[-empyre-] week one | mobile apps and environmental performance

Wed Nov 4 15:40:26 AEDT 2015

01–07 November 2015: 
WEEK 1—MOBILE APPS AND ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCES

We would like to open the discussion by thinking about the potentials and limitations of locative media and performance in relation to questions of mobility/immobility and history with a few examples of projects that we discuss in our book. 

Babak Fakhmzadeh and Ismail Farouk’s SowetoUprisings.com (2008) is an ongoing project that facilitates a collaborative rewriting of history about the student uprisings against Apartheid in 1976, particularly in the context of South Africa’s official presentation of its history for the 2010 World Cup. The project also raises important questions about access and trust.

DesChene + Schmuki’s The Monsantra Project (2010) sends PlantBots, edible plants grafted to remote-controlled robots, into our everyday environments from supermarkets to nature reserves in order to initiate discussions of GMOs, particularly in the United States, where they are less regulated (and perhaps understood) than elsewhere. The project also included a Mobile Art Lab where participants can make their own PlantBots and learn more about GMOs.

Finally, Babak Fakhmzadeh and Eduardo Cachuco’s Dérive.app (2013) combines the radical politics of the Situationists’ concept of “dérive” with the highly controlled mobile networks that power our smart phones. The project also facilitates practices of dériving by prompting users to follow instructions on task cards in a variety of decks that help disorient/reorient yet also track movements via GPS.

We will invite our guests to write more about these projects as well as their current and other previous ones.

Best,
Dale and Patty

Guest biographies

Babak Fakhmzadeh (Dérive.app and SowetoUprisings.com), Brazil/Netherlands

Babak was working in ICT4D (2001) before it had a name, never really left it, and knows how to throw together a pretty mean combination of a host of web technologies. He designed a method to geotag Flickr photos (2006) before Flickr was doing it, brought photomarathons to Africa (2007) and won the Highway Africa new media award (2007) with Ismail Farouk. Work of his was selected to represent Uganda at the World Summit Award, twice (2011, 2012), winning the global competition in 2012 with Eduardo Cachucho. Twice, he made it to the Guinness book of records (1994, 2011). He's had both joint (2007) and solo (2011) photography exhibitions and created what was probably the first mobile phone based city tour (2004) as well as what probably was the first QR-code assisted smartphone-based city tour (2009). His 'lorem ipsum' of photos (2014) currently serves 1.5 million photos per month.

Ismail Farouk (SowetoUprisings.com), South Africa

Ismail Farouk is an artist and urban geographer. In his practice, he focuses on developing creative responses to racial hatred, social injustice and ghettoization. Currently, he holds the position of Researcher at the African Centre for Cities (University of Cape Town); he is responsible, there, for the Central Citylab project and, in this context, focuses on urban cultures. His work has appeared in several exhibitions: Afropolis (Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Cologne, 2010); Urban Concerns (Johannesburg Art Gallery, 2008); ZA: Young Art from South Africa (Palazzo delle Papesse, Sienna, Italy, 2008;Apartheid: The South African Mirror (CCCB, Barcelona, 2007). In 2008, he was a fellow at the MAK Centre for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles; this residency gave rise to the exhibit Canceled Without Prejudice (2008-2009). Ismail Farouk was the first recipient of the Sylt Quelle Cultural Award for Southern Africa (2008), presented by the Goethe Institut, South Africa.

DesChene + Schmuki (The Monsantra Project), United States/Canada

Canadian artist Wendy DesChene and American artist Jeff Schmuki began practicing as PlantBot Genetics in 2009. Both artists developed strong connections to the natural environment at an early age. Wendy is part indigenous people of Canada. Her father built an off-grid lakefront cabin in the deep forest of Ontario where the family has spent several months every year since she was a toddler. Jeff was raised in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, an environment of extremes that nurtured a unique relationship to the fragile landscape and a respect for limited natural resources. PlantBot Genetics creates installations, interventions, and collaborations that combine activism, research, and social space to foster discussion and generate action in the area of ecological awareness. By linking environmental issues to a diverse array of creative operations, DesChene + Schmuki extends the “knowledge of the moment”, demonstrates the fragile connection between the natural world and personal action, and offers simple, positive changes that increase sustainability.
On Nov 4, 2015, at 8:13, Dale Hudson <dale.hudson at nyu.edu> wrote:

