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A Nourishing Network
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Defining Our Current Network Scenario
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by Yoshinari Nishiki
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From “Telephone/Fax”, through “Early Internet”, to “Virtual Touring Software”, towards “a Slow-Speed Virtual-Physical Residency”
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-s soon as the COVID-19 pandemic started to severely kick off Europe in March 2020, many of the local cultural events switched to online. Like many others, it took me some time to get accustomed to proprietary online meeting environments such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet (all of which I only use on the Windows side of my dual-boot Linux-base ThinkPad [Jitsi is an exception]). While I enjoyed the vibe of “anyone could attend anything from anywhere in the world”, I felt the novelty of “at home” or “remoteness” had quickly disappeared. These days, I still do book interesting-looking online events, but can barely motivate myself to actually show up in front of the screen. Once “online” has been rendered almost completely flat by the surge of repetitive Zoom conferences and streaming events, perhaps it is time to look back some of the first virtualization efforts of art in history. In fact, “available from home” was nothing new.
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-In 1991, the Project InterCommunication Center (ICC), founded by the Japanese telecom giant NTT, hosted an event titled “The Museum Inside The Telephone Network” and invited almost 100 artists^[^1]^. It was an experiment to set up an invisible museum using telephone/Fax which were the most common back then and the fastest ways to transmit audiovisual data. In the early 90s, telephones were mostly available from home and the level of mobility only stretched as far as a cordless landline phone. However, they managed to offer five different “channels”: a Voice & Sound channel where prerecorded audio-based pieces could be listened to, a Live channel through which you could attend live performances and talks, an Interactive channel which involved interactions by physical telephone buttons, a Fax channel where you could print image-based pieces in black and white, and a Personal Computer channel that allowed you to view computer graphics-based pieces on the computer screen. Some of the artists found optimal uses of the media: e.g. for the Fax channel, the Japanese painter Tadanori Yokoo selected 1080 images from his extensive waterfall postcard picture collection and made them available to print at home^[^2]^. As a result, a cascade of images incessantly came out of the fax machine as though transforming into a waterfall itself.
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-Following this, there was another virtualization attempt by ICC called “on the Web -The Museum Inside The Network-” in 1995^[^3]^. By this time, the Internet had become partially available in some homes and pieces of artwork were accessible through websites from personal computers. Some of the art projects foresaw the age of social media: Kazuhiko Hachiya presented “Mega-Diary” where the links to diaries written by 100 people were gathered and updated on a daily basis^[^4]^, Kouichirou Eto made the “Real Panopticon”, a web platform that worked on top of the exhibition website and allowed the viewers to observe what other visitors were currently looking at online^[^5]^. I have always been thrilled by ambitious remarks made while speculating on the future of the Internet from 90s. One of the committee members of the project, theorist Toshiharu Itoh left us a quote that lets us reflect on where we are today^[^6]^:
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The technology of information communications is a “technology of consciousness” that belongs to the realm of the spirit and the senses more than to the realm of practicality and function. Bearing this in mind, I hope to immerse myself within the fabric of the network.
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-My question now is: What is our current state of consciousness and how should it be expressed through the networks available? As an example of a pandemic-ready practice, Norwegian visual artist/musician Lars Holdhus a.k.a TCF comes into my mind.
-
-I met TCF physically for the first time in 2016 at TodaysArt, an audiovisual electronic art festival hosted in The Hague, the Netherlands. I got to know him through a mutual friend when we went to see him perform compositions based on algorithms used for cryptocurrency mining^[^7]^. At that time, TCF was already well-established both in the fields of contemporary art and music, often touring around Europe and beyond. Then the talented musician, stopped making music a couple of years ago for some reason and relocated himself back to Norway where he is originally from. Not having heard anything of him for quite some time, TCF, after the COVID-19 pandemic, suddenly appeared on the Internet radio run by Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art. He said he had just picked 50kg of mushrooms last month (at the time of the interview)^[^8]^.
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-TCF said he is trying to localize his practice as much as possible, be self-sufficient, and lower his impact on the environment, while simultaneously keeping himself as an active agent in the field of contemporary art. TCF apparently does not tour any more and instead distributes a piece of software in which his 3D avatar learns how to walk/run through machine learning and the AI composes music on the fly.
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-TCF presented “Awne” at Unsound Festival hosted from Kraków, Poland in October 2020^[^9]^:
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-Awne is a system where natural farming, permaculture and biomimicry meets music and art. In recent years TCF has worked on setting up a way to compose art and music that draws inspiration from biological processes, natural farming techniques, the twelve design principles of permaculture, our understanding of nature, microclimates and how to lower your impact on the environment... It will be built around the software (Unity + Machine Learning) that TCF is currently using in parts of his live performances.
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-It was live streamed from YouTube and was embedded in the festival website. Someone commented on the video: “I don’t exactly know exactly how my awareness of agricultural processes is increased if I watch plasticky looking 3D models of mushrooms bounce on other objects 😅. Nevertheless some of the animations and sounds were fun to look at / listen to.^[^10]^”
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-I see our present network scenario to be somewhere between the following: reduced travel, an ever more powerful set of online tools, and environmental emergency (and urgency). Although Awne was a streaming event, I could still feel the presence of TCF, even in comparison to his live performance back in the day.
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-Based upon the above mentioned network components, I am currently in the process of setting up a “slow-speed” virtual-physical residency program between The Hague and Minamisanriku, a small municipality in Japan known to be one of the areas most affected by the 2011 Tsunami. It is an ethereal attempt to connect the two coastal regions beyond two vast oceans and one continent while setting “water management” as the common theme. “Virtual does not need to be fast” is the tag line and we are aiming to leave a “physical” trail in Minamisanriku through which the local residents can gradually shed the abominable image of a disaster-stricken area.
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-[^1]: https://www.ntticc.or.jp/en/exhibitions/1991/intercommunication-91-the-museum-inside-the-telephone-network/
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-[^2]: https://monoskop.org/File:InterCommunication_91_The_Museum_Inside_the_Telephone_Network_1991_hires.pdf
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-[^3]: https://www.ntticc.or.jp/en/feature/1995/The_Museum_Inside_The_Network/index-e.html
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-[^4]: https://www.youtube.com/embed/DIWKZhbr3VQ?start=1144
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-[^5]: https://www.youtube.com/embed/DIWKZhbr3VQ?start=1481
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-[^6]: https://www.ntticc.or.jp/en/feature/1995/The_Museum_Inside_The_Network/message/itoh-e.html
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-[^7]: https://soundcloud.com/liberationtechnologies/tcf-54-c6-05-1c-13-cc-72-e9-cc-dc-84-f2-a3-ff-cc-38-1e-94-0d-c0-50-5c-3e-e8
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-[^8]: https://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/sonia-312-lars-holdhustcf
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-[^9]: https://www.unsound.pl/en/intermission/events/tcf-presents-awne
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-[^10]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQucsMWYVnI
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**Yoshinari Nishiki**
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-Born in an unacknowledged commuter town to Osaka, Nishiki had to invent his own ways to have fun and that ultimately shaped the foundation of his art practice. After irreversibly failing in the Japanese education system, Nishiki left the country for the UK and started to run art projects. Through a judgmental discount card scheme that actually worked on a main street of Liverpool, he met Graham Harwood who was to invite him to a masters program at Goldsmiths. Despite the lack of qualifications, Nishiki successfully made a legal train fare dodging system using racing pigeons and graduated with a merit. Nishiki relocated himself to Japan and began to be based in an international Augmented Reality laboratory in the middle of a mountain. He made Augmented Tree Climbing for the boy scouts and the research got published in a gaming conference. Since 2017, Nishiki has been based in Rotterdam and collaborated with researchers from TU Delft on artistic interventions into logistics systems. Projects pursued have included, among others, free transport by crowd, moving a mountain of agricultural produce with food couriers, and single-handedly flipping a 20-foot container. He is also known as Inari Wishiki.
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A Nourishing Network
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The Pandemic's Dark Cloud
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by Mél Hogan
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s the pandemic settled into consciousness across the globe, humans devolved. People in countries where the response to COVID-19 was most mismanaged started to snack a lot.^[^1]^ Pre-sliced packaged charcuterie. Ritz crackers. Oreo cookies. In their growing helplessness, people also sharply increased their consumption of alcohol, especially women in the US.^[^2]^ For some it was drugs. Those lucky enough to keep their job doubled down on work, staying at their stations or desks for longer hours – part avoidance and part stuckness into systems that could offer no other plan.
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-The dread by now is cumulative. Pick your pain: covid19, white supremacy, climate catastrophe. People are reaching new levels of “doomscrolling” on social media, playing online video games, and “binge-watching” Netflix as ways to pass the time, waiting for the virus to run its course, or politicians to make a plan. As things shut down, Zoom quickly took over as the way to communicate at a safe social distance. Education quickly became clicking at screens. No more shopping in person meant ordering by way of interfaces. All of these screens more or less allowed things to continue, if not as normal, then as a viable alternative in the meantime. It remains to be seen if this online world we’ve adopted so quickly is the new normal, and here to stay, or if it’ll reflect to us the inefficiencies of how we lived before and save us from ourselves. Or, maybe it will call into question the terrible inequities that are only made more evident by this pandemic.
-
-By April, the news media were already reporting that lockdowns had meant cleaner air and clearer water.^[^3]^ Satellite images showed less pollution over China and the US. Animals were found roaming freely in different parts of India.^[^4]^ “Nature is healing” became a popular meme celebrating the lessening of human impact and nature’s recovery.^[^5]^ But were the effects of lockdown, or quarantine, of humans being trapped in their homes, and of doing everything online, truly a more sustainable way of going about life? Had the turn to “the cloud” proven to be the weightless way forward? Social isolation and disinformation propagation problems aside, could the internet become a tool to inadvertently save the environment?
-
-In thinking of the internet and the many devices connected to it, these account for approximately 2-4% of global greenhouse emissions, which only promise to double by 2025.^[^6]^ Data centres and vast server farms (where data is stored and transmitted) draw more than 80% of their energy from fossil fuel power stations. Online video alone – porn, Netflix, YouTube, Zoom – generated 60% of the world’s total data flows before covid19 hit. A Google search uses as much energy as cooking an egg or boiling water in an electric kettle.^[^7]^ Yearly emails for work (and not accounting for spam) have been calculated to be equal in terms of CO2 emissions to driving 320 kilometres.^[^8]^ These numbers have likely gone up considerably since the pandemic.^[^9]^ This way of living wasn’t sustainable then, and it certainly isn’t now.
