The Story of Life in 10 1/2 Species, by author, illustrator and photographer Marianne Taylor, must be the most interesting, beautifully designed and enlightening book about biology I’ve ever read. Packed with colourful illustrations, graphics and photos, it is also firmly rooted in rigorous science and doesn’t shun complexity.

The premise of the book is surprising: “If an alien visitor were to collect ten souvenir life forms to represent life on earth, which would they be?” Taylor uses soft-shelled turtle, Darwin’s finches, the giraffe and other living organisms as a springboard to survey the long evolution of life on Earth and break down the intricacies -and in some cases the subjectivity- of taxonomy.

The fern, for example, opens up observations about the formation of oxygen in the atmosphere, about chlorophyll and the fact that “before there was life there was chemistry.”

Nautilus have changed very little over past 500 million years. Taylor explains how these “living fossils” survived 5 catastrophic mass extinctions. And yet, today they need to be protected from human activities. Already threatened by pollution and climate change, the molluscs are also hunted for sale as live animals or for their shells.

Act Wild for Lord Howe Island Stick Insects

The chapter about humans is a humbling one. It comes after the chapter on sponges, animals that have no organs, no circulation, no digestive systems, no distinct body parts. The human species has all of the above, plus an impressive list of evils: it is hyper-predatory, obsessed with domestication and it thrives at the expense of all other living things. The section also rehabilitates Neanderthal men. They were great apes too and were as quick-thinking and as societally advanced as we are today.

The chapter on the stick insect of Lord Howe Island does restore a tiny bit of faith in humanity. The story of the massive insect offers lessons about Lazarus species (organisms thought extinct and rediscovered), life in ultra hostile environment and the phenomena of island gigantism and island dwarfism but it also shows that many surviving species are dependant on human conservation efforts. If we disappear the least adaptable will fall into the “evolutionary dead-en” category.

The giraffe (Latin name: Camelopardalis!) tells about the inbreeding depression. A low population is accompanied by a drop in genetic diversity which can concentrate harmful genetic mutations that further weakens the population as a whole and slows down its potential rate of evolution.

Roelant Savery, Edward’s Dodo, 1626

The author uses the dusky seaside sparrow and the many, unsuccessful programs put in place to save it from extinction, as an opportunity to look at cloning technologies, genetic engineering and other tools at the disposal of conservationists to “rebuild” a species that is extinct or about to be extinct.

The “half” species in the title is artificial intelligence. That section is a bit of an odd one. It crams together the “artificial selection” imposed on cultivated crops and domesticated animals, genetic engineering, cybernetics, the marriage of living tissue to non-living components, etc. Its conclusion suggests a planet in the throes of mass extinction and powered by flying robot pollinators and artificial photosynthesis. Nothing to be cheerful about but Taylor keeps such a good balance between reasons to despair and reasons to keep the hope alive that I almost forgot to be angry about what we’re doing to the other inhabitants of planet Earth.

De-growth is a term most people find unpalatable. If not alarming. We were brought up with the idea that relentless growth is the only economic force that matters. Growth, we’ve been told, means increased living standards. And yet, it would be irresponsible to continue ignoring the massive human and environmental costs of our infatuation with economic growth. Especially now that the pandemic has people dreaming of “the world after.”

DISNOVATION.ORG & Clémence Seurat, Post Growth Toolkits (The Interviews), 2020

DISNOVATION.ORG & Baruch Gottlieb, Energy Slave Token (Human Labor To Fossil Fuel Conversion Units), 2020. Photo: DISNOVATION.ORG

Economists and policymakers, however, argue that de-growth is little more than a naive and unrealistic ideology that can only lead to sudden mass joblessness, infrastructure collapse, widespread hunger and the breakdown of everything that makes our existence efficient and pleasant.

So where do you turn to when you’re a citizen seduced by the idea of an economy that does not inflate relentlessly, does not feed on finite resources and on the exploitation of the living? What leverage is available for transformative practices and imaginaries to overcome the continuous growth of our energy consumption?

A good place to start is the exhibition POST GROWTH at iMAL in Brussels where the DISNOVATION.ORG collective together with Baruch Gottlieb, Clémence Seurat, Julien Maudet and Pauline Briand invite visitors to question every Silicon Valley word, every technosolutionist promise and that ingrained conviction that it’s growth way or the highway. If you can’t make it to Brussels, do check out their POST GROWTH TOOLKIT, an online collection of interviews with thinkers whose research explores the forms that a post-fossil society could take and the challenges we need to confront to get there. The online resource is an incredibly inspiring guide to help you navigate concepts like Collapse Informatics and self-obviating systems as well as issues such as the need to base our decisions on the 7th Generation Principle, the fact that we won’t be able to externalise the most extreme forms of environmental destructions for much longer. Or, most crucially, how men peeing on walls in the city streets of Paris contributed to geodiversity.

Negatechnology, Interview with Bill Tomlinson

Ideology of Growth. Interview with Valerie Olson

The POST GROWTH show grapples with overwhelming issues that would normally make me want to bury my head in the sand. But because the works exhibited weave practical and theoretical ideas, depressing facts and uplifting concepts, healthy scepticism and appeals to our imaginations, individual decisions and collective actions, I emerged from my visit at iMAL with a sense of hope. And that is not a feeling I experience often these days.

DISNOVATION.ORG & Baruch Gottlieb, Solar Share (The Story)

The works I found most thought-provoking where the ones from the Solar Share series in which DISNOVATION.ORG together with artist, researcher and curator Baruch Gotlieb examines the radical implications of a speculative economic model based, not on fossil fuels, but on the energy emitted by the Sun.

Instead of being hooked on resources that are not infinite, the economic model proposed by Solar Share is intimately connected to the elementary sources of energy coming from the Sun, the Earth and the cosmos. The research project aims to revise the prevailing narratives with an acknowledgement of the material conditions required for the persistence of our form of life in the biosphere.

DISNOVATION.ORG & Baruch Gottlieb, Solar Share (The Farm), 2020. Photo: DISNOVATION

DISNOVATION.ORG & Baruch Gottlieb, Solar Share (The Farm), 2020

Exhibition view at iMAL by Caroline Lessire

The Solar Share (The Farm) installation investigates vertical hydroponic farming alluring promises of food security in urban centres, in the Arctic, underground and in the middle of the desert. Leafy greens, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, herbs and other high-water content produce grow without soil, without pesticides and with far less water than conventional agriculture requires. Unfortunately, this artificially controlled environment is energy-intensive, it requires constant air conditioning and LED lighting. Furthermore, hydroponic-grown produces obtain their nutrients from the solution added, not from the soil which means that they never get in contact with many of the billions of microorganisms that inhabit the soil and stimulate a healthy microbiome.

Hydroponics might be part of the solution to feeding the world -especially if you don’t take the externalities into account- but they cannot feed densely-populated cities. For that, we need vast areas of cropland planted with grains, legumes, root, sugar and oil crops, the produce of which is to be eaten directly or fed to animals that produce meat, milk and eggs.

Solar Share (The Farm) takes the shape of 1 square meter experiment which makes visible the vast technical infrastructure and energy flows required to grow a food staple like wheat in an artificial environment. From a systemic point of view, the “miracle” of soil-less farming is heavily dependent on cheap fossil energy to function. Even if the farms were powered by solar energy, they would still rely on the polluting extraction of minerals and other outsourced (and unaccounted for) contaminating processes distributed all over the globe. The installation challenges the agroindustry’s inflated claims by bringing to light the layers of invisibilised interdependencies and by providing a speculative reference reckoning of the incalculable ecosystem services at play in conventional agriculture.

DISNOVATION.ORG & Baruch Gottliebb, Energy Slave Token (Human Labor To Fossil Fuel Conversion Units), 2020

In 1940, Buckminster Fuller introduced the term energy slave to describe the energy required to power the modern lifestyle. The energy requirements for any lifestyle can be calculated as a number of “energy slaves” equivalent to the number of human labourers whose muscles and stamina would otherwise be needed to produce the same amount of energy. The concept puts us in the very uncomfortable shoes of a slave master. It has been estimated that the average European lords over the equivalent of 400-500 “energy slaves” 24 hours a day to keep our homes and infrastructures functioning, to grow our food, pump our water and manufacture our goods.

The Energy Slave Token consists of a series of weights made of bitumen, which are the energy equivalents to specific quantities of physical human labour time (ie. 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 1 year, 1 life). Making energy more tangible than any kWh and other gigajoules ever could, the weights visualise the orders of magnitude that separate the labour force generated by human bodies from the energy exploited mostly from the fossil fuels that power the technosphere. These open source tokens are designed to be easily replicated, used and distributed without restriction.

DISNOVATION.ORG & Baruch Gottlieb, Solar Share (The Coins), 2020

DISNOVATION.ORG & Baruch Gottlieb, Solar Share (The Coins), 2020. Photo: DISNOVATION.ORG

Solar Share (The Coins), the third work in the Solar Share series, is the one I can’t stop thinking about. Allow me to mostly copy/paste its description:

The concept of Emergy attempts a comprehensive accounting of the energy involved -directly or indirectly- in the reproduction of a product or service. With Emergy, factors such as extremely slow and vast processes that tend to be overlooked can be acknowledged as vital contributions to life.

Some areas of the world get more sunlight than others, some “use” more sunlight than others. Europe uses considerably more energy than it receives from the sky through imports in various concentrated forms, principally petroleum, coal and natural gas. Brussels is one of the least sunny cities in Europe, receiving only 3 kWh/m2 on an average day, and only 1000 kWh/m2 a year, a fact that its energy consumption doesn’t reflect.

Solar Share coins are made of the ubiquitous PET plastic, a petroleum bi-product, ancient sunlight concentrated in organic material over millions of years. A few grams of PET has the same embodied energy as 1m2 of yearly solar irradiation in Brussels.

How might our understanding of economics change if the instruments we used for money had an equivalent value to the solar energy required to materially produce them? As a speculative response, each Solar Share coin embodies the average solar irradiation received at a specific urban location.

DISNOVATION.ORG, Julien Maudet, Pauline Briand, Clémence Seurat & Baruch Gottlieb, Post Growth Toolkit (The Game), 2020

Post Growth. Exhibition view at iMAL by Caroline Lessire

Post Growth. Exhibition view at iMAL. Photo: DISNOVATION

Post Growth. Exhibition view at iMAL. Photo: DISNOVATION

POST GROWTH remains open until 17 January 2021 at iMAL in Brussels.

More photos on DISNOVATION flickr page.

Previous DISNOVATION stories: Predictive Art Bot. A call for artworks that interpret AI-generated concepts, Shanzhai Archeology: defying our standardized technological imagination, Disnovation, an inquiry into the mechanics and rhetoric of innovation, etc.

AI in the Wild. Sustainability in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, by Peter Dauvergne, author, environmentalist and Professor of International Relations at the University of British Columbia.

MIT Press writes: Drones with night vision are tracking elephant and rhino poachers in African wildlife parks and sanctuaries; smart submersibles are saving coral from carnivorous starfish on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef; recycled cell phones alert Brazilian forest rangers to the sound of illegal logging. The tools of artificial intelligence are being increasingly deployed in the battle for global sustainability. And yet, warns Peter Dauvergne, we should be cautious in declaring AI the planet’s savior. In AI in the Wild, Dauvergne avoids the AI industry-powered hype and offers a critical view, exploring both the potential benefits and risks of using artificial intelligence to advance global sustainability.

Dauvergne finds that corporations and states often use AI in ways that are antithetical to sustainability. The competition to profit from AI is entrenching technocratic management, revving up resource extraction, and turbocharging consumption, as consumers buy new smart devices (and discard their old, less-smart ones). Smart technology is helping farmers grow crops more efficiently, but also empowering the agrifood industry. Moreover, states are weaponizing AI to control citizens, suppress dissent, and aim cyberattacks at rival states.

Face recognition for chimpanzees. Photo: Kyoto University, Primate Research Institute

AI has the potential to both save and destroy life on Earth. On the one hand, its developers and marketers promise that the widespread implementation of intelligent systems will promote global sustainability, conserve nature, manage ecosystems, monitor the intensification of climate change and protect endangered wildlife. On the other, there’s the reality: AI, though it has value and potential, is often used as yet another greenwashing tool that stealthily invigorates existing systems of domination, exploitation, accumulation and oppression. It’s no surprise then if the groups that massively invest in AI are transnational corporations and states (most notably the US, Russia and China) which tend to see in AI the key to unlocking even more profit, more power, more control over resource extraction, production and consumption.

QUT’s LarvalBot, the undersea robot that delivers coral larvae to damaged reefs

The sheer physical and geological dimensions of AI are staggering. Not only will building all those autonomous vehicles, those smart devices and their accompanying infrastructures involve massive extraction of minerals and energy production but they will further shorten the lifespan of the electronics we already own, making the management of e-waste even more uncontrollable in terms of human right abuses and pollution.

Even the data necessary to feed AI comes at a huge environmental cost. Datafying life on Earth, whether it’s personal relationships, bees or toasters, will require the construction of new data centres. No matter how “green” Bezos and Zuckerberg claim their data centres are, wind turbines and solar panels still require the extraction of minerals. And even if that were not the case, the rebound effect of implementing 5G, autonomous cars, robots and IoT means that the amount of data to be stored in data centres will explode.

Those of you who already find it difficult to believe that the road to more sustainability is paved with a plethora of new smart appliances probably already know much of the above. And when Dauvergne gets to grip with smart cities and the likelihood that no amount of urban smartness is going to have much of an impact on feelings of alienation, on income inequality and on unbridled consumerism, his discourse might not be unfamiliar to most of you either. However, I learnt a lot from the chapter on smart farming equipment and AI implementation in agriculture and the way they are only going to reinforce the broken system put in place by the likes of John Deere, Bayer Monsanto, DuPont and other membres of an agro-industry that privileges profits over nutritional needs.

Another highlight of the book for me was the section on social justice and inequality. It discusses the well-known consequences of AI biases but it also illuminates how the diffusion of AI facial and emotion recognition technology constitutes a powerful tool in the hands of states that could use them to target, censor and repress citizens who question the environmental and social costs of the current economic and technological growth trajectory.

I can’t say that AI in the Wild is revolutionary. Maybe because I’ve been looking closely at the carbon footprint of AI for a number of years now. But I’m glad I read the book. It provides an invaluable panorama of the environmental, political, economic and ethical weaknesses of AI. The text flows, the language is clear and way the author sums up AI most damaging failures is always pertinent and thought-provoking. Dauvergne tries to keep a balance between AI potential and AI oversell throughout the book but concludes that AI won’t save the Earth on its own, especially if it is not accompanied by sweeping political and economic reforms that would ensure that environmental principles are integrated into the design of AI and that companies and states are held accountable for the many ways AI is accelerating unsustainable production and excessive consumption.

The easiest way to introduce WhiteFeather Hunter is to write that she is a multiple-award winning artist. Adding that she is a bioartist and a scholar wouldn’t still quite cover her practice. It’s more complicated than that but it is also relentlessly exciting.

WhiteFeather Hunter. Photo: Matthew Brooks/ Milieux Institute

WhiteFeather Hunter, Mooncalf, 2019-present

In 2018, the artist collaborated with a microbiologist to create a “skin renewal” cream containing bacterial enzymes from her own saliva and from soil samples to explore the concept of bacto-intimacy and cast a critical gaze at the hi-tech lingo the cosmetic industry uses to sell its anti-ageing formulas. That same year, she also explored the possibility of using native plant species and an extremophilic bacteria to help heal highly contaminated gold mine tailing sites in Nova Scotia, Canada. A year earlier, she worked with a designer to create a delicate, organic-mechanic Gucci knock-off dress. Throughout her career, she has produced rogue taxidermy, sculptural pieces out of animal intestine from the local butcher and artificial bones, hacked electronics, investigated “lichenological time”, used landscapes and bodies as laboratories and experimented with the unpredictability of living material.

Right now, WhiteFeather Hunter is working on a PhD research project at SymbioticA (a research laboratory enabling artists and researchers to engage in wet biology practices in a biological science department at the University of Western Australia) that explores the intersection of feminist witchcraft and tissue engineering through the development of a body- and performance-based laboratory practice. One part of her research consists in collecting her own menstrual fluid and using this potent source of stem cells and growth factors to extract a serum that will be used as a new nutrient media for tissue culture. The serum could thus constitute a more ethical alternative to the fetal calf serum used in cellular agriculture. The fact that she is the first to study the viability of menstrual serum as a substitute for fetal calf serum to grow mammalian tissue in vitro tells you a lot about the masculine predominance in STEM fields.

Such a portfolio called for an interview!

WhiteFeather Hunter, Mooncalf, 2019-present

WhiteFeather Hunter, Mooncalf, 2019-present

Hi WhiteFeather! I’d like to start with the place of witchcraft in your practice. You have a deep understanding of biology. You are a PhD candidate in Biological Art at the University of Western Australia and have also worked in many international laboratory as an artist in residency and you have served as the Principal Investigator and Technician of the Speculative Life BioLab at the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology at Concordia University. You often wear a lab coat in photo portraits. Since your practice has evolved in such close connection with science, I’m wondering what you encounter in witchcraft that you do not find in the rational, scientific world? How does witchcraft and science complement each other? Do they provide different types of answers to the same problem, for example? How do you reconcile them? If these are the correct terms to use.

Reconciling the worlds of science and witch(craft) requires digging up the history of gender, class and racial suppression, which are often intersected within the brutal trajectory of colonial and techno-capitalist advance, including biomedical. The foremost scholar on this history, analysed through a feminist lens, is of course Silvia Federici. Her two books, Caliban and the Witch (2004) and Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women (2018) are must-reads. I must also acknowledge Donna Haraway as a primary influence on many technofeminist witches such as myself, in terms of new philosophies for manifesting a future-now that is more equitable for women, trans and nonbinary people, BIPOC, more-than-human species or anyone/ anything else deemed as ‘other’ than the hetero cis-male baseline standard. We are working at queering, at the crossroads — specifically at the intersection of not just science and witchcraft, but also biotechnology and art, towards accessible (empowering) modes of social reconstruction, or ‘social reproduction’ on our own terms.

When I use the term witchcraft, I often emphasize the ‘craft’ aspect of the word, to indicate a legacy of folk, DIY, traditional or lay approaches (empirical, lived or situated knowledge bases) that inform individual and community care practices. This is in contrast, or sometimes now complementary to, institutionalized, authorized ‘care’ protocols such as conventional medical methods. The trick of my research is to attempt to seamlessly meld an embodied experience of ‘spirituality’ and all that it entails (ie. understanding the agency of nonhuman or more-than-human organisms and ‘inanimate’ matter — à la Jane Bennett) with measurable results to produce a body of work that both critiques and holds accountable the (economic, ecological, cultural and health) impacts of new technologies on the world, while also manipulating these tools towards more emancipatory ends. This is not to discount the many benefits of science — not at all. My perspective is that the ‘witch’ always was a scientist, and that science should be ultimately empirical/ lived. The problem is that often empirical knowledge is sometimes discredited (if not profitable) or exploited (if profitable) by industry, taking it out of the hands of the researcher or community.

Witchcraft spells for tissue culture

In the Missing Witches podcast, you talk about the history of witchcraft as anti-capitalist resistance. Apart from the podcast, what would you recommend we look to get more information about this type of resistance?
And does this dimension of witchcraft as anti-capitalist resistance (or resistance in general) have any resonance in today’s world? Could activists find any inspiration in witchcraft? Even male activists or is witchcraft for women alone?

Witchcraft is definitely not for women alone. The witch is a shape-shifter and defies sex/gender pigeonholing. Deviance from hegemonic norms is the celebrated forte of the witch.

Currently, we see numerous capitalist attempts at appropriating pop culture notions of witchcraft, along with other previously suppressed spiritual practices (such as indigenous traditions) for profitable outcomes, such as the sale of props like crystals and smudge sticks by beauty brands, etc. The witch knows that so-called ‘healing’ crystals for sale on Amazon or the Sephora website, for example, can often involve problematic, exploitative earth extraction methods — this is counter to the witch’s desires. The witch ultimately needs no ‘magical’ props other than political, knowledgeable control over her own body and what she can create with it/ for it/ through it, for herself and/or her community. This isn’t to say that she lives in a hut in the woods with mud floors and a sooty cauldron, out of reach of any cell phone tower. That might be nice for some, but not necessary.