> Welcome to the November discussion, “Transnational Environments and Locative Places.” 
> 
> This month we invite special discussants whose new media practices reflect, reconstruct, recalibrate, and rethink each of these terms. An ecological way of thinking demands tracing these complex, mobile intersections between the technological, the natural, the aesthetic, the geographical, the social, and the migratory in order to understand them—and then act on them. Ecology means understanding how things, people, and ideas are interconnected. Ecology also suggests constant movement, change, composting, migration, growth, decay, renewal. The artists and collectives featured this month move from interpretations of representation towards encounters with presentation. The artists, designers, and collectives featured this month speculate on the volatile conjunctural folds between collaboration, participation, infiltration, intervention, micropublics, and the politics of ecologies and place. This investigation is designed to open up territories and places to consider the hinge between transnational environments and locative places in new media as a necessary and urgent social practice. We hope the discussion energizes speculations and provocations, unresolved terrains rather than fixed maps.
> 
> 
> 
> On Nov 4, 2015, at 5:39, Renate Terese Ferro <rferro at cornell.edu> wrote:
> 
> 
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Welcome to our November discussion on -empyre soft-skinned space,
>> Transnational Environments and Locative Places.  The discussion will be
>> moderated by long-time -empyre friends
>> Patricia R. Zimmermann (United States), and Dale Hudson (United Arab
>> Emirates/United States).  We are thrilled that their recent book Thinking
>> Through Digital MediaTransnational Environments and Locative Places
>> http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/thinking-through-digital-media-dale-hud
>> son/?isb=9781137433619
>> has been the  catalyst for this month¹s topic which highlights conceptual
>> issues in global digital media practices. Thanks Patty, Dale and all of
>> your guests for joining us this month.  I have included the moderator¹s
>> biographies below. 
>> 
>> Moderator Biographies:
>> DALE HUDSON (UAE/USA) is a media theorist, critic, and curator.  Dale
>> Hudson is Associate Professor (NTE) and Curator of Film and New Media at
>> New York University Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. His work appears in
>> American Quarterly, Cinema Journal, Screen, and other journals and
>> anthologies. He is coauthor (with Patricia Zimmermann) of Thinking Through
>> Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places (Palgrave,
>> 2015). He curates online exhibitions for the Finger Lakes Environmental
>> Film Festival (FLEFF), and served on the preselection committee for the
>> Abu Dhabi Film Festival (ADFF).
>> 
>> PATRICIA R. ZIMMERMANN (USA) is Professor of Screen Studies and Codirector
>> of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival at Ithaca College, USA
>> (www.ithaca.edu/fleff <http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff>). Her books include
>> Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film; States of Emergency:
>> Documentaries, Wars, Democracies; and Mining the Home Movie: Excavations
>> in Histories and Memories. With Dale Hudson, she is coauthor of Thinking
>> Through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places
>> (Palgrave, 2015). Two new books, Open Spaces: Openings, Closing and
>> Thresholds of International Public Media (University of St. Andrews Press)
>> and The Flaherty: 60 Years in the Cause of Independent Cinema (coauthored
>> with Scott MacDonald) (Indiana University Press), will be published in
>> 2016.
>> 
>> 
>> Renate Ferro
>> Visiting Associate Professor of Art
>> Cornell University
>> Department of Art
>> Tjaden Hall, Office 306
>> Ithaca, NY  14853
>> Email: rferro at cornell.edu
>> URL:  http://www.renateferro.net
>>          http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net
>> Lab:   http://www.tinkerfactory.net
>> 
>> Managing Moderator of -empyre- soft skinned space
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/
>> 
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
> 

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