Ecological Aesthetics advance copy just arrived!
So excited that my advance copy of Ecological Aesthetics: artful tactics for humans, nature, and politics has arrived! Out July 3!
Julian says it’s a good read.
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Tops of 2017: a different kind of year in review
This was a short-lived tradition I started almost a decade ago, and I’m stoked to reboot it. Here, I put forward four Top 5 lists of my own: The Top 5 people I newly met in 2017, The Top 5 people I’d like to meet because of what they did (or the work I saw from them) in 2017, The Top 5 exhibitions for me (what I found most enjoyable), and The Top 5 shows I wish I had seen, but didn’t. Hope you like it! Feel free to comment, leaving any things/people I missed but might (or should have) enjoy(ed)!
The Top 5 people I newly met in 2017
- Julian James Lafayette Stern. My newborn son. Obvs. Also his mom is AMAZING.
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De Angela Duff
De Angela Duff co-runs the Integrated Digital Media program, a creative technology degree (er, set of degrees – undergraduate, masters, and PhD) in the engineering college at New York University. She restructured it to be more creative – to cover design and arts thinking along with utilitarian engineering skills – and grew it to more than double its size in a few short years. All this and she is a proud woman of color to boot. She hosted me in New York, along with Luke (below) for a talk I gave at their program last Spring.
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Luke DuBois
Luke DuBois co-hosted me on my aforementioned New York visit. He and his work are fun, smart, political, and engaging on so many levels. He is most known for his “human portraits made from data” (this is Dubois’s TED talk) and for his work on Cycling74’s artful Software Development App, Max. He’s also a great teacher and composer, and a generous seeker of funds for his students; and one can get a real pulse on liberal news simply by watching his Twitter or Facebook feed fly by…
- All my new studio assistants: Mary Widener, Jenna Marti, Alex Gugg, Josh Passon, Reid Finley, and Olivia Overturf (actually, I met Olivia in 2016, but it’s a fit). These folks have been working feverishly on new sculptures, new experiments, my new card game, and more. They do so with passion, creativity, and professionalism, all while having to put up with a very strange boss.
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Maggie Sasso
Maggie Sasso was a Nohl Fellow (a big deal in Milwaukee) a few years back, and we were thrown together for side-by-side solo shows coming up in Madison’s Watrous Gallery in Fall 2018. We decided to meet up to discuss the space… and eventually agreed to collaborate! I’ve had a blast getting to know her, her work, and her family. She is very generous, very smart, very fun, and both creatively thoughtful and thoughtfully creative. If you don’t know her or her art… do yourself a favor! It’s humorous and tragic, with both implied and explicit narratives from the sites and lives she touches.
The Top 5 people I’d like to meet because of what they did (or the work I saw from them) in 2017
- Amanda Boetzkes is someone whose work I only briefly encountered while doing research for my new manuscript, and who then wound up giving amazing and insightful feedback on an earlier draft of that text, pushing me towards the book it eventually became. The book is, without any doubt, much stronger because of her constructive criticism. Boetzkes has some wonderful texts out there already, and I am eagerly awaiting her new book project, Ecologicity: Vision and Art for A World to Come, which “analyzes the aesthetic and perceptual dimensions of imagining the ecological condition.” More on Amanda Boetzkes via her website, or check out some of her writing via Amazon.
N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics was hugely influential on my dissertation and thinking, and I still cite her regularly in my classes and texts. Almost 20 years later, her 2017 Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious differentiates between a thinking that describes “thoughts and capabilities associated with higher consciousness such as rationality, the ability to formulate and manipulate abstract concepts, linguistic competencies, and so on,†and “cognition†(2), which is the nonconscious capacity for processing information, the latter gained through biological sensation or perception, or technological sensors, mechanical feedback, or data received from external sources, among other things. Cognition, in other words, is a “much broader faculty†extant on some level “in all biological life-forms and many technical systems†(14). Hayles wants to have the humanities engage with and better understand “the specificities of human-technical cognitive assemblages and their power to transform life on the planet†through a more coherent “ethical inquiry†(3-4). She wants us to look more closely at what and how those systems act, cognize, and think, what we do with and as them, and why. Hers is an important premise and fascinating study of the “supporting environments†humans are “embedded and immersed in,†which “function as distributed cognitive systems†(2). As I said in an earlier briefiew of the book, I found myself alternatively nodding with approval ,and shaking my head in disagreement, while reading, but that is precisely because this is such an interesting field with too much to debate. And Hayles’s bringing these ideas into the humanities is unmistakably important, and may prove to be another game-changer.-
Kathy High
Kathy High is the super cool bio artist behind Blood Wars, where participants contribute their white blood cells toward battle against each other in a petri dish, until only one winner in this (literally) bloody tournament remains. We’ve shot a few emails back and forth around the section I wrote about her work in my upcoming book, but I’d love to meet her in person.