-
-There are search engines (eg. Ecosia^[^10]^) and add-ons (eg. Carbonalyser by The Shift Project,^[^11]^ green-algorithms.org^[^12]^) that help measure user impacts on the environment, but these miss addressing the bigger questions – such as moving away from confronting personal use to the systemic, material, and ideological issues baked into the internet. Why is the internet like this? The question is more political than it is purely technological. It’s more emotional, even, than it is political. Because we’ve drifted so far away from understanding nature as inherent to human and non-human wellbeing alike, towards unrelenting and exploitative capitalism and extractivism, it means we now have these massively entangled systems that reinforce one another, generate profit for the very few, but finally benefit nothing and nobody.^[^13]^ These systems are harder to abolish or undo, so instead we turn to solutions that lessen their impacts, and we consider the rest inevitable – or worse, natural. We might, for example, shift data centers to cooler climates to save on cooling costs, we might develop more efficient software, we might offer carbon offsetting and plant trees, but none of these technofixes reach the heart of the our current predicament: our solutions and our problems originate from the same short-sighted, greed-driven, competitive, and market-driven agendas that caused this deadly pandemic in the first place.
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-In 2020, we are generating 50 million tons worldwide of electronic waste, with an annual growth of 5%.^[^14]^ This means that we produce e-waste at three times the rate that humans reproduce. Much e-waste is toxic and severely impacts land, water, plants, animals, and humans. This damage is permanent. At the other end of the supply chain, fields of wheat and corn have become lakes of toxic sludge to accommodate the rare earth mining industry.^[^15]^ From Mongolia to China to the Congo, people labour in dangerous conditions, mining through the ore-laden mud to find rare minerals to power our devices. Elsewhere, people work endless shifts to assemble computers, phones, tablets. It should be no surprise then that the internet that connects this all is toxic too, evidenced by both the work of content moderators who filter the internet, and the shady tactics used by Big Tech to evade taxes to get filthy rich off the backs of this global human-powered machine. As Ron Deibert put it recently in his 2020 CBC Massey Lectures, “If we continue on this path of unbridled consumption and planned obsolescence, we are doomed.”^[^16]^
-
-So we can either become extinct from the repercussions of our centuries old destructive neoliberal colonial institutions, as the planet pushes back with more pandemics, storms, and violence, or we can get together and admit to our failures as colonisers. These failures tap into something profound, deeply broken, about what settlers have historically valued and continue to enact. We are living largely in the dark fantasies of ghosts – and these old, settler ideas haunt and break us. We can imagine better. We can make other decisions. We can tune our emotions to move from awareness to anxiety to action. We return public lands to Indigenous peoples. We defund police and dismantle white supremacy. We transform ourselves, and our communication systems will follow.
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-[^1]: [[*https://www.convenience.org/Media/Daily/2020/May/1/6-Snack-Sales-Soar-During-Pandemic\_Marketing*]{.underline}](https://www.convenience.org/Media/Daily/2020/May/1/6-Snack-Sales-Soar-During-Pandemic_Marketing)
- [[*https://news.italianfood.net/2020/04/02/pre-sliced-packaged-charcuterie-partly-offsets-pandemic-blow/*]{.underline}](https://news.italianfood.net/2020/04/02/pre-sliced-packaged-charcuterie-partly-offsets-pandemic-blow/)
- [[*https://www.foodbusinessnews.net/articles/16078-the-snack-trends-predicted-to-persist-post-pandemic*]{.underline}](https://www.foodbusinessnews.net/articles/16078-the-snack-trends-predicted-to-persist-post-pandemic)
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-[^2]: [[*https://nypost.com/2020/04/13/americans-are-handling-coronavirus-pandemic-by-binging-on-snacks/*]{.underline}](https://nypost.com/2020/04/13/americans-are-handling-coronavirus-pandemic-by-binging-on-snacks/)
- [[*https://www.herworld.com/gallery/life/wellness/overeating-binge-eating-covid19-pandemic-work-home/*]{.underline}](https://www.herworld.com/gallery/life/wellness/overeating-binge-eating-covid19-pandemic-work-home/)
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-[^3]: [[*https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/coronavirus-shutdowns-have-unintended-climate-benefits-n1161921*]{.underline}](https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/coronavirus-shutdowns-have-unintended-climate-benefits-n1161921)
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-[^4]: [[*https://www.planetofstudents.com/blog/social-awareness/effects-of-lockdown-on-the-environment/*]{.underline}](https://www.planetofstudents.com/blog/social-awareness/effects-of-lockdown-on-the-environment/)
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-[^5]: [[*https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emmanuelfelton/coronavirus-meme-nature-is-healing-we-are-the-virus*]{.underline}](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emmanuelfelton/coronavirus-meme-nature-is-healing-we-are-the-virus)
-
-[^6]: [[*https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200305-why-your-internet-habits-are-not-as-clean-as-you-think*]{.underline}](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200305-why-your-internet-habits-are-not-as-clean-as-you-think)
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-[^7]: [[*https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ethicallivingblog/2009/jan/12/carbon-emissions-google*]{.underline}](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ethicallivingblog/2009/jan/12/carbon-emissions-google)
-
-[^8]: [[*https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200305-why-your-internet-habits-are-not-as-clean-as-you-think*]{.underline}](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200305-why-your-internet-habits-are-not-as-clean-as-you-think)
- and
- [[*https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-55002423*]{.underline}](https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-55002423)
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-[^9]: [[*https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/unsustainable-use-online-video/*]{.underline}](https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/unsustainable-use-online-video/)
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-[^10]: [[*https://www.ecosia.org/*]{.underline}](https://www.ecosia.org/)
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-[^11]: [[*https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/carbonalyser/*]{.underline}](https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/carbonalyser/)
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-[^12]: [[*http://www.green-algorithms.org/*]{.underline}](http://www.green-algorithms.org/)
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-[^13]: [[*https://landback.org/manifesto/*]{.underline}](https://landback.org/manifesto/)
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-[^14]: [[*https://www.thebalancesmb.com/e-waste-recycling-facts-and-figures-2878189*]{.underline}](https://www.thebalancesmb.com/e-waste-recycling-facts-and-figures-2878189)
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-[^15]: [[*https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-green-wind-power-experiment-Pollution-disastrous-scale.html*]{.underline}](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-green-wind-power-experiment-Pollution-disastrous-scale.html)
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-[^16]: [[*https://munkschool.exposure.co/a-qa-with-ron-deibert*]{.underline}](https://munkschool.exposure.co/a-qa-with-ron-deibert)
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The Pandemic's Dark Cloud was written in November 2020 as a
-reflection on the relationship between the pandemic and environmental
-media, with a focus on "the cloud" and its undergirding networked
-infrastructure. The central idea of this piece is to demonstrate the
-interconnectedness of all things -- covid, care, community, nature,
-ewaste, racism, greed -- in both the making and undoing of our modern
-communication systems.
-
-This piece is intended as a provocation, so your thoughts and feelings
-are very welcomed!
-
**Mél Hogan** is the Director of the [[Environmental Media Lab
-(EML)]{.underline}](https://www.environmentalmedialab.com/) and [[Associate
-Professor]{.underline}](https://www.melhogan.com/) at the University of Calgary,
-Canada. She is also an Associate Editor of the Canadian Journal of
-Communication. Career highlights so far include keynoting the 2020
-McLuhan lecture at the Canadian Embassy in Berlin, and giving a plenary
-at transmediale 2020. \@mel\_hogan / melhogan.com / mhogan\@ucalgary.ca
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A Nourishing Network
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Re-Centralization of AI Focusing on Social Justice
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by Adnan Hadzi, Denis Roio
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-n order to lay the foundations for a discussion around
-the argument that the adoption of artificial
-intelligence (AI) technologies benefits the powerful
-few,^[^1]^ focusing on their own existential concerns,^[^2]^ we
-decided to narrow our analysis of the argument
-to social justice (i.e. restorative justice). This paper
-represents an edited version of Adnan Hadzi’s text on
-Social Justice and Artificial Intelligence,^[^3]^ exploring the
-notion of humanised artificial intelligence^[^4]^ in order to
-discuss potential challenges society might face in the
-future. The paper does not discuss current forms and
-applications of artificial intelligence, as, so far, there
-is no AI technology, which is self-conscious and self-
-aware, being able to deal with emotional and social
-intelligence.^[^5]^ It is a discussion around AI as a speculative
-hypothetical entity. The question then could arise, if such a speculative
-self-conscious hardware/software system were created, at what
-point could we talk of personhood? And what criteria could
-there be in order to say an AI system was capable of
-committing AI crimes?
-
-Concerning what constitutes AI crimes the paper uses the
-criteria given in Thomas King et al.’s paper Artificial
-Intelligence Crime: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Foreseeable
-Threats and Solutions,^[^6]^ where King et al. coin the term “AI
-crime”. We discuss the construction of the legal system through
-the lens of political involvement of what could be
-considered to be ‘powerful elites’^[^7]^. In doing so we will be
-demonstrating that it is difficult to prove that the adoption of AI
-technologies is undertaken in a way, which mainly serves a
-powerful class in society. Nevertheless, analysing the culture
-around AI technologies with regard to the nature of law with a
-philosophical and sociological focus enables us to demonstrate
-a utilitarian and authoritarian trend in the adoption of AI
-technologies. Mason argues that “virtue ethics is the only
-ethics fit for the task of imposing collective human control on
-thinking machines”^[^8]^ and AI. We will apply virtue ethics to our
-discourse around artificial intelligence and ethics.
-
-As expert in AI safety Steve Omonhundro believes that AI is
-“likely to behave in antisocial and harmful ways unless they are
-very carefully designed.”^[^9]^ It is through virtue ethics that this
-paper will propose for such a design to be centred around
-restorative justice in order to retain control over AI and thinking
-machines, following Mason’s radical defense of the human and
-his critique of current thoughts within trans- and post-
-humanism as a submission to machine logic.
-
-The paper will conclude by proposing an alternative
-practically unattainable, approach to the current legal system
-by looking into restorative justice for AI crimes,^[^10]^ and how the
-ethics of care could be applied to AI technologies. In conclusion
-the paper will discuss affect^[^11]^ and humanised artificial
-intelligence with regards to the emotion of shame, when
-dealing with AI crimes. In this paper we will aim at re-centralizing AI ethics through social justice, with focus on restorative justice, allowing for an advanced jurisprudence, where human and machine can work in symbiosis on reaching virtue ethics, rather than being in conflict with each other.
