#compartscriticalstudies

An elemental universe is one where all matter exists as fluctuating combinations of one or more elements. If we were to observe these fluctuations in phases within matter, we would cut1 matter creating a temporary division of elements in order to learn something new about the object. What we observe would tell us about the object in its divided state, but it would not reveal how fluctuations between phases occurs. This would remain hidden as the act of observation itself would exclude this from being determined.

Changes in the elements could occur as a result of political interventions into phase shifting processes. Metals, such as lead in lead acid batteries, can be transformed into lightning with phase changes occurring at a subatomic levels. There has been a push for more lightning vehicles by conglomerates and authorities looking to fix the climate crisis with technology, whilst at the same time profiting from it. This has tipped the elemental balance towards lightning production, but has unseen consequences on entities close to lead extraction and recycling facilities. Their well being is compromised, a cost that is considered acceptable to those hoping to profit from sales of lightning vehicles. The product that is supposed to help reduce environmental damage is simultaneously damaging its local milieu and those nearest its birthplace.

There are many other examples of this type of parasitic relationship in clean technologies, but they go unobserved as the cuts required to take heed of these injustices occur far from view and are thus not visible to those not looking for them. Perhaps it is not possible for the elemental balance to be restored in the current system. However if it is we would have to partially submerge our identities2 and become part of the larger collective Capitalist infrastructure, effecting phase changes from within using multiple small but focused interventions. These interventions would need to block the flow of water through the system, and disrupt potentially harmful phase changes, to slowly bring back elemental balance through a coordinated series of measured actions. Collective entanglement within the system is a necessary first step to changing the system.

References:

1. Barad, Karen; "Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning."; Duke University Press Books, 2007.

I gave a lecture on Cosmotechnical writing to the current masters students. It was mainly to help them with their own writing for their bios and artist statements for the final exhibition. I talked about my previous research: making predictions using the I Ching, my writing on the Chinese Typewriter as precursor for Chinese mobile phone typing systems, qi and dao and Taoist creation myths, String theory, Bitcoin and climate change, and shan shui painting.

I  discussed how my visit to the Horniman Museum changed the direction of my work and I started to think of classification of technical objects using qi and dao as a possible topic. I showed them my five element classification system, and read the beginning of my essay. Writers I discussed included people like TJ Demos’ “Against the Anthropocene” and his lecture tour, Kathryn Yusoff’s “A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None”, and Yuk Hui’s “The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics”.

I used my writing practice as a means to discuss possible ways of writing Cosmotechnically. I gave my own interpretation of the definition of performative writing, talking about the hybrid voices that were the main characters in my stories. They were conceived as symbiotic human computer entities, part of a larger collective network of voices. Various technologies and their users are given joint agency in my stories. I saw combinations of elements as constituent parts of these voices, who would act accordingly.

I outlined the problems with the Anthropocene thesis stating it aligns with accelerationist ideas that Capitalist implementations of a technological singularity can save us from the climate crisis. Also noting that it doesn’t take into account the position and rights of those most affected by environmental problems such as people of colour and other vulnerable groups.

I outlined Yuk Hui’s vision of multiple cosmotechnics and its support for looking to other cultures’ stories and theories as a means of analysing and realigning technology to make its relationship with nature more moral. Ways of writing cosmotechnically I put forward to the class included writing from the perspective of different technologies, thinking about how particular groups of people could use technology to make their lives better, and coming up with ways to oppose the misuse of a technology.

Most people chose to speak as if they were a particular technology, but a lot of interesting ideas were discussed. Some people chose to become machine learning algorithms and discuss through their working process, the relationships these have with authorities. Some looked at climbing and sports technologies. Others looked at multiple timelines as mediated by technologies. Many new cosmotechnical possibilities were presented and it got people thinking about how they could write in a different and more performative way. I enjoyed giving the class and finding out about everyone else’s ideas, as invariably they were new concepts I had not considered before.

References:

1. Yusoff, Kathryn; "A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None"; University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

2. Hui, Yuk; "The question concerning technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics"; Urbanomic Media Ltd, 2016

Perhaps I could change the sound of the narrative voice according to element or movement? The text could be moved in a different way. Is the text spoken or whispered? I could use the blow up spheres to project different images for different elements. One sphere could be devoted solely to generated text. A nature sound could be created when text comes onto the screen, changing according to movement. One thing to test early is how many screens can be added to Ubuntu.

