October 22, 2016 Reykjavik Art Museum

During 13 – 16 October, 2016 A___Zooetics (a project exploring intersections between human, non-human and poetic knowledge spheres—zooetics.net), invited an international group of scientists, artists, designers, theorists and writers to stay and work at Ásbrú, the site of a former NATO base on the Reykjanes peninsula in Iceland. The three days of explorations that took place on and near the base will be staged and performed at Reykjavík Art Museum in conversation with a keynote lecture by sociologist Jennifer Gabrys (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, author of Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet).

The transition of Ásbrú from a fenced-off military zone to a creative-economy incubator inspires a lot of questions about the technoscientific imaginaries feeding this transition and fueling our sense of the future. These kinds of military infrastructures are already incorporated into the future fictional narratives of a seamless transition towards innovation, resource extraction and subservience to global market forces. The Future Fictions Summit enacted a think tank that performed a variety of excavations into past and future narratives of Ásbrú as a laboratory of Iceland and the high North. The findings of this gathering comprise of a series of models that invite a reprogramming of relations between the body, territory and nonhuman forms of life, opening up alternative temporalities and uncanny sensorial powers. In these models, algae that resides on Hafnir shores in the vicinity of Ásbrú are offered as a source of transformation on a variety of scales—from the intimate to the oceanic. 

October 13 –16, 2016: Future Fictions workshop by Zooetics

During 13 – 16 October, 2016 Zooetics invited an international group of artists, designers and writers to stay and work at Ásbrú, the site of a former NATO base on the Reykjanes peninsula, Iceland. Its transition from a fenced-off military zone to a creative-economy incubator inspires a lot of questions about the technoscientific imaginaries feeding this transition and fuelling our sense of the future. One core element of such an imaginary could be called the ‘quantified self’ with its ‘technologically enhanced body’. This workshop scales up ‘the self’ from the human body to the ecological and the geopolitical. It considers a range of forms and practices—from wearable technologies to bioindication to social engineering—that weave and mash together past and future fictions for Iceland and the greater Arctic.

September 24th, 2016: 

FiR & Zooetics: Non-Human, Non-Animal

Frontiers in Retreat and Zooetics collaborated and created a seminar Non-Human, Non-Animal at the Museum of Nonhumanity, which held series of Weekend Seminars each weekend the temporary museum was open at Suvilahti, Helsinki. The seminar focused on presenting artist’s practices that had grown along the Frontiers and Zooetics frameworks. The main topics where lives of non-human - rock, water and mushroom - and the measures of defining “life”.

The seminar began with an introduction by artist and writer Tracey Warr and professor Kira O’Reilly, who moderated the event. After that, artist Mirko Nikolić performed and presented his project Lives of Metals: Copperlove, followed by an inspiring discussion. Richard Skelton’s black&white short film In Pursuit of the Eleventh Measure (2016), was screened. Tracey Warr and Dionizas Litvaitis presented the Mycelium Zooetic Pavilion by Urbonas Studio, which was inspired by J.G. Ballard’s fictional living plant technologies. Tracey Warr also talked about her water exoplanet fiction, Meanda, where water is one of the main protagonists.

The programme was co-curated by Jenni Nurmenniemi (HIAP; Frontiers in Retreat) and Tracey Warr (artist and writer, Frontiers in Retreat; Zooetics). 

After the seminar Tracey Warr shared her presentation references on her website. 

Tracey Warr - NON-HUMAN, NON-ANIMAL SEMINAR Z TO A

ADAPTATIONS UTÖ (September 2015) ‘expanded’ video document; from workshop led by London Fieldworks / Zooetics. Listen with headphones if possible-->some low frequencies.

"the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more" Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday life, 1984.

Thanks to workshop participants: Kati Gausmann; Suvi Ermila; Saara Kanerva Tamminen; Hanna Husberg; Carl Giffney; Lluis Llobet Marti; Lilli Haapala; Anna Rubio; Katri Naukkarinen; Hertta Kiiski; Niko Nurmi; Yassine Khaled; Ulrika Ferm.