[ENCC Conference] Joining the dots: Practices and Imaginaries for Post-Fossil Cultures

Orihuela, Alicante, March 29-31 2023

 

 

Workshop Pierre Huyghebaert & Jara Rocha: "Towards a regenerative justice of/for digital ecologies" 

In this workshop, we will attempt an immediate practice of the pathways prospected by Femke's talk, to collectively plot towards more solidary infrastructurations with and within cultural organisations. Departing from situated digital arrangements of some voluntary projects (please bring the laptop you use at work!), we will elaborate on a set of outlines to detect and unfold modes for collaboration, mutual care and the imagining, reclaiming and maintaining of non-monocultural technocultures that would integrate digital infrastructures as elements for joyful regeneration.

ESP:

"Hacia una justicia regenerativa de/para las ecologías digitales".

En este taller, asumiremos una práctica inmediata a partir de los caminos trazados por la charla de Femke, para tramar colectivamente hacia infraestructuras más solidarias con y dentro de las organizaciones culturales.  Partiendo de los acuerdos digitales de algunos proyectos voluntarios (¡trae el portátil que usas en el trabajo!), trabajaremos con una serie de esbozos para detectar y desarrollar modos de colaboración, cuidado mutuo e imaginación, recuperación y mantenimiento de tecnoculturas no monoculturales que integren las infraestructuras digitales como elementos para una regeneración alegre.

 

Talk Femke Snelting: "Digital Dependencies: plotting infrastructure solidarity with cultural organisations"

"As digital transition is being increasingly understood as a compulsary vector for ecological transition and economical relance, cultural organisations have a role to play in plotting infrastructural solidarity without centering the extractive modes of Big Tech. In this talk, Femke will try to unpack some of the uncomfortable overlaps between digital dependency, sustainability and resilience and share examples of paranodal networking practices"

 

Recording of Femke Snelting's inspirational talk, not to be missed! --->

https://vimeo.com/818644597?login=true#_=_

Joining the dots conference overview:

Many pathways to low-carbon futures have been articulated, but most fail to engage communities in imagining themselves as being part of those futures and involved in the transition. Cultural centres play an important role in building imaginaries and providing inspiration to navigate future horizons. How can they become key actors of the necessary environmental, social and digital transition?

Post-fossil societies would look very different to the ones we inhabit today in Europe. Landscapes, transport systems, buildings, communities and indeed most social relations would be transformed. For this meeting, our guests will be practitioners, multidisciplinary researchers, artists and policymakers working on low-carbon futures, who will share the concrete questions they are working on and the practices they are building to help citizens appropriate the future and feel that they are able to create it.

Leaving petroculture behind will not happen just through mitigation of fossil fuel use. It will also require systemic and cultural change. In-depth workshops will look at how cultural organisations can

• switch to a more ethical and sustainable use of digital
• care for their human resources
• improve their environmental impact
• use art as a transformational practice

A key concern will be moving away from extractive logics - which exhaust natural resources, human resources, and data - towards collective practices for care, creation and flourishing.

+ info & registration: https://encc.eu/activities/events/joining-dots-practices-and-imaginaries-post-fossil-cultures

Keynote @ Groundings | Linnaeus University, Växjö

1-2 Dec, 2022

At the nexus of energy and agriculture, Groundings gathers a community of researchers, practitioners, and organisers in Växjö to ask what it means to ground our modes of study in collective struggle. The conference engages a diversity of research tactics in response to an ongoing shift in environmental discourse towards the extractive zones (Gómez-Barris 2017) and terminal landscapes (Diamanti 2021) of capital's energic and agricultural metabolisms as terrains across which the histories and horizons of multispecies survival, collective autonomy, and ecological flourishing are contested. Featuring keynotes from Jeff Diamanti and The Underground Division (Helen V. Pritchard, Jara Rocha, & Femke Snelting) followed by a culinary performance by local grower Zeenath Hasan, Groundings also foregrounds roundtable discussions, group readings, and other modes of collaborative study to initiate an ongoing inquiry into grounded traditions of practice-based research.

From the decolonial practices of Walter Rodney's Groundings With My Brothers (1966) to the working-class environmentalism of Sven Lindqvist's Dig Where You Stand (1978), this two-day conference aims to build a collective vocabulary and critical infrastructure around methodologies that remain accountable to the interlocking demands of decolonisation, decarbonisation, and liberation. Situated within ongoing struggles over energy and agriculture, this initial gathering asks how 'grounded environmental and territorial questions' might manifest as an 'on-the-ground set of contingent politics' (Gergan & Curley, 2021) within these fields. Whether speaking of renewable practices or large-scale farming, these terrains continue to be framed by the manifold emergent and long-standing settler colonial technologies that organize them, hardening relations to land based on domination in transnational arenas (Yang 2017) and modes of financial exploitation or extractive speculation (Dunlap 2021). Nonetheless, the current 'crisis' of energy and agriculture marks an opening for radical interventions.

Addressing both 'terrains of domination' and 'terrains of struggle,' we invite contributions across multiple formats to delineate the material, methodological, and 'epistemological grounds through which we theorize and imagine and name liberation' (McKittrick 2006; 2021). Disturbing the sediments of empire, filmmaker Filipa César's '"mining"' of historical strata' (2018) in Amílcar Cabral's agronomical texts provincialises Marxist accounts of soil metabolism while contemporary framings of 'racist environments' (Opperman 2019; Sharpe 2017), decolonial botany (Sheikh & Gray 2018), or late neoliberalism's 'polluted politics' (Onís 2021) take up lineages of anticolonial struggle to envision transformative ecologies. We might also look to feminist agroecological practices shared through generational knowledge and anticapitalist relations to land (Tamm & Wägner 1940; Sonjasdotter 2019) or to the 'grounded' place-based solidarities (Coulthard & Simpson 2016) that shape Indigenous resistance to fossil capital and colonial agronomy. Within the ancestral territory of Sápmi, which stretches across the settler states of Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia, Indigenous Sámi land is exploited through the corporate extractivism and green colonialism of wind and water energy projects. Refusing these modes of capture, Indigenous land stewardship movements such as the Áltá Action or Ellos Deatnu! counter the horizons of capitalist 'green transition' through direct actions that frame artistic practices as an intrinsic part of the struggle for self-determination (García-Antón, Gaski & Guttorm 2020; Kuhn 2020).