The witch may be a technophile — she is, however, squinting skeptically at capitalism in everything that she does, and twisting technologies towards beautifully weird outcomes.

I’m fascinated by The Witch in the Lab Coat and Mooncalf, your experiments with creating nutrient serum for mammalian tissue culture using menstrual blood. If I understood correctly, you would use your own blood to grow tissue in vitro. After the first moment of surprise, I had to admit that it would make sense to use a material that would otherwise go to waste as a nutrient. But how nutritious would that blood be to grow cells? It is clearly much more ethical than fetal bovine serum but is it as nutritious? Is menstrual blood any better than blood that has another origin?

There is a cultural perception of menstrual blood as somehow tainted, ‘unclean’ or dirty. We see this view regularly perpetuated, for example by extremely problematic artworks such as Anish Kapoor’s recent series of menstruating vagina paintings, wherein he describes his ‘fascination’ with vaginas as something that, “stems from blood as “ritual matter”, but also its association with “the abject, with death, with the impure”. He adds: “It’s so strange that both are a place of origin and a place of dirt, or other matter, menstrual [blood].”

Vaginal fluids, absent of infection by external agents are neither toxic nor hazardous (nor ‘dirty’), yet the commonality of the perception of menstrual fluid itself as ‘pollutant’ persists in a variety of cultural contexts, unsupported by science. Recent genomic profiling of microbiota within the vaginal canal has shown the prominence of commensal species that produce bactericidal and virucidal compounds, mainly lactic acid. Most importantly for my research, proteomic analyses of menstrual blood have shown that it contains hundreds of unique proteins not found in venous blood. Yet, it has never, to my knowledge, been experimented with as a nutrient serum for tissue culture. I have now already produced a supply of menstrual serum from my own vaginal fluids. I’ve denatured the serum, meaning essentially cooking it at 65˚C for 15 minutes to render any unknown viral vectors inert. The next experiments will be to culture a variety of cell types in the serum to see which ones thrive best.

Politically, this work is important not only for addressing misogynist cultural taboos — the actual production of menstrual blood is still a material outside the control of the patriarchal capitalist economy. Menstruators don’t sit on stainless steel factory funnel toilets, bleeding ad infinitum into the supply chain. Neither is menstrual blood a scarce resource whose value can be artificially inflated on the commodities market—though, conceivably, it could be were the taboos around it to be overcome and its utilitarian potential realized. I’m hoping to get ahead that game, and head it off at the pass. My work seeks to re-orient the long-standing socio-biological construction of the female body as problematic, to that of innate potential for self-actualization and, importantly, self-directed scientific experimentation.

What type of cells will you use? Will they come from other animals?

Currently, I’ve isolated what has been previously identified as endometrial regenerative cells, a multipotent stem cell type that is found to be very abundant and robust in menstrual blood. My own stem cells were extremely easy to isolate from a thin layer of endometrial tissue that was extracted from my menstrual blood during the serum separation process, meaning that I spun down the whole blood in a centrifuge, into its component parts: serum, tissue and red blood cells. I removed the serum top layer (for later use) and then extracted cells from the middle mucus and tissue layer. The bottom layer, the red blood cells, was discarded. The stem cells I extracted grew extremely well in vitro, and are now in cryopreservation as part of my own personal cell bank at the University of Western Australia. Scientifically, I still need to experiment further with them to prove that they are what I think they are, including differentiating them into different cell types to see exactly what their potentialities might be. Can they become cardiomyocytes? Can they become connective tissue cells? Can they become muscle cells? That remains to be seen. What I do know, though, is that they are not embryonic stem cells so they cannot become a complex organism; merely a singular tissue type after differentiation.

WhiteFeather Hunter, Mooncalf, 2019-present

WhiteFeather Hunter, Mooncalf, 2019-present

Can you freely use your own menstrual blood in laboratory settings? Does its use have to be approved?

Funnily enough, within the context of my PhD, I had to first sign over my bodily autonomy to my supervisor, assigning her the official care and control of my body for the purposes of scientific experimentation. Ultimately, what that meant was that I had to compose all manner of bureaucratic documents, including a Participant Information Sheet wherein I informed myself of the potential hazards of working with my own menstrual blood or using a menstrual cup for specimen collection. This is an entirely weird process where my bodily knowledge essentially becomes disembodied and institutionalized/ regulated. The Human Research Ethics approval process took well over six months, and the unofficial word I received mid-way through the process was that someone on the ethics committee was ‘uncomfortable’ with my proposed research, meaning I had to defend its importance in an extremely bulletproof manner that elevated it scientifically beyond any reasonable or subjective arguments against it. I was also required to give excessively detailed job task breakdowns to explain very precisely every single thing I would do with the menstrual blood and where I would do it, meaning that any last vestige of privacy around the handling of my intimate body materials was forfeited. It was quite an interesting exercise. Now I am officially approved for the handling of my own menstrual blood.

Will this PhD research project at SymbioticA, University of Western Australia, be accompanied by performances? Are you planning to deploy and communicate it outside of the academia context? (if that’s not too soon to ask)

Performance is a big part of not only the dissemination of the research in terms of artistic outputs, but also for the gestation and in-corp-oration of new ideas. I use performance as a way to embody new knowledge as I am working through it and gaining it. It is a research method. The performances are recorded and then edited into didactic video performance works. I’m also an educator and making knowledge, particularly high-tech scientific knowledge, accessible is one of the core principles in my overall ethos. So, this is one of the ways that I use art towards a politics of knowledge accessibility. My performance videos are always interspersed with text subtitling that both provoke critical thought while also explaining protocols. I think that this way of working lends itself well to the new reality we find ourselves in with so many online interactions for conferences, exhibitions, etc.

WhiteFeather Hunter, with Gen Moison, Vanessa Mardirossian, and Alex Bachmayer, Bactinctorium, 2017-2018. Petri dishes of Vogesella indigofera growing on menstrual blood agar

WhiteFeather Hunter, Serratia marsescens printed on silk

You also work with bacteria and other microorganisms and talk about co-creation. How much can you control or guide the aesthetic outcome of works developed in co-creation with microorganisms? Do they often surprise you?

I am always surprised, and that is part of the love of working with microorganisms. It’s a state of perpetual curiosity and also humility towards the more-than-human worlds. If I say that I am co-creating with microorganisms, I say it cautiously because I am always aware of the systems of control that are in play when generating the work. Ultimately, we are all co-creating our realities with innumerable microorganisms, electronic and other systems every day. I place a particular focus on the agency of the microbial world in the context of my own creative projects because it’s an acknowledgement of the fact that as much as I work within systems of control, I am never completely in control.

WhiteFeather Hunter, PROSPECTIVE FUTURES: THE AURELIA PROJECT, 2018. Photo: Mireille Bourgeois/ IOTA Institute

WhiteFeather Hunter, PROSPECTIVE FUTURES: THE AURELIA PROJECT, 2018

WhiteFeather Hunter, PROSPECTIVE FUTURES: THE AURELIA PROJECT, 2018

WhiteFeather Hunter, PROSPECTIVE FUTURES: THE AURELIA PROJECT (Cupriavidus metallidurans), 2018

I’m very curious about PROSPECTIVE FUTURES: THE AURELIA PROJECT. Every single aspect of it is compelling. Your intention was to make a ritual offering of gold-producing microbes to a poisoned site where the settler industry has rendered a Nova Scotia landscape useless and dangerous. What is the background of the location? How did this site become polluted and how did it affect the First Nations who lived there?

I consulted with an indigenous curator on this project, Roger Lewis, facilitated by IOTA Institute. All of the knowledge of place, in terms of its impacts on the local First Nations, is owed to him and what he shared with me in person, both onsite at the tailings site and in his office at the Nova Scotia Museum. Roger explained to me that there is no separation between the Mi’kmaq people and the landscape that houses them, now or ever throughout history. ‘Place’ is not simply a physical location but a psychospiritual and multi-temporal co-evolution of all beings. In this understanding, all damages and harm done to the landscape are done to the people that belong to that landscape, on multiple levels. The site I worked with, the Montague legacy gold mine tailings site, is a place next to people’s homes, waterways and inhabited natural landscape. It is heavily polluted with the chemicals and byproducts of ‘legacy’ gold mining, meaning the more polluting and toxic practices that were used in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It still contains high levels of mercury and arsenic. It continues to affect people, including those who take their dogs there for walks, not understanding the toxicity levels present because they have lived next to it for so long that it has become normalized. The Nova Scotia government is interested in remediating the site, but not necessarily with its sights set on righting past wrongs, but in order to go back in and re-mine the site since it still contains high percentages of gold particulate from the original ore.

WhiteFeather Hunter, BLÓM + BLÓÐ (flowers + blood)

Can you tell us about your PhD at the University of Western Australia? What is your investigation about and what are you hoping to achieve?

My PhD is both a science doctorate as well as a design degree, so my research outputs have to meet both scientific research criteria as well as include artistic production. The art objects I produce will serve as case studies that support both a cultural and scientific analysis of my topics, which include the use of menstrual blood as a biological material in cellular biology protocols, as well as witchcraft practices in a standard (controlled) academic laboratory context. The connection point between the two is the nature of taboo in relation to (women’s) body materials and the technological manipulation of them. My main laboratory work is specifically towards producing a spoof prototype of ‘unclean’ meat, or lab grown meat produced with menstrual serum, in order to provide critique of the continuously hyped-up “clean meat” industry, among other things. My supervisor is one of the originators of lab-grown ‘meat’, Ionat Zurr (with her collaborator, Oron Catts) and has a long history of addressing the need for critical discussion of the impacts, potential and violence in tissue culture practices. The tissue I produce, that is grown in menstrual serum, is real (“semi-living”) tissue and the protocols for doing so are scientifically sound. But, I present it only as an instigation, not an actual product. I’m not interested in instrumentalizing women’s bodies any more than they already are by the current developments in biotechnology.

Any other upcoming projects and field of research you might be working on now?

As always, I’m advocating for the democratization of sci-tech praxes, and am working towards ways of doing more of my work at home, in my own kitchen and bathroom, as complementary spaces to the laboratory. I’m currently waiting on approval to work in a lab in Montreal with François-Joseph Lapointe to sequence the microbial and mycobial genomic material present in my own menstrual fluid. Because of the COVID situation, Montreal remains in a red zone and I’m unable to get into the lab, but I’ve had fun in the meantime, carefully collecting dozens of vaginal swabs for the full duration of my menstrual cycle, at home. I’ve treated my bathroom/ toilet as my laboratory, with my kitchen as the auxiliary storage space for all of my samples. My vaginal swabs sit in tubes next to my carrots and avocados in the vegetable drawer. Cleaning my toilet has never been so interesting, and I’m totally into this transformation of the banal into something officious for academic research.

Thanks WhiteFeather!

Keep up with WhiteFeather Hunter’s exhibitions and conferences on her news website. Next on her agenda are (among other events) a presentation of the Mooncalf project at Taboo – Transgression – Transcendence in Art & Science conference, an exhibition of the Mooncalf project as part of the upcoming Culture of Contamination show at the New York Hall of Science and an artist residency at the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle (Cornwall), UK.

The Cost of Free Shipping. Amazon in the Global Economy, edited by Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Ellen Reese.

Publisher Pluto writes: ‘One-click’ instant consumerism and its immense variety of products has made Amazon a worldwide household name, with over 60% of US households subscribing to Amazon Prime. In turn, these subscribers are surveilled by the corporation. Amazon is also one of the world’s largest logistics companies, resulting in weakened unions and lowered labor standards. The company has also become the largest provider of cloud-computing services and home surveillance systems, not to mention the ubiquitous Alexa.

With cutting-edge analyses, this book looks at the many dark facets of the corporation, including automation, surveillance, tech work, workers’ struggles, algorithmic challenges, the disruption of local democracy and much more. The Cost of Free Shipping shows how Amazon represents a fundamental shift in global capitalism that we should name, interrogate and be primed to resist.

The Cost of Free Shipping documents the impact that Amazon has inside and outside the workplace. Inside are the daily indignities for workers, the productivity pressures, the employment insecurity, the racialized-gendered biases and the health and safety hazards in the warehouses as well as on the road where “last mile” delivery workers (often hired by subcontractors) are equally submitted to “algocratic” discipline.

The chapters that investigate the influence of Amazon capitalism outside of the “fulfillment centres” should, sadly, leave no one undisturbed. Even if you don’t work for Amazon, even if you avoid its platform like the plague and don’t own an Echo, a Kindle, a Ring or anything that reeks of systematic surveillance of users, your life is still affected by the tech giant. Amazon Web Services, one of Amazon’s most profitable operations, control almost half of the cloud infrastructure market, providing data storage for Netflix, Facebook, McDonalds, NASA, Disney and several U.S. governmental agencies. Amazon is also, in part, responsible for the decline in small businesses. And wherever the company decides to install warehouses, data centres and offices, the area will experience increased spatial injustice: the movement and operation and maintenance of freight trucks are accompanied by a sharp increase of truck traffic, air pollution and respiratory illnesses for some of the already most disadvantaged communities. The damage on the environment and on citizens health is such that it neutralises any immediate economic benefits for the local population. Then there’s the aggressive tax-avoidance, the intense lobbying, etc. As the book shows, Amazon’s efforts to maximise profits have almost no ethical limits. But you knew that already…

An Amazon warehouse in England. Photo: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images, via TNYT

Amazon workers and immigrants’ rights organisations protesting. Photo via techcrunch

This collection of critical essays by scholars, workers, journalists, labour and community organisers not only demonstrates that the lure of free shipping creates enormous costs for workers, communities and the environment, it also gives inspiring examples of grassroots resistance to Amazon capitalism.

Having described the evils of Amazon, the book highlights the attempts to rein in Amazon’s control of the workplace and grip on the economy.

In some European countries, where unions are stronger than in the U.S., Amazon facilities have seen union actions, strikes and industrial conflicts. More recently, workers in Italy, Spain, Poland and France have gone to strike over labour conditions related to COVID-19. The book also lists a series of successful protests in the U.S. In 2018, Somalis workers led a movement in Minneapolis to demand prayer rights and better working conditions. A year later, New York City unionists made collapse the plan to open an Amazon “HQ2” in Long Island City. That same year, programmers and other Amazon tech employees were organized under the banner Amazon Employees for Climate Justice and urged the company to address climate change. The movement culminated in Jeff Bezos pledging Amazon to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. A second campaign is challenging Amazon’s tight relationship with the military-industrial complex, demanding Amazon stop providing services to federal immigration enforcement and to the police. Sadly, the growing tech-worker movement shouldn’t hide the fact that the economic and political interests of the tech left do not necessarily align with the ones of the working class.

And indeed, so far these actions have had only limited impact on the icon of corporate domination and labour exploitation. The authors in the book, however, are hopeful that by sharing their research and the experiences of the most fruitful protests, other workers will join the resistance and that they will be supported by unions, by a broad network of citizens and by local and international alliances.

I enjoyed the variety of essays. Some of them are based on academic research, others on in-depth interviews with Amazon employees, on previous employment experiences as warehouse workers, on observations from public tours of warehouses or on ethnographic observations. There are some (hard to avoid) repetitions and a few questions that the press has already copiously documented but other than that, but I also discovered many disturbing facets of Amazon. Seeing all those issues brought together in one publication made me realise that Amazon’s corporate power and ruthless surveillance of workers and customers alike are incompatible with our democratic values.

More info and a discount code in Pluto’s podcast Radicals in Conversation: Workers Resisting Amazon.

On 31 October, the Furtherfield Gallery in London launched an exhibition centered around “the world’s first horror experience by and for machines”.

In true horror movie style, a pandemic is keeping the gallery closed and the human visitors locked up inside their home. Meanwhile, the machine is left undisturbed, using CCTV cameras to observe the world remotely and turn its understanding of it into a horror film for machines.

UNINVITED, by Nye Thompson and UBERMORGEN, is a puzzling, disturbing but strangely seducing work. It rejects human viewers as much as it draws them in. A mix of dystopia, scifi and reality, the film echoes our confusion about the machines which intelligence (or utter stupidity) we sometimes fail to fully appreciate.

Nye Thompson & UBERMORGEN, UNINVITED film still: Exploration > Tarmac, 2020. Image courtesy of the artists

Nye Thompson studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London but ended up working as a software designer. After 2 decades exploring human-machine interface and big data, she decided to get an MA in art and has since been busy probing machines watching each other and watching us, bot to bot communication, unsecured networked surveillance cameras and other systems that leave humans feel slightly out of their depth. I’m glad she teamed up with the always brilliant UBERMORGEN. And I’m even happier that she found a moment to answer my questions:

Nye Thompson & UBERMORGEN, UNINVITED (extract), 2020. Video Furtherfield

Hi Nye! UNINVITED is described as “a self-evolving networked organism: an installation of mechatronic ‘Monsters’ watch and generate a ‘horror film’ for machines, using their shared impressions of the universe collected through millions of hallucinogenic virally abused sensors.” Could you unpack this for me? What material/content does this organism use? How does it work? What are those hallucinogenic virally abused sensors?

UNINVITED was the unforeseen outcome of a massive botnet (probably Mirai aka Future). Millions of Internet of Things devices and systems around the world became virally infected by the botnet – the vast majority of them surveillance cameras – and out of this sick hallucinating critical mass something new emerged – a new distributed network organism with camera eyes everywhere (the hallucinogenic virally abused sensors) – desperately striving to understand itself and its environment and to protect itself. This organism has a centralised cloudBrain where key processing of the data received from its sensors takes place. It also has mechatronic avatars which perform part of these processing activities. One of these avatars – or ‘Monsters’ as we call them – is active inside Furtherfield Gallery. The UNINVITED organism’s boundaries are fuzzy and constantly changing and it also has an organic component – we as humans are profoundly entangled within it. And we as artists felt ourselves to be operating very much as nodes within the UNINVITED network.

Here is a drawing of the system architecture as I tried to define it early in 2020, particularly in terms of how the Monsters fit within the organism.

Nye Thompson and UBERMORGEN, UNINVITED Organism Schematic (Network View), 2019. Courtesy: Nye Thompson

Why a horror movie for machines and not a romantic comedy? Is there something deeply horrifying about the way today’s machines operate?

Well the horror film framing was something that emerged during UBERMORGEN and my very first discussions about a potential collaboration. We were thinking about human-machine networks and some emergent non-human agency, while also browsing through the huge archive of algorithmically-captured security camera images that I had obsessively collected and catalogued from my Backdoored project. The idea of the horror film came from these images which have the eerie quality of horror film stills. I suppose it’s because these images speak of unobserved watchers and a gaze which if not actively inimical is certainly inhuman. Horror films are structurally so interesting (much more so than romantic comedies) and the idea of juxtaposing the visceral emotionality of horror films with the cool ‘objectivity’ of the network created a really powerful tension. Then the horror film framing brought with it so much conceptual richness – obviously there is an aspect of cultural horror to the idea of our surveillance society and our growing vulnerability to this unpredictable network of devices and systems growing up around us.

But from a machine perspective there is also a really interesting horror narrative in the idea of the botnet – millions of zombie devices virally weaponised to destroy one another – and the idea of a machine consciousness emerging from this system fascinated me. All these ideas fed into the movie.

If UNINVITED is a movie for machines, is there any chance that the human audience will understand it or get anything meaningful (from a machine perspective) from it?

For a while now I’ve been interested in the idea of machine-as-audience or rather as primary audience. And for me (and I hope for some other humans) one of the fascinating aspects of this is the opportunity to catch just a glimpse of the world from a non-human perspective – another world revealed within the familiar. But as I mentioned before, we are hopelessly entangled within the UNINVITED network and machine learning is all based on human cultural references, so the movie uses filmic tropes which are familiar to us all. Maybe it’s a bit like the classic machine learning ‘black box’ – you put in familiar data and what emerges at the other end is ‘sort of’ familiar though you can’t exactly trace it back to the input data. Then the sound track (created by artist/composer Thom Kuli) acts as a kind of bridge emotionally opening up the machine narrative to a human audience. Whether the human response to the movie provides useful or meaningful data from a human perspective is an interesting question – i suppose you could think about it as a kind of movie CAPTCHA to collect data on human response to stimuli.

