Walking Walden with Wen Stephenson and Jane D. Marsching :: June 20, 2013; 1:00pm :: Walden Pond, Concord, Massachusetts (Meet at Thoreau’s House Replica near the Walden Pond parking kiosk).

A walking event that reconsiders the radical politics of Thoreau in our time. Connect observation, environmental awareness, aesthetic action, and social change to the climate crisis now. We will walk from Walden Pond to Brister’s Hill, home of one of the first freed slaves in Concord and symbol of Concord’s engagement with the abolitionist movement. As we walk we will consider what is nature, what is changing, and what is radicalism today? Continue reading

Media Archaeology & Technological Debris Conference :: June 21, 2013; 10:00 am - 5:30 pm :: NAB LG01 (New Academic Building), Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London (map) :: Free, open to the public, no reservations necessary.

Conference speakers: Sean Cubitt (Media & Comms, Goldsmiths); Graham Harwood (Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths); Jennifer Gabrys (Sociology, Goldsmiths); Gabriel Menotti (Audiovisual, UFES); Jussi Parikka (University of Southampton); and James Wallbank (Access Space, Sheffield).

This workshop means to combine the thriving approach of media archaeology with the growing environmental concerns about technological debris, emphasizing the complementary character of these topics in the construction of a material understanding of media practices’ past, present and future. Continue reading

Wasteland Twinning Network Forum — An exploration of urban wastelands and networked transdisciplinary practice :: September 21-23, 2012 :: Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (ZK/U), Berlin.

The Wasteland Twinning Network hijacks the concept of ‘City Twinning’ and applies it to urban wastelands in order to generate a network for parallel research and action.

The Forum will bring together the international project partners of the Wasteland Twinning Network from Europe, Asia, USA and Australia. Hosted at the Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik, the Forum will feature presentations, guest speakers, critical debates, Twinning Ceremonies, wasteland interventions and workshops. Continue reading

Turbulence Commission: Crow Sourcing by Andy Deck:

How does the crow fly? Eager beaver, take the bull by the horns. Talk turkey and get on your high horse. Clear up the hogwash contributed by the birdbrains. Monkey around and make them eat crow. If you know a hawk from a handsaw, or have the memory of an elephant, well then, make a bee-line for the website and separate the sheep from the goats until you’re dog tired. It’s the cat’s meow. Crow Sourcing engages collective memory and insight to demystify and reanimate a dizzying array of sayings, idioms, and expressions that will be discussed and collected via Web, mobile, and social media until the end of 2012. The results will then be presented as printed matter. Continue reading

We Won’t Fly For Art: Media Art Ecologies by Ruth Catlow, Culture Machine Vol 13: Paying Attention (2012):

“The insights of American anarchist ecologist Murray Bookchin into environmental crisis hinge on a social conception of ecology that problematises the role of domination in culture. His ideas are becoming increasingly relevant to those working with digital technologies in the post-industrial information age, as big business daily develops new tools and techniques to exploit our sociality across high-speed networks (digital and physical). According to Bookchin, our fragile ecological state is bound up with a social pathology. Continue reading

[Oyvind Fahlstrom's World Maps, Aurel Scheibler] Sense of Planet: The Arts and Ecology at Earth Magnitude - A NIEA Symposium :: August 25, 2012; 9:30 am - 6:30 pm :: UNSW CBD Campus, Level 6 (Combined Theatres T1 & 2), 1 O’Connell Street, Sydney, NSW 2000.

The acceleration of climate change, species extinction, and other ecological crises, enjoins us to find ways of grasping historical and evolving circumstances at earth magnitude. The Sense of Planet symposium concentrates together an international array of artists, eco-theorists and scholars to address the issues and activities of representing the earth in its entirety, and of representing and self-representing regions or localities amid the complex global systems in which they are enmeshed. Continue reading

Life in Code and Software: Mediated Life in a Complex Computational Ecology, David M. Berry (ed), Living Books About Life:

The essays in this collection explore the relationship between living, code and software. For Berry, technologies of code and software increasingly make up an important part of our urban environment - indeed, their reach stretches to even quite remote areas of the world. Life in Code and Software introduces and explores the way in which code and software are becoming the conditions of possibility for human living, crucially forming a computational ecology, made up of disparate software ecologies we inhabit. As such we need to take account of this new computational environment, Berry argues, and think about how today we live in a highly mediated, code-based world - a world where computational concepts and ideas are foundational, and within which, code and software become the paradigmatic forms of knowing and doing.

Artist Animal by Steve Baker, University of Minnesota Press:

Artist Animal examines the work of contemporary artists who directly confront questions of animal life, treating animals not aesthetically or symbolically but rather as beings who actively share the world with humanity. Featuring full-color examples of their art, it situates artists within the wider project of thinking beyond the human, asserting art’s power to open new ways of thinking about animals.

Animals have always been compelling subjects for artists, but the rise of animal advocacy and posthumanist thought has prompted a reconsideration of the relationship between artist and animal. Continue reading

[Indeterminate Hikes + (2012) Android App & Performance. Whitney Museum of American Art ISP Exhibition, The Kitchen, NYC] Interview with Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermint of Ecoarttech by Sophia Kosmaoglou, Furtherfield.org:

Refusing to regard technology merely as a tool, Ecoarttech expand the uses of mobile technology and digital networks revealing them to be fundamental components of the way we experience our environment. Their most recent work Indeterminate Hikes + (IH +) is a phone app that maps a series of trails through the city. IH + can be accessed globally, or wherever users have access to Google Maps on their mobile phones. After identifying the users’ location, IH + generates a route along random “Scenic Vistas” within urban spaces. Users are directed to perform a series of tasks along the trail and provide feedback in the form of snapshots generating an ongoing, open-ended dialogue. Continue reading

You are invited to apply for a place in the 2012 Session of the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa). The 2012 Session, Futures of Nature, is part of a drive within the humanities to reframe the disciplines and critical theory in light of the environmental emergency that is said to endanger most species on the planet, including our own.

We will reflect on some of the major challenges relating to the contemporary conditions and the long-term sustainability of life on Earth. Ours is an age characterized by the indelible imprint of human activity on the Earth’s climate, its geology and its conditions – a process which may lead to the planet’s becoming inhospitable to human life. It is also an era that blurs the distinction between human history and culture and the Earth’s natural history and material composition. Continue reading