San Francisco

Multispecies Intra-Actions: A Round Table with Karen Barad

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This post comes to you from Cultura21

On the 17th November from 10:45AM to 12:30 PM (PST) at theSOMArts centre in San Francisco the public is invited to participate in a roundtable discussion with Karen Barad, currently Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a diverse panel of researchers ranging from ethnographers to artist.

Barad’s seminal 1996 essay, where she coined the term “intra-action,” will serve as a theoretical charter for the roundtable.

“Boundaries do not sit still, it is through specific intra-actions that a differential sense of being is enacted in the ongoing ebb and flow of agency…Agential intra-actions are specific causal material enactments that may or may not involve ‘humans.’ Indeed, it is through such practices that the differential boundaries between “humans” and ‘nonhumans,’ ‘culture’ and ‘nature,’ the ‘social’ and the ‘scientific’ are constituted”

Members of the roundtable will each give short “provocations” (3-5 minutes), bringing Barad into conversation with empirical matters and concepts from their own assorted texts on the table. Audience members are also invited to participate in the discussion and become provocateurs.

Following the roundtable, Karin Bolender of the Rural Alchemy Workshop will be performing “Gut Sounds Lullaby” at 2:00PM in the same space.

For more information: http://www.somarts.org/multispecies/

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

– Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)
– Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)
– Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)
– Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

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BLDGBLOG: Literary Climatology

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Some fascinating ideas from BLDGBLOG in excerpt form a little while ago, which relate to ideas of ecodrama:

1) Performance Physics 

It was, we might say, not performance art but performance physics: an immersive, urban-scale demonstration of quantum dislocation… constantly out of self-synch in a single setting… the skies of San Francisco temporarily modeling an inter-dimensional event.

2) Sky Forensics

…the passage of the Blue Angels had been setting off car alarms all over the city… the locations of the car alarms always coincided with the physical passage of the airplanes… you could actually reconstruct the aerial trajectories of the planes through entirely indirect means.

In twenty years’ time, then, forensic historians could reconstruct the skies of Fleet Week 2011 using nothing but data from parked cars.

3) Literary Climatology

…we briefly got onto the subject of skywriting… The idea of blogging in the sky through the medium of artificial weather—chemically produced, aerodynamic clouds draping the city in a haze of literary climatology…

Of course, it’s worth the whole post….

via BLDGBLOG: Literary Climatology.

Is something missing from Maya Lin’s What Is Missing?

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Maya Lin, the artist most famous for creating the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, a piece of public work that cut deep in the American psyche, unveiled another memorial last week in San Francisco. What is missing? is a homage to extinct species.

In her artists’ statement she says:

What is missing? is a wake up call and a call to action, showing what is being done throughout the field of conservation and also what individuals can do in their everyday lives to make a difference in habitat and species protection.

What is missing? will make the critical link between global warming concerns and habitat protection: if 20% of global warming emissions are caused by deforestation then What is missing? will integrally connect these issues, asking the question:

Can we save two birds with one tree?

I’m sorry. It may be that last coy bon mot that pushed me over the line but…  if any piece of work epitomises something Michaela Crimmin was talking about recently when she wrote,“Art is not going to combat climate change by didacticism of preaching”, it’s Lin’s giant speaking tube.

Perhaps the piece doesn’t have the right impact when viewed via YouTube, but to my eyes, Lin’s work does the opposite of  creating connections between environment and global warming, as she claims.  Instead, Lin’s megaphone appears to reduce the natural world to something exotic and far-away at the pointy end of a tube.

I’m right, aren’t I?

www.maylin.com
www.whatismissing.net

EDIT. I’ve just noticed in a review of the work in the SF Chronicle that children can enter the tube – if they take their shoes off. That makes it even worse, somehow.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

(Park)ing Day

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parkingday

Back in the spring I met John Bela of Rebar, one of the design team who thought up (Park)ing Day five years ago. The idea of turning parking spaces into parks for a day continues to spread. In my home town of Brighton, some artists have been creating the city’s first (Park)ing Daythere.  This [picture above] is one being set up just a couple of hours ago by design consultants IDEO in Chicago.

It’s interesting this idea came from San Francisco, a city whose culture has been deeply influenced by the ideals that underpin the web. Create something good. Give it away. Measure its success by how far it spread, not by the money you make from it.

Photo by SimonK

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

Rising Tide Conference, San Francisco: April 17th – 19th, 2009

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The Rising Tide conference is a series of topically organized panels, seminars, and roundtable discussions, bringing together creative professionals, scholars and students to engage in conversations and debates about the intersections of ethics, aesthetics, and environmentalism.

The event includes panels, exhibitions, film screenings and satellite events. Rising Tide is jointly hosted by California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and Stanford University.David Buckland from Cape Farewell is one of the keynote speakers. Panel themes include politics and capitalism, mobility, cities, rivers and oceans and material culture.

This groundbreaking conference will be jointly hosted by California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and Stanford University this spring. Our audience and collaborators come from various disciplinary backgrounds. They are artists, activists, community organizers, venture capitalists, philanthropists, students, and faculty of Fine Arts, Design, Architecture, Writing, Criticism, Curatorial Practice and Environmental Sciences who are helping to push the green revolution to a tipping point.

The conference will convene on the San Francisco Campus of California College of the Arts on Friday, April 17th, on the Stanford Campus Saturday, April 18th, and at CCA on Sunday, April 19th. We are planning a series of satellite events (screenings, exhibitions, performances, lectures…) throughout the month of April.

www.risingtideconference.org

Go to the Ashden Directory