In taking up the provocation of militant research practices as an attempt to 'generate capacity for struggles to read themselves' (Colectivo Situaciones 2005), Groundings seeks to cement alliances between an expansive set of disciplinary coordinates including anticolonial methods, environmental humanities, artistic research, postcapitalist and decolonial design, critical geography, infrastructure studies, historical materialism, activism, solidarity studies, soil studies, queer trans*feminist technoscience, militant cinema, and beyond.

+ info, registrations and programme: https://lnu.se/en/meet-linnaeus-university/current/events/2022/groundings-from-situated-knowledges-to-terrains-of-struggle/

Groundings is supported by funding from Linnaeus University, Regenerative Energy Communities, and the Institute for Experimental Design and Media Culture (IXDM), FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern, Switzerland.

Figurations of timely extraction @ The Material Life of Time

a Temporal Belongings conference, 15th-17th March, 2021:

 

https://www.temporalbelongings.org/the-material-life-of-time.html

 

Much of the time of our lives is given to us by the relationships, properties and movements of worldly materialities. Atmospheric carbon has irrevocably transformed agricultural time (Kassam et al 2018), microplastics are queering reproductive time (Davis 2015), dissolvable sutures have remade the time of health, while rare earth minerals make possible the mobile phones at the heart of debates around acceleration and time squeeze (Wajcman 2008). In all of these ways and more, we see material objects — their uses, cost, manufacture, changing composition and characteristics — at the heart of modern debates about how time should be used, lived and valued.

A deeper recognition of the material lives of time thus attunes us to questions of how times are being made, where its materials are coming from, who or what is being displaced in the process, and what kinds of material practices are being called forth. How does the global race for resources in a time of climate breakdown, including for oil, gas, arable land and fresh water, make new times of migration, colonialism and dispossession? How are new bio- and medical technologies affecting embodied temporalities? How are particular generational, political or bureaucratic times out-of-synch (or not) with geological times, biological times or ecological times, and what are the consequences? What kind of resonance do concepts such as ‘modernity’, ‘post-modernity’, ‘growth’, ‘recession’, ‘crisis’ and ‘acceleration’ take on from this perspective? What kinds of speculative futures are being produced and for whom (Keeling 2019)?

‘Materialising’ time also works back on concepts, approaches and methods for studying time by calling into question the dualistic treatment of ‘social time’ and ‘natural time’ which has structured a significant proportion of work on time (Adam 1994). We are asked to  rethink key temporal concepts by attending more closely to their material basis and the ways these materials remain, morph, wear away and disappear with changing environments and socialities, “not in a relation of linear unfolding, but threaded through one another in a nonlinear enfolding of spacetimemattering” (Barad 2010). Another set of questions thus revolves around how to study time in its complexity, the difficulties that disciplinarity presents, and what to make of the continual rediscovery that time is not unitary and objective, but multiple and situated.

 

Figurations of timely extraction (Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting)

 This piece engages with three figurations of timely extraction: consortium, borehole and amalgam. It makes use of the contaminated and contaminating practice of figuration to plot stories that highlight some of the milestones of deadly collaboration, of optimised acceleration, and of sedimented damage. These stories might provide a way to make present the time-space complexities that emerge from the connections between extractivism, computation and semiotic-material values. Attempting to expose the rocky figures of consortium, borehole and amalgam, implies exposing also some of their interdependent articulations such as transnational alliances, gold mining and geocomputation and how they shape life/non-life temporalities. The dynamic crossings of time and matter that they are embedded in establish a dynamics of repeated damage, via latent regimes which maintain extractive forces, practices and modes. 

 

ìnfo and full programme: https://www.temporalbelongings.org/uploads/6/8/8/9/6889024/mlot_full_programme_210308.pdf 

 

4S/EASST 2020 -- Methods in Studying Data/Natures -- Trans*feminist scanning practices for geocomputation

Panel: Methods in Studying Data/Natures

Wed, August 19, 10:00 to 11:40am CEST (10:00 to 11:40am CEST), virPrague, VR 16

 

Abstract

During recent years geocomputation has become increasingly entangled with so-called 4D visualization. The contemporary infrastructure of fossil fuel extraction depends on these software tools for geological data handling, interpretation and modelling of subterranea. In this paper, in the context of co-research workshops, as part of the creative practice research work "ROCK REPO" we discuss hands-on engagement with entangled game engines and earth modelling software--collective explorations of the space-time matterings of geocomputation data. We argue that when undergrounds are rendered as 4D objects – these imaginaries align with other geo-computation tools, to form normative understandings of inhuman agency and the representation of the earth-as-resource. From smooth sliders that move across mega-annums of geological time to the technical temporalities of generating point clouds through LiDAR, these practices, make present undergrounds as visible data volumes in space-time. In turn these volumes are rendered as available for timely and optimised extraction. Drawing on the inquiries of the “ROCK REPO” we suggest that there are multiple space-time matterings present in computational environments. In addition we argue that this is a practice of “eventual (in)consistency” in which multiple renderings of space-time intersect all the time and at the same time not at all. As a response we propose a set of trans*feminist scanning data practices for affirmative responsibility-taking.

The Underground Division (aka Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting)