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

[Christina McPhee]

Dear Audrey and Francisco of FRAUD-
How great to have the chance to bring this intervention on lichen, the
incalculable /-financialization abstractions, and forest culture into the
heart of London at Somerset House. Please could you describe the physical
attributes of your installation (?) - how you are carrying these ideas into
the space ?
Thanks

Christina

On Sun, Jun 10, 2018 at 3:09 PM FRAUD <aud at fraud.la> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 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
>
>
>
> 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 Dominguez is 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)
>
> FRAUD is 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.
>
>
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