Nye Thompson & UBERMORGEN, UNINVITED (film still: Relaxing > Clinic), 2020. Image courtesy of the artists

Nye Thompson & UBERMORGEN, UNINVITED (film still: Baseline > Metropolis), 2020. Image courtesy of the artists

How do the texts (where i’ve found a Depeche Mode quote!) and the sound respond to the images?

By texts you mean the film captions? I’m glad you found those. They are taken from the making of the film which was actually performed using a rigorous and elaborate algorithmic process. We started the movie planning by designing what we call an Audio Video Motion (AVM) Profile. The motion part refers to the movement patterns of the Monsters. The sound was the foundation – we knew how important an element it would be – and it was decided that it would follow a classic Requiem structure, but that we would map it conceptually to an evolutionary narrative for the UNINVITED network organism. This gave us 5 primary Modi (EXPORATION, FIGHT/FLIGHT, COURTSHIP, RELAXING, BASELINE) then each of these Modi split into 4 Phases or States for the network. You can see this structure within the movie and soundtrack. When it came to the video each of the 20 Phases is generated from 2 still images collected by the UNINVITED network. These images were analysed with all the machine learning tools available to the network – obsessively drilled into and scoured for content and human faces. The content analysis was then expanded into segments of AI-generated text. This text data was used to map the images into the Modi/Phase framework. Fragments of this text have also found their way into the captions.

Nye Thomspon, «The Seeker» Words That Remake The World. Version 1.0., 2018. Installation view at the Victoria and Albert Museum

Nye Thompson, Backdoored, 2016 – 2018

How does UNINVITED relate to some of your previous works, such as The Seeker and Backdoored, that explored surveillance and machine vision?

There is a really direct relationship between these 3 projects for me. Both The Seeker and UNINVITED emerged out of my fascination with the surveillance camera images I collected during Backdoored – what these images actually represented and how they came to exist as examples of emergent machinic agency. I wrote this text about the images at the time and also this short piece about their genesis. These are ideas that I have kept coming back to over the last 3 years, and both The Seeker and UNINVITED represent different ways of thinking about them.

Nye Thompson & UBERMORGEN, UNINVITED, 2020. Installation view at Furtherfield. Image courtesy of the artists

How does the installation at Furtherfield differ from the web experience?

This is really where COVID comes into play – it has caused a rapid evolution of UNINVITED in different directions from those we planned at the start of the year when we were designing the Furtherfield installation. The physical installation of the railed Monster in the gallery contains various dormant features which would have allowed it to actively respond to the presence of a human audience in the gallery as well as to the memories it is replaying in the movie. But like most of us now it is locked down in isolation, and as its physical body is curtailed it has expanded more into the online space – in the form of UNINVITED,ICU. I think within the gallery installation you are more aware of the grinding mechanical physicality of the Monster as it runs along its rails, and also that it is the primary movie audience whereas you are a step detached – watching the movie but also the Monster’s response.

Although you probably didn’t intend it that way, UNINVITED is a bit of a painful title for anyone working in the cultural world. This year, because of the pandemic, most of us have been uninvited to most of the projects/events we were working on. What happens to the installation at Furtherfield now that the country is in lockdown?

Haha, no the title has proved horribly prescient in a way that none of us could have anticipated. The installation in Furtherfield will remain in total isolation, quarantined from the world. Although it will expand soon to another quarantined installation, this time in an empty Communist-era theatre in Romania. Although it seems painfully ironic now, pre-COVID 19 we had initially talked about how interesting it would be to have the UNINVITED Monsters as a physical system operating in an isolated space and only perceivable remotely.

I’d also like to ask you about ‘/artefact’ a new video installation which premiered a couple of weeks ago at the Biennial Moving Image Festival Visions in the Nunnery Gallery in London. The work uses mapping data systems to lay claim to an area of Mars and erect a border around it. The work seems to make more tangible this phenomenon of using sophisticated machinery to unilaterally conquer territories humans could otherwise not access, like outer space or deep into the ocean. What were you trying to do with this work?

That’s an interesting take – I wrote myself a manifesto when I was planning /artefact and one of the tenets was “In a space that can only be perceived through mechano-digital mediation there is no meaningful gap between virtual and physical.” I’m really interested in the power dynamics embedded within the software infrastructures we all use. Platforms like Google Earth (which I used to generate footage for /artefact) generate a new shared reality overlaying and conflated with the physical world. They make new means of world exploration publicly available, while at the same time taking ownership of the visible appearance of the worlds and controlling what can and can’t be seen. I was really interested in playing within this dynamic. I’d also been spending a lot of time (virtually) travelling along border walls and looking at this awkward mapping (a kind of meta-drawing) of political power onto an indifferent geography. So I decided to examine this act by transferring it onto Mars and annexing territories for myself. I really liked the ridiculous hubristic incongruity of the idea. However of course it also anticipates the very real power exo-planetary power struggles we can expect to see played out over the coming decades.

Thanks Nye!

UNINVITED is on Furtherfield website and gallery until 31 Jan 2021.

Related stories: u s e r u n f r i e n d l y, UBERMORGEN solo show in London; Positions in Flux – Panel 1: Art goes politics – Hans Bernhard from UBERMORGEN.COM. 4 years ago, Millicent Hawk interviewed Nye Thompson about her work Backdoored.

The MAINTENANT Festival in Rennes is probably going to be my favourite digital art event of 2020. First, because it’s been one of the very very few cultural festivals I attended physically this year. Second, because of its accompanying conference, AMBIVALENCES #1, which looked at art and digital culture in the context of the environmental crisis.

Yannick Jacquet & Fred Penelle, Mécaniques Discursives. Place Sainte Anne. Photo: Gwendal Le Flem

The scholars, curators and artists participating to Ambivalences #1 examined the wide spectrum of creative practices that engage with pollution, invasive species, sea-level rise, fossil fuel, mass extinctions, etc. Can artists explore those issues in a way that is meaningful and impactful? Which strategies do they develop in order to break through the wall of attention fatigue? Can their work ignite a public (or even institutional) desire to change our relationship to the living?

I discovered so many interesting ideas and artworks at the conference that I’m going to translate my notes (the event was in French) and share them with you below.

I’m going to start with Bénédicte Ramade‘s talk. Next week, I’ll write about Manuela de Barros’ keynote and later I’ll sum up some of the key moments from the panel with philosopher and curator Loïc Fel and with artists Claire Bardainne and Joanie Lemercier.

Bénédicte Ramade at Ambivalences #1 – Espace Tambour, Université Rennes 2. Photo: © Gwendal Le Flem / Association Electroni[k]

Bénédicte Ramade at Ambivalences #1 – Espace Tambour, Université Rennes 2. Photo: © Gwendal Le Flem / Association Electroni[k]

In her History of Ecological Art talk, art historian and curator Bénédicte Ramade explored the differences between ecological art, environmental art, green art, ecologist art, Anthropocene art, etc.

The word ecology, Ramade reminded us, was coined in 1866 by Ernst Haeckel. The German zoologist applied the term oekologie to the “relation of the animal both to its organic as well as its inorganic environment.” From this scientific origin, the term rapidly mutated and became synonymous with “environment” in the 1920s. It later took on a political dimension by becoming an “ecologism” in the sense of environmental politics, including the protection of nature. Over time, the word became almost synonymous with nature and lost some of its essence.

The 3 types of artistic practices Bénédicte Ramade presented are:
– ecological art practices with a focus on the scientific,
– ecologist art practices that have more social and political dimensions,
– and Anthropocene art practices that establish partnerships with the living.

The first category, ecological art, is anchored in science and in the ambition to solve pollution problems technically and tangibly. It is what Timothy Morton calls an ecology without nature, it’s a philosophical approach that sees nature as one of the possible territories of ecology but not as its exclusive breeding ground.

Dennis Oppenheim, Annual Rings, 1968

Not all artists engaging with nature can be regarded as ecological artists. Arte Povera artists, for example, use natural elements but do not claim any environmental position. The same goes for Land artists who have no desire for a scientific intervention on nature. They operate in the landscape, but without any environmental purpose, any intention to heal or repair any environmental malfunction.

Ecological artists have a much stronger connection with scientific research. They started working in the 1960s but it’s only in 1992 that they got their first collective exhibition, Fragile Ecologies, at the Queens Museum in New York.

Alan Sonfist, Becoming the Animal Within, 1972-73

The exhibition gathered artists who worked in urban settings and were interested in science. Alan Sonfist, for example, was looking into ethology in order to forge connections with the living, including the botanical.

Helen and Newton Harrison, Survival Piece #2: Notations on the Ecosystem of Wester Salt Works (with inclusion of Brine Shrimp), 1971

Helen and Newton Harrison are other ecological artists. Their Survival Piece #2 consisted in a series of pools filled with water of different salinity, from seawater to brine ten times saltier than seawater. The Dunaliella salina, an alga that produces carotenoids as a response to increasing salinity, was introduced into each pond. Hence the different colours of the water in the pools. The artists then added brine shrimps which, as they were eating the algae, gradually depolluted the water and lowered its salinity. The work demonstrates the possibility of setting up filtration mechanisms that are totally ecological and based on scientific research.

Alan Sonfist, Time Landscape, 1965-1978

To rehabilitate an infertile piece of land in the north of New York SoHo, Alan Sonfist planted ancestral plants from NYC which he had identified in ancient documents dating back to the first colonisation wave. Having determined which trees and vegetation had been decimated by European colonisers, the artist grew a “time landscape”, a piece of lost nature that is still thriving today. Only non-human animals can enter the “precolonial forest.” Far from being some kind of Disneyland nature, the garden hosts rats, squirrels and other forms of wildlife that human neighbours might not like very much.

Patricia Johanson, Leonhardt Lagoon, Dallas, 1981-1985

Patricia Johanson was invited to Dallas to breathe new life into a badly degraded lake in the middle of the city. The water was murky and covered in algal bloom and the whole area was so polluted that barely any animal or vegetation lived there. Even the (human) inhabitants of the city avoided it. The artist used local and specially selected plants to activate various systems of water filtration and create microhabitats for wildlife. Big orange structures doubled as pathways for human visitors and refuges for frogs, turtles and marine wildlife. Today migratory species stop by to feed in this healthy environment. This is one of the earliest examples of art as bioremediation. Johanson collaborated with a variety of scientists, engineers, city planners and local citizen groups to ensure the success of the project.

Mel Chin, Revival Field Pig’s Eye Landfill, 1990-1993, Saint Paul Minnesota

Revival Field results: amounts of zinc and cadmium absorbed by Thlaspi caerulescens

Mel Chin’s Revival Field Pig’s Eye Landfill never opened to the public. The work allowed scientists from a Texas University to develop and test out the effect of hyperaccumulator plants on very polluted soils, at Pig’s Eye Landfill, a State Superfund site in St. Paul, Minnesota. Scientific analysis of biomass samples from this field confirmed that six varieties of the hyperaccumulator plants could extract heavy metals from contaminated soil, proving thus the potential of “Green Remediation” as a low-tech alternative to costly remediation methods.

This scientific dimension characterises ecological art in the U.S. Aesthetics comes second. Chin’s work could not be seen by the public. Both Sonfist and Johanson’s parks look rather bleak in Winter. Which might explain why ecological art didn’t immediately capture the imagination of curators and audiences. The main objective of ecological art is not to please the public but to help ecosystems heal.

The next type of artistic practices Ramade presented belongs to “ecologist art”. More militant, more politically-engaged than ecological art, ecologist art is also more inclined to connect with the broad public of citizens. Previous works also tried to engage with the public but their main preoccupation was an ecological solution in the scientific sense, a knowledge-based rehabilitation of an environmental dysfunction.

Joe Hawley, Mel Henderson, Alfred Young, Oil, 20 September 1969. Performance event at the Standard Oil docks, Richmond, California. Photo: Robert Campbell / Chamois Moon

In 1969, Joe Hawley, Mel Henderson and Alfred Young drew the word “OIL” in biodegradable green dye in the San Francisco bay to call attention to a massive oil spill that had taken place a few months earlier along the Santa Barbara coast. The location of their action was the coast of Richmond, California, home to the Standard Oil refinery.

Nicolas Uriburu, Venice, Grand Canal, 1969

Nicolas Uriburu, Buenos Aires, 22 March 2010. Photo: Greenpeace / Martin Katz

That same year, Nicolas Uriburu embarked on a gondola and dyed Venice’s Grand Canal acid green, using a pigment that turns green when synthesised by water microorganisms. Concerned with environmental issues (and perhaps also by the art world’s indifference to them), his performance aimed at raising awareness about air and water pollution. Uriburu organised similar actions in Buenos Aires, Paris, Brussels, London and other locations. Sometimes even in collaboration with Greenpeace.

Gustav Metzger, Mobbile, 1970-2015. Centre Pompidou Metz

Gustav Metzger put plants and bits of meat inside a plexiglass box for one week. The only air they could breathe came from the exhaust fumes of a car. The work, first staged in 1970, reflects on the danger of a society that relies heavily on cars and fossil fuels. After one week, the plants inside the box were completely asphyxiated, a proof of the deleterious effect that air pollution has on living organisms.

Agnes Denes, Wheatfield – A Confrontation, 1982. Photo: John McGrall

Agnes Denes, Wheatfield – A Confrontation, 1982

Agnes Denes planted two-acre of wheat on a landfill at the feet of the Twin Towers in New York City. The terrain was estimated to be worth around 4,5 billion dollars. Her crops, however, earned her only 154 dollars in profit. The price of crops is fixed in Wall Street, physically located a mere block away from the field but billions of km away in terms of vision of world priorities. The work calls attention to the tensions between agricultural production and the estate value of land, between the world’s economy and the state of the Earth itself.

Tue Greenfort, Milk Heat, 2009, Wanas estate, Sweden. Photo: Anders Norrsell

Tue Greenfort excels at highlighting the contradictions at the heart of ecological promises. Invited to work at an organic farm that doubles as an art centre and sculpture park in Sweden, the artist quickly identified the energy cost necessary to produce organic milk.

At the time of milking, cows’ milk is 38°C, but the liquid needs to be cooled down to 4°C before it can be transported to the dairy. Greenfort realised that since Sweden is a cold country, the milk could be cooled at low energetic cost by having it go through a pipe system outside the barn.

The installation also shows how we heat up the environment through our consumption choices:

“The artist wants to highlight the effects of livestock on the environment, regardless of whether it is organic. He questions if dairy products can be seen as ecologically sustainable, when the methane emissions from cows result in a negative impact on the climate.”

Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosing, Ice Watch, Place du Panthéon, Paris, 2015

A few years ago, Olafur Eliasson brought blocks of ice all the way from Greenland to a few European capitals at a huge environmental cost. The installation gave rise to heated debates around the CO2 cost of the transport of the ice to Paris which, even if it was compensated by the plantation of trees, remained jarring. On the other hand, one shouldn’t underestimate the emotional effect of being confronted with this ice. Not only were people crying in front of the ice knowing they were about to disappear but even museum institutions were challenged to intensify the conversation around the need to reduce the environmental impact of their cultural events. Maybe the level of awareness Ice Watch raised made up for its environmental price tag?

Now can we talk about “green art”? In his book on the green colour (the cover for the English edition of the essay is a bit off-putting but I can’t recommend Michel Pastoureau‘s books enough), Michel Pastoureau explains how the association of green with nature has mostly been a marketing invention. That’s one of the reasons why Ramade would rather talk about an “Anthropocene art”, an art that establishes partnerships with the living and recognises its agency.

Lois Weinberger, Cut, 37 meters, 1999. Innsbruck university

Lois Weinberger made a cut in the pavement of the campus of Innsbruck University. He then let the cut evolve by itself, trusting the living to continue the transformation. Soon, seeds brought by birds and wind, turned the long strip into a mini green garden.

Jérémy Gobé, Corail Artefact, 2019

A couple of years ago, Jérémy Gobé discovered a traditional lace pattern that is structurally similar to that of a coral skeleton. He worked with lace-makers to make organic cotton lace that will be used as potential support for coral development. The tests in the Pacific have been postponed due to the outbreak of the pandemic.

The work not only allies art, science and remediation, it also has the kind of aesthetic ambitions that were sometimes lacking in early ecological art.

Maria Thereza Alves and Gitta Gschwendtner, Seeds of Change: A Floating Ballast Seed Garden, 2012-2016, Bristol

Maria Thereza Alves and Gitta Gschwendtner worked on ballast flora, the plants brought to England in the stabilisation water and soil that were used to weigh down trading boats. Between 1680 and the early 1900s, ships entering the port of Bristol unloaded many tons of ballast along the river and the harbour. This ballast often contained seeds from where the ship had sailed. Some of these seeds are still found growing around Bristol today. Ballast flora are symbolic of the complexity of world history and, as Seeds of Change: A Floating Ballast Seed Garden demonstrates, they have the potential to challenge our definitions of “native landscape”. The work also raises questions about the point at which an ‘alien’ species becomes ‘native’, and how we determine our sense of national identity and belonging.

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Sissel Tolaas and Gingko Bioworks, Digital reconstruction of the extinct Hibiscadelphus wilderianus Rock, on the southern slopes of Mount Haleakala, Maui, Hawaii, around the time of its last sighting in 1912 (Resurrecting the Sublime), 2019

I wrote about Resurrecting the Sublime a few weeks ago, in my review of the show Survival of the fittest. Nature and high-tech in contemporary art.

The next editions of Demain’s Conferences dedicated to the issue of environmental change will take place in Caen (April 2021) and in Nantes (September 2021). A collaboration between Stereolux, Oblique/s and Electroni[k].

With considerable delay and only pitiful excuses to justify it, here’s the second part of the notes I scribbled down during the conference AMBIVALENCES #1 which took place in early October in Rennes in the framework of the Maintenant digital art festival.

Joanie Lemercier and Pierre Vanni, Visual identity of the Festival Maintenant

Part 1 of my report summed up Bénédicte Ramade’s overview of the History of Ecological Art. Today, I’m sharing the notes I took during the round table “Digital Arts and Environmental Awareness” that discussed the ambivalent relationship between digital artists and the environmental crisis. Contemporary art has a massive ecological footprint. Contemporary art that uses -and sometimes even champions- digital tools also relies on technologies that generate extractivism, e-waste, human misery and unbridled energy consumption.

The participants to the panel were curator and COAL co-founder Loïc Fel, artist Claire Bardainne as well as artist and activist Joanie Lemercier.

Ambivalences #1 – Espace Tambour, Université Rennes 2. Photo: © Gwendal Le Flem / Association Electroni[k]

Let’s start this overview of the discussions with Joanie Lemercier. His experience as a digital artist who was not involved in activism and environmental struggles until recently will hopefully demonstrate that we can all put our skills and technological tools -even the ones that come with a calamitous carbon footprint- at the service of environmental activism.

Lemercier is an extremely successful artist. Together with digital art curator and producer Juliette Bibasse and sometimes other collaborators, he develops interactive installations that escape from screens and play with architecture, with viewers’ perception, with space geometry.

Daniel Chatard, from the series Niemandsland (No man’s land)

Daniel Chatard, from the series Niemandsland (No man’s land)

This year, he was showing one of his interactive pieces at the Maintenant exhibition but he also worked on the visual identity of the festival together with Pierre Vanni. Lemercier described the images they created as being half artistic projects and half militant works that build on his first-hand discoveries of the coal mining industry in Germany. Two years ago, after many years spent working inside a comfortable bubble, he got to visit the gigantic Hambach open-pit coal mine. The surface mine is operated by RWE to extract lignite, the dirtiest type of coal. Some call this open cast exploitation the ‘wandering’ hole because of the way it eats up the German landscape at the speed of 2,3 cm per hour. Nothing can stop the machines’ steady march. Not its disastrous ecological impacts. Nor the people who protest because their villages find themselves on the way of the excavating machines and have to be relocated.

