Category: arts

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Interesting event: Cruel Design/Disobedient Design

Anna Feigenbaum posted this call for participation to Crit-Geog-Forum, looks like an event that’ll stimulate some discussion. Not entirely sure I believe Dismaland really does anything political but is rather already subsumed in the ideology it presumably intends to critique. I mean, I’ve just seen someone at the train station in a Dismaland t-shirt…

Nevertheless, Debbie Withers‘ involvement definitely recommends this as something that will be interesting.

The event is run by the Civic Media Hub which is worth checking out.

So see below for details:

Cruel Design/Disobedient Design

A showcase and discussion on the art and politics of designing for justice in association with Cruel Designs at Dismaland.

Event Information:
Saturday, 26 September 2015
Bristol, Hydra Books TBC
16:00 to 18:00

From anti-homeless spikes and border fences to DIY tear gas masks and union banners, design practices are used for social control and social change. In this public event with designers, curators and social justice campaigners we explore what it means to design for disobedience.

Free, ticketed event: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cruel-designdisobedient-design-tickets-18324462962

with:
Gavin Grindon / curator of Cruel Designs at Dismaland & Lecturer in Curating / University of Essex

Barnbrook / Creative Studio / London

MinuteWorks / multidisciplinary graphic design studio specialising in sustainable communications / Manchester

Occupy Design / Crisis graphics for crisis times! / London

Debi Withers / Curator, writer, researcher & publisher / Bristol

And More!

Facilitated by:
Anna Feigenbaum / Civic Media Hub & Senior Lecturer in Digital Storytelling / Bournemouth University

Sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Journalism, Culture & Community at Bournemouth University, The University of Essex Centre for Curatorial Studies & the MeCCSA Social Movements Network

This event is the second in our series of public discussions on Civic Media and Social Justice. Our first event, Mapping for Justice, was held in London in June 2015.

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Theorising Bioart encounters after Simondon – paper by Andy Lapworth

Alba the transgenic rabbit – bioart by Eduardo Kac

Andrew Lapworth, who recently finished a PhD in Geography at Bristol, has written a really interesting and accomplished article that has just come out as ‘Early Online‘ in Theory Culture & Society. I recommend reading it if you have any interest in the philosophy or sociological studies of science, technology and bioart. Sadly, its behind the paywall…

Here’s the abstract:

In recent years ‘bioart’ has been lauded in the social sciences for its creative engagements with the ontological stakes of new forms of biotechnical life in-the-making. In this paper I push further to explore the ontogenetic potentials of bioart-encounters to generate new capacities for thinking and perceiving the nonhuman agencies imbricated in the becoming of subjects. To explore this potential I stage an encounter with Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, highlighting three implications for theorizations of the constitution and transformation of subjects. First, Simondon forces us to rethink the subject in terms of its transductive emergence from pre-individual processes, and its metastable susceptibility to ongoing transformations. Second, he substitutes voluntarist conceptions of thought with an involuntarist primacy of material encounters as the conditions for novel individuations. Finally, I argue that Simondon enables a thinking of the politics of the (bio)art-encounter in terms of its ontogenetic capacity to materially produce, rather than merely represent, new subjects and worlds.

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In Certain Places…

In Certain Places logoIn Certain Places is a programme of artistic interventions and events, led by curators Elaine Speight and Professor Charles Quick with the support of associate Rachel Bartholomew, in the School of Art, Design and Fashion at the University of Central Lancashire. Based in the City of Preston, in the North West of England, the project examines how artists can contribute to the form and functions of a place, by exploring new approaches to art, culture and urban development.


In Certain Places, whom I happen to follow on Twitter, have a new blog – looking forward to seeing what gets posted. The first post is about the recent Nordic Geographers conference, in which several of my colleagues participated.

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Workshop> Exploring Virtual Control, UCL (olympic park)

UCL urban lab are hosting an interesting workshop called ‘exploring virtual control’ at the London olympic park.

