<div dir="ltr">Welcome to October, 2017 on -empire- soft-skinned space!<br><br>Radical Aesthetics of Multispecies Worlding, Eco-Art, and Solidarity in a More-than-human Capitalocene<br>Moderated by Margaretha Haughwout (US) with invited discussants<br><br>October 1 to 7th Week 1: Radical Entanglements, Radical Aesthetics, EcoAesthetic Systems<br>Discussants: Valentine Cadieux (US), Lissette Olivares (US) Randall Szott (US)<br>With Guest: Antonio Roman-Alcala (US)<br><br>October 8th to 14th Week 2: Mediated Natures, Speculative Futures and Justice<br>Discussants: Julie Andreyev (CA), Grisha Coleman (US), Meredith Drum (US), Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa (US)<br>With Guests Tyler Fox (US), Jordan Yerman (CA)<br><br>October 15th to 21st Week 3: Weedy Resistance & Debt Solidarity with the More-than-Human<br>Discussants: Ellie Irons (US), Christopher Kennedy (US), Max Haiven (CA), Cassie Thornton (US)<br><br>October 22nd to 31st Week 4: Capitalocene Times: from Entangled Plants-People to Cheap Food-Sick Consumers <br>Discussants: Elaine Gan (PH,US), Jason Moore (US), Joline Blais (US)<br><br>-- <br><br>This month, we will ask about radical aesthetics, ecological arts practices, multispecies worldings, and the possibilities for survival in the epoch many, including Jason W. Moore and Donna Haraway, term the Capitalocene. Those of us who align with nonhuman others in resistance, revolution, and recuperation [1] often rally around sociopolitical acts of worlding; we might identify with creative arts practice; or, we might collaborate through agroecology, urbanism, or citizen science, for example. Undoing the modernist binary of culture and nature -- which masks the hierarchy of human, subhuman, and nonhuman, and which fuel the engines of capitalism and colonialism -- is of critical importance, and underlies our work.<br><br>Capitalocene, a term that challenges the problematic universalizing framework of the Anthropocene, decenters "anthropos" or humanity in general, and centers instead on regimes of power and wealth that exploit human labor and labor beyond-the-human. Moore recognizes capitalism as an entire way of organizing nature — "a planetary system of power, capital, and nature". Capitalism, to Moore, is a "world-ecology" with a specific history — occurring over the past 500 years — and perhaps, therefore, possible to overcome. To Moore and Haraway, we need to look to the early modern period, to see the beginning of the market system, and its resultant colonial violence on and upheavals of humans, plants, animals, entire ecologies. [2]<br><br>This month, [-empyre-]'s guests will extend, complicate and perhaps occasionally answer the following questions:<br><br>Week One :: Radical Entanglements, Radical Aesthetics, EcoAesthetic Systems ::<br>What are the radical aesthetics of ecological practice? How do systems and systems theory inform or depend on a radical aesthetics of multispecies worlding and ecological art in the Capitalocene? How do our practices reify or undo systems and the binaries of modernity? How does this kind of work engage the Capitalocene?<br><br>Week Two :: Mediated Natures, Speculative Futures and Justice ::<br>How can we understand terms like justice, solidarity, ethics, survival, radicality in the Capitalocene? What are the stakes, the costs and the possible futures for different ecologies and the humans that live amongst them?<br> <br>Week Three :: Weedy Resistance & Debt Solidarity with the More-than-Human ::<br>Given that art so often contributes to regime of capital, is it realistic to think there is potential for our work to contribute to its undoing? What are some ways that multispecies artists and multispecies worlders achieve resistance? Can we include other engagements beyond-the-human — hauntings, challenges to life, that can aid in revolutionary ecologies?<br><br>Week Four :: Capitalocene Times: from Entangled Plants-People to Cheap Food-Sick Consumers::<br>Might attention to specific crop commodities such as sugar, rice, and blueberries teach us alternate ways of mapping global, regional, local economies? What kinds of temporalities and historical materialisms are enacted or destroyed by the cultivation of particular crops? Do revolutionary ecologies call into being other temporalities and speculative futures?<br><br><br>1. Deborah Bird Rose, Reports From a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonization (Sidney: University of New South Wales Press, 2004).<br><br>2. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed.<br>Jason W. Moore (Oakland: PM Press, 2016).<br><br>--<br><br>For this month of October, 2017, I invite the –empyre– subscriber list to make these issues come alive in our soft-skinned space along with our incredible group of weekly discussants and guests. I would especially like to thank Elaine Gan and Meredith Drum, two discussants in later weeks, for raking through ideas with me, and for offering so much great feedback and insight. I am so energized by the candor, enthusiasm, and brilliance on these topics of multispecies worlding that have already emerged with this month’s discussants.