- Ben Davis is the author of 9.5 Theses on Art and Class and an all-around great writer on the arts, aesthetics, pop culture, and how they all relate to both everyday and overarching politics. He is smart, and funny, and manages to wrap up a lot of difficult-to-understand aesthetic and cultural philosophy and theory into easier to understand texts, when it is called for. Part activist, part writer, part arts and culture critic, whenever I stumble onto his writings I always read and enjoy them, and imagine a coffee or beer with Ben would be fun and enlightening.
- Lin-Manuel Miranda. This is a no-brainer. If you don’t know who he is, I can’t help you. Hell, I feel like I’m pretty late to his fan club myself…
The Top 5 exhibitions for me (what I found most enjoyable)
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Bill Viola
Electronic Renaissance, Bill Viola at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence. I find Viola’s slow motion and high definition video installations of the last decade to be mesmerizing; where he began as an experimental video artist, playing with time and image, he has now mastered that material and discipline. He has long been re-staging historical (mostly religious) paintings, with a few moments before and after in his detailed slo-mo imagery, and this exhibition curated his updates alongside the originals. It was a wonder to take my time with the show, an affective and curious ride…
- The Venice Biennale. I finally made it out! What an amazing few days of jumping around contemporary art and ideas, and a beautiful city. I’d never been (though some of my work has been part of the periphery), and I feel like this was a very strong year. Candice Breitz has always been a favorite (since my time in South Africa, 2001-2006), and I was very pleased to be introduced to the work of Michel Blazy.
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Rashid Johnson
Hail Now we Sing Joy, Rashid Johnson at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Locals: if you missed this, you missed out. Johnson is a master of mixed media and installation, using materials that allude to race and gender, identity and escape, while pushing us to explore how we think-with ourselves and our surroundings, histories and presents, materials and how and why they matter. Not only are there explicit ties to politics and its knowns and unknowns, but implications of ecology and more long-term accountability, and where these coincide with issues of race and class, interpersonal relationships and how they function.
- Stacey Williams-Ng, tour of Black Cat Alley. Wlliams-Ng has amplified how Milwaukee murals are acts of politics, dialog, community, and commercialism, all in one. Black Cat Alley has launched a lot of debate and new business, a shining light on a number of locally featured artists. Yes, there was some controversy around Adam Stoner’s mural (and again when it was painted over) – but in my opinion the outcomes of the conversations it spurred have had a net positive effect, mostly because of the generosity of everyone involved. It was great to get a group tour with other generous folks in the Fall of 2017.
- Shane Walsh at The Alice Wilds. I did not review this show because it was before my blog was rebooted, but I did follow up with this post about Shane’s work a few months later.
The Top 5 shows I wish I had seen, but didn’t.
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Nicole Eisenman in Munster
Skulptur Projekte Münster. Only every ten years, this citywide exhibition sees new permanent commissions, several exhibitions and ephemeral projects, and a whole history of work of years gone by. I went a decade ago and … wow, it was like a treasure hunt! I hope I make it again some day.
- Sara Cwynar’s Rose Gold at Foxy Production. I’m just gonna pull from the text on this one, because it totally nails it: “Apple’s Rose Gold iPhone [tracks] how the phone acts as a talisman of desire for objects, people, power, and money. The film considers how individuals — the artist is one of its protagonists – negotiate complicated feelings of love and hate for commercial objects and how features such as touch and 3D resonate directly with the user’s emotions and imagination.”
- Sean Slemon’s Confluence Tree. I LOVE Sean’s work, and wrote the catalog essay for this one – but sadly had to miss it. More on his work and this show via this post.
- “Merce Cunningham: Common Time†at the Walker Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Mostly known for his cutting-edge and revolutionary choreography from mid-last century until his death in 2009, Cunningham also collaborated across genres and disciplines from installations to theatre, costumes to printmaking, painting, music, and more. I’ve loved and appreciated much of the work by his contemporary William Forsythe, and I imagine this show was stunning…
WanÃ¥s Konst. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure I understand what is going on here, but it looks RAD. I love it.
Comment with your lists!!!
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Sketching: The World After Us, speculative media sculptures
This blog post is a sketch – something I will occasionally do about my own work, or with others. It will always be a thinking-with of new materials and ideas, with this one coming out of the writing of my forthcoming second book (Ecological Aesthetics: artful tactics for humans, nature, and politics), chats with colleagues and peers and specialists, playing with media objects, proposing a fellowship (I didn’t get), and more. I welcome feedback! I imagine this particular proposal being a years- and perhaps decades-long project, with this first exhibition being produced over the next two or so years… The images are very recent experiments!
THE WORLD AFTER: US SPECULATIVE MEDIA SCULPTURE
What will Digital Media do, after us?