Today 33% of electricity in Germany relies on coal. “When I do an exhibition and Germany and I connect a video projector, I burn coal,” commented Lemercier. The experience was eye-opening. Since then he has been trying to reduce his carbon footprint; taking fewer planes, cycling, recycling, etc. But, he believes, all these efforts pale in comparison with the magnitude of the CO2 emissions generated by the Hambach mine. And it is especially frustrating to realise how governments, fossil fuel energy lobbies and other important organisations attempt to put the blame on individuals.

Joanie Lemercier, projection to support the work of Ende Gelände, a civil disobedience movement occupying coal mines in Germany to raise awareness for climate justice

Joanie Lemercier, Autodesk earth impact, 2020

Instead of just feeling crushed and impotent, the artist decided to use his usual technological tools, his lasers, drones, cameras and projectors to get access to places that people would normally not be allowed to visit. He thus started filming the mining activities, documented the actions of activists, the police interventions, the destruction of forests and churches, the families forced to abandon their villages, etc.

While wondering who was responsible for these environmental disasters, Lemercier stumbled upon a company called Autodesk that makes software for architects. Autodesk is proud of its commitment to environmental sustainability. Yet, its tools are used by fossil fuel companies. The artist contacted them and exchanged with the CEO who was happy enough to chat about the company’s great environmental policy, about how they give free software to start-ups that produce electric bikes, etc. After a few exchanges of emails in which the artist asked them why they also work for the fossil fuel industry, they stopped answering. They even cancelled his account and erased their exchanges from their forums.

Joanie Lemercier, pop-up exhibition at Autodesk offices, 2019

After Autodesk cut all communications, Lemercier went to their offices in Montreal and installed a small photo exhibition at the entrance. It gave him and fellow climate justice activists the opportunity to discuss with employees, to comment on a number of unpleasant realities and enter into a dialogue. The company called the police.

RWE’s Tagbau Hambach coal mine with the famous bucket-wheel excavator, Germany. Photo: Joanie Lemercier

Autodesk’s RWE case study (via Drilled News)

Lemercier later designed Autodesk.earth, a website that exposes Autodesk’s impact on the environment. Not only did the website attract almost 3 million views but the artist also received emails from Autodesk employees concerned about the issue.

Joanie Lemercier, Climate Action in London

Joanie Lemercier, Climate Action in London. Photo: Anthony Jarman

He also used his own artistic skills to directly support the work of the activists. I think he did a great job at amplifying their voices and making their civil disobedience more visually impactful. For example, Lemercier used portable projectors to assist the actions of Extinction Rebellion, projecting their logos on Buckingham Palace and on Parliament Square in London. These were improvised, almost risk-free, ephemeral actions. The images of the interventions, however, remain. Sometimes, they even got used by the mainstream press and as such, they contribute to an aestheticisation of the climate justice protests.

Ambivalences #1 – Espace Tambour, Université Rennes 2. Photo: © Gwendal Le Flem / Association Electroni[k]

Loïc Fel‘s talk was packed with interesting ideas and artistic works that were new to me. Fel is a Doctor of Environmental Philosophy, an expert in sustainable development and the cofounder of COAL – COALition for art and sustainable development created in 2008 to connect artists and cultural actors working on environmental issues with institutions, NGOs, scientists and enterprises. If you’ve never heard of the COAL Prize, do check out the finalists of this year’s call dedicated to the erosion of biodiversity.

Fel focused his talk on the ambivalence in the relation between artists investigating ecological issues and the digital tools at their disposal. He explained that what distinguishes ecology from the other natural sciences, like zoology or biology, is that it is not exploring objects. Instead, ecology investigates the relationships between the elements. It is much trickier to represent or analyse relationships than to describe elements that can be isolated from one another and studied in lab settings. You cannot isolate an ecosystem to study it. Besides, studying relationships involves a notion of temporality. Works that involve ecosystem might be “finished” when we won’t be there anymore to experience them. Agnes Denes’ Tree Mountain, for example, will reach its maturity in 400 years time. It is thus sometimes difficult to make tangible the perception of the phenomena underway. The notion of space is challenging too. Ecology is made of hyperobjects (climate change, biodiversity erosion….), of phenomena that are immaterial in our daily perception of the world and that necessitate an exercise of critical thinking.  

What makes digital tool interesting for artists is that they not only integrate the issue of time but they can also accelerate it or even extend it, making it easier to materialise otherwise intangible phenomena.

Environmentalist James Lovelock’s Daisyworld computer simulation imagine the simplest ecosystem and make it easier to explain the dynamic relationships between biodiversity and climate change.

Another important point raised by Fel is that, from the point of view of art criticism, we are confronted with a cultural movement that cannot be defined using formal elements or a style. What defines the artistic movement around ecological issues is not a series of formal aspects but the commitment, the involvement of the artists. The works are often (but not always) characterised by a certain level of eco-design and in particular by a desire not to rely on energy & resource-hungry digital technology.

Fel illustrated his points with a few artworks:

Olga Kisseleva, Urban Datascape, 2015

In 2015, during the COP21, Olga Kisseleva installed a gigantic QR code made of wood on the Banks of the river Seine in Paris. When passersby opened the QR code with their phone and started moving around, an Augmented Reality tool superimposed data about climate change and the environment onto the panoramic view of Paris. The project integrated the impacts of climate perturbations directly into the daily experience of the city and helped people visualise phenomena that they otherwise wouldn’t see. Urban DataScape also offered a non-commercial and socially-engaged reappropriation of the QR-code.

Stéfane Perraud, Sylvia, 2019

Stéfane Perraud‘s installationSylvia explored biodiversity in the Risoux forest located in the Haut Jura Regional Nature Park. Over the past few years, scientists have been recording the soundscape of the park. The aim of their efforts is to bring to the light the kind of biodiversity that we struggle to observe. The artist used this bioacoustics material along with scientific data related to biodiversity erosion and climate change to speculate on the soundscape of this natural forest habitat through time depending on how harsh environmental impacts will be in hundreds, even thousands of years from now. Will the forest become quieter and quieter to the point of being totally silent over time?

Elise Morin, Spring Odyssey, 2019-2020

Elise Morin, Spring Odyssey, 2019-2020

Biologists and NASA scientists are trying to discover the secret of resistance to radioactivity. Without it, there is no long-term future for humanity in outer space.

This secret might be hidden in terrestrial radioactive landscapes such as the area surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The Ukrainian Red Forest, in particular, has become a space where plants had to adapt and develop forms of resistance. It is also an open-air laboratory where potential solutions can be tested out and where concepts of progress and nature can be confronted.

With Spring Odyssey, Elise Morin proposes to study scientifically the plants and stage the research but also to place it inside a digital simulation in order to test its effects.

Young shoots of tobacco plant carrying a natural mutation are grown in a laboratory to become bioindicators of radioactivity. A kind of organic version of the Geiger counter. The plant is also part of a VR environment: The red forest VR experience is a way to break a border that the body could not support naturally. A rite of passage to a new physical reality that blends myths, science and technology around a powerful invisible phenomenon and to question the fluctuating limits of our intuitions.

Rocio Berenguer, G5 Interespèces

Rocio Berenguer, G5 Interespèces

G5 Interespèces stages an important summit of big powers. However, this is not the G8 or the G20 summit: no governments nor financial powers are invited to join the discussions. The participants are the different kingdoms that share the planet: animal, mineral, vegetal, human and machine kingdoms (I want to apologise to the members of the Fungi Kingdom who, once again, have been cast aside.) They must debate on the possibilities of collaboration, fusion, determination, autonomy or independence of the different kingdoms in order to ensure the survival of life on a damaged planet.

Rocio Berenguer‘s project uses speculations and futuristic scenarios to open up perspectives for humans. It also relies on an AI that analyses in real time a questionnaire about the future of life filled in by the human members of the public.

The AI acts as a translation bridge between the different signals of each species. The problem is to translate the right signals into a language that each species can understand. The main issue is communication. How can we be understood without risking anthropocentrism?

Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway, Most Blue Skies

As Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway’s Most Blue Skies demonstrates, poetry too can play an important role in the desire to protect the environment. Raising awareness around problems is not enough, it has to be turned into action. The poetical can move us to the point that we want to act. Most Blue Skies is connected to a satellite system that analyses the colour of the sky in real-time. Satellite system and an AI identify the precise spot on Earth where the sky is perfectly blue. Combining atmospheric research, environmental monitoring and sensing technologies with the romantic history of the blue sky, the installation addresses our changing relationship to the skyspace as the subject for scientific and symbolic representation.

Ambivalences #1 – Espace Tambour, Université Rennes 2. Photo: © Gwendal Le Flem / Association Electroni[k]

Compagnie Adrien M & Claire B, L’ombre de la vapeur, 2018

Claire Bardainne, an artist, art director and co-founder of the Compagnie Adrien M & Claire B, told us about a work her collective developed around the Torula, or Baudoinia compniacensis, a mushroom native to the Cognac region that feeds on the vapours of the famous cognac brandy. Found on the walls of buildings near brandy maturation warehouses in Cognac, it’s been nicknamed “the whiskey fungus.”

Invited to create an interactive installation inside a building which walls were blackened by the fungus, Compagnie Adrien M & Claire B decided to pay homage to the fungus with an immersive installation that used digital tech to reveal the shadow of the vapour.

Visitors of the installation found themselves immersed in the dark and walking among tiny luminous cells. The particles moved in response to the visitors’ movements. Notes from “Cantique du champignon” (Canticle of the mushroom) accompanied the piece. The sound work, composed by Olivier Mellano, drew its inspiration from the DNA interpretation of the Torula mushroom. The protein music technique, aka DNA music, composes music by converting protein sequences or genes to musical notes.

I can’t remember how I stumbled upon Mario Santamaria‘s collection of blobs and splotches. Shapeless and also probably clueless, the little blimps are representations of the internet as they are drawn in U.S. patents. They made me smile as much as they embarrassed me: do we really know so little about the infrastructures that underlie modern life?

Mario Santamaria, Cloudplexity, 2019

Mario Santamaria, Cloudplexity, 2019

If you click around Santamaria’s website and feel like you’re falling down the rabbit hole, that’s part of his plan. He wants you (and the data) to go to places where you’re not supposed to go. You won’t be entering a strange subterranean universe inhabited by anthropomorphic creatures though but you will learn a lot about the very materiality of the internet.

In 2016, for example, the artist physically traveled to his website. Or rather to the webserver where it is hosted. From his home in Barcelona, it takes a click and a few milliseconds to get access to his data hosted on a server in Bergamo. In real life, as a human being, it took him 14 days to follow the route taken by the data. He started in Barcelona and then went from one ISP point to the next, travelling to Paris, then Switzerland, then Stockholm, Milan, Perugia and, finally, Bergamo. Good thing the server was hosted in Europe and Santamaria has a European passport. He documented the landscapes and buildings along the way and the images are strangely mundane and eye-opening.

Mario Santamaria, Travel to my Website, 2016

For an exhibition in Barcelona this year, the artist created a router symbolised by the emoji of the rabbit hole, an access point that led data on the most absurd world tour. Using Thor, he made the data packets travel extravagant routes: from Barcelona to South America and back, from Barcelona to Asia to a string of European cities and then back to Barcelona.

Santamaria also shares his own experience and knowledge with other citizens. He sometimes plays the role of the tourist guide, taking sightseers on an Internet bus Tour to visit the data centres, landing areas of fibre optic cables and other anonymous elements of infrastructure that host “the internet” and underpins contemporary life.

Mario Santamaria, Internet Tour Zaragoza. Photo: Alberto Santamaría

Mario Santamaria graduated in Fine Arts and in the Master Degree in Visual Arts and Multimedia by the Polytechnic University of Valencia. He has done residencies and exhibited his work all over the world and I’m really happy he found a moment to answer my many questions:

Mario Santamaria, Unfixed Infrastructures and Rabbit Holes. Blueproject Foundation, Barcelona, 2020. Photo: Roberto Ruiz

Mario Santamaria, Unfixed Infrastructures and Rabbit Holes. Blueproject Foundation, Barcelona, 2020. Photo: Roberto Ruiz

Hi Mario! Cloudplexity is one of my favourite works of 2019. It’s smart, simple and tells so much about our inadequacy of picturing “the cloud” or even “the internet”. If I understood correctly, your research started with patents dating back to 1998 and continued until the 2018 patents. Did you observe any change in how the internet was pictured over these past 20 years? Has it become even foggier over time for example? Or have we always been totally clueless?

The series starts in 1990 and ends in 2018. I search in patent registries for internet representations in the form of diagrams or drawings. Then I remove the elements that do not interest me, and I focus on the representation of the Internet. I keep the same format, reference numbers, year and registration. Within the United States archive, the first representation I have found of something similar to the Internet as a cloud form is the Defense Data Network (DDN) in January 1990, the DDN was a separate military network from ARPANET. A fog inside the cloud.

The clouds have multiplied inside the space of representation. The Internet is a cloud, but so is Facebook, Google or Instagram. It seems that as objects become more technical their representation becomes blurred, changing their position in the human field of vision. They become data extraction spaces and connective nodes. Vacuum cleaners, bracelets, telephones, refrigerators are also clouds, their operational representation as an appliance exceeds their utilitarian capabilities in relation to the user. Behind our backs, part of their image remains in a blind spot, outside our ocular capacities. This confusion is tackled by late capitalism and its “intellectual property” when it tries to recognize and record every emerging form. It does so in the cloudiness, before it becomes visible and this is a task increasingly destined for machines rather than humans.

Mario Santamaria, Cloudplexity, 2019

Is this a specific type of patent that represents the internet as a transparent blob? A patent for a service or product that doesn’t have digital technology at its core for example?

In a way, yes, it seems to be a resource to delimit an area in which different things are inscribed. But also to represent something that we do not fully understand or establish its limits. Does the concept of cloud have limits or borders?

I like this Antonio da Correggio’s painting “Jupiter and Io” (c. 1530), in the myth, Jupiter becomes a cloud so he can sleep with the nymph Io.

Mario Santamaría, Jupiter, Io and smartphone, 2019

I’m also curious about the Internet Tours you organised in several cities across Spain. You did one in Madrid and the other in Zaragoza. Since much of the infrastructure that enables our always-on digital culture is anonymised, located outside of city centres or downright hidden from public scrutiny, how did you find about them? What is the research process I should adopt if I wanted to know about internet infrastructure in my own city?

I have made numerous Internet Tours in Madrid (2018), Barcelona(2018, 2020), Bilbao (2020) and Zaragoza (2019). Also in workshop format with students in Italy (http://internetour.com/ISIA/) where different groups of students have made their versions of Internet Tours in several Italian cities: Urbino, Bologna, Verona or Palermo.

We also made a video tutorial with sonar+d where we explained how to create your own tour. Only in Spanish sorry.

As you know Barcelona was a popular tourist destination, the idea is to pervert the tourist act of the bus and re-appropriate the experience of collective exploration. Our body is part of a network of tele-technologies settled on the territory. Surfing the internet is a speleological practice, from the house to the cave and from the bunker to the data center.

In the Internet Tourist Bus where we can route together, move like a data packet from node to node. The Explorer’s metaphor in your own city, visiting industrial parks, spaces between roads and concrete buildings.

Internet Tour, Barcelona 2019. The Influencers Festival, CCCB. Photo by Carlos Monroy/The Influencers

Mario Santamaria, Internet Tour, Barcelona 2019. The Influencers Festival, CCCB

Mario Santamaria, Internet Tour, Zaragoza 2019. Etopia Art and Technology Centre

One thing I keep reading about internet infrastructure is that they rely on a colonialist heritage. The undersea cables, for example, following the old trading & communication routes from European countries and their former colonies. Is this something you observed in Spain? And is it still roughly the case or are geopolitics shifting?

Of course, you can see the relationship with that colonial past. For example, the large construction companies of public works are those that deploy more fiber optics and we can see how Spanish companies develop public works (trains, roads) in countries that were formerly Spanish colonies.

For me, the history of the Internet is a process of synchronization of the world and the construction of the transatlantic telegraphic cable in the second half of the 19th century is a determining moment. It meant a revolution when it came to establishing the exchange rate between different currencies such as the pound and the dollar. The Internet is a process of synchronization that integrates different devices, concepts and infrastructures.

A few days ago, we went for a picnic to Playa del Litoral, Barcelona with friends and students where AFR-IX telecom is carrying out the works of the first phase to connect the 2Africa cable, with 37,000 km in length, it will be one of the largest submarine cable projects in the world and it will interconnect Europe (to the east through Egypt), the Middle East (through Saudi Arabia) and 21 landings in 16 countries in Africa.

Photo courtesy of Mario Santamaria

Since you did a tour of both Madrid and Zaragoza, I’ve been wondering what makes these two cities interesting for any citizen who wants to understand internet physical infrastructure. Madrid is the capital of the country so I’m not surprised to read it has many data centres but how about Zaragoza? Why that city in particular? What makes it a good place to explore internet infrastructure? Does this city of less than a million inhabitants play a particular role in Spain?

The idea of Internet Tour is to create a common tactic that can be developed in very different places and contexts. Each region has its peculiarities and that uniqueness in relation to the infrastructure is explored in the tours. It is also an open model, do some research and organize a tour for friends and strangers into and through the Internet in your city.

Zaragoza is the 5th city of the Spanish state by population and traditionally an important military and merchandise node in the north of the Iberian Peninsula, and this has to have some relation to the fact that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has plans for the construction of three centers in this region. In each city, research is being done on its infrastructure and its relationship with communication technologies.

In Madrid we proposed to go around the capital, a circle, from ISP to ISP, playing with the idea of being a packet of data without TTL, gravitating eternally without destination around the city.

In Barcelona, the route was structured around the coast, the relationship with the port, the sea, the climate crisis and fragility.

In Zaragoza, a gas company operates that uses the infrastructure of the gas ducts to install optical fiber, this relationship between the gas and the optical fiber served us to articulate a route from the copper stations in dismantling and the transformation of part of the infrastructure in something increasingly light, ubiquitous and volatile.

Mario Santamaria, Internet Tour Zaragoza. Photo: Alberto Santamaría

Mario Santamaria, Internet Tour Zaragoza. Photo: Alberto Santamaría

I read in El Cultural that you had physically travelled from Barcelona to the place in Bergamo, Italy, where your webpage is hosted. You followed the same route as the network packets, stopping at every internet service provider point. This took you to Paris, Stockholm, Perugia, etc. You did that physical trip, really? In 14 days? Can you tell us about the odyssey? How close can you get to the locations where the data transits and hops from one isp to another?

My intention is not to investigate the way data travels, it is to move like them. To incarnate, to embody a process that is algorithmic, to get into my “trace body”. In 2016 I carried out the artistic project Travel To My Website which consisted of a journey from my home in Barcelona to the server where my personal website is hosted in Bergamo, Italy. This action imitated the same route that data takes through the internet infrastructure. The planning of the trip was created by means of a computer diagnostic tool, about data traffic, called Traceroute. This tool provides a list of IP addresses, usually corresponding to geographical locations. The Traceroute also shows us the times it has taken the information to move from one point to another. In 67 milliseconds the data on my website left Bergamo, heading for Perugia, Milan, Stockholm, Switzerland until it reached Barcelona. Traveling to my website was the opposite: I decided to travel to these places with the aim of moving as a data package. This action proposed the embodiment of an algorithmic procedure (TCP/IP protocol) and at the same time materialised the temporality in which the body of data moves.

Mario Santamaria, Node 04. BT Group Building, Milan, Italy / Daily geolocations. Travel To My Website, 2016

Mario Santamaria, Node 02. Telia Company AB Building, Stockholm, Sweden / Daily geolocations. Travel To My Website, 2016

Three years later, I presented the online version for the Arebyte gallery in London. On this occasion, I decided to create a web page that compiles all the graphic material of the experience of the journey made in 2016, such as photographic captures of the nodes (data centres), the places where I stayed, the objects that accompanied me, the views from the means of transport, maps and recommended routes, wifi passwords and travel notes. The way of showing this file meant a trip back to the computer landscape. If in Travel To My Website (2016) it is the human body that adopts a mechanical temporality and moves like a data package, here it is a computer procedure, the Traceroute, that processes a human temporality. In such a way that the web is a navigational device that works with the same contradictions that came about during the journey and at the same time tells us about our relationship with tele-communication technologies.