-
The Disciplinary Power of artificial intelligence
-
-In order to discuss AI in relation to personhood this paper
-follows the descriptive psychology method^[^12]^ of the paradigm
-case formulation^[^13]^ developed by Peter Ossorio.^[^14]^ Similar to how
-some animal rights activists call for certain animals to be
-recognised as non-human persons,^[^15]^ this paper takes on
-the notion of AI as a non-human person being able to reflect on
-ethical concerns.^[^16]^ Here Wynn Schwartz argues that “it is
-reasonable to include non-humans as persons and to have
-legitimate grounds for disagreeing where the line is properly
-drawn. In good faith, competent judges using this formulation
-can clearly point to where and why they agree or disagree on
-what is to be included in the category of persons.”^[^17]^
-In the case of AI technologies we ask whether the current
-vision for the adoption of AI technologies, a vision which
-mainly supports the military-industrial complex through vast
-investments in army AI,^[^18]^ is a vision that benefits mainly
-powerful elites.
-
In order to discuss these questions, one has to
-analyse the history of AI technologies leading to the kind of
-‘humanised’ AI system this paper posits. The old-fashioned
-approach,^[^19]^ some may still say contemporary approach, was to
-primarily research into ‘mind-only’^[^20]^ AI technologies/systems.
-Through high level reasoning, researchers were optimistic that
-AI technology would quickly become a reality.
-Those early AI technologies were a disembodied approach
-using high level logical and abstract symbols. By the end of the
-80s researchers found that the disembodied approach was not
-even achieving low level tasks humans could easily perform.^[^21]^
-During that period many researchers stopped working on AI
-technologies and systems, and the period is often referred to as
-the “AI winter”.^[^22]^ Rodney Brooks then came forward with the proposition of
-“Nouvelle AI”,^[^23]^ arguing that the old-fashioned approach did
-not take into consideration motor skills and neural networks.
-Only by the end of the 90s did researchers develop statistical
-AI systems without the need for any high-level logical
-reasoning;^[^24]^ instead AI systems were ‘guessing’ through
-algorithms and machine learning. This signalled a first step
-towards humanistic artificial intelligence, as this resembles
-how humans make intuitive decisions;^[^25]^ here researchers
-suggest that embodiment improves cognition.^[^26]^
-With embodiment theory Brooks argued that AI systems
-would operate best when computing only the data that was
-absolutely necessary.^[^27]^ Further in Developing Embodied
-Multisensory Dialogue Agents Michal Paradowski argues that
-without considering embodiment, e.g. the physics of the brain,
-it is not possible to create AI technologies/systems capable of
-comprehension.
-
-
-Foucault’s theories are especially helpful in discussing how
-the “rule of truth” has disciplined civilisation, allowing for an
-adoption of AI technologies which seem to benefit mainly the
-upper-class. However, should we then consider the notion of ‘deep-truth’
-as being the unwieldy product of deep learning AI algorithms?
-Discussions surrounding truth, Foucault states, form legislation into
-something that “decides, transmits and itself extends upon the
-effects of power”^[^28]^. Foucault’s theories help to explain how
-legislation, as an institution, is rolled out throughout society
-with very little resistance, or “proletarian counter-justice”^[^29]^.
-Foucault explains that this has made the justice system and
-legislation a for-profit system. With this understanding of
-legislation, and social justice, one does need to reflect further
-on Foucault’s notion of how disciplinary power seeks to express
-its distributed nature in the modern state. Namely one has to
-analyse the distributed nature of those AI technologies,
-especially through networks and protocols, so that the link can
-now be made to AI technologies becoming ‘legally’ more
-profitable, in the hands of the upper-class.
-
-In Protocol, Alexander Galloway describes how these
-protocols changed the notion of power and how “control exists
-after decentralization”^[^30]^. Galloway argues that protocol has a
-close connection to both Deleuze’s concept of control and
-Foucault’s concept of biopolitics^[^31]^ by claiming that the key to
-perceiving protocol as power is to acknowledge that “protocol
-is an affective, aesthetic force that has control over life itself.”^[^32]^
-Galloway suggests that it is important to discuss more than the
-technologies, and to look into the structures of control within
-technological systems, which also include underlying codes and
-protocols, in order to distinguish between methods that can
-support collective production, e.g. sharing of AI technologies
-within society, and those that put the AI technologies in the
-hands of the powerful few.^[^33]^ Galloway’s argument in the
-chapter Hacking is that the existence of protocols “not only
-installs control into a terrain that on its surface appears
-actively to resist it”^[^34]^, but goes on to create the highly
-controlled network environment. For Galloway hacking is “an
-index of protocological transformations taking place in the
-broader world of techno-culture.”^[^35]^
-
AI technologies and Restorative Justice: The Ethics of Care
-
-
-Having said this, the prospect could be raised that
-restorative justice might offer “a solution that could deliver
-more meaningful justice”^[^36]^. With respect to AI technologies,
-and the potential inherent in them for AI crimes, instead of
-following a retributive legislative approach, an ethical
-discourse,^[^37]^ with a deeper consideration for the sufferers of AI
-crimes should be adopted.^[^38]^ We ask: could restorative justice
-offer an alternative way of dealing with the occurrence of AI
-crimes?^[^39]^
-
-
-Dale Millar and Neil Vidmar described two psychological
-perceptions of justice.^[^40]^ One is behavioural control, following
-the legal code as strictly as possible, punishing any
-wrongdoer,^[^41]^ and second, the restorative justice system, which
-focuses on restoration where harm was done. Thus an
-alternative approach for the ethical implementation of AI
-technologies, with respect to legislation, might be to follow
-restorative justice principles. Restorative justice would allow
-for AI technologies to learn how to care about ethics.^[^42]^ Julia
-Fionda describes restorative justice as a conciliation between
-victim and offender, during which the offence is deliberated
-upon.^[^43]^ Both parties try to come to an agreement on how to
-achieve restoration for the damage done, to the situation
-before the crime (here an AI crime) happened. Restorative
-justice advocates compassion for the victim and offender, and a
-consciousness on the part of the offenders as to the
-repercussion of their crimes. The victims of AI crimes would
-not only be placed in front of a court, but also be offered
-engagement in the process of seeking justice and restoration.^[^44]^
-
-Restorative justice might support victims of AI crimes better
-than the punitive legal system, as it allows for the sufferers of
-AI crimes to be heard in a personalised way, which could be
-adopted to the needs of the victims (and offenders). As victims
-and offenders represent themselves in restorative conferencing
-sessions, these become much more affordable,^[^45]^ meaning that the barrier to seeking justice due to the financial costs would
-be partly eliminated, allowing for poor parties to be able to
-contribute to the process of justice. This would benefit wider
-society and AI technologies would not only be defined by a
-powerful elite. Restorative justice could hold the potential not
-only to discuss the AI crimes themselves, but also to get to the
-root of the problem and discuss the cause of an AI crime. For
-John Braithwaite restorative justice makes re-offending
-harder.^[^46]^
-
-
-In such a scenario, a future AI system capable of committing
-AI crimes would need to have knowledge of ethics around the
-particular discourse of restorative justice. The implementation
-of AI technologies will lead to a discourse concerning who is
-responsible for actions taken by AI technologies. Even when
-considering clearly defined ethical guidelines, these might be
-difficult to implement,^[^47]^ due to the pressure of competition AI
-systems find themselves in. That said, this speculation is
-restricted to humanised artificial intelligence systems. The
-main hindrance for AI technologies to be part of a restorative
-justice system might be that of the very human emotion of
-shame. Without a clear understanding of shame it will be
-impossible to resolve AI crimes in a restorative manner.^[^48]^
-
-
-Furthering this perspective, we suggest that reflections brought by new materialism should also be taken into account: not only as a critical perspective on the engendering and anthropomorphic representation of AI, but also to broaden the spectrum of what we consider to be justice in relation to all the living world. Without this new perspective, the sort of idealized AI image of a non-living intelligence that deals with enormous amounts of information risks to serve the abstraction of anthropocentric views into a computationalist acceleration, with deafening results. Rather than such an implosive perspective, the application of law and jurisprudence may take advantage of AI’s computational and sensorial enhanced capabilities by including all information gathered from the environment, including that produced by plants, animals and soil. Thus we might want to think about a humanised symbiosis between humans and technology,^[^49]^ along the lines of Garry
-Kasparov’s advanced chess,^[^50]^ as in advanced jurisprudence.^[^51]^ A legal system in which humans and machines work together on restoring justice, for social justice.
-
-
-
-
-[^1]: Cp. G. Chaslot, “YouTube’s A.I. was divisive in the US presidential election”, Medium, November 27, 2016. Available at: https://medium.com/the-graph/youtubes-ai-is-neutral-towards-clicks-but-is-biased-towards-people-and-ideas-3a2f643dea9a#.tjuusil7d [accessed February 25, 2018]; E. Morozov, “The Geopolitics Of Artificial Intelligence”, FutureFest, London, 2018. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g0hx9LPBq8 [accessed October 25, 2019].
-[^2]: Cp. M. Busby, “Use of ‘Killer Robots’ in Wars Would Breach Law, Say Campaigners”, The Guardian, August 21, 2018. Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20181203074423/https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/aug/21/use-of-killer-robots-in-wars-would-breach-law-say-campaigners [accessed October 25, 2019].
-[^3]: Cp. A. Hadzi, “Social Justice and Artificial Intelligence”, Body, Space & Technology, 18 (1), 2019, pp. 145–174. Available at: https://doi.org/10.16995/bst.318 [accessed October 25, 2019].
-[^4]: Cp. A. Kaplan and M. Haenlein, “Siri, Siri, in my Hand: Who’s the Fairest in the Land? On the Interpretations, Illustrations, and Implications of Artificial Intelligence”, Business Horizons, 62 (1), 2019, pp. 15–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2018.08.0 04; S. Legg and M. Hutter, A Collection of Definitions of Intelligence, Lugano, Switzerland, IDSIA, 2007. Available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/0706.3639 [accessed October 25, 2019].2
-[^5]:N. Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014.
-[^6]: Cp. T. King, N. Aggarwal, M. Taddeo and L. Floridi, “Artificial Intelligence Crime: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Foreseeable Threats and Solutions”, SSRN Scholarly Paper No. ID 3183238, Rochester, NY, Social Science Research Network, 2018. Available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3183238 [accessed October 25, 2019].
