[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 2]

[FRAUD]

Dear all,

We are delighted to join the network discussion (and with such great 
company!).
Some little bits to begin.

*Networks:*
In our case, we are interested in the materiality and necropolitics of 
the network and critical ecologies. Of late, we have been thinking 
through the finantialisation of nature through emission trading systems 
and green bonds. We are producing a genealogy of the conception of the 
forest as a space of carbon flows which has carbon circulation, exchange 
and storage as a nominal abstractions. Emission trading and green 
markets are popping up globally (China just started its own), it is 
predicted to be the biggest trading market by 2020. Carbon Futures is a 
speculative valuation system that captures and extracts 'natural 
resources'. We are also inquiring into how these markets are networked 
and we are investigating what is obfuscated by this abstraction 
(cultural conflicts, subaltern knowledges and environmental violence). 
Happy to expand, also we have a show opening Tuesday in London on this 
topic :) [https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/complex-values].
*
**The incomputable:*
During related research (in the Finnish forests) we were fascinated 
about the reindeer lichen in East Fennoscandia, a disappearing species 
that problematises the management of industrial forestry in Finland. 
Generally lichen species are interesting because they constitute the 
majority of diversity in the northern forests--there are only 5 tree 
species, whereas there are thousands of lichens. Being a composite of a 
algae or cyanobacteria and a fungi, their genetic make-up is more 
exposed to mutation, hence diversity. They also have an interesting 
cultural relevance as both a delicacy and a famine food. Lichen presents 
itself as an non-computer readable element in the forestry modelling 
calculations. While the efficiency of industrial forests is heralded, 
validating the move to increase production and cutting down of trees, 
'inefficient' old growth forests provide essential elements such as 
beard moss the source of food for reindeer in winter. The post World War 
massive clear cutting in the north and subsequent forestry is a 
scarification leaving Finland with approximately 5% of its old growth 
forest. Calculations have deemed industrial forests more efficient in 
terms of carbon sequestration, and consequently enriches the Finnish 
economy with carbon credits. In addition, forestry growth provides jobs 
and fuels many by-product economies. We explore these complex 
entanglements and scales of power. How are forests calculated? Which 
forms of knowledge are privileged in this discussion? What is deemed an 
acceptable compromise/sacrifice? How does one begin to discuss the 
simultaneous cultural livelihood and destruction of a nation?

Also, something to throw out there, there is an interesting tension 
between the incomputable, the uncapturable, as a method of resistance 
and survival, as well as disappearance/extinction from the network.

    "[P]ower is in fact grounded in the very ability to calculate,
    count, measure, balance and act on these calculations. Inversely to
    make oneself ungovernable one much make oneself incalculable,
    immeasurable uncountable" [Eyal Weizman:
    https://www.e-flux.com/journal/38/61213/665-the-least-of-all-possible-evils/]



*A footnote on invasive / native* (mentioned last week):
Those definitions in themselves are quite problematic. Usually there is 
a point in time after which a species' arrival is determined to be 
invasive. That point is heavily imbued in politics of immigration, 
colonialism and other ways of viewing the world that have little to do 
with the plant or animal's 'threat'. Without expanding further here, we 
did a project exploring this some time ago, Dreaming in 
tongues/舌頭/langues/ بألسنة/tunger, and Cooking Sections do great work on 
this subject.

Look forward to continuing the discussion over the week.

