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

[Patricia Zimmermann]

Babak, Wendy, and Jeff's post raise provocative issues about the hinge between the mobile and the performative, between the transnational and the specificity of place. 

They also problematize the ever-fluid term "environment" as they enact recalibrations between ecologies and humans via apps and actions.  

In Derive, the app functions as a hinge between place, conceptual rerouting, mobilities enacted and performed. In Monsantra, the plantbots themselves perform a hinge between the ecological and the industrial, between space and place.  Both projects suggest reorganizations and reroutings between the technological, the natural, the geographic, the social.  

Babak, Ismail, Wendy and Jeff, I wonder if you might share with us how this conceptual  and ecological notion of mobilities is worked out in your projects?  What are its constituents? How can we consider it an intervention into the stasis of the pastoral and the transnational as configured by neoliberal capital?  How do mobilities in all their modalities and iterations inform this reconstruction of relationships between virtual, digital, analog, embodied?

Patty

Patricia R. Zimmermann, Ph.D.
Professor of Screen Studies
Roy H. Park School of Communication
Codirector, Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival

Ithaca College
953 Danby Road
Ithaca, New York 14850 USA

http://faculty.ithaca.edu:83/patty/
http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff


________________________________________
From: empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of Dale Hudson <dale.hudson at nyu.edu>
Sent: Friday, November 6, 2015 8:41 AM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] week one | mobile apps and environmental performance

----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Thanks, Jeff.

Patty and I really loved the way that the PlantBots initiate discussions without the same potentially threatening affect of more direct approaches to documenting the health and environmental hazards of GMOs, which we imagined as a corollary of sorts to ways that corporations exercise intellectual property to discourage innovation with digital technologies and media content.

Could you tell us more about what you’re been doing int relation to pollinator decline? I would also be interested to know whether you and Wendy have been thinking of any of these issues in relation to indigenous rights?

Best,
Dale


On Nov 5, 2015, at 17:00, Jeff Schmuki <jschmuki at gmail.com> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Hello Dale and All,
>
> PlantBot Genetics began as a street-based project where we would release PlantBots into public spaces.  These humorous PlantBot Invasions would easily draw attention, and once someone stops for a moment, they will ask a question. Humor is a vital ingredient as it creates a safe place for the discussion to occur.  Those visiting hopefully come away empowered through links, published information, and guidelines for better food and environmental practices at home. Today we often use an 18’ off-grid, trailer (ArtLab) converted into a mobile platform containing a library of information and hands-on activities. Most are surprised at the proliferation of GM products in the market and being unlabeled, we all are consuming them. Is it better to have a choice? When the project began in 2009, most were unaware of GMOs and wanted to learn more. Today many do know and while some just want to play with the PlantBots, complex discussions on supporting transparency in food labeling, supporting local farming, composting, pollinator decline and native plants, always transpire. Everyone seems to have a good time and PlantBot fun transcends language wherever we are. GM research is being done worldwide today, and is a complex issue yet, "what will it all become" is an interesting question. PlantBot Genetics believes conversations from these events is powerful and provides the opportunities for change, whether it be at the individual level or through community-wide discourse. Most recently we have been focusing on pollinator decline in the US and abroad.
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