-[^7]:P. Mason, Clear Bright Future, London, Allen Lane Publishers, 2019.
-[^8]:Mason, Clear Bright Future.
-[^9]:S. Omohundro, “Autonomous Technology and the Greater Human Good”, Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 26 (3), 2014, pp. 303–315, here: p. 303.3
-[^10]: Cp. C. Cadwalladr, “Elizabeth Denham: ‘Data Crimes are Real Crimes”, The Guardian, July 15, 2018. Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20181121235057/https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/15/elizabeth-denham-data-protection-inf ormation-commissioner-facebook-cambridge-analytica [accessed October 25, 2019].
-[^11]: Cp. B. Olivier, “Cyberspace, Simulation, Artificial Intelligence, Affectionate Machines and Being Human”, Communicatio, 38 (3), 2012, pp. 261–278. https://doi.org/10.1080 /02500167.2012.716763 [accessed October 25, 2019]; E.A. Wilson, Affect and Artificial Intelligence, Washington, University of Washington Press, 2011.
-[^12]: Cp. P.G. Ossorio, The Behavior of Persons, Ann Arbor, Descriptive Psychology Press, 2013. Available at: http://www.sdp.org/sdppubs- publications/the-behavior-of-perso ns/ [accessed October 25, 2019].
-[^13]: Cp. J. Jeffrey, “Knowledge Engineering: Theory and Practice”, Society for Descriptive Psychology, 5, 1990, pp. 105–122.
-[^14]: Cp. P.G. Ossorio, Persons: The Collected Works of Peter G. Ossorio, Volume I. Ann Arbor, Descriptive Psychology Press, 1995. Available at: http://www.sdp.org/sdppubs-publications/persons-the-collected-works-of-peter-g-ossorio-volume-1/ [accessed October 25, 2019].
-[^15]: Cp. M. Mountain, “Lawsuit Filed Today on Behalf of Chimpanzee Seeking Legal Personhood”, Nonhuman Rights Blog, December 2, 2013. Available at: https://www.nonhumanrights.org/blog/lawsuit-filed-today-on-behalf-of-chimpanzee-seeking-legal-personhood/ [accessed January 8, 2019]; M. Midgley, “Fellow Champions Dolphins as ‘Non-Human Persons’”, Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, January 10, 2010. Available at: https://www.oxfordanimalethics.com/2010/01/fellow -champions-dolphins-as-%E2%80%9Cnon-human-persons%E2%80%9D/ [accessed January 8, 2019].
-[^16]: Cp. R. Bergner, “The Tolstoy Dilemma: A Paradigm Case Formulation and Some Therapeutic Interventions”, in K.E. Davis, F. Lubuguin and W. Schwartz (eds.), Advances in Descriptive Psychology, Vol. 9, 2010, pp. 143–160. Available at: http://www.sdp.org/sdppubs-publications/advances-in-descriptive-psychology-vol-9; P. Laungani, “Mindless Psychiatry and Dubious Ethics”, Counselling Psychology4 Quarterly, 15 (1), 2002, pp. 23–33. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09515070110102305 [accessed October 26, 2019].
-[^17]: W. Schwartz, “What Is a Person and How Can We Be Sure? A Paradigm Case Formulation”, SSRN Scholarly Paper No. ID 2511486, Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, 2014. Available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2511486 [accessed October 25, 2019].
-[^18]: Cp. Mason, Clear Bright Future.
-[^19]: Cp. M. Hoffman, and R. Pfeifer, “The Implications of Embodiment for Behavior and Cognition: Animal and Robotic Case Studies”, in W. Tschacher and C. Bergomi (eds.), The Implications of Embodiment: Cognition and Communication, Exeter, Andrews UK Limited, 2015, pp. 31– 58. Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/1202.0440
-[^20]: N.J. Nilsson, The Quest for Artificial Intelligence, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009.
-[^21]: Cp. R. Brooks, Cambrian Intelligence: The Early History of the New AI, Cambridge, MA, A Bradford Book, 1999.
-[^22]: Cp. D. Crevier, AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence, New York, Basic Books, 1993; H.P. Newquist, The Brain Makers, Indianapolis, Ind: Sams., 1994.
-[^23]: Cp. R. Brooks, “A Robust Layered Control System for a Mobile Robot”, IEEE Journal on Robotics and Automation, 2 (1), 1986, pp. 14–23. Available at: https://doi.org/510.1109/JRA.1986.1087032 [accessed October 25, 2019].
-[^24]: Cp. Brooks, Cambrian Intelligence.
-[^25]:Cp. R. Pfeifer, “Embodied Artificial Intelligence”, presented at the
-International Interdisciplinary Seminar on New Robotics, Evolution and Embodied Cognition,
-Lisbon, November, 2002. Available at: https://www.informatics.indiana.edu/rocha/publications/embrob/pfeifer.html [accessed October 25, 2019].
-[^26]: Cp. T. Renzenbrink, “Embodiment of Artificial Intelligence Improves Cognition”, Elektormagazine, February 9, 2012. Available at: https://www.elektormagazine.com/articles/embodiment-of-artificial-intelligence-improves-cognition
-[accessed January 10, 2019]; G. Zarkadakis, “Artificial Intelligence & Embodiment:
-Does Alexa Have a Body?”, Medium, May 6, 2018. Available at:
-https://medium.com/@georgezarkadakis/artificial-intelligence-embodiment-does-alexa-have-a-body-d5b97521a201
-[accessed January 10, 2019].
-[^27]: Cp. L. Steels and R. Brooks, The Artificial Life Route to Artificial
-Intelligence: Building Embodied, Situated Agents, London/New York, Taylor
-& Francis, 1995.
-[^28]: M. Foucault, “Disciplinary Power and Subjection”, in S. Lukes (ed.),
-Power, New York, NYU Press, 1986, pp. 229–242, here: p. 230.
-[^29]: M. Foucault, Power, edited by C. Gordon, London, Penguin, 1980,
-p. 34.6
-[^30]: A.R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization,
-Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2004, p. 81.
-[^31]: Cp. M. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the
-Collège de France, 1978–1979, London, Pan Macmillan, 2008.
-[^32]: Galloway, Protocol, p. 81.
-[^33]: Cp. Galloway, Protocol, p. 147.
-[^34]: Galloway, Protocol, p. 146.
-[^35]: Galloway, Protocol, p. 157.
-[^36]: Crook, Comparative Media Law and Ethics, p. 310.7
-[^37]: Cp. R. Courtland, “Bias Detectives: The Researchers Striving to
-Make Algorithms Fair”, Nature, 558, 2018, pp. 357–360. Available at:
-https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-05469-3 [accessed October 25, 2019].
-[^38]: Cp. H. Fry, “We Hold People With Power to Account. Why Not
-Algorithms?” The Guardian, September 17, 2018. Available at:
-https://web.archive.org/web/201901021
-94739/https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/17/power-
-algorithms-technology-regulate [accessed October 25, 2019].
-[^39]: Cp. O. Etzioni, “How to Regulate Artificial Intelligence”, The New
-York Times, January 20, 2018. Available at:
-https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/opinion/artificial-intelligence-
-regulations-rules.html [accessed October 25, 2019]; A. Goel, “Ethics and
-Artificial Intelligence”, The New York Times, December 22, 2017. Available
-at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/opinion/artificial-intelligence.html
-[accessed October 25, 2019].
-[^40]: Cp. N. Vidmar and D.T. Miller, “Socialpsychological Processes
-Underlying Attitudes Toward Legal Punishment”, Law and Society Review,
-1980, pp. 565–602.
-[^41]: Cp. M. Wenzel and T.G. Okimoto, “How Acts of Forgiveness Restore
-a Sense of Justice: Addressing Status/Power and Value Concerns Raised by
-Transgressions”, European Journal of Social Psychology, 40 (3), 2010, pp.
-401–417.
-[^42]: Cp. N. Bostrom and E. Yudkowsky, “The Ethics of Artificial
-Intelligence”, in K. Frankish and W.M. Ramsey (ed.), The Cambridge
-Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
-2014, pp. 316–334; Frankish and Ramsey, The Cambridge Handbook of
-Artificial Intelligence.
-[^43]: Cp. J. Fionda, Devils and Angels: Youth Policy and Crime, London,
-Hart, 2005.8
-[^44]: Cp. Nils Christie, “Conflicts as Property”, The British Journal of
-Criminology, 17 (1), 1977, pp. 1–15.
-[^45]: Cp. J. Braithwaite, “Restorative Justice and a Better Future”, in E.
-McLaughlin and G. Hughes (eds.), Restorative Justice: Critical Issues,
-London, SAGE, 2003, pp. 54–67.
-[^46]: Cp. J. Braithwaite, Crime, Shame and Reintegration, Cambridge,
-Cambridge University Press, 1989.
-[^47]: Cp. A. Conn, “Podcast: Law and Ethics of Artificial Intelligence”,
-Future of Life, March 31, 2017. Available at:
-https://futureoflife.org/2017/03/31/podcast-law-ethics-artificial-intelligence/
-[accessed September, 22 2018].
-[^48]: Cp. A. Rawnsley, “Madeleine Albright: ‘The Things that are
-Happening are Genuinely, Seriously Bad’”, The Guardian, July 8, 2018.
-Available
-at:
-https://web.archive.org/web/20190106193657/https://www.theguardian.com9/books/2018/jul/08/madeleine-albright-fascism-is-not-an-ideology-its-a-method-interview-fascism-a-warning [accessed October 25, 2019].
-[^49]: Cp. D. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”, Socialist Review, 15 (2), 1985.
-Available at:
-http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html
-[accessed October 25, 2019]; C. Thompson, “The Cyborg Advantage”, Wired,
-March 22, 2010. Available at: https://www.wired.com/2010/03/st-thompson-
-cyborgs/ [accessed October 25, 2019].
-[^50]: Cp. J. Hipp et al., “Computer Aided Diagnostic Tools Aim to
-Empower Rather than Replace Pathologists: Lessons Learned from
-Computational Chess”, Journal of Pathology Informatics, 2, 2011. Available
-at: https://doi.org/10.4103/2153-3539.82050 [accessed October 25, 2019].
-[^51]: Cp. J. Baggini, “Memo to Those Seeking to Live for Ever: Eternal
-Life Would be Deathly Dull”, The Guardian, July 8, 2018. Available at:
-https://web.archive.org/web/20181225111455/https://www.theguardian.com
-/commentisfree/2018/jul/08/live-for-ever-eternal-life-deathly-dull-immortality
-[accessed October 25, 2019].
