[-empyre-] Walking the Future--- a question of reconciliation, restitution, healing?

[kanarinka]

So many great questions - I'll start with these --
>>>>From your perspective as a teacher and activist,  do you agree that a
more ‘humane’ opportunity comes from the walking the coastline project, as
they had hoped, fifty years ago? Or does feminism bring difference in a new
register?

>>>>Now that the climate change crisis is ubiquitously foretold and
documented, thanks to  big data deployments in mediated information on
every level of coding…does this context have feminist opportunity?

The Boston Coastline: Future Past project is about scaling down the
narratives and representations of climate change to the scale of the city
on the one hand and to the body on the other hand. As such I definitely
consider it to be a feminist approach as it's situating the global disaster
narrative into concrete places and bodies and temporalities and asking
people to engage with what this means for them, their city, their
neighborhood.

There has been a turn to the "non-human" and the consideration of various
kinds of interconnected ecologies, which I fully support over the
anthropocentric way of thinking. But we also need to consider that we
ourselves are still fundamentally human, we have these perceptual
mechanisms that help us make sense of the world that are related
specifically to our bodies. High-level abstract views are useful for
telling stories but not useful for communicating consequences to bodies,
families, communities (which really are the scales with which most of us
can operate and take action with effectively in the world).



---
Assistant Professor of Civic Media and Data Visualization, Emerson College
Fellow, Emerson Engagement Lab
Research Affiliate, MIT Center for Civic Media
www.kanarinka.com | @kanarinka | 617-501-2441


On Fri, Jul 1, 2016 at 3:18 PM christina at christinamcphee.net <
christina at christinamcphee.net> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> To "actually make stuff that embodies those principles (of feminist
> ethics)…”   — thanks, Catherine d’Ignazio— I’ve copied below the whole
> quote around this from your introductory post today.
>
>
> In your collaborative project with artist Andi Sutton,  “Boston Coastline:
> Future Past” , participants walk past coastline edges through the core of
> Boston — physically performing the 1630 edge as a score through the city.
>
> http://www.kanarinka.com/project/boston-coastline-future-past/
>
> In the video, the sound montage of voices delivers something like
> this…”When you put your body actually on the line… how can we emotionally
> reconcile ourselves to these various futures that are encroaching on us— an
> actual movement around the city creates a transformation of your body and
> your spirit…”
>
> I wonder, does it also create a transformation of the city (— becoming a
> question of design)?
>
>
> To raise awareness through an affective means like this one— I note your
> emphasis on ‘reconciliation’ with a future of rising sea levels….  is there
> an element of feminist ethics in the process of reconciliation? The latter
> term echoes, strangely and intertextually, in my imagination to the ’truth
> and reconciliation’ justice hearings in post-apartheid South Africa…
> making me speculate that, there is a kind of judicial, or anyway,
> judgement, element to your project?  Awareness of the old and future coast
> lines, as they were caused by urban development to fill in, and now are
> under threat (perhaps certain) of return to the ocean— is this awareness
> part of a kind of act of communal healing? as if the infill had been a kind
> of violent extension of human freehold on a delicate ecosystem?  Do you see
> this kind of work as a form of restitution? reconstitution ? …
>
>
>
> Recalling Kevin Lynch’s way-finding in Boston in the sixties:  “Our real
> task is not to prevent the world from changing but to cause it to change in
> a growth conducive and life-enhancing direction, ” Lynch wrote in  "What
> Time is This Place.” Do you think that the walking coastline project has a
> feminist aspect? Playing out the perceptual subject of time— personal and
> communal sensations—from within the matrix of big data— your project with
> Sutton follows up on Lynch and also  Lawrence and Anna Halprin’s scoring
> experiments.  These precursors hoped that such experiments would generate
> newly ‘humane’ options for urban designers and planners…
>
>
> From your perspective as a teacher and activist,  do you agree that a more
> ‘humane’ opportunity comes from the walking the coastline project, as they
> had hoped, fifty years ago? Or does feminism bring difference in a new
> register?
>
> Now that the climate change crisis is ubiquitously foretold and
> documented, thanks to  big data deployments in mediated information on
> every level of coding…does this context have feminist opportunity?
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> Catherine wrote,
>
> "In thinking about data visualization, I think we have a lot to draw on
> from the histories of critical cartography and indigenous mapping and
> feminist critique. But I feel like where we can build further is not
> stopping at critique (which is what academics so often do - point out
> oppression and leave it there, deconstruct everything and then goodbye) but
> actually move towards operationalizing critiques of power, feminist ethics
> into design principles for how to make things more just, more fair, more
> representative, etc. and then actually make stuff that embodies those
> principles. “
>
>
>
> — Christina
>
>
> http://christinamcphee.net
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
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