the Cell for Digital Discomfort @ The Hauntologists | BAK (Utrecht)

 

10 September–13 November 2022
BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht

18–20 November 2022
İKSV, Istanbul

2–4 December 2022
GUDSKUL, Jakarta

Participants include: Özge Açıkkol, Merve Bedir, Kerem Ozan Bayraktar, Cell for Digital Discomfort (Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak, and Jara Rocha), Dika+Lija, Philippa Driest, freethought collective, Ilgın Hancıoğlu, Alexandra Karyn, Gayatri Kodikal, Gatari Kusuma, Yen Noh, Rifandi Nugroho, İlyas Odman, Marina Papazyan, Anitha Silvia, and Zone Collective (Megan Hoetger and Kirila Cvetkovska), among others. 

The Hauntologists is a project emerging through experimentation and collective research within the 2021/2022 BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice. Engaging spectrality as a tactic to investigate and redress the conditions of brokenness of the world, it takes place in Istanbul, Jakarta, and Utrecht from 10 September until 10 December 2022 as a continuously evolving and geographically distributed discursive, performative, publishing, and exhibitionary composition.   

At present, many find themselves haunted by the persisting brokenness of the world—inequality, war, racial and gendered violence, precarity, techno-colonialism, and other perpetual crises. Can one haunt back to intervene and redress this ongoing sense of dread? Could spectrality be embraced as an embodied cultural and political sensibility to experiment with? Can research be practiced as a haunting to overcome the limits of traditional categories of knowledge, knowledge production, and so-called artistic research? 

+info: https://www.bakonline.org/program-item/the-hauntologists/

[workshop] Installing Ourselves into Libreplanet

RESCHEDULED: May 23

A workshop session to map out each of our current conditions of connecting and being together, the physical-political, and technological conditions using a diagrammatic methodology.

The workshop is geared towards installing ourselves into the conference's infrastructural spectralities by sharing, learning from and attuning to each others' conditions for connectivity, online participation and basic computer-mediated mundane day-to-day life. We want to pose this affirmation as an initial trigger: installing is about situating — attuning to our network of (inter)dependencies and attuning to the dependencies with our local and vernacular but also standardized and planetary networks.

This workshop was created in the context of the Fellowship for Situated Practice organized by BAK.

  + info: https://www.fsf.org/events/libreplanet-workshop-april-25-installing-ourselves-into-libreplanet

 

Fellowship | for Situated Practice | on Spectral Infrastructures | for Digital Discomfort

Happy to announce that this week I'm starting a 10-month fellowship at BAK, with a cohort of 18 amazing artist-researchers, joining the Cell for Digital Discomfort with dear companions Cristina Cochior and Karl Moubarak.

A CELL FOR DIGITAL DISCOMFORT

'Digital Discomfort' is a mode of dealing with, resisting, attending to and intervening into the sneaky moments of techno-capitalist innovation, linear solutionism and seamless operation. The Cell For Digital Discomfort (CFDD) wants to stay with this unease for all too comfortable modes of infrastructural becoming as a starting point for collectively exploring and experimenting ways to refuse compliance with the informatics of domination. We want to provide ourselves with spacetimes for a praxis of ongoing transdisciplinary critique of technical infrastructurations and the entangled ways they world worlds.

The urgency for the work of the CFDD is produced by the contemporary stage of global digitisation, from an infrastructural perspective: cloud-computing, hyper-connectivity, flow-management, planetary computing (which touches both material and spectral aspects of infrastructure). This results in an increase and intensification of economized forms of accounting responsibilities and their impact (eg.: carbon trade, immunity certificate, platform capitalism) which also causes a delegation of labour, of care, of response-abilites, of imagination, of damage.

The tensions that are produced necessitate a scale leap of problematics: the meso scales of the subject -- or even the municipality -- is often not accountable for the massive/turbo scale of the planetary computing of financial capitalism, the geological damage of climate change, etc. Also on the micro scale: quantum computing, molecular affection of organisms that get exposed to environmental transformations derived from ecocidal practices, turbo speed of high-speed trading and so forth, and the slow violence of an emergent point of no return.

In order to work on this, we have decided to focus the research on a cut through the technopolitical complexity of 'discomfort'. We would like to use the opportunity of the Fellowship to bring that framework in a more explicit conversation with crip techno-science, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, queer struggles and environmental justice. We are interested in developing practices that would go towards something like 'solidary discomfort'.

This means to exchange with agents that might have radically different sensibilities for what digital comfort and discomfort might mean (and to do so by means of conversations, collective practice, experiments of displacement, remediation, etc); to study the particular discomfort that haunts digital infrastructures (reading tools and texts through one another, to identify mutual affections); to extend the Catalog of Formats for Digital Discomfort with additional vectors, and anti-solutionist technologies and techniques (documenting, collecting, testing and trying, remixing, developing digital/conceptual prototypes, disseminating, partially repairing).

The tensors we identify and through whose inbetweens we would like to orient ourselves include (but are not limited to):

• Comfort-Discomfort

• Hostipital-Hospitable

• Parasite-Host

• Dependent-Independent-Interdependent

• Inclusive-Exclusive

• Unpleasant-Pleasant

• Desirable-Needed

• Welcoming-Hostile

• Awkward-Confident

• Antagonistic-Affirmative

• Seamless-Broken

• Accessible-Inaccessible

• Open-Closed

• Repair-Abolish

• Non-extractive-Extractive

• Solidary-Walled

• Caretaking/Maintenance-Stabilising/Fixing

• Continuing-Forking/Derivating

• Free-Open

• Macro-Meso-Micro

• Infra-Supra

• Turbo-Chronic-Slow

• Welfare-Goodliving

• Present-Latent-Absent

• Damaging-Damaged

• Situated-Planetary

• Foreground-Backround

• Fungible-Durable

• Inheritance/Legacy-Invention/Innovation

• Horizontal-Hierarchical

• Mundane-Universal

The work of CFDD would involve a thickening analysis of radical interdependencies (mutual constitutions of practices and tools, solidary networks, technical self-defence) and the articulation of a shift on accountability (what counts, what matters, what is read as a matter of fact/concern/care). Such analytics implies practically and conceptually engaging in the ontoepistemological shift of what has been termed as the "crisis of presence".

 

+ info about the BAK Felloship for Situated Practice and Spectral Infrastructures: https://www.bakonline.org/fellowship/2021-2022/

+ info about my work on/from the Cell: https://www.bakonline.org/person/jara-rocha/