<br><br>-Margaretha <br><br> <br><br>TO MAKE A POST TO THE SUBSCRIPTION LIST USE:<br><br><<a href="mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au">empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a>><br><br> <br><br>TO ACCESS ARCHIVES USE THIS URL:<br><br><a href="http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/">http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/</a><br><br> <br><br>TO ACCESS THE WEBSITE FROM THE CORNELL SERVER TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT EMPYRE GO TO:<br><br><a href="http://empyre.library.cornell.edu">http://empyre.library.cornell.edu</a><br><br> <br><br>Biographies:<br><br>Moderators: Margaretha Haughwout<br>My personal and collaborative practice operates at the intersections of
technology and wilderness in the interest of imagining the possibilities
for human and ecological survival. My “practice of survival” works
across many media, often complicating the division between the
technological and the natural. I draw from legacies found in conceptual
art, socially engaged art, and biological art to ground work that
connects to biological systems and that reaches beyond scarcity models
for existence. I work collaboratively with the Guerrilla Grafters and the
Coastal Reading Group.<br><br><br>Weekly Guests:<br><br>Week 1:<br><br>Valentine Cadieux<br>Professor Valentine Cadieux is Director of Environmental Studies and Sustainability at Hamline University. Using art and science approaches to society-environment relations and specifically the political ecology and moral economy of agrifood systems, she builds publicly-engaged participatory research processes for students and members of the public to learn together about differing ways of understanding environments, and to practice performing and justifying environmental and food system interventions in collaborative ways. <br><br>Her research and teaching focus on how social and environmental practices can help people negotiate aspirations for equitable, healthy, and sustainable food systems and residential landscapes. She has developed a public Food and Society workshop for building collaborative knowledge tools that help communities build food systems. These tools focus on valuing existing community assets and capacity — and on understanding what practices can make food chain relationships sustainable and just, and can repair social and ecological traumas that have resulted from food production methods.<br><br>Lissette T. Olivares <br>Lissette T. Olivares is the co-founder and co-director of Sin Kabeza Productions, an activist collective of researchers who work together as symbionts. She is a graduate of Vassar College, Peking University, the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Between 2010 and 2012 she was an Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow at the Gallatin School of Individualized Studies where she was supported by an NYU Provost Postdoctoral Fellowship for Academic Diversity. In 2012 SKP produced their first architectural intervention, SEEDBANK: An eco evo devo design fiction in the SF Mode, designed for posthumanist research at dOCUMENTA(13), which was published in the Lodz Museum’s Urban Ecologies program. After an unexpected encounter with an orphaned hedgehog in Kassel Lissette became committed to wildlife rehabilitation and multispecies architecture, and has worked with Indian dogs, raccoons, squirrels, and white tailed deer. Between 2015-2016 she was a research fellow at Terreform ONE where she collaborated on the Modular Edible Cricket Farm while investigating “Speculative architecture and design for a Post Anthropos/Anthropocene.” In 2016 Lissette was selected as a rapporteur for the Feral Technologies: Unmaking Multispecies Dumps work group at the HKW’s Anthropocene Campus. She was invited to present SKP’s multispecies architectural platform at the Yinchuan Biennale Conference, while their designs were featured at the NGBK gallery in Berlin as part of the Animal Lovers exhibition. Her intradisciplinary research has been supported by the Fulbright Fellowship, Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, ICI-Berlin Curatorial Fellowship, and A Blade of Grass’ Artist Files Fellowship, which recognizes socially engaged art production. Lissette and SKP are currently engaged in a coevolutionary dream that envisions a refuge, research, and rehabilitation center for dis/placed and dis/abled wildlife that will also serve as a decolonial laboratory for eco and bio artist activist research.