happenings in space #7: jan. 11 - jan. 18,
material cultures, reciprocal landscapes, magic and ecology, carbon-intensive scholarship, and multimedia encounters.
We’re back from a short holiday/political chaos/zoom fatigue hiatus! Events are just beginning to pick back up in the new year. If you have an event that touches on art, space, place, design and environment, feel free to submit it to Happenings in Space by e-mailing topozoners@gmail.com.
TUESDAY JANUARY 12
MATERIAL CULTURES — UVA PROJECTING FELLOWS— 3:00 PM PST
Projecting Fellows brings together the 2019-2020 class of fellows from American architecture schools to explore a cross section of emerging interests in the discipline and the vehicle of the fellowship project. Commonly selected via national call for proposals, fellowship projects are dually indicative of emerging interests in academia and evolving institutional agendas.
Kim Stanley Robinson - Some Lessons from the Pandemic for Dealing with Climate Change — Oregon State University — 6:00 PM PST
Kim Stanley Robinson is a science fiction writer and winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. He is a New York Times bestselling author who has written more than 20 books including, most recently, The Ministry for the Future (Orbit Books, 2020). His work often explores ecological themes, and in 2008 he was named one of Time magazine's "Heroes of the Environment."
Pandemic as Portal is a nine-week series featuring visionary thinkers who are imagining the world anew as it reconfigures in the midst of the pandemic. Each speaker will explore their highest vision of environmental and social justice, think about the crucial steps we can take as individuals and communities to bring that vision to life, and share stories of how this new paradigm is already taking shape.
SCREENING: Lynn Hershman Leeson's "The Electronic Diaries" — New Museum, copresented with Rhizome and C-Lab Taiwan — 8:00 PM EST
In 1984, Lynn Hershman Leeson began to talk to a video camera. Over the next four decades, she documented her personal and artistic journey as she continually looked ahead to a transformative technological future while confronting her own painful past. The Electronic Diaries are a groundbreaking exploration of the relationship and slippage between the real and virtual self, culminating with Leeson’s efforts to store her own archives in DNA, and to create her own custom antibody. This artistic research in biotechnology suggests new links between new technology and the body, personal memory and mediated archives—the thematic poles that have long animated Leeson’s practice.
This special screening, followed by a conversation with the artist, is copresented with Rhizome and C-Lab Taiwan as part of “First Look: Forking PiraGene,” an online exhibition that imagines gene writing and discovery as a collective practice, positing a sci-fi scenario in which people propagate a “pirate gene” through informal networks of exchange. The exhibition is a part of Lab Kill Lab, a 7-day, 5-work station feral lab project, conceived and directed by Shu Lea Cheang for C-LAB Technology Media Platform.
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 13
RECIPROCAL LANDSCAPES: Stories of Material Movements — ESALA Public Lecture Series — 11:00 AM PST
How are the far-away, invisible landscapes where materials come from related to the highly visible, urban landscapes where those same materials are installed? Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements traces five everyday landscape construction materials–fertilizer, stone, steel, trees, and wood–from seminal public landscapes in New York City, back to where they came from. Bringing two separate landscapes–the material’s source and the urban site where the material ended up–together, the book explores themes of unequal ecological exchange, labor, and material flows. Reciprocal Landscapes challenges readers to think of materials not as inert products but as continuous with land and the people that shape them, and to reimagine forms of construction in solidarity with people, other species, and landscapes elsewhere. Jane Hutton is a landscape architect teaching at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture.
Fatima El-Tayeb - Queer of color activism in decolonial Europe — University of British Columbia — 12-1 PM PST
This talk explores what a decolonial strategy focused on Europe might look like and suggests that the practices of European activists and artists of color can offer potential answers, exactly because of the peculiar position in which continental structures of racialization put communities of color, not quite fitting either dominant models of Europeanness or of racialized minorities.
FRIDAY, JANUARY 15
Magic and Ecology: Anthropocene Magic— University of Cambridge — 10:00 AM PST
Western magic historically has been concerned with discerning connections between the human (microcosm) and the world (macrocosm), but modern magical practices digs deeper into these efforts of discernment. Faced with environmental crisis, what can magical techniques teach us about what it means to be a body entangled with other bodies? Lilith Dorsey and Sabrina Scott have both researched and practiced forms of magical entanglement, and in this panel they discuss witchcraft as an art of attuning to the real.
MONDAY, JANUARY 18
Joy White - Writing Terraformed: Race, Gentrification and the Inner City — Centre for Black Studies - University of Nottingham — 4:00 AM PST
In this lecture, Joy White will discuss the process of writing Terraformed; a ‘messy ethnography’ that uses a framework of hyper-local demarcation to analyse the impact of austerity, neoliberalism and racism in a specific neighbourhood. While there is little doubt that young Black lives are lived with and through levels of disadvantage, we cannot underestimate the hope that comes from creativity in all its forms. I therefore consider how hope for the future and hope for a better world is not just desirable, it is essential to our survival.
Johan Gärdebo - Liftoff Holocene - Touchdown Anthropocene: Academics reflect on carbon-intensive scholarship in the early 21st century — Low Carbon Methods & Media Lecture Series: Trent University — 12:00 PM EST
A look at the history of academic mobility from the republic of letters to zoom university.
ONLINE EXHIBITIONS +
MULTIMEDIA ENCOUNTERS — MIT MEDIA ANTHROPOLOGY LAB
How are ethnographic encounters with alterity mediated and transformed by multimedia technologies? Drawing on the insights and questions raised by both material culture studies and the ontological turn, we aim to facilitate a global conversation on the concepts, forms and mediums through which knowledge is produced and shared. This conference is hosted by UCL Multimedia Anthropology Lab, an interdisciplinary research network aimed at developing innovative methods for anthropological practice.
FORKING PIRAGENE — RHIZOME AND C-LAB TAIWAN
Copresented by Rhizome and C-Lab Taiwan as part of Shu Lea Cheang’s Lab Kill Lab, “Forking PiraGene” is an online exhibition that imagines gene writing and discovery as a collective practice, positing a sci-fi scenario in which people propagate a “pirate gene” through informal networks of exchange.
The works in “Forking Piragene,” by artists Devin Kenny, Harm van den Dorpel, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Sean Raspet & Francis Tseng, and Xin Liu, illuminate the personal, political, and aesthetic implications of working with genetic material. Suggesting alternatives to institutional uses of DNA for surveillance and law enforcement–or even standing in active opposition to such practices–these artists evoke the piratical possibility originally conjured by Li and Tang as part of the original Kingdom of Piracy project.
METABOLIC RIFFS — PODCAST
In the face of ecological devastation globally, and the rise of the authoritarianism that often catalyses ecological collapse, Metabolic Riffs, a podcast series, attempts to both unearth and reanimate the Earth that we inhabit. Our conversations engage with the environmental humanities, media and mediation, public policy and politics. These interviews center around a speaker, their body of work, and concerns they might have to offer to the humanities largely. The series goes beyond the conventional rubric of academic scholarship and speaks to activists, artists and campaigners alike. We interface with their critical practice around environmental justice, decolonial thinking, and community engagement. Metabolic Riffs is supported by Media+Environment (UC Press) and the Carsey-Wolf Center at University of California, Santa Barbara.