude technologies are represented, deliberated and thought about in science, engineering on through policy, governance, technology and popular media.
Public Carbon Capture: Request for Proposals
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.
This cycle, here, this one
"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."
This cycle, here, this one
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.
Conference of the Public: CoCreating Article 6
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.