-
-
-
-
-**Adnan Hadzi** is currently working as resident researcher at the University of Malta. Adnan has been a regular at Deckspace Media Lab, for the last decade, a period over which he has developed his research at Goldsmiths, University of London, based on his work with Deptford. TV/Deckspace.TV. It is through Free and Open Source Software and technologies this research has a social impact. Currently Adnan is a participant researcher in the MAZI/CreekNet research collaboration with the boattr project.
-Adnan is co-editing and producing the after.video video book, exploring video as theory, reflecting upon networked video, as it profoundly re-shapes medial patterns (Youtube, citizen journalism, video surveillance etc.). Adnan’s documentary film work tracks artist pranksters The Yes Men and net provocatours Bitnik Collective. Bitnik’s practice expands from the digital to affect physical spaces, often intentionally applying loss of control to challenge established structures and mechanisms, formulating fundamental questions concerning contemporary issues.
-dek.spc.org /
-bitnik.org /
-deptford.tv
-**Denis Roio**, better known by the hacker name Jaromil, is CTO and co~founder of the Dyne.org software house and think&do tank based in Amsterdam, developers of free and open source software with a strong focus on peer to peer networks, social values, cryptography, disintermediation and sustainability. Jaromil holds a Ph.D on “Algorithmic Sovereignty” and received the Vilém Flusser Award at transmediale (Berlin, 2009) while leading for 6 years the R&D department of the Netherlands Media art Institute (Montevideo/TBA). He is the leading technical architect of DECODE, an EU funded project on blockchain technologies and data ownership, involving pilots in cooperation with the municipalities of Barcelona and Amsterdam.
-
A Nourishing Network
-
-
*A Nourishing Network* is a publishing project that aims at documenting
-and circulating current research done by a network of artists, activists
-and programmers that collaborate with the Austrian net culture
-initiative *servus.at*. Especially in this moment of reduced mobility
-and physical encounters, the publication stimulates the circulation of
-materials and their further development in a community that usually
-gathers in small-sized events and festivals.
-
-The project is a continuation of *Art Meets Radical Openness*--*AMRO*
-in short--a bi-yearly festival organized by servus.at in Linz. The
-festival creates space for discussions around the current impact of
-internet technologies and platforms. It aims to imagine possible (real)
-sustainable models for computational infrastructures, as an alternative
-to the growing techno-solutionist trend.
-
-
*A Nourishing Network* is produced as a hybrid publishing process
-realised by Manetta Berends and Alice Strete from the Rotterdam
-initiative Varia.
-
-
-The project emerged as a response to the following three departure
-points:
-
-- **Another lost occasion for degrowth?**
-
-At the beginning many thought that the spring lockdowns of 2020 might
-have been a great opportunity to embrace less impactful lifestyles and
-production models. As soon as the measurements loosened up, the level of
-consumption rose to pre-lockdowns levels. Was the emerging environmental awareness overshadowed by a „sort of" return to normality?
-
-- **Re-centralization or blooming alternatives?**
-
-During the first wave of lockdown, data-avid proprietary services gained
-a more central role within online ecosystems and daily life. Faced with
-this new context, communities dealing with free and open source software
-continued to work on alternative platform models. What happened? And
-what could be further explored?
-
-- **Artdiversity loss: is now Zoom the best art gallery 2020?**
-
-In 2020 many cultural initiatives were forced to shift towards online
-videocalls, where often the materiality of bodies and matter is
-deprioritised. As the spectrum of technical possibilities offered by
-(centralised) digital platforms currently shape and actively format the
-field of the arts, how can we make space to experiment with alternative
-formats?
-
-
-
How the nourishing network works:
-
-
The publication is in itself an experiment: one in peer-to-peer
-publishing starting from the *feed* as a potentially multi-directional
-circulation device. Through web-syndication protocols and mail art
-practices, this publication engages with complex circulation flows,
-thereby exploring the social dynamics of such networked forms of
-publishing. Borrowing from food terminology, the activity of
-*nourishing* translates into an act of continuous care within the
-network and for the network itself.
-
-A subscription to the digital and/or postal feed, nourishes her
-subscribers with a stream of essays. The feeds are available at
-[https://](https://a-nourishing-network.radical-openness.org/)[a-nourishing-network.radical-openness.org](https://a-nourishing-network.radical-openness.org/)
-and can be digested in different ways: as RSS, Atom and ActivityPub
-streams, or as a stream of physical publications which are distributed
-through a "postal feed" throughout Europe.
-
-
How to circulate within the Nourishing Network?
-
-
The project is an invitation to stimulate circulation by further
-disseminating the material in online and offline ways. Each subscriber
-to the postal feed will receive two copies of the publication in order
-to extend the circulation network with one step -- by sending it to
-someone who might appreciate it. Similarly, the feed is prepared to
-circulate in online networks.
-
-
Finally, to enforce feedback and more spontaneous responses to the
-articles, we are open for contributions from the community of readers.
-
Colophon
-
-
A Nourishing Network is a peer-to-peer publishing experiment starting from the feed as a potentially multi-directional circulation device.
-
-A Nourishing Network is initiated by servus.at (Davide Bevilacqua) in collaboration with varia.zone
-(Alice Strete & Manetta Berends) and is published in the context of AMRO 2020 (Arts Meets Radical Openness).
-
-Editing: Davide Bevilacqua
-Design and development: Manetta Berends, Alice Strete
-Proofreading: Christopher Hütmannsberger
-Paper: Clairefontaine 80g
-Typeface: Gnu Unifont, WhiteRabbit, Ansi Shadow
-Print and production: Varia
-This project is produced with Free Software tools.
-The feeds are made with Pelican & Weasyprint.
-
-
-© servus.at and Authors 2020;
-Published under the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license.
-
-Many thanks to our partners, collaborators, authors and the AMRO community:
-
-Organized with: Kunstuniversität Linz, Department of Timebased Media
-Funders: Bundesministerium für Kunst, Kultur, öffentlicher Dienst und Sport; Kulturland Oberösterreich; Linz Kultur, LINZimPULS2019, Österreichische Gesellschaft für Politische Bildung.
-
-servus.at Main Sponsor 2021-2023
-
-
-AMRO Main Sponsors 2020
-
-
-
-
-AMRO Co-Sponsors: Ottakringer Brauerei, Pedacola, Buchbinderei Kölbl, Eindrucksvoll GmbH
-
-Partners: afo – architekturforum oberösterreich dorfTV, Radio Fro, Willy*Fred, Stadtwerkstatt STWST, Piet Zwart Institute – Rotterdam.
-
-
-
-This printed copy is one of the many feeds available at https://a-nourishing-network.radical-openness.org/
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- ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) )
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- ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) )
-( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( (
- ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) )
-( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( (
- ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) )
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- ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) )
-( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( (
- ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) )
-( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( (
- ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) )
-( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( (
- ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) )
-( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( (
- ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) )
-( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( (
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- ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) )
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- ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) )
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- ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) )
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- ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) )
-( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( (
- ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) )
-( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( (
- ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) )
-( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( (
- ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) )
-( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( (
- ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) )
-( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( (
- ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) )
-( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( (
- ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) )
-( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( A Nourishing Network ( (( ( ( ( (
- ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) )
-( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( (
- ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) )
-( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( (
- ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) )
-( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( ( ( (( ( ( ( (
- ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) ) ) )) ) ) ) )
-
-
A Nourishing Network
-
Infrastructure Mega Corridors:
a Way Out (or In) to the Crisis?
-
-
by Recommon.org
-
-----------------------------------a-----------------------------------
--------------------------- - - - - - -----------------------------
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-----------------w-----w-----w-----w-----w-----w-----w-----------------
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--------------------------r--r--r--r--r--r--r--------------------------
----------------------------- k-kk-k-kk-k -----------------------------
-
-
-
-
-
-██╗
-██║
-██║
-██║
-╚═╝
-
-In the last few months our lives have changed dramatically. Many of us
-lost their jobs while many others continued working under extreme
-conditions. Inequality and social injustices have become increasingly
-visible features of the economic system and the society in which we
-live.
-
-The pandemic might have impacted everyone's life, but it has not
-affected everyone in the same way. Among the sectors that did not
-suffer, but rather benefited from the crisis, are online platforms such
-as Amazon and the likes. Those sectors have become the vehicles for the
-transfer from "real life" to a virtual dimension for our working,
-schooling, sporting and socialising. Fortunately, many have been
-questioning what the implications of all this would be; including what
-might happen to the data generated by our online lives; by whom and how
-is this data being treated; and what are the implications? This is a
-debate that we hope will remain open, seeing as it concerns aspects that are
-not contingent to the health crisis, but are instead key factors in the
-reorganization of "the extractivist society". A society that enables a
-few elites to extract more and more material and financial wealth from
-the territories and local communities that inhabit them, effectively
-expropriating them from the power to decide upon their own lives.
-
-While most ongoing conversations center around the health crisis and the
-resulting recession, we want to bring attention to the systemic
-reorganization that is taking place as we speak. We are talking about a
-process that began before the pandemic, a new way of organizing large
-infrastructure according to the logics of mega-corridors, to reduce time
-and space, with the aim of continuously increasing profits on an
-increasing scale in the face of a slowdown in the growth of global
-trade. This process, which remains only partly visible, is highly
-energy-intensive and rooted in the fossil fuel economy, involving the
-construction of new high-speed railways for the transport of goods, port
-terminals, data centres and power stations, as well as new logistics
-centres covering hundreds of hectares. All this implies a radical and
-irreversible transformation of territories for the benefit of large
-private capital, where ports and production areas identified as "free
-trade", or "Special Economic Zones" (SEZs), all become interconnected.
-
-What are the manifestations in Italy and Europe of this global capital
-agenda? How will it change the social, economic and productive structure
-of our country and the continent? What impact will it have on the
-climate and the environment, two central areas where failures and
-systemic contradictions are already very visible? The question is partly
-rhetorical: it is difficult to imagine a "globalization 2.0" which will
-accelerate production, transport and consumption of goods at an
-unprecedented speed while at the same time profoundly reduce the
-systemic impact on the environment and climate, an impact that goes far
-beyond proposed calculations of direct and indirect emissions generated.
