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

Mon Nov 16 06:03:03 AEDT 2015

Ismail, Babak, Jeff , Wendy, and Empyreans--

I am re-entering our discussion of mobile apps after an intense week on the Ithaca College campus of walk outs, die-ins, letter writing, actions, small meetings, large meetings, classes rerouted, conversations about race and corporatization in hallways and offices, and international press coverage of our struggle.  It has been exhilarating and exhausting, a contradictory moment that is polyphonic and multiple.  

I thought I would offer a few posts with thoughts about the incredible works and interventions offered by Ismail, Babak, Jeff and Wendy  to bring together some threads about mobile apps and environmental performances. In another post, I will unravel and open up how this last weeks' set of ideas might open up thinking about the current  student and faculty struggles in South Africa and in the US.  The conjunctures and confluences of the moment have provoked some new thinking, and some new unknowns.

I was struck by some provocative thematics that emerged across the post by Ismail, Babak, Jeff, and Wendy's writing and projects.  I wanted to itemize what I discerned here in hopes of easy reading, as a set of speculations:

1. The notion of "street-based projects", in  Plant Bots, Art Lab, Soweto Uprisings, Derive, where the experience of the urban or rural environment is not essentialized but rather problematized as a polyphonic confluence of science, movement, bodies, insects, buildings. The street based project modality seems to mobilize what is unauthorized, unnoticed, unexamined, a micro-reclamation of public space through establishing tentative new connections between the animate, the living, the body, bodies, the anthropocene, and the inanimate, multilayered hinges and folds that disrupt invisibilities and unities

2. The idea of tools like apps and mobile labs disrupting what Babak has called "the unification of experience," (through guidebooks) and what Jeff and Wendy identify as the lack of transparency in food labeling and GMOs. These projects undertake a larger, more complex projects than simply dismantling these imagined and discursively enforced unities. From these wonderful descriptions of the projects and the links shared, these projects produce new systems of relations and experience. They produce a series of hinges through apps, people, places, environments, performances.  The environment is then reconstituted not as a pastoral unity, but as a discovery of new multiple pathways.

3. These projects are adaptable to the environments that they engage. Derive asks the user to rethink urban environments through the process of focus on the "unnoticed".  The Art Lab of Monsantra adapts to indoor gallery lab, mobile labs, greeen houses.  Each project demonstrates an ecological design of adaptability and change, mutating to the environment.

4. These projects and their designers (Ismail, Babak, Wendy, Jeff) emphasize new relations, the prompting of multivalent conversations between participants in spaces previously configured as unified, closed, inaccessible, closed.  Derive as Babak puts it "puts joy back in the journey".  Plant Bots as Jeff and Wendy assert marshall humor to reframe space as safe for conversation.

5. All of these projects revolve around invoking and then materializing through design and engagement a "sense of discovery," of investigation, of movement through that which is now loosened up.

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 Patricia Zimmermann <patty at ithaca.edu>
Sent: Sunday, November 8, 2015 10:45 AM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] week one | mobile apps and environmental performance

----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Ismail,

I am struck by the history implied in your post.  It's now ten years since your project SOWETO UPRISINGS, a radical reimagining of the multiple narrative routes of protest, a historiography that generates an archive as it also maps space differently.  The other part of your post describes the student uprisings in South Africa at the moment, a movement that has been virtually erased from news coverage in the US and Europe.  I only learned of it through a Facebook link and then through the  powerful talk on radical historiographic temporalities of Premesh Lalu at a recent closing lecture at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University (mounted by Tim Murray of Empyre).

You post is so powerful.

I wondered if you might share with our list what kinds of mapping, mobile, and organizing interfaces are being deployed in this new movement?  How do they intersect with the issues you outlined?  How do they move between the digital and the embodied?  And what kinds of mobilizations in both digital and embodied, on the ground demonstrations, are evolving? It strikes me that the current student movement in South Africa perhaps opens up our discussion of mobile apps and environmental performances towards a move transnational consideration.

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.
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu