#postnature

[oblinof]

https://tuamalanpakrecords.bandcamp.com/album/electrodomestico

[antibothis]

NNN / How to design a digital democracy

10 design requirements to fully immerse ourselves into the 21st Century—in which technology makes our world richer, not poorer.

With the rise of immersive technologies, the collective ecology of our media enters a new evolutionary phase. The merging of the physical and digital worlds raises urgent social and political questions. It blurs the boundary between people and computers, between physical and digital. Can we still distinguish fake from real? The following 10 demands propose a set of design requirements to fully immerse ourselves into the 21st Century—in which technology makes our world richer, not poorer.

[antibothis]

With this new issue of Degrowth and Progress, we would like to pursue a path of reflection to interrogate the ambivalence of a possible progression of degrowth, and attempt to stage a hybrid scenario of speculative thought and action. This collection draws upon the complexity of ethical, ecological and political frameworks and reveals other perspectives on the current crisis through critical essays, storytelling, science fiction, biomorphic design, audiovisual traces of artistic practices and allegorical maps.Progress was the firstborn of modernity, a major promise of continuous development towards the perfection of ‘humankind’. But progress in whose name? To whose benefit? With the exclusion of whom? Progress towards what kind of model? The notion of progress, besides being Eurocentric and linked to colonialism, has been the ideological framework for liberalism itself. The ideal of a continuous, progressive and desirable advancement of civilisation has been reframed in recent decades with ‘sustainable development’. But isn’t sustainability a concept far too simplistic to be able to address real questions of poverty, exploitation, segregation, congestion, depletion of land, desertification, terraforming, or the mass extinction of species? Could we think in a different direction about progress? Nataša Petrešin Bachelez

[antibothis]

DisCO Elements

Distributed Cooperative Organisations for radical workplace democracy

DisCO not Thisco not DisCO ...Times of crises give way to opportunities for radical innovations & solutions based on human trust. DisCOs can create bottom-up resilience & restore our relationships -both to one another and the planet.

[antibothis]

PiraTED Talk ! The Pirate Book “offers a broad view on media piracy as well as a variety of comparative perspectives on recent issues and historical facts regarding piracy”

[antibothis]

The ANT Manifesto

by Geoffrey Bowker

"The ants generically what they do, is they act very, very intelligently, but in a collective fashion. It's not just the individual thinker, it's what is the species doing right now: how are we developing, how are we changing? The way in which they act together is for all intents and purposes an intelligent form of action. No one person, in that, is the genius ant. Ants don't have Einsteins, ants don't have Stephen Hawkings... Ants just have other ants, but they're able to act very, very intelligently collectively. "

[hybridispiritualsystems]

POSTHUMAN HABITATS - foreground design agency

Exhibited at the American Academy in Rome, in collaboration with Grant Calderwood, Irene Tortora, and the Rome Sustainable Food Project, 2018. This speculative design project responds to the future city’s impending food and water scarcity, d...

[jamnbutter]

week 1

So I’ve decided I’ll combine my final project for art history (Post-Nature) with a game dev log on the current computer game I’m making, since it all seems kinda related (emphasis on kinda).

A game development log (dev log) is a journal of sorts that documents the process of creating a game. And the art history final project is also a journal of sorts to “map the important themes, histories, and aesthetics” of any subject of our choosing.

The topics I want to explore are themes of melancholy. At first when I tell people about this their initial reaction to this word alone is something along the lines of “oh PLEASE not again,” which speaks to the subject’s polarizing nature and how its related aesthetics have been over-romanticized to the point of disgust.  

Well... NOT SO FAST. 

The landscape of melancholy is actually quickly shifting, proving to be a complex subject characterized by an amorphous nature due to its various forms as artistic inspiration, psychological condition, seed for social/racial discourse and aesthetic tool.

good mourning

In Freud’s 1917 essay Mourning and Melancholia he states:

“mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on,”(1)

but the defining difference from melancholy is the subject’s ability to get over this loss. The melancholic subject instead establishes an “identification of the ego with the abandoned object” and “the ego wants to incorporate this object into itself”(2) and it does so by devouring it. Freud goes on to detail this uncomfortable swallowing and how the loss is secured in a double bind between incorporation and rejection.

This begs the question of who is the melancholic; who is doing the consuming and what are they consuming? Are we the subject or are we the object? In regards to racial discourses in the U.S. Anne Cheng states “the nature of the racial other is in fact quite assimilated into–or more accurately, most uneasily digested by–American nationality.” (3) Here Cheng places the U.S. as the melancholic who has lost its founding principles of freedom and liberty, and forms an ambivalent relationship with the “racial other” through the process of assimilation.

This ambivalent relationship can be seen acutely in the drawings of Yasuo Kuniyoshi created when the Department of Defense asked him to create propaganda war posters that were ultimately never made. Note in Clean Up This Mess (1942) the Japanese flag, samurai sword and what looks like to be an octopus that recalls woodblock prints. Kuniyoshi was a first-generation Japanese-American who immigrated to America in 1906.

Kuniyoshi, Sink Him in Pacific, 1942

Kuniyoshi, Clean Up This Mess, 1942

to eat or not to eat

So anyways, enter the realm of this melancholic but cute creature!

For my game, I wanted it to be based on a creature/beast that is anonymous, a silent protagonist. More to come next week!

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1. Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, (London, The Hogarth Press, 1917), 243.

2. Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, 249-250.

3. Anne Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000), 10.