-
-Will the major infrastructure mega-corridors plan be challenged in the
-post-pandemic economic crisis or will the current crisis be an excuse to
-accelerate it? Will its overall impact be properly assessed? This
-remains doubtful, seeing as harmful impacts of the global infrastructure
-agenda are currently considered as the least of their problems by investors
-and policy makers dazzled by forecasts and data about the production,
-logistics and global trade that is starting again.
-
-How does this infrastructure masterplan meet the needs of the millions
-of people who are already paying the highest costs of a profit-driven
-model at all costs? How does it meet the needs of communities that will
-be removed from their lands to make way for new mega infrastructure? How
-will it make our societies more resilient to the great droughts,
-typhoons, and increasingly heavy rains? How will it counteract the
-increasing cementing of the most densely populated areas and how will it
-enable everyone to have a roof over their heads?
-
-We believe that it is high time to open up to such far-reaching
-questions.
-
-Published on Counter Balance, 17 July 2020:
-https://counter-balance.org/news/infrastructure-mega-corridors-a-way-out-or-in-to-the-crisis
-Translated from an original blogpost in Italian by Elena Gerebizza and Filippo Taglieri from Re:Common introducing their new report “The great illusion. Special economic zones and infrastructure mega-corridors, the way to go?”: https://www.recommon.org/la-grande-illusione/
-
-
-
-
**Elena Gerebizza** is a researcher and campaigner for Re:Common since 2012. She focuses on campaigns against the expansion of fossil fuels and large scale infrastructure for over 15 years. A graduate in international politics with a MA in International relations at the University of Amsterdam ISHSS, she has participated in field visits to communities affected by the impacts of the extractive industry in Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Republic of Congo, among others. Her most recent activity includes investigative research on the expansion of infrastructure mega-corridors, including on some specific gas and transport projects.
-
**Filippo Taglieri** is a researcher and campaigner for Re:Common since 2017. He works on campaigns
-against fossil fuels, especially coal and gas, and has carried out field research,
-particularly in Latin America, on the socio-environmental impacts of extractive
-industries and large infrastructures. Graduated in communications studies, he has
-been a political activist in support of farmers' movements for years.
-
-**Re:Common** is an Italian, not-for-profit organization. It conducts investigations and promotes campaigns against the dodgy economy and the devastation of the territories across the world caused by the indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources and large public and private infrastructure projects.
-www.recommon.org
-
-
A Nourishing Network
-
The Philosophy of Warnings
-
-
by Santiago Zabala
-
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--------------------------r--r--r--r--r--r--r--------------------------
----------------------------- k-kk-k-kk-k -----------------------------
-
-
-
-
-
-
-████████╗
-╚══██╔══╝
- ██║
- ██║
- ╚═╝
-
his month an undergraduate student told me his parents were using the
-pandemic to persuade him to avoid philosophy as it could not prevent or
-solve real emergencies. I told him to let them know that we find
-ourselves in this global emergency because we haven't thought
-philosophically *enough*. The increasingly narrow focus of experts this
-century, has prevented us from addressing problems from a global
-perspective, which has always been the distinctive approach of
-philosophy. This is evident in the little consideration we give to
-warnings. Too often these are discarded as useless or
-insignificant---much like philosophy---when in fact they are vital.
-Though philosophers can't solve an ongoing emergency---philosophy was
-never meant to solve anything---we can interpret their signs through a
-"philosophy of warnings." Although this philosophy probably won't change
-the views of my student's parents, it might help us to reevaluate our
-political, environmental, and technological priorities for the future.
-
-
Much like the recent philosophies of plants or
-insects^[^1]^,
-which emerged as a response to a global environmental crisis, a
-"philosophy of warnings" is also a reaction to a global emergency that
-requires philosophical elucidation. Although the ongoing pandemic has
-triggered this new stance it isn't limited to this event. Nor is it
-completely new. Warnings have been a topic of philosophical
-investigation for centuries. The difference lies in the meaning these
-concepts have acquired now. Before philosophy we had prophets to tell us
-to be alert to the warnings of the Gods, but we secularized that office
-into that of the philosopher, who, as one among equals, advised to heed
-the signs; to use our imagination, because that is all we have. The
-current pandemic has shown us how badly prepared we were for a global
-emergency, even one whose coming has been
-announced^[^2]^
-for decades. But why haven't we been able to take these warnings
-seriously? Before tackling this question, let's recall how warnings have
-been addressed philosophically.
-
-
Examples of warning philosophy can be traced back to Greek mythology and
-Plato\'s *Apology*. Apollo provided Cassandra with the gift of prophecy
-even though she could not convince others of the validity of her
-predictions, and Socrates warned the Athenians---after he was sentenced
-to death---that their inequity and mendacity undermined the democracy
-they claimed to honor. Against Gaston Bachelard, who coined the term
-"Cassandra complex" to refer to the idea that events could be known in
-advance, Theodore Adorno warned that any claim to know the future should
-be avoided. It is probably in this spirit that Walter Benjamin warned we
-should pull the brake on the train of progress as it was stacking
-disaster upon disaster. In line with Hannah Arendt's warnings of the
-reemergence of totalitarianism after the Second World War, Giorgio
-Agamben began his book on the current pandemic with "A Warning":
-biosecurity will now serve governments to rule through a new form of
-tyranny called "technological-sanitary" despotism.
-
-
These examples illustrate the difference between warnings and
-predictions. Warnings are sustained by signs in the present that request
-our involvement, as Benjamin suggests. Predictions call out what will
-take place regardless of our actions, a future as the only continuation
-of the present, but warnings instead point toward what is to come and
-are meant involve us in a radical break, a discontinuity with the
-present signaled by alarming signs that we are asked to confront. The
-problem is not the involvement warnings request from us, but rather
-whether we are willing to confront them at all. The volume of vital
-warnings that we ignore---climate change, social inequality, refugee
-crises---is alarming; it has become our greatest emergency.
-
-
Indifference towards warnings is rooted in the ongoing global return to
-order and realism in the twenty-first century. This return is not only
-political, as demonstrated by the various right-wing populist forces
-that have taken office around the world, but also cultural as the return
-of some contemporary
-intellectuals^[^3]^
-to Eurocentric Cartesian realism demonstrates. The idea that we can
-still claim access to truth without being dependent upon interpretation
-presupposes that knowledge of objective facts is enough to guide our
-lives. Within this theoretical framework warnings are cast off as
-unfounded, contingent, and subjective, even though philosophers of
-science such as Bruno Latour continue to
-remind^[^4]^
-us that no "attested knowledge can stand on its own." The internet and,
-in particular, social media have intensified this realist view, further
-discrediting traditional vectors of legitimation (international
-agencies, major newspapers, or credentialed academics) and rendering any
-tweet by an anonymous blogger credible because it presents itself as
-transparent, direct, and genuine. "The quickness of social media, as
-Judith Butler pointed
-out^[^5]^,
-allows for forms of vitriol that do not exactly support thoughtful
-debate."
-
-
Our inability to take warnings seriously has devastating consequences,
-as recent months make clear. The central argument in favor of a
-philosophy of warnings is not whether what it warns of comes to pass but
-rather the pressure it exercises against those emergencies hidden and
-subsumed under the global call to order. This pressure demands that our
-political, environmental, and technological priorities be reconsidered,
-revealing the alarming signs of democratic backsliding, loss of biodiversity, and commodification of our lives by surveillance capitalism. These
-warnings are also why we should oppose any demand to "return to
-normality," which signals primarily a desire to ignore what caused this
-pandemic in the first place. A philosophy of warnings seeks to alter and
-interrupt the reality we've become accustomed to.
-
-
Although a philosophy of warnings will not prevent future emergencies,
-it will resist the ongoing silencing of emergencies under the guise of
-realism by challenging our framed global order and its realist
-advocates. This philosophy is not meant to rescue us *from* emergencies
-but rather rescue us *into* emergencies that we are trained to ignore.
-
-[^1]: http://cup.columbia.edu/book/a-philosophy-of-the-insect/9780231175791
-[^2]: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/experts-warned-pandemic-decades-ago-why-not-ready-for-coronavirus/
-[^3]: https://arcade.stanford.edu/blogs/returning-order-through-realism
-[^4]: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Down+to+Earth%3A+Politics+in+the+New+Climatic+Regime-p-9781509530564
-[^5]: https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/09/judith-butler-culture-wars-jk-rowling-and-living-anti-intellectual-times
-
-
-
Published in the Institute of Arts and Ideas on October 7, 2020 https://iai.tv/articles/the-philosophy-of-warnings-auid-1646
-
-**Santiago Zabala** is ICREA
-Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University in
-Barcelona. His most recent book is *Being at Large: Freedom in the Age
-of Alternative Facts* (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020). santiagozabala.com
-
A Nourishing Network
-
Zugzwang or the Compulsion to Find a Common Baseline in Sound
-
-
by Christina Gruber, Natalia Domínguez Rangel, Samuel Hertz and Emil Flatø
-
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----------------------------- k-kk-k-kk-k -----------------------------
-
-
-
- Zugzwang: German for "compulsion to move", is a situation found in chess and other turn-based games wherein one player is put at a disadvantage because they must make a move when they would prefer to pass and not move (Oxford Dictionary)
-
-
-███████╗
-╚══███╔╝
- ███╔╝
-███████╗
-╚══════╝
-
-
-
ugzwang explores how a more-than-human approach towards the use of technology can help us to tune in with our companion species and environments, understanding them as assemblages - open-ended gatherings of living and non-living ways of beings.^[^1]^ We aim at observing the role of sound as a critical player in re-connecting with our environments and to engage in relations of care on both ends to help us navigate on earth’s surface. Key themes came up in online discussions our multidisciplinary group had during the first lockdowns due to the outbreak of COVID-19, in preparation of a joint panel for the festival Art Meets Radical Openness in May 2020.
-
-
What could a common baseline sound like?
-
-The attempt to tune-in with our environments opens possibilities to critically discuss questions of listening, talking, and connecting with all our companions, living and non-living. While the act of listening opens particular possibilities for care, it is not an inherently benign action: both nonhumans and humans (including the military^[^2]^) use their auditory capacities to eavesdrop on other species^[^3]^. Sound is omnipresent, but unfamiliar as a way for the world to present itself: We have problems understanding. Miscommunication and distortion happen constantly. Can listening become once again one of the main assets to learn about our environment? The access to vast archives of data allow the interpretation of planetary sounds using machine learning^[^4]^. But will this prevent further misunderstandings? How can humans actively teach these systems to avoid a too strong human-perspective and enable them to think as a connected network resonating on Earth? Zugzwang is local and global, and so are our five short explorations into forms of noticing, following the characteristics of sound, how they can be received, propagated, and perceived.