The lantern installation by TeamLab is inspirational and reflects traditional aspects of Chinese culture. Perhaps I could use a Chinese lantern in my piece too.

Another idea would be to change the graphics so they are less two dimensional. If I used three.js I could introduce more 3D graphics and change the landscape backgrounds so that they look more like dioramas or panoramas. I thought of this when thinking back to worlds I created within shoe boxes as a child. Similar effects could be created within three.js using appropriate perspective camera views and landscape textures that are placed at different distances away from the viewport.

Reference:

Deborah Levitt from The New School in New York was the first speaker. She discussed her book “Rendering worlds” which looks at the affordances of emerging media and world-making when modelling cosmotechnical systems. Other books mentioned included “How life worlds work” by Michael Jackson, and “The Animatic Apparatus”, another of her books.

She discussed how new forms of animated digital life have interoperative vitality effects. In VR the image floats free of its bond to the real as the body becomes untethered from a biological or theological destiny. There are many forms of synthetic biologies including the oncomouse, the aliens in the “Avatar” movie, and even touched on the Sonic the Hedgehog character design controversy that was in the news recently. 

She discussed how animation can produce a world, but not necessarily the world as we know it. It has a slightly different function to cinema which more often represents particular world views. Animation has the potential to model worlds and futures that we would like to happen. This is especially of relevance in our current situation. In this way animated worlds could be thought of as cosmotechnical.

Animation be used to mediate between the imperceptible aspects of computation and human perception. It can help us navigate in-between world of the pluriverse with multiple future potentialities, spaces where all can live peacefully together in conviviality and difference. Here she uses the pluriverse as a means of thinking beyond Western universality. Cosmotechnics is the unification of the cosmic order and the moral order through technology. Technology integrates the cosmos into social ritualised practices. Cosmotechnics emphasises a re-evaluation of relationships between humans, technology, the environment and the cosmos which could help us think differently about ways to improve this world.

She briefly dicussed the Anthropocene and describes it as a global axis of time and synchronization that is sustained by a view of technological progress towards the singularity. For her to re-open the question of technology is to refuse this homogeneous technological future that is presented to us as the only option. Other futures are possible, we only have to think of them to start making them.

VR is a useful option for speculative worlding. It allows us to inhabit worlds different to our own. VR’s tight coupling between human sensorium and machine parts of systems enable us to think in new ways. The worlds can be realistic or more fantastical. The immersed user knows he or she is in an artificial world but the embodiment within this fantasy allows for more speculative thinking to occur. VR tracks the body’s movements to make its generated world more immersive. We can create a relationship between our own experience and the cosmological world referred to in cosmotechnics to create something new, perhaps something better than our current world.

VR can be used as a site for ethnographic field studies. For this she cites the example of Hyphen Lab’s piece “Neurospeculative Afro-feminism” which allows users to explore a fictional futuristic Afro-Carribean beauty and hair salon through VR. One audience member took offence at this use of VR stating that it was reproducing the colonial gaze, not allowing people from these communities to actively engage in these new speculative worlds to improve them and contribute ideas. This was vehemently denied by Hyphen Labs in their talk about this piece. 

The golden spike is where the Anthropocene era is meant to have begun. Who gets spiked by geology? What colour is the flesh of geology? There is a shadow geology of disposable lives, waste, toxicity, contamination, extinction and exhaustion. The Anthropocene creates a planetary genesis tying human actions to the beginning of an epoch. In this theory human agency is a substitute for geologic process.

However geology is a subjective mode of the human, and can be thought of as a universal model of material agency with mastery over geologic processes. Originary geologic happenings reproduce power structures in the present through historical materialities.

According to theorists and scientists the Anthropocene is not yet ended, and it reorganises understandings of ongoing events. You could think of origins as accounts of agency or trajectories of power. Geology is a transactional zone where origins, subjectivity and matter intertwine.

When looking at environmental issues we should investigate the genealogy of dispossession, uprooting and extreme violence that so often co-exists with this crisis. Humanity has not understood the violent repercussions of colonialism, industrialisation, or capitalist production. A W.E.B. Du Bois quote illustrates this idea:  "Whiteness as ownership of the Earth for ever and ever".

Eco-optimism and geoengineering indicate a desire to overcome coloniality without relinquishing the power to decide our future. The colonial assumption for the responsibility of saving the world is rearticulated as white man's burden, a paternalism tied to a redemptive and seemingly innocent saviour narrative. However are we merely living off the cumulative hurt of others?

