[-empyre-] ArtTechFood: Week 2

[Amanda McDonald Crowley]

Thanks for introducing these two projects, Shu Lea,

To get some discussion going, I have spent some time with your "poetic gesture" your web art work exhibited at FIELDS in Riga, and also contemplating the certain "failure" you describe of  GROWTH section of the previous iteration of SEEDS UNDERGROUND.

A lot of your work requires a certain level of participation and engagement by the audience, given its performative nature. From what I can see, the action required of your audiences is successful when the piece is realized as a performance, and certainly your call to action, through the links to the Campaign for Seed Sovereignty. But as the performance concludes, so does the audience interaction. I wonder if this doesn't also speak to some of the issues of mapping that Marina and Stefani are exploring also? What makes for a successful ongoing engagement - participation in the system. When agribusiness is so vast and has access to such resources as I witnessed in the mid west of America?

What I especially like about the web art piece is the disintegration of the text; the sowing of the seeds as a gesture to distribution. 

I have heard you speak and perform a notion of composting of the web, and witnessed some of your other work where composting very literally, becomes a part of your art practice and your daily life simultaneously. In your project at Transmediale in 2013, Composting the City | Composting the Net, you examine "the parallel degenerative process of fermentation and fragmentation of our daily food scraps and shared digital commons. While Composting the City investigates urban food waste management systems, Composting the Net sources net cultures’ accumulated data. Food scraps dumped onto a compost heap are layered and turned until all traces of labeling are erased. On the net, the abundance of info-data sinks into a deep “reservoir” with tags attached."

Can you talk to the relationship between waste and data in these works?

I'll formulate a response to your newer work shortly :)

best

Amanda




On Mar 15, 2016, at 6:13 AM, shu lea cheang wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Hi, all...
> 
> While the week 1 dialogues have left many threads to follow up, I want to pick up certain comments
> that Amanda and Renate made about tactical (btw. the term is relived in this year's transmediale in Berlin) media art projects, intervention and resistance related to food growth, access, distribution and ultimately participation and system that Marina Zurkow raised.
> 
> Amanda wrote, "as I drove from Omaha to Kansas City one day "I can confirm we grow both crops out here: corn AND soy."  With the two crops corn and soy, i cannot be overjoyed with the vastness of farm growth, these acres of fields in the States are contested zones for farmers and corporations.
> 
> In 2013,  I started seeds underground project,
> taking the case of VERNON HUGH BOWMAN v. MONSANTO in the supreme court of the United States
> (Washington, D.C. Tuesday, February 19, 2013) as starting point (http://seedsunderground.net/index.php?mod=germinate) amid the heated debate for the European Union to adopt a new seed policy, which favours the seed industry corporations by making all seeds subject to strict regulation. Seeds underground holds parties for seeds exchange and have exhibited in several venues. I also created a web interface to trace the seeds' distribution and growth,which sadly is not applied much as it does require certain level of participation.
> http://seedsunderground.net/
> 
> As a 'poetic gesture' (a gesture we elegantly make) , I presented the project as a webart piece at the FIELDS exhibition (curated by Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits and Armin Medosch) with Rixc, Latvia in 2014.
> http://fields.seedsunderground.net/index.php?mod=screen