-
-The Fictions of Iconic Earth Images, and the Possibilities of Sound – Emil Flatø
-
-Suddenly, silence. Silence in the microphones of acoustic ecologists. No bewildering noise from the whirl of the bottom trawler and its massive engine, no buzz of chainsaw along the rainforest’s perimeter^[^5]^. The ambient sounds of traffic reduced to a minimum. In March 2020, a nonhuman precision-weapon, the SARS-CoV-2 virus, had put a pause to human enterprises – and a muffle to its sounds.
-
Recordings of this sudden silence made a strange impression on many commentators. Paradoxically, it was as if the amplitude of human clamor became sonorous only when it could be played back as an absence. Why is it that our daily interruptions in ecological life hardly register – the confusion our chatter must introduce to the tapestry of bird calls that crisscross public places, the inescapability of boats in trading-route rivers – while sudden encounters with worlds without us fill us with awe?
-
-Or perhaps more curiously than awe, these impressions of human impact through their absence have a history of instilling a sense of custodianship on the beholder^[^6]^.
-
-
The emergence of environmental consciousness was far more conditioned by images than sounds. The undisputed icon of modern environmental awareness is a photographical genre that only became possible through the Cold War space race: Images of earth from space^[^7]^. The 1972 Blue Marble image, captured by one of the astronauts aboard Apollo 17, is one of the world’s most reproduced images. Its impact on culture is intimately tied to environmental consciousness: While the image only became possible as humans learned to leave the planet on which all of their history had played out, the intellectual revolution had to do with looking back to see the only planet we have. The moral implication was clear: Take good care of it^[^8]^.
-
-
-
-
-The fiction of human agency involved becomes clear if we take the visual trope that expresses this point seriously: The hand holding Earth in its hands. It is a surrealist image, in literal terms. It casts us all in the role as an individual giant, large enough to hold the world up like a precious basketball.
-
-Only despots believe in that fiction^[^9]^. (An image of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, King Salman of Saudi Arabia and former President of the United States Donald Trump should pop up on your inner eye.)
-
-In reality, the Blue Marble, like the recordings of silent environments post Covid-19, depicted a world we inhabit, but where we do not figure; high-resolution satellite imagery is a newer development^[^10]^.
-
-
-
But the specific way our cosmological and ethical imaginations are conditioned, matters. The propensities of sound are different from those of photography. Listening to our momentary lull, we should not merely ask about what we don’t hear – us – but what it means to hear environments, and how our consciousness of our surroundings may change if we consider the matter in auditory terms. Perhaps for no other reason than the primacy of visual thinking in environmental thought; that there is a relative paucity of iconic sounds, of chewed sonic metaphors, of heavily preconceived auditory templates, brought down upon us from Western traditions of science and representation, with which to think what is around us.
-
-
This time, perhaps we can hear ourselves for what we are, rather than seeing us for what we are not: Omnipotent, larger-than-Earth beings with the planet in our custody.
-
-
-
-Is there care on both ends? Re-establishing bonds with our companion species - Christina Gruber
-
-As a freshwater ecologist and visual artist I work with fish on a daily basis. In the last few years, I have been focusing on one specific kind, the sturgeon. This living fossil has been on earth for over 200 million years, adapting to constant changes and overcoming crises. Throughout the last 150 years sturgeon populations decreased drastically due to human overexploitation. In the conservation project LIFE Sterlet^[^11]^, we aim to strengthen the wild stock of sterlet, the smallest of the six Danube sturgeons, to establish healthy and self-sustaining populations in the Danube river. We are located on an artificial island built for flood protection for the city of Vienna, Austria.
-
-
-
-Do we only listen to what we want to hear?
-
-
-The loss of freshwater biodiversity happens most of the time unnoticed, in silence. However, the decline of freshwater species exceeds most other terrestrial ecosystems by a wide margin^[^12]^: Between 1970 and 2014, freshwater fish populations have declined by 83%.^[^13]^ Sturgeons communicate on infrasound levels, inaudible to human ears. Stil, there are sources from indigenous communities, such as the Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin, referring to the phenomenon of “sturgeon thunder”, drumming sounds produced during spawning season.^[^14]^
-
-My work routine adjusts to the life cycle of the sturgeons. After months of care in our hatchery, we release thousands of fish into the Danube. Observing their development from eggs, to larvae, to juveniles, does not only mean that we are providing care in a very basic sense of the term^[^15]^. It also requires serious attention, to treat them correctly, and to avoid damage or risk^[^16]^.
-
-Even though sturgeons have been around for millions of years, we know little about their habitats. This is why we monitor them along the river to point out recommendations for their protection. One of the most effective ways to follow a fish is sound, as the waves travel faster underwater. In Acoustic Telemetry, hydrophones are used to track the fish, but not to record their noises. All you actually hear is “beep”. But what if hydrophones allow us to enter into the muddy reflections of the past and this dinosaur’s life cycles, and even more so help us to reconnect to this hidden layer of our earth’s surface? Working closely with sturgeons made me wonder how they perceive sound, and what they sound like. Do they communicate to each other, are they gregarious or solitary? Can I hear them too? To hear like a fish, means to hear with the entire body, based on the main organ of orientation in fish, the lateral line. Attention to fish perceptions, then, may attune us to our own unexplored capacities for sensing the world, like the fascia, a thin casing of connective tissue that holds everything in place but also enables intensified sensing^[^17]^. In addition to our own sensory organs, technology can help us to detect sounds out of human hearing range, acting as a stepping stone to help us recalibrate with more-than-human entities.
-
-Trying to hear my companion species made me realize how much I need the sturgeons and how much work they do for me. What if more people could hear these living dinosaurs? It could make us realize the close ties between sturgeons and healthy ecosystems, including humans, and that it is possible to tune in and give space to them. And we might start to understand that it is not we who are thinking, but rather the environment that is thinking through us, as David Abraham^[^18]^ proposes.
-
-
-
-Connecting Acoustic Spaces - Natalia Domínguez Rangel
-
-My work connects with architecture, acoustics, technology and nature. I am responsive to how sound affects and resonates with a body physiologically and psychologically, and how critical listening deepens, extends and sets connections to other acoustic ecologies not only to the anthrophony^[^19]^.
-
-During the first lockdown due to COVID-19, I invited people to send me audio recordings of their acoustic environments. The call is open till the end of the year due to the ongoing pandemic. “Connecting Acoustic Spaces” will be the resulting work becoming a sound sculpture in 2021.
-
- I am involved in the way we are listening and interpreting our surroundings, especially in this time where we are experiencing a global pandemic, partial lockdowns in different time frames, intensities and outcomes.
-Throughout the first lockdown, our urban acoustic environment changed radically. It has not only impacted our cities but also diverse scientific research. For instance, in seismology the drop of the human noise footprint was between 20% and 50% and that has helped to easily spot micro-earthquakes. This “silence wave” helped to record and archive tremor fingerprints that were not audible previously. I find it very relevant how, gradually, our noise footprint increases and how unaware we were (are?) of the huge impact it has.
-
-This has brought me to reflect on: How do we imagine ourselves as listening objects, bodies? The need to understand our own acoustic agency and how it tunes in or makes sense with our and other sonic environments.
-
-For which reason are we listening?
- Deep listening does not outstand the ear alone, as Pauline Oliveros remarked in her work. For her, listening involved the whole body. “Sound has such a physical presence that it feels like it is coming at you through the pores of your skin; You listen through your lungs. You listen through your stomach. You listen through your heart.”^[^20]^] Then you come to understand that you also listen to your body. You are your own acoustic box.
-
- And what about silence?
-
- Are urban sound ecologies destroying silence as many Acoustic Ecologists claim? “Their ecological approach appears to treat silence as an endangered species; something that must be preserved by maintaining habitats for its incubation and growth”^[^21]^
-
-Yet again, I do not think we can romanticize the idea of an aural utopia by misjudging the nature of city sounds. Technology is present and mediates the space. Therefore, how could we tune in again with different ecologies with the help of technology?
-
-When we acknowledge the idea of “tuning in,” shall we imply the act of acoustic attenuation? Or to think about “silent commons”, as Ursula Franklin called them within the city^[^22]^. The impact of technology creates new opportunities and hazards in this topic. Thus, how could we keep advancing technologically without being a solo act?
-
- With “Connecting Acoustic Spaces”, I am still in the process of listening. In the following link you can listen to what I recorded in my listening practices throughout the first lockdown in Vienna from the 15th March till the 10thMay in the most frequented and touristic places.
-https://soundcloud.com/nataliad/viennese-acoustic-transition
-
-
-Spotting the Runoff – Samuel Hertz
-
-“We in the morning / catch, from the train, in the green garbage runoff, / sight of white herons and the cormorants. / When they’re here in the evening, we safely assume the world hasn’t gone anywhere.”^[^23]^
-
-Even though the herons and cormorants remain in site, the world has gone somewhere, however imperceptibly. Ed Roberson’s “Eclogue” points to the gnomonic shadows highlighting empty space as a way of measuring time. Yet, the chronological safety implied by regular migration patterns belies the severity and scales of disappearance that happen just beyond view, out of sight and earshot. Attenuation to the patterning of bird migration, in this case, is just enough of a false positive to overlook the garbage runoff, or to believe anything can truly repeat. If patterned vision upholds this homeostatic narrative, perhaps sound can be understood as a method for delving into the infinitesimal — yet significant and cumulative — dimensions of change.
-
-How then to make audible the sounds of disappearance? To hear absence? The analytic lens of machinic audio analysis is — in recent years — the most reliable format for reporting subtle shifts in acoustic environments caused by environmental stressors, due to the ability to capture large sonic datasets required for detailed comparisons. What these analytic frameworks lack, however, is the ability to encourage nuanced understandings of expansive temporal and spatial scales necessary for tackling the conceptual and practical problems of a changing climate. For, as Hawkins and Kanngieser eloquently state, “relative to human perceptive capacities, factors [of climate change] accumulate too slowly for the scales and capacities of a human-sensing body in the context of the human lifespan to fully comprehend”.^[^24]^ Application of effective climate policy involves not only analytic/algorithmic frameworks, but attendant feelings of care and responsibility towards. To develop care for bundles of entangled dynamic flows that are innately asynchronous with the spatiotemporal scales of the lived-life of humans, new scalar sensitivities must coincide with any algorithmic approach.