It is a website that takes as long to load and view the files of each stage of the journey (telecommunication node) as it did the stage of my offline journey. Therefore, to download the images of my first day in Milan, the user must remain with the browser open for 4 days.

And, it is in this relationship of the user with the web that we propose an alteration of the codes and conventions that we establish with the online interfaces. The proposal (re)locates the phenomenon of the observer, shows his or her regime of visibility, their meetings and expectations, the horizon of expectations and tells us about an out-of-time and dysfunctional journey that unfolds 67 milliseconds in 14 days.

Mario Santamaria, Travel to my Website, 2016

Mario Santamaria, Travel to my Website, 2016

I’m very intrigued by a project you developed at the Hangar Interaction Lab. It “consists of the development and prototyping of a series of artefacts-routers that establish other forms of network connectivity.” Can you tell us more about it? Is there already something we can see / read online about this research?

The objective is to create speculative connective objects, in the first prototypes I work with the TOR network to redistribute the traffic geographically, altering the routing protocols used “tunnels”. Moving through the Internet infrastructure under parameters that are not those of efficiency, thinking in sculptural terms, the flow of materialities activated in a telematic process. The relationship between different temporalities, objects, geography and body.

Mario Santamaria, Caress Router, 2019

Mario Santamaria, Speculative Networks, 2019

In 2016 we organised a workshop in MediaLab Prado Madrid that aimed to leave a data packet floating eternally on the Internet by altering the TTL protocol. To turn unexceeded time into inexhaustible time. Since then, I have been developing, in collaboration with Hangar and Andrea Noni, we have developed several prototypes using the TOR network possibilities. The latest has been shown in the exhibition Unfixed Infrastructures And Rabbit Holes where the main element of the exhibition is a router that connects us to the internet so that the data has to travel through the infrastructure as long as possible looking for the limits of the network protocols. We have managed to test 40,000ms of latency in this network that we have created. And we represent it as a rabbit hole:

Mario Santamaria, Unfixed Infrastructures And Rabbit Holes, 2020

Show Me a Ghost is a very curious and interesting work as well. The photo project reveals the difficulty for computer vision system to detect the representation of a ghost. How did you discover that fact? And how do you explain it in the context of a technology and a society so focused on images?

I found that within the structure of the image.net file there is no category of ghost, that is, there is no training dataset to define what shape or appearance it has. I found it interesting and decided to create a dataset of ghost images and try in an absurd way to train the facebook algorithm to recognize ghosts in images. A kind of symbolic action on the gaps of technological development formalised as if it were a photo book without images.

The series shows how a computer vision system interprets the representation of a ghost, an element that does not appear in the categories of “ImageNet” and is so far undetectable in the eyes of the algorithm.

The aim of the project was to address the spectral issue in computational photography if in analogue photography the phantom operated by a superposition of time and captures, in computational photography the disturbance does not come from its representation. The phantom is in the black box, in that full moon that we all photograph with the same result.

Mario Santamaria, Show Me A Ghost, 2017

Mario Santamaria, Show Me a Ghost, William H. Mumler, 2017

Thanks Mario!

One of Mario Santamaria‘s works The Phantom of the Mirror. Trolling Google Art Project is currently on view at ZKM Karlsruhe as part of Writing the History of the Future – The ZKM Collection, curated by Peter Weibel and Margit Rosen.

Related stories: A guided tour of Dublin’s physical Internet infrastructure; Critical investigation into the politics of the interface. An interview with Joana Moll; Critical Exploits. Interrogating Infrastructure, etc.

Women of Science Tarot by Massive Science.

The MIT Press summary: The Women of Science Tarot Deck is a card game that helps us tell stories about our future based on principles of science. Each major arcana card features a fundamental scientific concept like extinction, diversity or gravity. The 56 minor arcana cards feature inspirational women who have changed the course of STEM. The lively illustrations are by neuroscientist and comic artist Matteo Farinella. For readers new to tarot or those who want to learn more about women in STEM, accompanying the deck is a guidebook with biographies of all the women featured on the cards as well as information about the major arcana cards.

I wasn’t expecting the MIT Press to release a deck of cards that mixes divination and astrophysics, feminism and cartomancy, chemistry and the occult. The esoteric element, I suspect, is mostly a pretext to get us to discover great scientific minds that happen to be female and often unjustly forgotten.

The deck contains the 22 Major Arcana (or trump cards) with The Fool, The Magician, The Devil, The Tower, The High Priestess and other well-known figures and elements. This time, however, they have been given a scientific coat. The Emperor evokes the atomic bomb, The Strength is set in the heyday of the Industrial Revolution, The Wheel of Fortune has been upgraded to the Large Hadron Collider, The Judgement is one of the key characters of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, etc.

The cards of the Minor Arcana feature 56 female scientists. The cards are divided into four categories or suits: Nano for the invisible fields like math and physics; Micro for the molecular fields of chemistry and microbiology; Macro stands for the systemic fields of ecology and geology; Astro for the cosmic field of astronomy. Marie Curie, Rachel Carson and Ada Lovelace are there of course. But also Tapputi-Belatekallim who lived in Mesopotamia around 1200 BCE and was the first recorded chemist. There’s also geochemist Katsuko Saruhashi whose research and advocacy led to the ban on nuclear weapon testing; Alice Augusta Ball, a young chemist who developed the first effective treatment for leprosy; Sister Miriam Stimson, a Catholic nun and chemist who laid the groundwork for the discovery of the structure of DNA; Wang Zhenyi, an 18th-century self-educated astronomer who explained how science, not divine interventions, explained lunar eclipses; Bertha Parker the first indigenous North American archaeologist who, without formal training, made important contributions to our understanding of early North American civilisations.

And because I knew nothing about tarot before opening this one, the information above comes straight from the accompanying guidebook. It contains instructions for playing and for the readings, the meanings of each card as well as the short bios of 56 scientists.

The illustrations are a joy. I love the way Matteo Farinella (who is not only a comic artist but also a neuroscientist) uses pink in a way that screams “bold and audacious”, not “coquettish and sappy”.

I can’t promise that the Women of Science Tarot will be an efficient fortune-telling tool but I do believe that it will make for a smart and charming present for pretty much everyone. Except for the sexist pig in your life. We all have one of those and he doesn’t deserve a present.

Related story: HEXEN 2.0.

Deep space is a vacuum, it doesn’t carry sound waves as air and water do. With no medium to travel through, outer space remains (mostly) silent. Except of course in the universe of film and television!

Tamara Shogaolu, Echoes of Silence, 2020. Ado Ato Pictures

Tamara Shogaolu, Echoes of Silence, 2020. IDFA Doclab night at the Planetarium. Photo: Nichon Glerum, Amsterdam, 22 November 2020

Echoes of Silence, which recently premiered at ARTIS Planetarium in Amsterdam during IDFA DocLab, translates in a full-dome experience the many ways sound designers working for the film industry have imagined the sounds of outer space but also how each continent and culture have different ideas about the kind of noises that fill in the vast expanse between planets and stars. The immersive audio experience with dome projections takes the viewer on a trip into space. The animations and images of starlit skies as they are observed from various parts of the world are accompanied by the sound of space used in films and TV series at each location. The project highlights the universal sense of wonder about what lies far beyond our atmosphere but il also implicitly questions the predominant Western view of space.

Alfredo B. Crevenna, Santo Contra La Invasion De Los Marcianos / Santo vs. the Martian Invasion, Mexico, 1967

For millennia people from every part of the world have tried to understand celestial bodies. In Mesopotamia, Ancient Greece, Persia, India, China, Egypt and Central America, astronomical observatories were built, maps were drawn to represent the position and movements of celestial objects. Unfortunately, as dominant cultures homogenised languages and customs, they also marginalised and even dismissed other views of the skies, especially the ones expressed by cultures that recorded their beliefs orally, like the Navajo or the Hawaiians.

Echoes of Silence, developed by Director Tamara Shogaolu and her studio ADO ATO Pictures, brings to light how early films from various parts of the world echo some of those sidelined perspectives:

We discovered that in Pre-Star Wars films not only was there a variation in the way different cultures visualized space but that there were regional trends in the design of their soundscapes. Japan’s militaristic culture reverberates in the soundscapes of their plentiful science fiction cannon. Native American filmmakers have suggested the relationship between earth and space is more peaceful. Mexican films portray extraterrestrials coincidentally similar to Lucha Libre wrestlers. However, as the decades progressed euro-centric portrayals of space became more dominant and pervasive throughout the world. Through Echoes of Silence, we aim to memorialize all sounds of space.

Tamara Shogaolu is a filmmaker, immersive artist and she is the founder and Creative Director of the award-winning film and XR studio Ado Ato Pictures. I caught up with her over Skype during IDFA Doclab:

Hi Tamara! I love the premise of the work and this idea that space and all celestial bodies sound differently depending on where you are in the world or depending on your culture. How did you discover these differences?

When I was in film school, one of my professors, Tomlinson Holman, was a Creator of THX who started his career working on George Lucas films. I remember a lecture in which he was telling us about the process of sound design in Star Wars films and how back then the sound libraries you had at your disposal for space were very limited. They were a bit cartoony. With 3 other guys, he started building up a sound library for outer space, making weird sounds using vacuum cleaners and other objects to make out this universe.

I realised that what they did back then shaped the way that most of us think about space and what it sounds like. The irony is of course that there is no sound in space. It’s all from human imagination.

From there I started wondering if there were other interpretations of space by other people living in different parts of the world. I thus started researching and creating an archive of films from around the world set in space. I watched and listened to many of them. I studied sound design a bit when I was in film school. And I started to notice that there were trends in the way the sounds were used. Star Wars marked a defining moment. It influenced the way the same libraries were used and interpreted and the kind of messages they conveyed in relationship with the storytelling.

Neill Blomkamp, District 9, 2009. South Africa

Ishirō Honda, Space Amoeba, Japan, 1970

Can you talk about some of the differences of interpretations depending on cultures and geography?

I found that most Latin American films use more humorous undertones. It’s all very exaggerated. Whereas there is more of fear undertone in most US and European films. You get a sense of the unknown, of the presence of dark forces. You sense that in Star Wars of course but also in 2001: A Space Odyssey and in so many other films.

Asian films were also interesting to listen to because there is more, let’s say, diplomacy in sound design, including when aliens appear. Even in some of the Godzillas films, there wasn’t such a strong component of fear. If you look at one of the stars charts that were used 100s of years ago by emperors in Japan, you will see how the stars were used to show that these emperors were meant to be in power. Stars were woven into diplomacy in a certain way and you can still see some threads of that today in the way sound is being used in cinema.

We also found some Native American films, especially some Lakota and Navajo films, and even though they were made in the U.S., they were very much about a friendly environment in terms of what the stars say about our lives. It was interesting to see how traits from indigenous knowledge from hundreds of years ago had filtered into the way that the sound was being implemented and designed.

We made a public archive so that people can find the films. They also have a possibility to suggest films that should be added to the archive.

Tamara Shogaolu, Echoes of Silence, 2020. IDFA Doclab night at the Planetarium. Photo: Nichon Glerum, Amsterdam, 22 November 2020

Tamara Shogaolu presenting Echoes of Silence during IDFA Doclab night at the Planetarium. Photo: Nichon Glerum Amsterdam, 22 November 2020

As your work reveals, the way we represent space differs according to where we are. What about time? Has the way space is being sonified evolved over time or are we stuck in early sci-fi ideas of what space sounded like?

I think there are some films now that try to better respect reality. Gravity, for example, tried to make the space experience more realistic.

Our piece basically travels through the world and the sounds come from archival sounds used in all those films. When you go into the actual space, you experience leaving the Earth, those are sounds from the NASA library.

I was curious about the human imagination and how not only space but also the way we imagine space can be colonised. I was wondering how we can question this colonisation of human imagination, how can we make it more inclusive and involve different perspectives on space sounds and what we imagine to be out there and, from there, we could build up an imagination from us as a whole planet. You often hear about how astronauts, when they leave the Earth, start seeing their country and then their continent until they finally realise that we are one planet. The ways we imagine space, the way we design it can be connected to the way that we relate to our environment or learn from our surroundings. And that whole process could be more inclusive.

Space research and the world of extended reality seem to be dominated by white male individuals. Black female filmmakers don’t have the same opportunities. Black female characters are deemed less appealing. Has Black Lives Matter changed that?

I think it’s too soon to tell. When something happens, people tend to have an immediate strong response but after a while the attention shifts. I think that the pandemic has made it possible for some people to hyper-focus on the representation issue.

Last week, I was in a summit for a conference dealing with the African diaspora and people were talking about how they were living in Europe, about the Afropean identity and what that means to have a bi-cultural identity. Some filmmakers were saying that they had to prove that they can do big box office films when in reality black filmmakers already have and continue to make successful films. There have been exemplary works in music, art and films made by black people and yet these people are still seen as anomalies, as not being the norm.

As a black woman working at the intersection of film, tech and animation, I’m often questioned and asked whether I can actually deliver some of my ideas. I’m very aware of that but it is part of my existence and I don’t really know anything else.

There is definitely more openness in discussing the work this year and I think that, because of the pandemic, people are more open to exploring the possibilities of digital experience for connecting people but I still feel that the people who make the decisions are the same. I don’t know if it’s just a fad and something that will pass but having black, indigenous or native people around the world involved in telling their own stories and in creating content would be better for the whole world. I hope this is not just a passing trend. I have noticed the change but I’ve also noticed how people from big companies reach out saying they want to support my work but months pass and you don’t hear from them again. I don’t want to be too pessimistic because I’ve seen how some organisations have put on the effort to make a change and bring diversity to their content and the artists that they support but I’ve also seen how others didn’t go much further than posting something on social media. The gate-keepers and those making the decisions are still the same.

Echoes of Silence marks the first time you work on a full-dome experience. What were the challenges of creating for a dome?

Honestly, it was super challenging and I have so much respect for anyone who works in full domes! From a director’s point of view, it was very challenging because you are working on a grid and the sense of space is totally different. It is not at all like in VR. When you are directing in VR, there is the 360 space where you are still at the same level and you have a sense of the world that surrounds you. With a dome, everything changes: things appear different in height but also in distance and placement. There are multiple dimensions that I have to think about when working on a composition. I was very lucky that I could go to the planetarium here in Amsterdam and that I had a crash course with the head of the planetarium who would watch different cuts and give me feedback. That was amazing.

The dome required a totally different process. We made a model of the planetarium in VR and then we would project the planetarium in the headset in order for me to be able to check some details. But then we would go to the planetarium and stuff would be flipped. It was a surprise every time even until the very last test that we made. Every planetarium is different: they vary in sizes, the brightness of the projector changes, etc. As a result, the composition of your picture can change from one planetarium to another. I work in animation and transitions are super important in animation. What looked good inside headset had then to be tested inside the planetarium hoping it would look good there too but then once arrived there, we’d realise that everything was backwards. It was very challenging but I learnt so much. As a director, I started thinking about space in different ways, even with the 2D films I’m working on now. I have acquired a different sense of space and camera movements after this experience at the planetarium.

So the work was site-specific and if you had to show it in a different planetarium, you would have to adjust to the new space again?

Yes, but we also made a VR version of Echoes of Silence which will stay constant for people who want to experience it. I wanted to create something positive for people, let them travel around the world and escape for 7 minutes. The best is to experience while laying it on the floor.

The work seems to require so many skills and competence. How many people were working on Echoes of Silence?

That’s just the two of us. It was mostly me and my editor. The budget was tiny but we still managed to work with a sound composer, a sound designer and a sound mixer. They did an amazing job. The sound is an important part of the experience. It was very much a two women-propelled project and many sleepless nights working together but we got to work on all aspects of the piece and that is always exciting.

Thanks Tamara!

The Ado Ato Pictures team has also created a scalable version of Echoes of Silence that you can experience on your phone with a VR headset. It should be made available shortly. Echoes of Silence is the winner of the 2020 Netherlands Film Fund DocLab Interactive Grant. It was part of the IDFA DocLab Competition for Immersive Non-Fiction.

3rd and final part of my report from the conference AMBIVALENCES #1 which took place in early October in Rennes in the framework of the Maintenant digital art festival. Part 1 outlined Bénédicte Ramade’s overview of the History of Ecological Art. Part 2 highlighted key moments from the round table “Digital Arts and Environmental Awareness” that discussed the ambivalent relationship between digital artists and the environmental crisis.

Brandon Ballengée, DFA 147: Phaethon, 2013. Cleared and stained Pacific tree frog collected in Aptos, California in scientific collaboration with Stanley K. Sessions. Part of Malamp: The Occurrence of Deformities in Amphibians, 1996-Ongoing

This final chapter sums up the notes I took during Manuela de Barros‘s keynote lecture “On the notion of ambivalence in the relationship between arts, technology and society” (the video recording of the talk is here, it’s in French and the interesting part starts in 08.40)

Manuela de Barros is a Lecturer in Art History and Aesthetics at Université Paris 8. In her talk, the philosopher and art theoretician attempted to show that while ambiguities, complexities and even equivocations abound in artworks, they do not invalidate the artistic proposals. They are part of the creative questioning that artists bring to technology and to a world uncertain about its future.

The continuous dialogue between art and science, de Barros explained, is an economic and probably also an anthropological necessity.

Manuela de Barros. Keynote at Ambivalences – Espace Tambour. Photo: RAWR.prod

1816 was The Year Without a Summer. The severe climate disruptions were caused by the volcanic eruption of Mt Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sambawa. The eruption has been linked with drastic weather changes in North America and Europe, with frosts in June and heavy rains throughout the summer in many areas. This led to food shortages, which may have prompted westward migration in America and, in a Europe led to widespread famine. That year, Mary Shelley imagined the story of Frankenstein. John William Polidori started devising the figure of the vampire. The characters bring out ethical and philosophical questions such as the definition of what is human, the obligations we have towards our ontology and the question of our possible rights to modify it. They also interrogate our relationship to the environment. Today’s visual artists follow in the 19th Century writers footsteps.

In her keynote, Manuela de Barros explored the limits of Earth resources, the responses to climate change, the sharing of a limited territory with non-human beings, the energy and ecology transition and other environmental issues through the lens of artistic proposals. Her keynote was articulated around 4 main themes:
– climate change and geoengineering,
– food crisis and animal sentience,
– biosciences and the transformation of the living,
– degrowth, energy transition, co-responsibilities, post-colonialism or the colonisation of oceans and space.

1. Climate change and geoengineering

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can be interpreted as a warning against the power of science and our obsession with modifying nature. In the novel, nature and science have a life/death relationship. Science uses and instrumentalises nature but it can also devastate it. The use that Victor makes of science, for example, is the motor of his own destruction. However, nature itself can also be violent and blind. Both science and nature yield immense destructive power.

Today, Shelley’s nature doesn’t exist anymore. The Capitalocene has affected all the places, all the inhabitants of this planet. Even the most remote locations and beings have, to some degree, been impacted by climate change. One such remote area is the Far North.

Rihards Vitols, Anniu, 2018

Powered by a solar panel and two mini wind turbines, the Anniu boat produces ice cubes. The vessel would roam around the Antarctic and drop the ice cubes into the water in order to slow down the melting of the ice cap and the rise of sea level. Could technology save a planet damaged in part by technology?

Art Orienté Objet, La peau de chagrin, 2009-2010

Art Orienté Objet explored the ambivalence of our reaction to Climate Change. A polar bear raises its paws towards a sky made of bulbs that symbolise global warming that kills both the bear and its habitat. A sensor lightens up the installation as visitors come near, involving them in the narrative. The bulbs selected by the artists are supposed to allow for energy saving. However, they contain soil-polluting mercury, they heat up the room and they gave rise to new industrial developments that greatly enrich their manufacturers. Arctic (which comes from the Greek arktos, “bear”) has become the land to exploit for resources that will be extracted and exploited to keep the industrialisation drive high and will this contribute to the thawing of permafrost and ice caps.

Other artists are interested in geoengineering, an industry that might further disturb ecosystems while keeping alive the myth that we don’t have to make any substantial efforts in order to enjoy both infinite growth and a healthy planet.

Marie-Luce Nadal, La Fabrique du Vaporeux n°1, 2014

Marie-Luce Nadal, La Fabrique du Vaporeux n°1 / Factory of the Vaporous n°1, 2014

Marie-Luce Nadal found out a few years ago that geoengineering is nothing new in rural areas. In fact, her family of wine producers has been intervening on cloud formation for at least 3 generations. In his diaries, her grandfather wrote down the weather, the risks for crops but also how he was using a hail cannon to disrupt the formation of hailstones in the atmosphere. It’s a type of geoengineering on a micro-scale.

Made using materials recycled from an old alcohol distillery, The Factory of The Vaporous No. 1 is a portable machine to capture clouds. Half-utopian half-serious, The Factory of The Vaporous is composed of a system that extracts air and water, a set of instruments that separate the air and water from their chemical and inorganic components, as well as a series of tools which allows her to measure and mix these components with the aim of producing pure essence of cloud and synthetic thunderstorm.

Marie-Luce Nadal, Extracteur de foudre portatif et munitions de foudre

Marie-Luce Nadal, Lightning ammunitions

The lightning extractor backpack is another far-fetched machine. This one is designed to find and capture lost lightning strikes wherever they occur. So far, Marie-Luce Nadal has collected 114 lightening strikes that are stocked inside munitions.

2. Food crisis and animal sentience

In her 1962 essay Silent Spring, Rachel Carson told the public how DDT pesticides had killed birds and silenced the US rural landscape. A similar silence is falling over forests, seasides and other “natural” spaces. Three of the key aspects brought to light by Carson are still very much alive almost 60 years after the publication of her book: environmental destruction, lack of interest and deceit on the part of the industries involved and the defection of the states.

Jacques Loeuille, Birds of America, 2018

Jacques Loeuille followed in the footsteps of ornithologist and father of US ecology John James Audubon who, in the 19th century, made an inventory of all the birds in the Mississippi. Loeuille notes that many of the birds that Audubon had drawn have now disappeared.

Birds of America is made of 7 films, each of them is dedicated to a bird that has left the territory. With their departure, it is the mythology of the USA that is eroded. The Bald Eagle, for example, was adopted as the national bird symbol of the USA in 1782. It was in danger of extinction until recently due to habitat destruction and degradation, illegal shooting and the contamination of its food source, largely as a consequence of DDT. No longer endangered, the Bald Eagles are now protected by multiple federal laws and regulations.

Loeuille’s work shapes a counter-history of the politics of the United States from an environmental point of view and questions the impact that species extinctions and environmental damage have on the image and identity of a country that is supposed to be the most powerful in the world.

Magali Daniaux & Cédric Pigot, Devenir Graine (Becoming Seed), Action in front of the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, Longyearbyen, Mai 2012

Food, along with water, air and the sand necessary to make concrete, is the most important resource humans need to survive. It is also at the origin of world instability, mass migration, hunger, violence, etc. The way we produce, eat and waste food is a major cause of environmental degradation.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault promises to provide the world with a “backup” for seeds from crop varieties growing across the world. Opened in 2008, the facility is managed by the Norwegian government, the Crop Trust and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center (NordGen). It is also financed by various governments and by organisations and donors such as the Foundation Bill and Melinda Gates. What does it mean to entrust private enterprises with the ownership of seeds which are at the source of animal and human food? Especially when you know that food constitutes a potential political and economic weapon?

As Magali Daniaux & Cédric Pigot explain in one of the projects they made about the Seed Vault, the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard is located North of the Barents Sea, where prospecting for gas and oil reserves takes place, and inside the Arctic circle, which provide a metaphorical illustration of the relations between man and nature. The vault encapsulates some of the most salient geopolitical and geostrategic issues: global warming, cross-border collaborations but also diplomatic tensions between Norway and Russia, the management of fossil fuel and nuclear resources, the development of GMOs and the commercialisation of living things.

3. Biosciences and the transformation of the living

Discourses about animals emerge from fields as diverse as biology, ethnology, sociology, ethics, literature or even religion. None of these disciplines adequately covers the irreducibility of the ambivalent relationship we have with animals: they are both food and life companions, they are linked to nature and they are radically instrumentalised by industry and commerce. What happened to animality with the loss of nature?

“The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being?”
– Jeremy Bentham (1789) – An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.

Bentham places the animal question in the context of a general liberation that involves humans as well.

Animals have various status and roles for humans. Domestic animals (either pets or butchered) belong to the human sphere. The risk for them is to lose their animality. As for wild animals, whether they are living in the wild or in captivity, it’s their wildness that is under threat, their ability to survive without any (deliberate) human intervention. But the wildness of a lion is not the wildness of a shark which is not the wildness of a fly. Meanwhile, lab animals sometimes start their life as pets or wild animals and become mere things. The paradox is that we use animals in laboratories because we cannot use humans for ethical reasons. And yet, we select these animals because they are biologically close to us and thus their reactivity (among others neurological or even their behavioural reactivity) is close to ours.

In art too, the animal plays an important role. It was one of the very first subjects of artists (think of cave paintings), a material, an actor of the work and a material for conceptual reflection.

Artists who use biotechnology often interrogate what in our present already constitutes the future and operate a real anthropocenic repositioning. Their work repositions the human within the ensemble of the living as an integral part of it and not only as a stakeholder. These artists not only flatten the classical hierarchy that puts the human at the top of the ladder above other animals and plants, but they also challenge old conceptions by taking into account forms of life usually neglected, such as bacteria and viruses. In their works, the often forgotten oceanic continent is finally getting the attention it deserves.

Robertina Sebjanic, Aurelia + Hz Proto Viva Generator, 2015

Robertina Sebjanic uses jellyfish to explore the possibilities of coexistence between animals and machines but also to directly interrogate the 6th wave of mass species extinction. Jellyfish have inhabited the oceans for 500 million years. Because of their longevity, their genetic characteristics are of great interest to the cosmetic and the pharmaceutical industries. So while in the near future some might enjoy an ultra-long life, others (humans or non-human) will struggle to survive. Sebjanic’s installation questions the capitalist biopolitics and the possibility of radically reforming the means and objectives of biotechnologies in order to redefine social values and improve interspecies relationships.

When the installation was exhibited in Paris, the jellyfish were adopted by the Paris aquarium. Works like this also raise the issue of the use of animals in artworks.

4. Degrowth, energy transition, co-responsibilities, post-colonialism or the colonisation of oceans and space

Some artists chose to comment on technology while using DIY, recycling, low tech, development of new materials in order to comply with the rules of sustainable development.

DaniauxPigot, Cthulhu, 2020

Cthulhu, for example, is a tactile, pink stoneware reference to Donna Haraway’s critique of the human exceptionalism contained in the concept of the Anthropocene and call for an emphasis on multispecism.

Théo Mercier, Déjeuner sous l’herbe (Ajax triple action), 2020. From the series Silent Spring. Photo: © Erwan Fichou

Théo Mercier, Déjeuner sous l’herbe (Total), 2020. From the series Silent Spring. Photo: © Erwan Fichou

Théo Mercier’s sculptures address current ecological concerns by using precious materials to reproduce the most mundane and polluting objects of our daily life, giving plastic artefacts a nobility they have long lost.

Neither of the examples above constitutes a reactionary return to traditions. Instead, the works explore through organic media the consequence of a society that so heavily relies on technology.

Manuela de Barros also found some time to look at Space Art and its inherent ambiguities. Even artists who have deep ecological concerns can create works that leave planet Earth and operate in zero gravity (producing thus works that have a high energy cost.)

Makoto Azuma, Exobiotanica 2 -Botanical Space Flight, 2017

Ikebana artist Makoto Azuma launched flowers and other plants in orbit. He put them in space with the help of two vessels, a team of 10 people and JP Aerospace, a company that developed a volunteer-based DIY Space Program.

de Barros drew pertinent parallels between the colonisation of space and the colonisation of oceans which threatens to further weaken and impoverish ecosystems already affected by plastic waste, overfishing, rise in greenhouse gases, etc.

The artworks she selected have the ambition of demonstrating the power of an imagination powered by science and technology but they also show how difficult it is to change the world when you are an artist with only limited funding. Thinking, creating, developing new forms, she said, requires independence, in particular financial independence. Environmental issues are essentially economic and political. That is why she ended her keynote with works by artists who engage directly with our daily life and with the power relations in a democracy.

Antoine Schmitt, manif.app

manif.app is a tool developed by artist Antoine Schmitt during the violent manifestations in Paris last Winter and then during the first 2020 lockdown. The website allows people unable to join a manifestation, a protest or a demonstration to show their support virtually. Their avatar is anonymised and visible publicly on the map, along with all the other avatars. Virtual protesters have the possibility to move their avatar around the map but also to hold a banner bearing the slogan of their choice.

manif.app is very successful. Last June, tens of thousands of Brazilians used it to protest against Bolsonaro’s attacks on human rights.

Forensic Architecture, The Death of Adama Traoré, 2020

Investigative group Forensic Architecture, whose work de Barros called “anti-fake news”, uses technologies and overlooked pieces of evidence such as the ones drawn from meteorology, eyewitness accounts and architectural reconstructions in court cases that denounce human rights abuses. Often working with NGOs and human rights lawyers, FA brings to light facts that confound the versions of events told by police, military, states and corporations. They have recently probed the death of Adama Traoré who was killed in police custody in circumstances that remain unclear.

Previously: AMBIVALENCES #1: A History of Ecological Art + Ambivalence, part 2: On the uneasy relationship between digital art and the environment.

Bank Job, a book by Hilary Powell and Daniel Edelstyn.

Chelsea Green Publishing describes the book: Art hacks life when two filmmakers launch a project to cancel more than £1m of high-interest debt from their local community.

Bank Job is a white-knuckle ride into the dark heart of our financial system, in which filmmaker and artist duo Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn risk their sanity to buy up and abolish debt by printing their own money in a disused bank in Walthamstow, London. Tired of struggling in an economic system that leaves creative people on the fringes, the duo weave a different story, both risky and empowering, of self-education and mutual action. Behind the opaque language and defunct diagrams, they find a system flawed by design but ripe for hacking.

A 2017 Positive Money survey states that 85 percent of members of the UK parliament do not understand the banking system or how money is created. Their ignorance about the functioning of the economy is alarming for a country that needs to address the problems of rising inequality, deepening poverty, housing crisis and record personal debt. The situation is probably not that much more cheerful in the rest of the Western world. Especially after one year battered by a pandemic.

As much as I like to write about disheartening socio-political abuses, I thought I should end 2020 with an uplifting story. I found it in a book that details a couple’s artistic fight against toxic debt culture.

That couple is Hilary Powell and Daniel Edelstyn. Edelstyn is a filmmaker, Powell an artist and in 2017, they took over an old bank out in Walthamstow, a district located in one of London’s most economically and socially deprived boroughs. Inside, they printed their own money, just like the Bank of England, except that they sold the bills as works of art. The duo splits 20,000 pounds of the sales proceeds, donating half to local nonprofits and using the rest to buy payday-loan debts resold by banks (usually to collections agencies) for a fraction of its original value.

Instead of the Queen, Adam Smith, Winston Churchill or Jane Austen, their banknotes celebrated some of the local people whose life is dedicated to redressing the broken economic system: Gary Nash, the founder of a food bank; Saira Mir who is running a soup kitchen; Stephen Barnabis, the head of the Soul Project that provides activities and hope for young people, particularly those from deprived backgrounds and then there was Tracey Griffiths, the headteacher of the artists’ children’s primary school in Walthamstow deeply affected by government’s education cuts.

Hilary Powell and Daniel Edelstyn, Bank Job

Hilary Powell and Daniel Edelstyn, Bank Job. Photo: Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Hilary Powell and Daniel Edelstyn, Bank Job

Hilary Powell and Daniel Edelstyn, Bank Job

The most spectacular chapter of the project is the performance “Big Bang 2″, titled in reference to 1986 Thatcher-led Conservative government deregulation of the financial markets.

The artist’s version of an event that changed the City of London consisted of exploding a gold-painted van in front of London’s financial district. The vehicle was filled with paper notes stamped with the word “DEBT” in block capital letters. With the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf business district in the background, this made for very photogenic shots. The long preparation to set up the controlled blast actually sounds scarier than the detonation itself.

Hilary Powell and Daniel Edelstyn, Bank Job, Big Bang 2 debt explosion. Photo credit: Graeme Truby.

Hilary Powell and Daniel Edelstyn, Bank Job. Photo: Andrew Testa for The New York Times

The Bank Job book tells about the hurdles, the personal experiences and the small stories behind Eldestyn and Powell’s headline-grabbing actions but it also explains the close connections between debt, the current economic system, democracy and freedom.

In the publication, the artists detail how the project doubled as a long, hands-on investigation into the invisible and “hackable” aspects of banking and monetary systems that are, in many respects, designed to benefit the few at the expense of the many. Their bank became a lab where other artists, thinkers, members of the local community and curious passers-by could participate in the printing process, learn about the economy and debate about possible alternatives to neoliberalism, to lives of indebtedness, to a decade of austerity and to systems that are deliberately obscure.

If you’re nostalgic about art before Zoom, need tips on how to get the authorisation to blast a vehicle in health&safety maniac London and are looking for a kind of “Monetary Systems for Dummies”, then Bank Job is for you. The documentary about the whole adventure should be released soon.

Hilary Powell and Daniel Edelstyn, Bank Job

Hilary Powell and Daniel Edelstyn, Bank Job

Hilary Powell and Daniel Edelstyn, Bank Job

Public announcement!

Mathieu Asselin, Monsanto. A Photographic Investigation, 2013

Charlotte Jarvis, Blighted by Kenning, 2011

Next month, I’ll be giving online classes titled Art & Politics for Plants. On plant geopolitics, phytoengineering and uncanny crops with the School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe.

While I did my best to sideline the humans as much as possible in last year’s animal classes, homo sapiens will play a bigger role in the plant classes and it won’t always be a glorious one:

Western cultures tend to see nature as a vast reservoir of services and resources to own and capitalise on. Plants, in particular, are often regarded as mere tools to exploit for food, medicine, fuel, industry and ornamental purposes. Over the years, however, this purely utilitarian viewpoint has revealed its calamitous consequences, marginalising communities, fostering inequality and threatening biodiversity and the survival of the animal world.

Time has come to co-evolve in a more sympathetic and mutually beneficial way with the most important (in terms of biomass at least) inhabitants of this planet.

During the weekly sessions, we’ll use art & sometimes also design to talk about biopiracy, GMOs, deforestation, mass extinction and de-extinction, land grabbing but we will also look at neurobotany, biohacking, green colonialism, the holobiont, office plants (they are plants too!), space farming and the ambiguous role played by invasive species.

In my wildest (and most ambitious) dreams, the class would be beautiful and a bit troubling. Like the film Little Joe:

Jessica Hausner, Little Joe (trailer), 2019

Hicham Berrada, Mesk Ellil, 2015-2019. Installation view at Punta della Dogana, Venezia 2019 © Palazzo Grassi. Photo Delfino Sisto Legnani & Marco Cappelletti

Carsten Höller and Stefano Mancuso, The Florence Experiment, 2018. Photo via La Repubblica

Plants appear to overrun largely uninhabited apartment buildings in south-west China’s Sichuan province, September 2020. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock, via The Guardian

Each week, the class will give a broad overview of the debates, state of knowledge and possible controversies surrounding a specific theme. The survey will be accompanied by many examples of artworks and design projects that illustrate, contest or investigate that same topic.

There will be space for questions and conversations.

The online classes will be taking place over the course of five weeks, two hours each week. The first session will be an informal “getting to know each other” event during which i will also be taking notes of any special curiosity and interests participants might have.

Classes are live: you can directly interact with the instructor as well as with the other participants from around the world. Classes will also be recorded for playback if you are unable to attend that day.

The school is offering a limited number of pay-what-you-can tickets to take part in this class. Preference given to women, POC, LGBTQ+ and persons from underrepresented communities who would otherwise be unable to attend.

This way to join!

How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Learning to Fight in a World on Fire, by Andreas Malm, an associate professor of human ecology from Lund University, Sweden.

Publisher Verso Books writes: The science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a booming fossil fuel industry, rising seas, rising emission levels, and a rising temperature. With the stakes so high, why haven’t we moved beyond peaceful protest?

In this lyrical manifesto, noted climate scholar (and saboteur of SUV tires and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse. We need, he argues, to force fossil fuel extraction to stop–with our actions, with our bodies, and by defusing and destroying its tools. We need, in short, to start blowing up some oil pipelines.

Offering a counter-history of how mass popular change has occurred, from the democratic revolutions overthrowing dictators to the movement against apartheid and for women’s suffrage, Malm argues that the strategic acceptance of property destruction and violence has been the only route for revolutionary change. In a braided narrative that moves from the forests of Germany and the streets of London to the deserts of Iraq, Malm offers us an incisive discussion of the politics and ethics of pacifism and violence, democracy and social change, strategy and tactics, and a movement compelled by both the heart and the mind. Here is how we fight in a world on fire.

Two protesters use bamboo lock-ons to block the road outside the Newsprinters printing works at Broxbourne, Hertfordshire. Photo: PA, via: The Independent

In 2016, climate activists disrupted the flow of crude oil from Canada to the US by turning off valves on North America’s pipeline system. They justified their action by saying that U.S. policymakers and oil companies had failed to address climate change and that their act of sabotage was “the only way we get their attention. All other avenues have been exhausted.”

COP after COP, march after march, the climate movement has grown into the most dynamic social movement in the Global North. And yet, investments in fossil fuels haven’t slowed down significantly, Australia continues to plan mines and airports in areas that should be protected, plants are still burning coal, meat and dairy consumption –organic or not- shows no sign of slowing down, etc. Even the sales of SUVs, notoriously toxic for the planet, are going strong. The author actually explains how he and a group of “Indians of the Concrete Jungle” have gone through Ostermalm, Oslo’s most affluent neighbourhood, to deflate the tyres of SUV, leaving leaflets to explain the gesture was not a personal attack but a way to bring attention to the potentially devastating effects that SUVs have on climate change and on other citizens’ health. They even published manuals on how to unscrew the cap on the valve and deflate a tyre, adding that the most important rule is to avoid the vehicles used by artisans, workers or by people with disabilities, etc. The only targets being the SUVs that have no practical purpose beyond flaunting the wealth of their owners. Apparently, sales of SUVs in Sweden dropped that year.

Is it ever acceptable to resort to sabotage and “controlled” violence if the cause is just, urgent and ignored after decades of peaceful protests and other mellow tactics? Can you justify smashing the kind of property -pipelines or SUVs- that harm our future and our planet?

A woman peers through a shattered window in Holloway prison after the explosion in December 1913. Photograph: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images, via: The Guardian

Not everyone has the time nor the luxury to do a sit-in. Sometimes, as episodes in history have shown, non-violent disruption leads you nowhere. The emancipation of slaves from the French colonial rule in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), for example, was the result of slave uprising that plunged the colony into civil war. The Haitian Revolution was a bloody affair but it ended in 1804 with the independence of the country. The suffragettes didn’t just politely ask influential men to give them the right to vote. After decades of patient pressure on Parliament that yielded nothing, they added window-smashing, rock-throwing, arson, letterbox torching and other types of property destruction to their arsenal of tactics. They were, however, careful to attack only empty building to avoid causing any death.

As the author notes, Extinction Rebellion, a model of civil resistance, did more for the climate emergency than a thousand peer-reviewed papers. The movement has gained the respect of the wider public because of the gentleness of its protests. But why, asks Andreas Malm, should the fight against fossil fuel require fewer efforts than the fight for human rights? Why shouldn’t non-violent protests be aided by militant action? After all, what is at stake is huge. Climate injustice knows almost no bounds, especially in you live in the Far North, on small islands and in other areas already heavily impacted by a climate change your culture played almost no part in causing.