Reference:

I went to see the interactive virtual reality exhibition “We live in an ocean of air” today. It left a deep impression on me with its flocking branches, swarms of particles forming branches, breath and foliage. It reminded me of an ancient tree with deep roots and energy running through its veins. This was analogous to the processes present in all life. Networks of branches and roots formed as you swirled in the space.

I also went to see Bill Viola and Michelangelo at The Royal Academy. I was struck by the elemental aspects of the work, as these were relevant to my own practice. There were videos of people underwater breathing, the image of them rippling, with bubbles rising. The bubbles and water travelled upwards and the images rippled when underwater. Fire was reflected in the water. The reflection line dividing some of the images had bubbles travelling away from the line, and ripples distorting the image. I found the portrait video works with fire or bubbles travelling upwards especially interesting. Perhaps similar imagery could be the starting point for some of the graphics for my work.

Norimichi Hirakawa | datum, 2017, Moerenuma Park, Sapporo, Japan from norimichi hirakawa on Vimeo.

Norimichi Hirakawa’s digital works are chaotic and glitchy generative pieces, but their form and colour schemes are sometimes reminiscent of nature or the cosmos. This is work that could inspire the graphical aspects of my work in progress. 

Related to my interest in using tai chi in my work is the Malay rituals art archive. It has video documentation of many different dances and rituals used in Malay culture. It also has a lot of image documentation of traditional performance forms such as Mak Yong Malay dance drama, and Teochew puppetry.

Possible titles for my essay could be:

“Exploring an elemental classification of internet and geotechnologies through five Cosmotechnical fables” or “Five Cosmotechnical fables exploring the Chinese environment through an elemental classification of technology”. One possible idea would be to maybe use Google Earth data in imagery for the work in progress piece.

References:

http://counteraktiv.com

https://vimeo.com/user14378708

https://medium.com/digital-art-weekly-by-danae-hi/18-museums-boosting-the-scene-of-digital-art-f8a4b4fa5eb9

https://www.pusaka.org/

I could make an artwork where it is possible to perform element bending for each of the different elements. Different shapes (possibly shown through gestures) could represent different elements:

    Wood: rectangle,

    Fire: triangle,

    Earth: square,

    Metal: round,

    Water: wavy.

In choose element mode (could randomly choose element by "throwing" yarrow sticks) you can draw one of the shapes to pick an element. Drawing using your hands enables you to bend the element you are using at that time.

A throw motion is like a very short sentence. It will give you a short answer (like an element, or a line of poetry relating to a particular element). A longer drawing motion is like saying something that takes more time. It will give you a few sentences (like a verse of poetry of a few lines).

The slower you draw, the more visual and sound feedback you get. If you draw quickly, things happen but disappear fast, and sound is minimal. If you draw slowly, more things happen, and sounds gets more complex perhaps?

Tai Chi movements could create special effects on the screen. The landscape screen could be split into 5 vertical strips, one for each element. As each element story is told, a timeline graphic shows you where in the story you are, and travels horizontally across all 5 strips. The background is different for each element strip, perhaps different vertical shan shui landscape paintings ever changing.

T.J. Demos | Against the Anthropocene from Kaaitheater on Vimeo.

How do we critically reflect on climate change through the arts? TJ Demos’ previous books include “Decolonising Nature” and his latest book “Against the Anthropocene”. His latest book has a more activist stance. The term Anthropocene coined in the early 2000s. The term supported a strongly technical and scientific sense, with not much in the way of political discussions. This proved problematic for TJ Demos, hence his polemical work “Against the Anthropocene”.

There is no such thing as discrete human subjectivities, we are connected to nature and enmeshed with it. Anna Sing’s book “Multispecies Salon” argues this. The term Anthropocene looks more at humans only, and in general as being responsible for climate change. However it is not all humans, but particular ones that are responsible for climate change. Some have been more adversely affected depending on wealth, poverty, class, gender, race etc. There is a disproportionate impact of climate change depending on who and where you are.

“Climate change represents the burning of Africa.” - TJ Demos

Political conference delegates agree on 1.5 degrees celcius warming, but this would be catastrophic for people in coastal regions in Bangladesh for example. There is a suggestion that geoengineering may be a necessary response to climate change. Technofixes for climate change deals with the symptoms but not the causes. Economic growth is seen to be compatible with climate solutions, but is this belief true? The Capitalocene these argues that climate change has been going on for 500 years, but if we are to address it properly we need to address this capitalist history.