-
-Can sound-based performative methodologies encourage modalities of listening that allow for the hearing of shadows? To observe ever-more carefully, and importantly to address the creeping disappearance that lays contiguous to a human-world of ostensible homeostatic repetition? With two recent projects, Zugzwang with collaborator Christina Gruber (Ars Electronica Festival 2020), and DOOM with collaborator Layton Lachman (premiere, Sophiensæle 2021), I address dynamic interactions between sound, experiences of time, and the possibilities for analysis and practice to generate new scalar sensitivities.
-
Zugzwang (in this particular format) turns the process of environmental analysis inside-out, granting the human ear access to recordings normally reserved for machine processing. As the listener walks through the installation, field-recordings of soil sedimentation stream past, letting the listener organise themselves within an immersive experience of data becoming sensually available. In DOOM, an audience finds themselves in the middle of an eternal, slowly-evolving drone/doom-metal concert wherein various spatiotemporal scales become activated; four performers drift through the space, performing glacial guitar solos, quickly putting on their makeup, and singing to each other — actions which coalesce into many variable experiences of time through which one can feel the space, action, and attention slowly shift throughout the durational performance.
-
-My hope is that performative experiences such as these can help encourage and nurture new relationships to the passing of time and experiences of data that will further aid in the understanding of — and responsibility for — the unique and intertwined scalar problems of climate.
-
-
-Being in Zugzwang
-
-As humans increasingly move their environs, building capitalist ruins^[^25]^, the compulsion to move in ways that are ethical, life-sustaining and even life-affirming for the more-than-human community becomes a moral imperative as much as a practical necessity. Our four explorations of how to tune in through auditory capacities – human, animal and technological – may work as a bit of a field guide, suggestions for how to orient ourselves better and more conscientiously. Soundscapes, even the silence under lockdown, turn out to be dense with life and meaning. Whether we hear them with our whole bodies, listen with deep attention or stretch beyond the scales and realities humans can perceive without technological aid, it seems there is a productive friction in sound, which positions us more firmly and compels to move in different ways than other media and forms of sensation.
-
-
-
-It helps us reorient around an important meaning of environments: Our surroundings.
-
- Sound conveys a world in Zugzwang.
-
-
-
-
-[^1]: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press, 2015. p.23.
-[^2]: The US and the UK jointly run a center dedicated to electronic eavesdropping in Menwith Hill, Yorkshire. Ryan Gallagher, "Inside Menwith Hill: The NSA's British Base at the Heart of U.S. Targeted Killing," The Intercept, September 6, 2016.
-[^3]: Intra- and interspecies eavesdropping is a well-established phenomenon in ecology. To cite just one study, it has been found that male humpback whales listen for the mating songs of competing mates to locate a female, reducing the singer’s chance of success, Rebecca A. Dunlop & Michael J. Noad, “The ‘risky’ business of singing: tactical use of song during joining by male humpback whales,” Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 70 (2016), 2149–2160.
-[^4]: Brian Dunbar, “Spooky Space 'Sounds'”, NASA.gov, National Aeronatics and Space Administration, October 26, 2017 .
-[^5]: A curious facet of the lockdown as a media event, was the blossoming of writings about ways silence was being recorded and related to in cities and ecosystems. Jimmy Thomson, “‘An important time to listen’: ocean scientists race to hear the effects of coronavirus under water,” The Narwhal, April 19, 2020. ; Richard Labreuseur, “How COVID-19 shutdowns are allowing us to hear more of nature”, The Conversation, May 5th, 2020, ; Quoctrong Bui and Emily Badger, “The Coronavirus Quieted City Noise. Listen to What’s Left,” The New York Times, May 22nd, 2020
-[^6]: Benjamin Lazier, “Earthrise; or, The Globalization of the World Picture”, The American Historical Review 116, Issue 3 (2011): 602–630.
-[^7]: Dennis Cosgrove, Apollo's Eye: a cartographic genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
-[^8]: See the section on Hans Blumenberg’s reading of the image in Lazier, “Earthrise”, 619-626. This custodial reading is by no means the only interpretation that was made at the time – Martin Heidegger thought of the Blue Marble’s predecessor, a disorienting, black-and-white view of the earth from below, as the nightmarish realization of the conquest of the world as picture”, ibid., 609-614; Martin Heidegger, “The Age of World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1977) 115-54. However, through the 1970s environmental movement, Earth Systems Science and Global Environmental Governance, the custodial idea became more prevalent.
-[^9]: In his fourth Gaia lecture on “The Anthropocene and the destruction of (the image of) the Globe”, Bruno Latour makes a strong case against thinking climates at the global scale, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge (UK): Polity Press, 2017). I don’t endorse his particular argument, but it is worth reading.
-[^10]: For a primer on different resolutions in contemporary satellite imagery, see National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service (NESDIS), “Can Satellites See You? Can You See a Satellite?”, NESDIS Newsblog, November 27, 2017, .
-[^11]: http://life-sterlet.boku.ac.at/
-[^12]: Sala, O.E. et al. (2000). Global biodiversity scenarios for the year 2100. Science 287, 1770–1774.
-[^13]: www.livingplanetindex.org. 2019
-[^14]: Bocast, C., Bruch R.M., Koenigs R.P., Sound production of spawning lake sturgeon (Acipenser fulvescens Rafinesque, 1817) in the Lake Winnebago watershed, Wisconsin, USA. Applied Ichthyology 2014, 1-9. See also
-WLUK-TV FOX 11, “Sounds of the sturgeon”, YouTube. .
-[^15]: Definition of care: The provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or something (Oxford Dictionary).
-[^16]: Second definition of care according to the Oxford Dictionary.
-[^17]: Referring to the Case Study of Margarida Mendes “Environmental Sensing - Refractions of the Infrastructural Body, presented in October 2020 at the Shape of a Practice at HKW, Berlin.
-[^18]: Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. Pantheon Books, 1996.
-[^19]: Anthropophony, consisting of the Greek prefix, anthropo, meaning human, and the suffix, phon, meaning sound is a neologism used to describe all sound produced by humans, whether coherent, such as music, theatre, and language, or incoherent and chaotic such as random signals generated primarily by electromechanical means. Bernie Krause "Voices of the Wild: Animal Songs, Human Din, and the Call to Save Natural Soundscapes" 2015, Yale University Press
-
-[^20]: Mark Swed. "How gay feminist composer Pauline Oliveros taught us to hear with more than ears," Los Angeles Times, August 5th, 2020. .
-[^21]: Arkette Sophie, 2004, Sounds like City. In: Theory, Culture & Society 21, p.166
-[^22]: Ursula Franklin. “Silence and the Notion of the Commons,” In The Broadview Anthology of Expository Prose, Laura
-Buzzard et al. (eds.) (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2016) : 439-444.
-[^23]: Roberson, Ed. “Eclogue”. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/89465/eclogue-573e30b04c753
-[^24]: Hawkins, Harriet and Anja Kanngieser. “Artful climate change communication: overcoming abstractions, insensibilities, and distances”. WIREs Climate Change. Vol. 8, September/October 2017. Wiley Periodicals.
-[^25]: This corresponds roughly to the situation Anna Tsing refers to as “third nature”, The Mushroom at the End of the World, viii. See also Tsing et al. (eds.) Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
-
-
-
-**Christina Gruber** is an artist and freshwater ecologist, who works at the intersection of art and science. In her work she deals with societal phenomena and their effects on the earth’s surface. Water is of special interest to her. Christina sees it as the element all things on earth have in common. It is the connector between stories of different places and layers, running through everything, from clouds to data centers.
-She has recently exhibited at the KEX Vienna, Kunstforum Warsaw, Kulturtankstelle Linz and the Chronus Art Center Shanghai. She has given lecture performances and talks at museums, festivals and conferences like CAC New Orleans, FHNW HGK Basel, STWST48x5, River Science Conference and AMRO festival.
-Christina is a Scientific Researcher at the Institute of Hydrobiology at the BOKU Vienna. She works at the LIFE Sterlet project to repopulate sturgeon in the Danube. In 2019 she was part of the servus.at Research Lab together with Antonio Zingaro and Davide Bevilacqua.
christinagruber.net
-
**Natalia Domínguez Rangel** (NL/CO) composer/sound artist living and working between Vienna and Amsterdam. Domínguez Rangel’s music and sound work offers a varied mix of contemporary classical composition alongside electronics, synthesis, field recordings, ambisonics, installations and performance. Her work has been connected with architecture, acoustic, technology and nature. She is interested how sound affects and resonates with a body physiologically and psychologically, and how critical listening deepens, extends and set connections to other acoustic ecologies not only to the anthrophony.
-For her, sound can be a source of both pain and pleasure.
nataliadominguezrangel.com
-
-
-**Samuel Hertz** is a Berlin-based composer and researcher investigating connections between sound and climate, emphasising geologic, ecologic, and social listening practices at more-than-human scales. As the first winner of the DARE Prize for Radical Interdisciplinarity, he researched Infrasound alongside climate scientists, music psychologists, and paranormal investigators, with a premiere at Opera North (UK). Current work includes Librations (with Carmelo Pampillonio), utilising Earth-Moon-Earth 16-26m radio telescope relays to create Moonbounce recordings. Librations premiered at Fylkingen (SE) in 2020.
-As a researcher, Hertz has been involved with HKW’s Anthropocene Curriculum since 2016 and is the author of six essays on sound and environment, including collaborations with Studio Tomás Saraceno, Sonic Field and Critical Path. Hertz has taught workshops on sound at Palais de Tokyo as well as at arts and academic institutions throughout Europe and the United States. Hertz has created live and immersive sound design for performance in such places as ImPulsTanz, Tanzplattform Deutschland, ICI/CCN, Charleroi Danses, and NEXT Festival.
samhertzsound.com
-
-**Emil Flatø** is a doctoral researcher working on the origins of scientific thinking about the future of climate change with human causes. This means reading a lot of faxes and machine-typed reports written by men with sideburns and thick glasses in the early 1970s: experts in “socio-technical engineering”, “system dynamics”, communications, planning and computer modeling. These men spoke with newfound confidence about the future of the Earth, the limits to growth, and the dangers of playing with the weather. They pioneered new alliances between military, government, industry and the academy. In sum, they did lasting work on our collective horizon of expectations about the environment. Previously, Flatø worked a staff writer and critic for the Norwegian weekly Morgenbladet.
-
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diff --git a/content-print/zugzwang_print.md b/print/zugzwang.md
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