<br> <br><br>Randall Szott<br>Randall Szott is a writer, chef and former merchant mariner. He has an MFA in Art Critical Practices, an MA in Creative Arts, and an interdisciplinary BA with a minor in philosophy. He has given presentations at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the California College of the Arts, the University of Houston, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee among others. His writing, commentary and interviews have been published and cited widely including the recent books Say It While You Still Mean It: Conversations on Art and Practice, and I’m Going to Live the Life I Sing About In My Song: How Artists Make and Live Lives of Meaning. He recently was invited to participate in a three week National Endowment for the Humanities summer institute: Space, Place and the Humanities. He lives in Barnard, VT where he has been collaboratively developing a ten acre parcel of land using a variety of regenerative agriculture techniques. There is a small permaculture test plot on the site, as well as a dye garden, small elderberry orchard, and a two acre vineyard. He has studied mushroom cultivation with Tradd Cotter and regenerative agriculture with Darren J Doherty. His work as a chef has involved farm to table restaurants, cooking at sea, and farm to school education for a small elementary school. His ongoing research has involved the intersection of soil + social practice.<br><br><br>Guest:<br>Antonio Roman-Alcala<br>Antonio Roman-Alcalá is an educator, researcher, writer, and organizer based in Berkeley, California who has worked for just sustainable food and political systems for the past 15 years. Antonio co-founded San Francisco’s Alemany Farm, the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance, and the California Food Policy Council, and his 2010 documentary film, In Search of Good Food, can be viewed free online. He holds a BA from UC Berkeley, and an MA from ISS in The Hague. Currently, Antonio maintains the blog <a href="http://antidogmatist.com">antidogmatist.com</a>, teaches with the Urban Permaculture Institute and at UC Santa Cruz, conducts activist-scholar research, and leads the North American Agroecology Organizing Project. He is also in search of new land to farm – a tough prospect in the urbanized and gentrified San Francisco Bay Area!<br><br><br>Week 2:<br><br>Julie Andreyev<br>Julie Andreyev’s art practice, called Animal Lover, <a href="http://www.animallover.ca">www.animallover.ca</a>, explores more-than-human creativity using methods of ethics of care, respect, and play. The projects are output as new media performance, video installation, generative art, and relational aesthetics. The Animal Lover projects have been shown internationally, and are supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Andreyev recently completed her PhD at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, supported by a Joseph Armand Bombardier Doctoral Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her dissertation, Biophilic Ethics and Creativity with More-Than-Human Beings, is an interdisciplinary investigation into an expansion of ethics for more-than-human beings, examined through interspecies relational creativity in art processes. Andreyev is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Design + Dynamic Media at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.<br><br><br>Grisha Coleman<br>Grisha Coleman works as a choreographer and composer in performance and experiential media. Her work explores relationships between our physiological, technological and ecological systems. She currently holds the position of Associate Professor of Movement, Computation and Digital Media in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering, and the School of Dance at Arizona State University. Her recent art and scholarly work, echo::system, is a springboard for re-imagining the environment, environmental change, and environmental justice. Coleman is a New York City native with an M.F.A. in Composition and Integrated Media from the California Institute of the Arts. Her work has been recognized nationally and internationally; including a 2012 National Endowment Arts in Media Grant [NEA], the 2014 Mohr Visiting Artist at Stanford University, a fellowship at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, and grants from the Rockefeller M.A.P Fund, The Surdna Foundation, and The Creative Capital Foundation.