“The UCL Urban Laboratory is hosting a workshop on Tuesday 18 August in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park to interrogate the mechanics of control within privatised public spaces. If you have any interest in the privatisation of cities, security design, city governance policy or the post-Olympic legacy”

It’s something of a coup to have it at the olympic park – and got me thinking of Francisco Klauser’s excellent work on these forms of control.

Here’s some more details:

This workshop held at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford serves as an introduction to the mechanics of control within privatised public spaces. Participants will learn about the way in which privatised public spaces are planned, built and monitored, before devising their own ways of mapping and documenting private public spaces. The workshop is organised by UCL Urban Laboratory, and led by the artists and built environment researchers Max Colson and Ollie Palmer, as part of a current exhibition hosted by RIBA. Book here.

The workshop consists of a series of structured group exercises and conversations, during which participants will choose to work on a photographic or mapping project. Please state your preference when applying.

Ollie Palmer is an award-winning artist, freelance designer and brand consultant based in London. He has worked commercially with BBC Worldwide, UCL and the V&A Museum, as well as leading projects for a number of other UK-based companies. As an artist, he has exhibited work at the V&A Museum and The Science Museum’s Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, as well as being selected as artist-in-residence at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

Max Colson is an artist based in London using photography, video and animation. He was the artist-in-residence at UCL Urban Laboratory between September 2014 and June 2015, funded by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust. Virtual Control: Security and the Urban Imagination, his first UK solo exhibition, is at RIBA 6 July – 21 September in London this summer. He was selected as one of the UK winners of the 2013 Flash Forward Emerging Photographer competition, and was shortlisted in the OPEN14 at Brighton Photo Fringe. He has exhibited in C/O Berlin, London, and this summer as part of ‘Data Rush’ at the Noorderlicht Photo Festival.

Limited places are available for this workshop. Tickets cost £20 or £15 for concessions (students/disabled/unemployed/over 65). Please book on the UCL Online Store. Contact Jordan Rowe for more details.

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Reblog> Why Africa is the new home of science fiction

Interesting stuff detailed by the inimitable James Bridle. Lots to explore here…

Why Africa is the new home of science fiction

Wordsmack, a speculative fiction publisher dedicated to digital platforms, is the latest project to join the African SF boom

Lauren Beukes

Anthology series Something Wicked features the likes of Lauren Beukes, above, in its archives. Photograph: Ulrich Knoblauch

A few years ago, I got very excited about Afrocyberpunk, a blog by Jonathan Dotse out of Accra, Ghana. The stories he posted suggested a strange and an exciting future for science fiction, proposing “not the science fiction of your grandfather or the Foundation of your Asimov” but “the dystopian gloom of failed states, the iron rule of corruption, cartels snaking cold fingers into the upper echelons of government, and hi-tech gangs of disillusioned youth”. While Dotse’s own novel has yet to see the light of day, he and others have been active in a number of ventures, online and off, to make this vision a reality.

One of these is Jungle Jim, an African pulp fiction magazine, which, despite only being available as a beautifully designed print edition, provides a great jumping-off point for exploring multiple genres. Jungle Jim‘s writers include Nnedi Okorafor, whose story “The Go-Slow”, published at Tor.com, blends magical fantasy into downtown Lagos traffic jams; Diriye Osman, who chronicles the lives of African LGBT kids in Somalia and London in stories such as “Earthling”; and Dzekashu MacViban, editor of Cameroon’s Bakwa magazine. Another is Something Wicked, South Africa’s first SF and horror magazine turned anthology series whose archives include short works by Sarah Lotz and Lauren Beukes, two South African authors who have found fame with dystopian future-fiction works in The Three and Moxyland respectively.

The most recent addition to the club is Wordsmack, a speculative fiction publisher dedicated to digital platforms. Publishing across Kindle, Kobo and iBooks, Wordsmack’s titles include young adult fantasy and techno-thrillers. A recent event, A Future Jozi, brought together three of their authors – Abi Godsell, Mico Pisanti, and Jason Werbeloff – to discuss why “Johannesburg is the best city in which to base the stories of our sci-fi rebels, our mutant karp”. Plenty of writers seem to agree with them.

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Reblog > Hybrid assemblages, environments and happenings – Eric Paulos

Eric Paulos reflects on a wealth of experience of interdisciplinary and participatory research, particularly in relation to the maker movement. Eric offers some great reflections on Mark Weiser’s interdisciplinarity and the importance of creative practice.

Hybrid Assemblages, Environments & Happenings -Eric Paulos

Abstract: This talk will present and critique a body of work evolving across several years of research at the intersection of computer science and design research. It will present an augment for hybrid materials, methods, and artifacts as strategic tools for insight and innovation within computing culture. It will explore and demonstrate the value of urban computing, citizen science, and maker culture as opportunistic landscapes for intervention, micro-volunteerism, and a new expert amateur. Finally, it will present and question emerging materials and strategies from the perspective of engineering, design, and new media.

https://twitter.com/epaulos

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Three new translations of books by Stiegler in 2014

Amongst the books to look out for this year are three translations of books by Bernard Stiegler.

The first to come out, in February, is an interesting collaborative critique of consumer capitalism by members of the Ars Industrialis association, fronted by Stiegler. In The Re-Enchantment of the World: The Value of Spirit Against Industrial Populism, and following the Ars Industrialis manifesto, Stiegler (et al.) argues against the proletarianization of the subject into an unthinking and passive consumer and for the renewal of life skills (savour-vivre) through an ‘industrial populism’.

The second, coming out in April, will be the final volume of the Disbelief and Discredit series, which offers a critique of the effects of the development of industrial technologies on our capacities for rest, considered reflection, leisure, the development of skills and, importantly, care for one another and for society. In the final volume, The Lost Spirit of Capitalism, Stiegler advances his argument for a new ‘industrial spirit’ by fostering a ecology that not only looks after the planet but also renews the exploited energies of human desire. This is another excellent translation by Dan Ross for Polity.

The third, coming out in August, is the first volume of the important series: Symbolic Misery. The Hyperindustrial Epoque will be the first appearance of Stiegler’s work concerning aesthetics in an extended format and contains some of his critical work concerning cinema. In particular, Stiegler advances his critical articulation of cinema as the industrial temporal object in order to argue that it is the aesthetic experience that can combat the creeping conditioning of experience on its own territory. Again, Dan Ross brings his detailed knowledge of Stiegler’s oeuvre to provide a valuable and timely translation.

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The Organ-Grinder’s Monkey – Louis Armand

Louis Armand, author of Event States and provocative arts critic/theorist, has a new book out that he has highlighted on his blog:

The Organ-Grinder’s Monkey

organgrindersmonkey

Theorising the “poetic turn” in cultural discourse from the 1950s to the present, The Organ Grinder’s Monkey meditates on the post-avant-garde condition mapped out in the work of an international roster of artists, writers, philosophers and film-makers, from Abstract Expressionism to the New Media, including Andy Warhol, Jean-Luc Godard, Cy Twombly, Jacques Derrida, Rosalind Krauss, Samuel Beckett, Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg, Alain Badiou, Dusan Makavejev, Marjorie Perloff, Michael Dransfield, Charles Olson, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Veronique Vassiliou, Guy Debord, Joshua Cohen, Pierre Joris, Philippe Sollers, Karen Mac Cormack, Marshall McLuhan, Lukas Tomin, John Kinsella, and Vincent Farnsworth.

“Armand is unafraid to ask the most basic questions, to go beyond the zone in which most cultural discussions operate in order to ask what underlies our capacity for thought, for imaging, for communication. Time and again he takes his reader to the edge of what is thinkable, subjecting familiar concepts to stringent analysis and casting an original light on old debates.”–Derek Attridge

Read more over on Armand’s blog, including an excerpt.