Turning off pipelines, deflating SUVs tyres and other property vandalisms are violent moves but Malm presents them as defensive acts that can deter investments in CO2 emitting industries, save wildlife and human lives and, in the longer term, might reduce violence. Extractive and polluting industries are the cause of far more direct and indirect violence than any form of eco-motivated sabotage.

The violence discussed in the book is never indiscriminate. It is sabotage and vandalism that come as a last resort. That shouldn’t threaten human or animal life. That never target resources and materials from which people depend for subsistence. Vandalising a super yacht is one thing, Malm notes. Poisoning someone’s groundwater or burning a family’s grove of olive trees will never be acceptable.

Whether or not you agree with the author’s suggestion that climate activism should move beyond the politics of non-violence, you’re bound to find that his book constitutes a stimulating intellectual exercise. It certainly occupied my thoughts and many of the conversations I had over the past few weeks.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline was finished in late March 2020, when COVID started sending the environmental cause into hibernation. How will the climate movement rebound after the pandemic? Will it be invigorated by all the debates about “the world after”? Will we be more resolute than ever to do what is right for the planet and its non-human inhabitants? Or will business as usual prevail, with just a bit of clever greenwashing here and there?

Image on the homepage: PERN.PL, via Warsaw Institute.

Do you remember when Trevor Paglen, with the help of the Nevada Museum of Art and NASA, launched an inflatable reflective sculpture into space as a temporary satellite? The project had the objective of being the first “purely artistic” object in the night sky that does not have any military, commercial or scientific interest.

The plan was to keep the sculpture in orbit for three months where it would have been visible from the Earth as a bright star, after which it would burn up upon reentry to the Earth’s atmosphere. Unfortunately, the deployment was delayed by Trump’s decision to shut down the U.S. federal government in 2018–2019. By the time the 35-day shutdown had ended, the museum’s engineers had lost contact with the satellite. It is now lost in orbit, constituting space junk. Ironically, the episode showed that Paglen was right: it really is difficult to disentangle space endeavours from politico-military interests.

Trevor Paglen, Unseen Stars, 2020. Installation view at OGR Torino. Courtesy the artist and OGR – Officine Grandi Riparazioni, Torino. Photo © Melania Dalle Grave / DSL Studio

Trevor Paglen, Unseen Stars, 2020. Installation view at OGR Torino. Courtesy the artist and OGR – Officine Grandi Riparazioni, Torino. Photo © Melania Dalle Grave / DSL Studio

Some wondered why an artist whose photographic project, The Other Night Sky, tracked U.S. spy satellites in Earth orbit and investigated the political dimensions of space, would dedicate his time to what looked like a frivolous exercise. In an interview with artnet, Paglen was asked whether there was any point in adding a man-made object in the sky if it had no scientific nor military purpose. His answer is worth a bit of copy/pasting action:

“Implicit in that question,” said Paglen, “is the idea that art is not a good thing and that artists should not be participating in this form of production. Why are we offended by a sculpture in space, but we’re not offended by nuclear missile targeting devices or mass surveillance devices, or satellites with nuclear engines that have a potential to fall to earth and scatter radioactive waste all over the place?”

The project encouraged people to consider the idea of a space exploration driven by motivations that echo the dreams, the poetry and the questionings about our origins that the night sky has always elicited in the minds of humans looking at the stars.

OGR Open Sessions | Art Corner – Meet the artist Ep. #1 | Trevor Paglen

Trevor Paglen, Unseen Stars, 2020. Installation view at OGR Torino. Courtesy the artist and OGR – Officine Grandi Riparazioni, Torino. Photo © Melania Dalle Grave / DSL Studio

Trevor Paglen delved deeper into this idea of space as “a place of possibility” in Unseen Stars, an exhibition postponed, briefly opened at OGR in Turin, now closed and I’m hoping that it will be extended until cultural spaces are finally allowed to open again in Italy.

Paglen collaborated with aerospace engineers to design what he calls “non-functional satellites”. Their formal aspect is meant to suggest what aerospace engineering would look like if its methods had not been guided by nationalism, global surveillance and industrial logics.

Shown alongside structures similar to the scaffoldings used by space technicians and engineers, the mirror surfaces of the sculptures play with the XIXth century industrial architecture of the OGR. They reflect the brick walls and reshape the volumes of the massive hall.

Trevor Paglen, Unseen Stars, 2020. Installation view at OGR Torino. Courtesy the artist and OGR – Officine Grandi Riparazioni, Torino. Photo © Melania Dalle Grave / DSL Studio

Trevor Paglen, Unseen Stars, 2020. Installation view at OGR Torino. Courtesy the artist and OGR – Officine Grandi Riparazioni, Torino. Photo © Melania Dalle Grave / DSL Studio

Trevor Paglen, Unseen Stars, 2020. Installation view at OGR Torino. Courtesy the artist and OGR – Officine Grandi Riparazioni, Torino. Photo © Melania Dalle Grave / DSL Studio

Trevor Paglen, Unseen Stars, 2020. Installation view at OGR Torino. Courtesy the artist and OGR – Officine Grandi Riparazioni, Torino. Photo © Melania Dalle Grave / DSL Studio

I wish the curators had provided more information about a series of military patches, historical documents and photos that were displayed on a table near the entrance. I think they showed the sources of inspiration for the exhibition. That’s on that table that I discovered the story of Echo 1, a passive satellite sent into orbit in 1960. It was launched folded flat and, once in space, it inflated in the shape of a huge balloon. Echo was a simple reflector used to bounce radio waves from one point on the surface of the Earth to another.

Echo 1 in a NASA hangar during an inflation test, 1960

Orbital Reflector Logistics. In Space No One Can Hear You Complain

Trevor Paglen, Unseen Stars, 2020. Installation view at OGR Torino. Courtesy the artist and OGR – Officine Grandi Riparazioni, Torino. Photo © Melania Dalle Grave / DSL Studio

Trevor Paglen – Unseen Stars, curated by Ilaria Bonacossa with Valentina Lacinio, will remain unseen until better and safer times at OGR – Officine Grandi Riparazioni.

Two Sides of the Border. Reimagining the Region, edited by architect Tatiana Bilbao, designer Nile Greenberg, designer and curator Ayesha S. Ghosh, in collaboration with Yale School of Architecture.

Lars Müller Publishers writes: Under the direction of Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao, thirteen architecture studios and students across the United States and Mexico undertook the monumental task of attempting to capture the complex and dynamic region of the US/Mexican border. Two Sides of the Border envisions the borderland through five themes: migration, housing and cities, creative industries, local production, tourism, and territorial economies. Building on a long-shared history in the region, the projects covered in this volume use design and architecture to address social, political and ecological concerns along the shared border.

Tent city for separated children, El Paso, Texas/Ciudad Juáres, Chihuahua. Image: Iwan Baan, 2018

Two Sides of the Border is the atlas of a unique space crisscrossed and shaped by people, cultures, commerce, labour, money, natural elements, infrastructures and ideas. Officially, a line/border/wall cuts that region in two but as the book demonstrates, the reality is a bit more complex and far more interesting.

The publication combines imagination, rigorous research and a bit of activism. You need imagination to envision the reality and future of a place where the border between Mexico and the US doesn’t exist. The research comes in the form of essays by documentary makers, scholars, architects, architecture students and other thinkers who explore a territory formed by continued exchanges between two nations. But the book is also pervaded by a politically-minded spirit that disputes the current divisive rhetoric about Mexico and the United States.

The book reconciled me with the field of architecture which I’ve neglected a bit over the past few (10??) years. Here is how architect Tatiana Bilbao describes her mindset when working on the Two Sides of the Border book and exhibition deserves to be copy/pasted:

Going back to the time when architects were really thinking about the territory is what we need. I think we have lost that opportunity in the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decades of this century. Architects have moved away from thinking territorially in big movements, with a focus on planning and an understanding of society. They have done so in favor of focusing on the individual project and the potential for garnering acclaim for changing neighborhoods.

I spent a whole weekend reading the book, examining the maps and photos. Here’s a small selection of the works I found most striking:

Meatpacking plant, Union, Ohio. Image: Iwan Baan, 2018

Remittance house, Puebla City, Puebla. Image: Iwan Baan, 2018

Iwan Baan‘s photos occupy about one third of the book. They speak silently about changing landscapes, hybrid architecture and cultures in constant mutations. His aerial photos, for example, show how NAFTA is far more than an economic agreement, it is an agent that physically affected the Mexican landscape and the construction industry with, for example, the development of massive industrial areas around the border.

The presentation by architecture students of projects that imagine the future of the region include Marilyn Reyes’s plan to assist monarch butterflies in their migration by providing the migrant nonhuman creatures with a space to rest in the borderlands between MX and the US; and Hallie Black’s floating building that belongs to the two states and becomes the space to push neoliberalism to its most dehumanising limits.

My favourite essay is (unsurprisingly) the one written by curator Alejandro Luperca who chose 4 artists whose works not only illustrate what it means to produce contemporary art on the border but also had a positive effect on the region and those involved.

Teresa Margolles, Irrigación [Irrigation], 2010

Luperca explains how he crossed the border together with Teresa Margolles with sheets soaked in earth, blood and other bodily secretions recovered from scenes of violence in Juárez. When stopped by the officer, they explained: “We have dirty laundry; we’re going to wash it.” The performance piece consisted of a water truck spraying the highways of Texas between Alpine and Marfa with 5000 gallons of water in which the sheets had been dipped. For the artist, this was a form of returning Texas’s waste products back to Texas — the state that exports the most firearms into Mexico.

Francis Alÿs, (in collaboration with Rafael Ortega, Julien Devaux, Alejandro Morales and Félix Blume), Paradox of Praxis 5, Ciudad Juárez, México, 2013

The shooting of Ciudad Juárez Projects with Francis Alÿs turned out to be far more risky than the video above even suggests. “Stop playing around, kids!” a municipal police officer shouted from a car in downtown Juárez, while the artist was kicking at a football ball in flames. Another patrol car stopped them, the cops pointing their weapons at Alÿs and Luperca while they were filming the stray dogs, the facades and a park where children played on swings in the distance. Their behaviour was too innocent not to look suspicious.

Enrique Jezik, Volveré y Seré Millones (I Will Return and I Will Be Millions), 2017

Enrique Jezik’s Volveré y Seré Millones (I Will Return and I Will Be Millions) project involved the installation of a banner on the Mexican side of the border. The slogan was also visible to the border patrol officers posted on the other side of the bridge. The phrase was first attributed to Túpac Amaru II, the Peruvian indigenous leader of a rebellion against the Spaniards in 1781 who was subsequently brutally executed and dismembered. Before the executioner cut out his tongue, Amaru is said to have pronounced the phrase in both Spanish and Quechua: “Tikrashami hunu makanakuypi kasha.” Ježik connects this emblematic, historical slogan of resistance to the forced repatriation of undocumented migrants.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Border Tuner / Sintonizador Fronterizo, Relational Architecture 23″, 2019. Photo by Monica Lozano

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Border Tuner / Sintonizador Fronterizo, Relational Architecture 23″, 2019. Photo by: Mariana Yañez

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Border Tuner interconnected El Paso and Ciudad Juárez using powerful robotic searchlights and live sound channels for communication across the border. Bridging both sides of the border, the installation emphasises the continuous collaboration that links the two cities and the two countries and provides a counter-narrative to the toxic rhetoric on the border.

Ersela Kripa wrote about her Nephelometry project: a network of low-cost dust sensors along the US–Mexico border. Low-cost sensor bundles installed on both sides of the frontier collect information on air pollution and its movement from one area to another. The mappings of the measurements defy the border wall, highlighting the shared airshed and ecological damage in the border region due to infrastructural and environmental neglect.

Stephen Mueller has a fascinating essay on borderland space and atmosphere. While dusty air and desert conditions are detrimental to the wellbeing of people who inhabit the area or walk through it, they can be exploited by military and security experts. In their eyes, the diverse desert atmospheres of the area constitute ready-made environmental adversaries. Training sites are thus strategically set up in the borderland.

Two Sides of the Border. Reimagining the Region. Book spread

Carla Fernàndez and Pedro Reyes‘s contribution reflects the US countless military interventions and overthrowing of regimes in Central America over the last two centuries. Its violent and destructive (overt or covert) foreign policy often violates international human rights laws and has forced thousands of Central Americans to seek asylum elsewhere. The two maps they created draw attention to the moral and legal responsibility of care owed to these refugees by the United States.

Sarah Lynn Lopez investigated the crisscrossing of objects, dollars and aspirations carried by individuals who lead transborder lives between Mexico and the US. One of the many examples she gives is cars and the impact they had on Mexican landscapes, spaces and infrastructures. In the early 20th century, approximately one out of every three migrants brought a car back with him or her to Mexico. This influx of automobiles led to the construction of roads. Her essay made me want to buy her book The Remittance Landscape.

More photos from the book:

A view across the border from El Paso towards Ciudad Juarez. Image: Iwan Baan, 2018

US-Mexico Eastern beach border. Image Credit: Thomas Paturet

San Ysidro Port of Entry. Image Credit: Thomas Paturet

Union Ganadera Ciudad Juarez. Image Credit: Thomas Paturet

Two Sides of the Border. Reimagining the Region. Book spread

Two Sides of the Border. Reimagining the Region. Book spread

Two Sides of the Border. Reimagining the Region. Book spread

Previously: Transnationalisms – Bodies, Borders, and Technology. Part 1. The exhibition; Book review – Über Grenzen. On Borders; Unstable Territory. Borders and identity in contemporary art; VOTEMOS.US – Mexico decides; Hyper-Border: The Contemporary U.S.-Mexico Border and its Future, etc.

For years, Egypt has been trying to convince European museums to return Egyptian antiquities that left their country illegally. One of the most famous disputed artifact is the bust of 14th-century BCE Egyptian queen Nefertiti. German archaeologists took it from the African country in 1912 and their country has since repeatedly denied loan requests from Egypt’s cultural institutions. The debate around the growing list of disputed museum treasures is one that most Europeans would rather not think about. Once in a while however, a scandal, a protest, a movie or a contemporary artwork forces ex-colonising countries to confront the firm grip that their institutions maintain on access to knowledge and on the global narratives of history.

Nora Al-Badri and Nikolai Nelles, The Other Nefertiti, 2015

Nora Al-Badri and Nikolai Nelles, Fossil Futures, 2017

In early 2016, artists Nora Al-Badri and Nikolai Nelles announced that they had illegally scanned the Nefertiti head at Neues Museum in Berlin, they also made a copy of the bust and released the 3D data. Their “Nefertiti Hack” became the centre of heated discussions about ownership, authenticity, cultural identity and power imbalances.

A couple of years later, the artists turned their attention to another icon of Berlin cultural life: Oskar, the world’s largest assembled dinosaur skeleton. This Brachiosaurus brancai lived nearly 150 million years old ago. Al-Badri and Nelles tracked its origins to the south of Tanzania. Discovered by German archaeologists when Tanzania was still under colonial rule, the petrified bones were shipped to Germany, assembled and are now the main stars of Berlin’s Museum of Natural History. The artistic investigation culminated in Fossil Future, a series of works that further examine the enduring consequences and legacies of colonial power.

Nora Al-Badri, Babylonian Vision, 2020

Nora Al-Badri‘s most recent research projects apply GANs to images of archaeological artifacts in order to continue her questioning of the institutional power structures of Western museums. What make her works -and the one she has developed in collaboration with Nikolai Nelles– so compelling is that they go beyond confronting the audience with uncomfortable ethical questions about the full history of museum collections. They also present new platforms for public discussions, new counter-narratives and new emancipatory strategies to examine issues of decolonisation.

Nora Al-Badri is a multi-disciplinary media artist with a German-Iraqi background. She lives and works in Berlin. She graduated in political sciences at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt / Main. We talked over a Skype video call:

Nora Al-Badri, Babylonian Vision, 2020

Nora Al-Badri, Babylonian Vision training, 2020

Hi Nora! Let’s start with Babylonian Vision, a work you’ve developed as the first artist in residency at the Institute for Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) and its Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+) led by Sarah Kenderdine.

In the description of the work, you say that you contacted the five museums that have the largest collections of Mesopotamian, Neo-Sumerian and Assyrian artefacts and they didn’t give you the authorisation. Did they actually answer you and motivate their refusal?

Some of them responded. Some have their formal channels through which researchers or journalists can make requests for their datasets or get information about the artefacts but usually, the response was that it would cost some money and that for each object you want to access, you would have to sign one page and describe the reason for your request. I needed 10 000 objects which made it unmanageable. Through these bureaucratic obstacles, these institutions are also gaining control over the objects.

Why 10 000? Did you already know there were so many digitised artefacts in these collections or was it that you needed the critical mass for the technology?

We needed critical mass to train a neural network from scratch. There are millions of objects even though not all of them have been digitised yet. In the end, I was glad that somehow the institutions do not realise that some parts of their database is actually available online. One person cannot download all these objects one by one but the process can be automated and that’s what we did. That was the web-crawling part of the project.

One of the most important thing to me when I was thinking about training data sets is the problem of the AI as a black box system that makes it impossible to trace back the dataset used. You just don’t know where the input data came from.

Ironically, this black box problem can now be used against the museum, against the colonial machine. We more or less know who/where the largest collections in the world are but they cannot prove that I used their datasets to train the system. In many instances, the black box aspect of AI can be a problem but in some cases, it can also be liberating.

Nora Al-Badri, Neuronal Ancestral Sculptures Series

Can you explain this idea of the technoheritage? Why was it an important concept to explore?

I started to use that term many years ago when museums began to digitise large amounts of their collections and then created what they described as “digital assets” or “digital artefacts”. In fact a law researcher, Sonia K. Katyal who wrote about another project of mine, did name her article about 3D printing and intellectual copyrights “Technoheritage”. I wondered what the term really meant, if it was just a formulation or something that was independent of the physical object that could be translated, mediated, used and remixed all over the place. In a way, for me, it was a separate entity and I used the term technoheritage to describe it. Heritage is a term that looks into the past but to me, technoheritage is not looking at the past at all. Instead, it is looking towards another scenario of the future. And rather than preserving something, it can offer a new contribution and be used as a starting point for artistic research, for remixing and even updating the object.

The Neuronal Ancestral Sculptures Series also explores the technoheritage. Everything we come up with as artists is not 100% new and original, it builds on what was done before and it cannot be totally isolated from its context. The series is meant to honour works produced thousands of years ago. We still have sculptures similar to those today.

The Neuronal Ancestral Sculptures Series is more or less about the image that comes out of it, it is a concrete as well as synthetic image, like a still image of an object that is the sculpture. Babylonian Vision, on the other hand, is about the process of the machine vision through the Babylonian lens, looking at the patterns and forms of a specific time and era.

BBC Newsnight, #NefertitiHack with Nora Al-Badri

Nora Al-Badri and Nikolai Nelles, NefertitiBot, 2018

Queen Margrethe II of Denmark views the bust of 3,400-year-old Queen Nefertiti, Berlin, 2014. Photo by Andreas Rentz/Getty Images via al-monitor

The NefertitiBot also looks at topics of appropriation, at how the Global North museums and institutions are monopolising the imagery of ancient artefacts. Why did you delegate that difficult conversation to a bot, to a product of technology?

The Bot was an experiment that deals with the computer-human interface. We live in a time when people delegate many things to computers and believe in the results of algorithms. We played with that myth of technology. Personally, as an artist, I wouldn’t delegate the discussions to an automated process but I think that through the interaction with an automated process, we can see more clearly how we, as humans, should learn to be more critical. Automation is not magic. We wanted to expose those kinds of questions to the audience and actually, we were surprised at how critical the Nefertiti Bot was. Of course, the Bot is packed with biases but they are my biases, they are decolonial biases so they are on the opposite side of the usual biases. As artists, we can work with the shortcomings of technology and turn them completely around.