<br><br><br>Meredith Drum<br>With artist Rachel Stevens, Meredith Drum co-created The Oyster City Project – a constellation of projects and events that draw attention to relationships between urban marine ecology, urban planning, neighborhood life, politics, economics and environmental justice. One component of Oyster City is an AR walking tour and game featuring 3D objects and text in real space visible with an iOS device that highlights the history and future of oysters in New York City. Another is the Fish Stories Community Cookbook a collection of seafood recipes, local histories, stories, drawings and ecological information contributed by people who live and work in the Lower East Side of NYC. Fish Stories was commissioned by Paths to Pier 42 in 2015. <br><br><br>Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa<br>Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa is a PhD candidate in Film and Digital Media at University of California Santa Cruz. His dissertation "The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research of Animal Life" focuses on the animal research films made by behavioral psychology during the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. His essay “Celluloid Specimens: Animal Origins for the Moving Image,” is being published in the forthcoming book Viscera, Skin, and Physical Form: Corporeality and Early Cinema. Schultz-Figueroa has curated and screened works at such venues as Anthology Film Archives, Light Industry, Artists’ Television Access, Northwest Film Forum, and The Shanghai Biennial, and his writing has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Culture Machine, and Photomeditations Machine.<br><br>Guests<br>Tyler Fox<br>Jordan Yerman<br><br><br>Week Three<br><br>Ellie Irons<br>Ellie Irons is an artist and educator based in Brooklyn and Troy, New York. She works in a variety of media, from video to workshops to gardening, to reveal how human and nonhuman lives intertwine with other earth systems. For the past five years her work and research have revolved around spontaneous urban plants, including the co-founding of two ongoing collaborative projects, the Next Epoch Seed Library and the Environmental Performance Agency. Her solo and collaborative work has been part of recent group exhibitions exploring contemporary environmental issues, including Social Ecologies, Emergent Ecologies, and the ongoing Chance Ecologies series. Her recent writing has appeared in Temporary Art Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Landscape Architecture Futures and on the blog Inhabiting the Anthropocene. She is a 2015 NYFA Fellowship recipient, a 2015 Turbulence Commission grantee and a 2017 Asian Cultural Council Fellow. She received her BA from Scripps College in Los Angeles, where she studied studio art and environmental science, followed by an MFA in painting and drawing from Hunter College. After teaching at CUNY and Brown University for several years, she is now pursuing a practice-based PhD at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her PhD research focuses on the intersection of socially engaged art and ecology fieldwork in the form of “public fieldwork”, a method of collaborative artistic practice designed to decenter the human and provoke engagement with the biological and cultural implications of weedy habitats and lifeforms.<br><br>An artist and educator based in Brooklyn and Troy, New York, Ellie Irons works in a variety of media, from walks to WIFI to gardening, to reveal how human and nonhuman lives intertwine with other earth systems. Her recent work focuses on plants, people and urban ecology in the so-called Anthropocene. Irons received her BA from Scripps College in Los Angeles, her MFA from Hunter College, CUNY, and is currently pursing a PhD in Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.<br><br><br>Christopher Lee Kennedy<br>Christopher Lee Kennedy is a teaching artist and organizer who creates site-specific projects that explore relationships between the built and natural environment, queer identity, and alternative education. These projects generate publications, research, performances, sculptures, and installations often in collaboration with other artists, community groups, or youth. With a background in environmental engineering, Kennedy uses field science techniques such as transects, specimen collecting, sampling, and mapping, in addition to new forms of storytelling and embodied experience to help archive and visualize complex systems. For the past few years, Kennedy has been increasingly interested in how urban ecological systems are adapting to global climate shifts including rising temperatures, toxic soils, mega-droughts, flooding events, and unprecedented urban development. His projects aim to question conventional notions of “wilderness” and “nature,” and to re-think the value of so-called wastelands — vacant lots, highway medians, post-industrial sites and transient green spaces — as ecologically, culturally, and politically important for both humans and non-humans.<br><br>Kennedy was born in Ocean County, New Jersey and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He has worked collaboratively on projects shown at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, the Levine Museum of the New South, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Ackland Art Museum and the Queens Museum. Kennedy holds a B.S. in Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a M.A. in Education from NYU, and a PhD in Education and Cultural Studies from the University of North Carolina.