The dates of the Anthropocene are proposed to have begun in the 1950s by geologists. This is when nuclear power was globalised. The book “Anthropocene or Capitalocene” edited by Jason W. Moore, rejects technoscientific empiricism in favour of looking at the cause from a political, colonial perspective. Capitalocene emphasises environmental violence and injustice against oppressed people and nature. Intersectionalist discussions look at the racial and colonial injustice that has accompanied the environmental transformation.

Forensic Architechture has also looked at the Capitalocene. Eyal Wiseman suggests that environmental transformation or climate change is not an unintended accident, but rather an intended aim of colonialism from the start. TJ Demos helped set up the Centre for Creative Ecologies to encourage this research and discourse. There is a risk of environmentalism becoming a privileged domain. In his view it needs to be linked to social justice domains. Environmentalism must not become a white domain, it needs to be intersectionalist and support social justice.

The Cthulucene: a term coined by Donna Haraway, from her book “Staying with the Trouble”. Linked to HP Lovecraft’s Cthulu, without the sexist undertones. Diverse mythological constructions such as naga, pachamama, or mother earth. Cthulucene is the era of multiscpecies being. Visualisations of the Cthulucene have been created by artists such as the Crochet Coral Reef. They sometimes show them as bleached to emphasise their destruction. Also shown are Navajo weaving and Pigeon Ring.

We need many names. A “Manifesto for the Gynecene” was an idea by artists Alexandra Pirici and Raluca Voinea in 2015. They proposed that patriarchy should be excluded in all its violent expressions such as colonialism, profit etc. Practices such as pachamana and rights of mother earth come out of indigenous traditions which are an example of the Gynacene. Defend Our Mother was an example of a poster by Fabiana Rodriguez, Gynacene aesthetics. Standing Rock against Dakota Access pipeline: “Water is life” proposing a different ontology based within a non-capitalist, non-commoditised understanding of environmental issues. Geontology is seeing the conditions of being as rift zones where different world views come into a clashing relationship.

Mountain top removal mining is when companies blow up mountain tops to get at coal underneath. Plantationocene is where agriculture has been turned into a science of colonialism. Anna Sing shows how divisions between genders and races are regimented into Capitalist labour systems, within a monocrop area. Plasticene is about the spread of plastics and micropolymers throughout the world. This is only going to grow in the future. We are plasticising the planet. Plastic as a material of Capitalism. The Pyrocene relates to the spread of wildfires such as in California.

"A World at War" is an article in New Republic. Our only hope is to mobilise like we did in world war 2. They want to decrease the CO2 in the air to under 300 parts per million. But they are looking at it from only a technoscientific viewpoint, and not looking at the 500 year history of Capitalism and its effects on climate change. Communities of colour are more endangered by incinerators than others, their lives are seen as less important somehow. We must decolonise environmentalism. Avoid the ecologies of affluence of white environmentalism. Ecological struggles are really the struggle for universal emancipation.

Artistic project “Forest Law”, 2014, investigates decades of oil exploitation in the Equadorian Amazon by oil companies, drilling for oil and leaving oil by-products on the floor. Artists building solidarities and connections with social movements is crucial. “The Party of Others”, a political party that is non-anthropocentric and includes animals and others so they can have a political voice. Rosa Braidotti calls it developing a zoe-centred (animal or non-human) egalitarianism. “The Climate Games” included Inflatables to activate participants, creating space between activists and police. There is a history of the use of cobblestones in revolutions in France. Non-violent civil shutting down of coal mines, “we are nature defending itself”, avoiding the anthropocentrism of the nature/culture binarism. In New York “not an alternative” wrote a letter to museums to detach from fossil fuel funding. David Koch, a fossil fuel corporate figure, got kicked off the board of the American Natural History Museum. Liberate Tate have been doing performance interventions showing the cost of petrocapitalism, and got Tate to stop its association with BP: institutional liberation. Non-reformist reform, welcomes small steps but also recognises it is inadequate.

Discussion after the talk:

Sustainability as an empty signifier. It supports not ecological sustainability but economical sustainability. Post-representational system in which language is dead. Evidence doesn’t necessarily change minds, people become sensitive and embedded in their positions. Create art based within the affect of social justice. What is Art in the post-representational present?

Billionaires buying escape silos in case of catastrophic futures. Others cannot do this. “Breakthrough Institute” (setup by people such as Bill Gates and other corporate leaders) don’t talk about racism or economic inequality, they talk about saving humanity and humanism through geoengineering and saving humanity with all its inequalities intact.

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