Nora Al-Badri and Nikolai Nelles, ‘NOT A SINGLE BONE’ exhibition at Nome Gallery, Berlin, 2017

Let’s talk about Fossil Futures. It’s always been clear how some cultural artefacts were stolen, appropriated by European and U.S. museums but we tend not to think in appropriation terms when it comes to dinosaurs bones, plants or anything you can find in a Natural History Museum. How did you get involved in this Tanzanian project?

It started a bit as the Nefertiti Bot started. Both Nefertiti and the dinosaur bones are museum centrepieces here in Berlin. That made us want to look closer. Before working on this project, I had no idea that the dinosaur was from Tanzania and that it had come through a large colonial expedition when not just the bones but many other resources were extracted. Many people where probably dislocated as well. If you look closer you will find many stories about objects, plants that have similarly been displaced and appropriated.

Nora Al-Badri and Nikolai Nelles, Territories of Cultural Fracking (videostill), 2017

Nora Al-Badri and Nikolai Nelles, Territories of Cultural Fracking (videostill), 2017

In an interview you did with Berlin Art Link in 2017 you talk about this plan to create a natural forest reserve instead of a museum. You were talking about “counter land-grabbing”. Do you keep in touch with the Tendaguru community and do you know what happened to this project of a forest reserve? /

We did several installations but what we never realised was how difficult it would be to fund the project, especially when we are talking about a project that criticises the people who should actually fund you. This was a failure that could have been anticipated.

We never got to realise the second part of the project which was for me the more important one and that involved installing that natural forest reserve. We were more or less the first people from Germany to go there and ask the community what they actually wanted and who they were. They wanted to set up their own museum, with their own narrative about the site. For them, it is still a sacred site that contains many more stories than the ones told here at the National Museum of Natural History. It ended up becoming a public debate here with the Natural History Museum and in the newspapers that became personal. And maybe I should quote one of the peculiar criticisms one of their historians had: he was enraged and stunned that we dared to speak to the people because we were no legitimate scientists like ethnographer or historians. As a matter of fact, just none of them ever dared to speak to the Tendaguru community.. Unfortunately, the museum managed to shut us down. We were only two artists and we only have so much power.

I’m also wondering about the discussions around the colonial past of Germany. Is it happening?

After the Nefertiti hack, it was a good moment in a way but from then on, the discussion evolved more and more into a broader public debate. Yet, I’m surprised to see how slow-moving the museums are, how conservatively-governed they are. There is a lot of money poured into that kind of research on the colonial past of collections for example. That is great but that research often stays in its ivory tower and hasn’t changed the fundamental nature of the collection. However, I remain optimistic that with more time, more intervention and more pressure from movements such as Rhodes Must Fall and Black Lives Matter as well as from other sides of society the situation will improve.

It is already changing of course but it’s still a bit too hesitant. When we think about decolonising institutions, be it a university or a museum, then the change will only happen through structural change. You can see for example how some people of colour are now invited to take part in discussions but I haven’t seen so many people of colour put in high positions where they can actually bring significant changes.

Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles, Robo Polke, 2018

Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles, Robo Polke, 2018

Another work you did with Jan Nikolai Nelles is Robo Polke, an industrial robot that is reproducing one of Pollock’s paintings. The work is a comment on machine non-creativity. How do you react to all the newspapers/magazines headlines that talk about AI becoming more creative, making music, films, paintings and is stealing the work of creative people?

Usually, when there’s so much hype around it, you realise that there isn’t so much to it. I’m not afraid of the creativity of the machine because I don’t believe that a machine can reproduce anything close to the idea of a soul or of human irrationality. It is true that machines can do extraordinary things. Now with the deep fake technology, we can automate nasty jobs such as the ones done by people in the advertisement. Soon we won’t need real people anymore: we will just need a database of people faces, bodies and movement.

But some people are afraid of losing even awful jobs to robots….

I believe these anxieties are giving society an opportunity to rethink what labour means. There will be many jobs that we cannot shift to machines. In particular, jobs that require compassion and empathy. Taking care of children or of the elderly, for example. This is a question for policy-making and the people, it’s about how right now we identify ourselves only through our work and how society perceives us based on the work we do. Maybe we need to reinvent our identities and rethink what makes us valuable. Hannah Arendt pointed that out some time ago in “Vita activa”.

Is there any upcoming work, event or field of research you’d like to share with us?

In January the exhibition Babylonian Vision will open in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Right now, I’m also doing some research on the question of the representation in datasets of the Global North vs the Global South. Today, even poorer households are not well represented in training datasets of big GAN. It might actually be an advantage in times of surveillance. The rich and the middle-class kind of surveil themselves. The downside, however, is the production of visual and geographical hegemony. I thought I could explore this aspect. When I do my Babylonian datasets this is already something for me that decolonial act because those objects, the ideas of the people of the time are not yet represented in any form of training data.

Scientific research papers are now being published that show that awareness of the problem is growing. But what does it mean if the poorer parts of society and the Global South are not protected? A lot of data is extracted from them but they don’t have the type of data privacy we have in Europe.

I also have a website-based project for Kunst-Werke in Berlin for this spring that deals with the feminine in hackerspaces. Artists from every continent are working on it as a virtual group show that will also be located in physical space.

Thanks Nora!

Maggie Kane is an academic, a self-learner, an activist and an artist. She works in user experience design, illustration, technology accessibility, interaction design but you can also meet her at hacker events, in a workshop building arcade cabinets, in non-profit maker spaces or in any venue where communities get together to solve concrete problems that their local government seems to be unwilling to dedicate efforts and funding to solve.

The list of community aid projects Maggie Kane plays an active role in is too long to copy so I’ll just mention a couple: She is the lead (volunteer) designer and fabricator for Free99Fridge, a free public food shelter project in Atlanta that feeds dozens of families in need each day. The six shelters host “solidarity fridges” that are placed outside local businesses and are filled with fresh fruits and vegetables for people to pick up. She’s also a (volunteer) art and educational program manager for The Bakery Atlanta, a multi-use community space in Atlanta run by a collective of creative thinkers aligned around social justice principles, environmental concerns and art. As if that were not enough, Maggie is also the (volunteer) technical producer for Nourish Botanica (formerly Nourishinblack), a greenhouse eatery project that doubles as a space to explore storytelling, healing and land reparations for Black farmers in Atlanta.

She’s both incredibly creative and resolutely down to earth. I discovered her work very recently through the The School of Machines, Making & Make Believe where she’s preparing to run online classes on the theme of Modelling for mutual aid. Toolkit for building supportive networks. I’ve since been wondering how she can be so active on so many fronts on her professional life AND find time to work with marginalised communities and support several mutual aid projects in Atlanta. The easiest way to discover her secret was to trap her in a Skype conversation:

Teaching art classes at The Bakery. Image courtesy of Maggie Kane

Hi Maggie! How did you get into mutual aid projects? Did it start with a personal experience?

I got into community tech work when I was studying sociology at the university. I was doing some research for a professor and we got a grant to do a comparative study on historical data from this neighbourhood I lived in in New Orleans. I looked at the data and started to visit several addresses. I thought I’d just talk to people but when I started discussing with the people who were there, I met a black man whose grandfather had started a barbershop in the neighbourhood. He was frustrated that people like him didn’t get any funding when they were struggling so much in this neighbourhood whereas a white student from university got money to talk to him about his life. To him, that was not the kind of help people in the neighbourhood needed. His name was Stan and I ended working with Stan on a project because I realised he was right: projects like the one I was working on do not really support the people and the communities that we want to work in.

I’m a very academic person, I love reading, I love philosophising but ultimately, I was very disappointed by academia. Doing a research on a population doesn’t help them. I started asking myself: Why don’t you just go to these people and do something with them that directly benefits them?

New Orleans DIY education organisation. Photo courtesy of Maggie Kane

New Orleans DIY education organisation. Photo courtesy of Maggie Kane

In any case, after that first research project was completed, I ended up doing a lot of work at a community centre that was just next door to Stan’s barbershop. I started by listening to people and listening to my neighbours about their problems. That was very different from being this privileged person coming in and trying to affect change. That’s how I found out that many people in the community didn’t have basic technical literacy skills, they didn’t know how to use a computer even though they needed to be able to use one to do essential things such as applying for a job. I ended up building up programming that adjust pretty easy problems people encountered when they were in front of a computer. I first partnered with that neighbourhood centre then with a library. I started approaching this type of community space. That was in 2011 and, over time, I partnered with more community spaces, first in New Orleans and then in Atlanta when I moved there in 2014.

I actually don’t have a tech background. My background is in research and arts. I didn’t want to go back to university, I wanted to see how I could learn by myself and try and be a better human. I got involved in Meetup groups, visited hacker spaces and discovered free tech community resources that allowed me to learn development skills, electronic skills without having to pay tens of thousands of dollars to learn that type of skills.

Teaching art classes at The Bakery. Image courtesy of Maggie Kane

Teaching art classes at The Bakery. Image courtesy of Maggie Kane

Organising DIY synth and electronics classes with instructors from the community. Photo courtesy of Maggie Kane

Organising DIY synth and electronics classes with instructors from the community. Photo courtesy of Maggie Kane

Teaching electronics. Photo courtesy of Maggie Kane

You are involved in many mutual aid projects. But you also have a career as a designer and you’re often busy working on hacking projects. So how do you make time when clearly you have so little of it? And why is it important for you to volunteer in mutual aid projects when you have so many excuses to do something else?

I genuinely enjoy helping other people with my skills and sometimes I get something out of it too. For a while, I was organising educational programming at a maker space / hacker space. I would organise classes that I wanted to learn so that participants and I would learn from each other. Over time, this relationship building process of working with people outside of monetary resources taught me about exchange and about sharing with other people.

I often say that I feel like I am a video game character. It’s like a RPG where I have a certain amount of time in a day. I have these 24 units of 1 hour. Then I have a series of skill sets that I built, the character that I built and I focus how my time should be spent. I also try to avoid burn-out which affects so many people involved in community aid projects at some point. I look for little triggers like back pain or simply fatigue. Every human being only has so much emotional capacity. Experience, however, has helped me be more efficient and detect faster what works and what doesn’t.

Organising DIY synth and electronics classes with instructors from the community. Photo courtesy of Maggie Kane

Organising DIY synth and electronics classes with instructors from the community. Photo courtesy of Maggie Kane

What is the place of art, imagination and creativity when developing and manage mutual aid projects?

Creativity plays a huge role!

You have to be creative to operate in this capitalistic system. You have to find all kinds of walk arounds and work with pretty much no assistance from the government.

Mutual aid is different from charity. Charity has a more top-down value, a trickle-down spirit where rich people are able to decide the type of people who need help and resources. In mutual aid, however, everyone comes together. For me, creativity involves being able to work with resources in an alternate fashion, finding alternate means for distribution.

The pandemic has made the need for mutual aid projects more visible than ever. Yet, one of its main components, the ability to physically be together, is now challenged by the safety measures. How can communities and participants of MAP face this new situation?

We lost an element of being together. In DIY spaces, for example, we can’t have shows anymore. We can’t come together and have community in-person conversations. On the other hand, as someone who is a self-taught technologist, I’d like people to get more into technology because it allows for more equitable access to information. Now there is this pressure to be more online and I’m glad about that. In the past, people were only using technology to promote in-person activities.

I’m involved in Free99Fridge. I’m the lead designer and builder for these free food shelters that we have around Atlanta. You can find these fridges all over the world and we have 6 of them in Atlanta. Many people are interested in the initiative and want to build their own. But the drawback for other people is that they don’t have the fabrication skills that I have or the knowledge of how to build a structure like I do. So I’ve been working on creating a very comprehensive guide for people who have never done construction before, never used a saw, etc. I want to make it very easy for people to know exactly what kind of material they have to buy from the hardware store, the type of tools they need, the type of processes that will help them build the food shelter. I’m a huge fan of open source projects. I’m trying to bring more art tech projects and mutual aid projects to an open source format so they can be more widely distributed in the whole world. Versus just in the circle of a few communities that are physically near each other.

Atlanta Free99Fridge. Image courtesy of Maggie Kane

Atlanta Free99Fridge. Image courtesy of Maggie Kane

Atlanta Free99Fridge. Image courtesy of Maggie Kane

Atlanta Free99Fridge. Image courtesy of Maggie Kane

Atlanta Free99Fridge. Image courtesy of Maggie Kane

Atlanta Free99Fridge. Image courtesy of Maggie Kane

I didn’t realise you needed a structure for the fridges! I saw some of them in the South of France and I naively assumed that you just had to plug in a fridge and put it in the street.

It depends on where you are. Here in Atlanta, when we first put a fridge outside, someone stole it within a day. Security is important. We have to make sure that the fridge is secure. In another location, we even put a microwave and someone tried to steal it so I had to make a new box for the microwave to be in. You need to figure out what your community is like and what its needs are.

The fridges are accessible 24/7. Because the city is so horrible in terms of working with unhoused people or people who need food. There is an actual legislation that says that you can get a citation if you get caught feeding people on the streets.

Latisha Springer the founder of Free99Fridge visited several businesses that have publicly accessible spots around their premises in order to avoid putting the fridge on city property. The businesses sponsor the electricity and by putting the fridges on their properties, we avoid getting into any kind of problem with the city. Our city actively fights against unhoused / homeless people. You see people walking around the street and you know the city doesn’t take care of them in any way. People are living under the bridges and the city recently put rocks there to make it too uncomfortable for people to sleep and shelter there. You are constantly fighting against these measures. As a creative person, I feel compelled to work on these types of problems rather than on aesthetic problems. Producing something for a gallery or for a middle-class and upper-class audience doesn’t make any sense to me. I find it more meaningful to help solve actual problems.

This is going to sound naive but have you tried speaking with people who are in charge in Atlanta? With people working at the local government?

I know one politician: Park Cannon. She is a state representative and she’s a queer identifying Black woman. She’s pretty progressive and ready to listen and to share information.

Apart from her, I’d say that the Atlanta city council and the Atlanta government are inherently corrupt. If you look at their actions and compare them with their promises, you realise how bad the situation is. And if you think about the Black Lives Matter protests of last Summer and how the government pushed back, how violent the police were to people who were just trying to vocalise their concerns, you see how difficult it is to continue to put in the effort and energy to try and convince these people when it seems that their actions are so self-serving. I haven’t had faith in the government since I started working on this type of projects. If I apply for grants to work on community air projects, I usually don’t get it. I’d rather spend the time doing a fund raiser with my community in order to develop new opportunities. It’s hard because we are in a system where capitalism always prevails over communities and profits over people. All day every day.

Who or what were your sources of inspiration when it comes to Mutual Aid Projects?

One project I find amazing is Precious Plastic which was started by Dave Hakkens. You can go to their website and download blueprints and instructions to build shredding machines and melting machines to recycle plastic and turn them into new objects. Dave tries to help other makers build these tools themselves.

I want to give a shout out to Couchsurfing. It allowed me to travel around Europe in a non-capitalistic way and to connect with great people.

A local project I really like is Queer Threads. It’s a project started by Southern Fried Queer Pride and it focuses on black creativity but it is also supporting queer people. It’s a pop up thrift store specifically for queers and trans people. A lot of the time, people who are transitioning really struggle to pay for the whole process, for new clothes and other things that will help them achieve their new identity. But now you can go to Queer Threads and buy clothes super cheap. It’s both economically-friendly and a great way to offer social support for some members of the community.

Photo courtesy of Maggie Kane

Thanks Maggie!

Maggie Kane’s course Modelling for mutual aid. Toolkit for building supportive networks is organised by The School of Machines, Making & Make Believe. The classes will take place online every Saturday from 20 February until 20 March 2021.

Warning: the book I’m about to review is in French and yes, I misled you when i gave an english title to this post. Apologies for that but I found the research of its authors so interesting, I wanted to share some of it with you.

In 1494, during his second trip to the Americas, Christopher Columbus is shocked by the storms he witnesses off the coasts of Jamaica. He believes however that the violent rains can be tamed by massive deforestations. Not only would the climate be less humid but the island could be turned into another hotspot of sugar production. After all, the scheme had worked 50 years ago when the Spanish and the Portuguese colonised Madeira and the Canary Islands: they put the forests in the virgin islands on fire and replaced the vegetation with sugarcane.

We tend to think that the anthropic dimension of climate change is a very modern debate. In Les révoltes du ciel. Une histoire du changement climatique XVe-XXe siècle, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher demonstrate that explorers, geologists, statesmen, historians, physicists, biologists and philosophers have been talking about climate change and geoengineering long before the two fields of research even had a name. Since the 15th Century, Europeans were not only preoccupied with heavy storms, dry landscapes, unseasonably dark Summers and unexpectedly cold regions (as is to be expected in mostly agrarian economies) but sometimes they were also confident that human interventions could tame those inconveniences.

Mastering the climate was an obsession of governments, especially British, French and Spanish governments, up until the mid-19th century. The book demonstrates quite convincingly how their belief that climates could be manipulated at will was used as a compelling argument to colonise the Americas and Africa.

In the 17th Century, colonising Europeans were shocked by the icy, long Winter of what is now Canada. How could the region be located at the same latitude as France and be so damn cold? Explorer Marc Lescarbot postulated that Canadian forests were so vast and so dense that they prevented the sun from warming up the earth. The colonisers believed that indigenous populations were to blame: they had not burnt the forests, worked the land and improved its value and the climate. Therefore, they didn’t really own the land.

And when European governments set their sights on colonising the Maghreb, they accused local populations of having degraded the climate. This time, however, the eco-racist reasoning was that populations in Arabic countries didn’t like trees. Not only were they unable to influence the climate but they had even destroyed and corrupted it by not turning the desert into forests. History would later show how much harm French colonisation would do to the environment in Algeria but that’s a story for another day.

This imperialist geo-engineering emphasis on forests stemmed from a belief that planting trees or cutting them to make way for crops modified the water cycle and thus the climate.

This colonial way to inhabit the Earth had its critics. In the 18th century, horticulturist and botanist Pierre Poivre was talking about how colons were responsible for climate collapse. Later, Alexander von Humboldt would denounce colonialism and say the european colonisers are destroying cities, people and climates in the Americas. What is striking in the first few chapters of the book is the very optimistic, almost Promethean, vision of climate change that Europeans used to have.

Marta Zafra, Felipe IV a caballo, after Velázquez. Part of the “+ 1.5º C changes everything” campaign, 2019 © WWF Espagne / Musée du Prado”

The climate was also the source of deep anxieties. 18th-century naturalist, cosmologist and encyclopédiste Buffon, for example, developed the theory that the Earth was a fragment of the Sun that was slowly cooling down. At first, it was great, it enabled life to bloom on Earth but in the future, it would become too cold for life to continue. Our planet was heading towards what he calls a thermic death. He did however believe that European societies could “improve” the climate in order to push back the death of life on Earth. The book also explores the heated debates around the anthropic causes of climate change that emerged during the French Revolution. The Revolutionaries accused the monarchy of having mismanaged the forests which had led to a degradation of the climate in France. The yields were poor, people were hungry. Royalists, on the other hand, accused the Revolutionaries of having destroyed the forests and with them, the climate.

The climate concerns lost their urgency around the second half of the 19th, when trains, roads, steamboats, new agricultural methods and more generally the Industrial Revolution put a stop to famines and discomforts brought about by poor climate. Ironically, it’s also the moment when the greenhouse gases responsible for climate change would start to intensify drastically.

For Fressoz and Locher, the current climate awareness closes a parenthesis. Blinded by the wonders of technology, the Westerners of the late 19th and 20th Century forgot what their predecessors had known for centuries: nature and culture are deeply intertwined. As L’invention du colonialisme vert (The Invention of Green Colonialism) –another book written in French- shows, the West hasn’t entirely lost its colonialist drive. Today, vast areas of lands in Africa are turned into natural parks to compensate for the carbon dioxide emissions of the very rich counties. The populations who have lived there and taken care of the landscapes for generations are expropriated. Just because Westerners think they know better what “nature” should look like.

If you want to know more about the book, ID4D has an interview with Fabien Locher.