<br><br><br>Max Haiven<br>Cassie Thornton<br>The University of the Phoenix is a premiere for-prophet learning platform committed to teaching the dead and the living to rise up together to avenge the crimes and cruelties of global capitalism. It organizes site- and context-specific educational encounters towards a radical financial literacy.<br><br>We are the world’s only institution of higher education dedicated to accumulating the human capital of the no-longer-living. This nomadic institution offers participatory classes on the themes of finance, debt, money and value. We also offer revenge consultancy services to those who have been wronged by global capitalism, and sometimes teach the dead to rise up and become stars.<br><br>The University of the Phoenix is a spectre that possesses the body of the for-profit university and the good-natured neoliberal model of “social practice” art. It is a free-school and research institute for the dead that is also sometimes open to “not-yet-dead” auditors. It teaches rigorous site-specific classes based on parapsychological local inquiry and ghoulish interventions. It is funny, but not a joke.<br><br>The University of the Phoenix is a collaboration between Cassie Thornton and Max Haiven at the haunted intersection of art, research and activism.<br><br><br><br>Week 4:<br><br>Joline Blais, Associate Professor of New Media at UMaine, is a mother, educator, writer, permaculture practitioner, ecovillage founding partner, competitive rower, avid hiker, and alpine ski coach. She co-directs Still Water, and co-founded LongGreenHouse, a “communiversity” project integrating the Wassokeag K-8 school, UMaine classes, permaculture practices, and Wabanaki Longhouse traditions. Her subsequent work at the Belfast Ecovillage spanned 8 years and involved permaculture design, art projects and workshops, land use governance, restorative justice facilitation, dynamic governance, non-violent communication and transition town training, and initial development of food forest orchards, as well as design, construction and research of a net-zero, solar energy "passive haus."<br><br>Her 2006 book At the Edge of Art investigates how new media art puts the power of networks and distributed creativity into the hands of ordinary citizens in a variety of non-art contexts. Her other publications and creative work explore the overlap of digital culture, indigenous culture and permaculture. Currently she is working on Wild Difference, a project to prevent the extinction of Wild Maine blueberries and the local culture that support them via a lead grant for the development of a physical Wild Blueberry Museum, and a pending NEH grant to develop the companion online virtual museum. Her time in the forests, and on and in the water (liquid or frozen) help maintain her own wild connection to her homeland.<br><br><br>Elaine Gan<br>Elaine Gan is Mellon Digital Humanities fellow at University of Southern California and art director of Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA). Raised in the big old cities of Manila and New York, Gan is an artist and interdisciplinary scholar who studies how human-plant interactions situate geopolitical histories. Recent projects include co-editing an anthology, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (Minnesota 2017) and co-curating an artscience exhibition, DUMP! Multispecies Making and Unmaking (Kunsthal Aarhus 2015). <a href="http://elainegan.com">http://elainegan.com</a><br><br><br>Jason Moore<br>Jason W. Moore is an environmental historian and historical geographer at Binghamton University, where he is associate professor of sociology. He is author or editor, most recently, of Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso, 2015), Capitalocene o Antropocene? (Ombre Corte, 2017), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (PM Press, 2016), and, with Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (University of California Press, 2017). His books and essays on environmental history, capitalism, and social theory have been widely recognized, including the Alice Hamilton Prize of the American Society for Environmental History (2003), the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the Section on the Political Economy of the World-System (American Sociological Association, 2002 for articles, and 2015 for Web of Life), and the Byres and Bernstein Prize in Agrarian Change (2011). He is chair (2017-18) of the Political Economy of the World-System Section (ASA), and coordinates the World-Ecology Research Network.<br><br> <br><br> <br><br><br>--<br><a href="http://beforebefore.net">beforebefore.net</a><br><a href="http://guerrillagrafters.org">guerrillagrafters.org</a><br><a href="http://coastalreadinggroup.com">coastalreadinggroup.com</a><br>--<br><br></div>