Audrey & Francisco of FRAUD


On 09/06/2018 10:41, Shu Lea Cheang wrote:
> dear all
>
> It seems like our week1 focus on Mycelium network is just heating up, 
> i am sure we will be coming back to reflect on mycelium's network 
> nature...
>
> Now we enter  rehearsal of a network - [week 2], with a focus on 
> networked activism and performance.
>
> We are interested in reviewing a glory past/present/future with update 
> on strategies of intervention including applications with social 
> networks and analogue tactics of 'body counts matter".
>
> I introduce the very very special guests for this week2.
>
> with great respect.
>
> sl
>
>
> John Jordan (UK/France)
>
> Labelled a  "Domestic Extremist" by the police, and “a magician of 
> rebellion” by the press, John Jordan has spent the last 25 years 
> merging art and activism. Working in various settings from Museums to 
> squatted social centres, International Theatre Festivals to climate 
> camps, he Co-founded /Reclaim the Streets/ and the /Clown Army/, 
> Co-edited /We Are Everywhere: the irresistible rise of global 
> anti-capitalism/" (Verso), and co-wrote the film/book /Les Sentiers de 
> l’Utopie/ (Editions Zones,2012). He now co-facilitates the /Laboratory 
> of Insurrectionary Imagination (Labofii)/, with Isabelle Fremeaux. 
> Infamous for fermenting mass disobedience on bicycles, throwing 
> snowballs at bankers, launching a rebel raft regatta to shut down a 
> power station, running workshops in postcapitalism and refusing to be 
> censored by the Tate Modern,/t/he Labofii now lives on the autonomous 
> zone of la zad of Notre-dame-des-Landes, 'a territory lost to the 
> republic,' according to the French government. For more info about the 
> zad see www.zadforever.blog <http://www.zadforever.blog>
>
>
>
> Nitasha Dhillon (India/USA)
>
> Nitasha Dhillon is one of two artists who make up the MTL Collective, 
> a collaboration joining research and aesthetic, theory and practice, 
> action and organizing. With Amin Husain as MTL, they are co-founders 
> of Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy magazine, Global Ultra Luxury 
> Faction (G.U.L.F.), the direct action arm of Gulf Labor Artist 
> Coalition, Strike Debt and Rolling Jubilee, Direct Action Front for 
> Palestine (DAFP), and most recently, as MTL+, Decolonize This Place, a 
> movement space and decolonial formation in New York City that combine 
> organizing, art, and action around five strands of struggle: 
> Indigenous Struggle, Black Liberation, Free Palestine, Global Wage 
> Worker, and De-Gentrification. Nitasha is currently a PhD candidate at 
> Department of Media Study, University at Buffalo.
>
>
> Ricardo Dominguez(USA)
>
> Ricardo Dominguezis a co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater 
> (EDT), a group who developed virtual sit-in technologies in solidarity 
> with the Zapatistas communities in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1998. His 
> recent Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab project 
> (http://tbt.tome.press/) with Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cardenas, Amy Sara 
> Carroll, and Elle Mehrmand, the /Transborder Immigrant Tool/ (a GPS 
> cell phone safety net tool for crossing the Mexico/US border) was the 
> winner of “Transnational Communities Award” (2008), an award funded by 
> Cultural Contact, Endowment for Culture Mexico–US and handed out by 
> the US Embassy in Mexico. It also was funded by CALIT2 and the UCSD 
> Center for the Humanities. The /Transborder Immigrant Tool/ has been 
> exhibited at the 2010 California Biennial (OCMA), Toronto Free 
> Gallery, Canada (2011), The Van Abbemuseum, Netherlands (2013), ZKM, 
> Germany (2013), as well as a number of other national and 
> international venues. The project was also under investigation by the 
> US Congress in 2009-2010 and was reviewed by Glenn Beck in 2010 as a 
> gesture that potentially “dissolved” the U.S. border with its poetry. 
> Dominguez is Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the University of 
> California, San Diego, a Hellman Fellow, a Society for the Humanities 
> Fellow at Cornell University (2018), and a Rockefeller Arts & 
> Humanities Fellow (2019) and Principal Investigator at CALIT2/QI, 
> UCSD. He also is co-founder of *particle group*, with artists Diane 
> Ludin, Nina Waisman, Amy Sara Carroll, whose art project about 
> nano-toxicology entitled *Particles of Interest: Tales of the Matter 
> Market* has been presented at the House of World Cultures, Berlin 
> (2007), the San Diego Museum of Art (2008), Oi Futuro, Brazil (2008), 
> CAL NanoSystems Institute, UCLA (2009), Medialab-Prado, Madrid (2009), 
> E-Poetry Festival, Barcelona, Spain (2009), Nanosférica, NYU (2010), 
> and SOMA, Mexico City, Mexico (2014): 
> http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/particle-group-intro.
>
>
> FRAUD(UK)
>
> FRAUDis a /métis/ duo of critical art practitioners. Their backgrounds 
> include computational culture, post-colonial and critical feminism, 
> performance, disruptive design, and space system engineering. They 
> develop art-led inquiries into the multiple scales of power and 
> governmentality that flow through physical and 
> cultural landscapes. The duo focuses on critical ecologies, exploring 
> forms of slow violence and necropolitics that are embedded in the 
> entanglement of archiving practices and technical objects, and erasure 
> as a disruptive technology in knowledge production.
>
> _http://fraud.la/_
>
>

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