Galaxy (yes, the phone)
The World After Us will be a new series of media sculptures that materially speculate on what our devices – phones and tablets, batteries and displays, etc – might become, over thousands or millions of years. Through research, experimentation, and craft, I will try (and likely fail) to turn phones into crude oil, coal, or other fossil fuels – and put the results on exhibit, in beakers and tubes. I will attempt to mimic geological time, as pressure and heat – through chemical interactions or specialized machinery – on laptops and tablets, then display where that potential lies, as petrified-like LCDs or mangled post-exploded batteries, on pedestals in a gallery. I hope to turn “dead media†computers into efficient planters for edible goods, food for mold, or seeds of their own growth – and show both those experiments, and their results, as videos and sculptural forms. I will also turn ground phones into usable supplies, for example ink and paper, and put them to use in these new forms. The final outcome will be an internationally exhibited body of work, and catalog. It is impossible for humans to truly fathom our planet on an Earth scale, or conversely from the perspective of bacteria. But we can feel such things, through art and storytelling – making our aesthetic encounters both conceptually and ethically vital toward new futures. At stake, whether in our everyday interactions or on a larger scale, are the (digital) relationships between humans and the natural world on the one hand, between politics and commerce on the other.
The World After Us will be a traveling exhibition and catalog, beginning in Milwaukee, and shown in several other spaces internationally. It asks:
What will digital media be and do, after us?
What will my laptop, or phone, look like in a million years?
How will our devices weather over time?
Can we artificially weather our devices, to sense and feel this?
Torch phone (yes, literally)
These are not rhetorical questions. But they are more speculative than they are able to be answered directly and correctly. And with this research project, I will speculate and experiment, wonder and wander, with our materials. I will (safely) mix phones in blenders, press laptops under steamrollers, break down tablets with borax. I will soak iPads in chlorine and sludge, cook iPhones like cakes, inject the Apple Watch with spores and mold. Torch, grind, freeze, flower. Highlight, amplify, ironize, intervene. Resiutate, speculate, wonder, and propose.
Can we use biofuel processes or hydrothermal liquefaction to turn a phone into fuel?
How might a laptop make the most efficient planter, or bed for life?
What would a tablet made of carbon, instead of plastic, be and do?
What does a joule feel like?
Geological time and Earth size, decomposition and regrowth: these are concepts we can comprehend rationally, but they are impossible to truly fathom. I propose that we can feel such things, aesthetically and thus ethically, if we substantiate future potential, artfully, in objects and installations. My experimental project will do precisely this. It will take the form of between eight and 15 objects or installations that might be: beakers of coal- or oil-like matter labelled with the device they once were (ie iPhone 7); laptops growing spores and mold, propagating life in new and different ways; participatory machines that take our energy and convert it into media; new designs for carbon-based phones, which will more easily decompose over time; prints made entirely of media devices: image, ink, paper, etc… These objects will be accompanied by the stories and experiments that produced them (text, image, video), as well as an essay which mediates the research as a whole.
Some relevant reading (not including my not-yet-released book!):
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Entrepreneurial Thinking, and its place alongside Art, Design, and Engineering (or, the UWM Student Startup Challenge)
There are a few different parts of my professional life that almost always get me a “Wow, that’s so cool!” – PhD in Engineering with a Studio Art Masters?! – Â while others get me strange looks – wait, you are an activist/humanities scholar that teaches… entrepreneurship?
But while my initial engagements with entrepreneurial programming at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee were purely personal – one of my best friends, mechanical engineering professor Ilya Avdeev, asked me to work on it with him – I’ve come to understand that, as with coding, drawing, or writing, for example, the techniques and tools employed toward entrepreneurial efforts easily translate into other arenas. I already teach arts thinking (material-based and open-ended), design thinking (problem definition and empathy), engineering thinking (problem-solving and iteration), and where they coincide, interfere with, and amplify each other. Entrepreneurial thinking, too, has its place alongside any and all of these.
Probably the tools I use most from my entrepreneurial toolset are the business model canvas, and, as part of that, customer discovery. The former is a 9-part chart where you continuously map and remap the value you are proposing (and to whom), your relationships with those customers, the kinds of work and partnerships you need for your business, and cost and revenue streams. Yeh, yeh, my eyes glossed over the first time heard this, too… but the truth is, the kinds of thinking this requires, and the need to sketch and resketch in the different areas of the canvas toward “lean launch,” can and are applied to social innovation (sustainability for nonprofits, for example), mission models (why the military does what it does, and for whom), curriculum design, artistic interventions, and more.
And while the canvas is meant to be utilitarian in its application, filling out the canvas requires “getting out of the building†and speaking to real people about habits, routines, the things they do and why. The interview process, the “right†way to ask questions, is inspiring, is more about listening than anything else – a “no go” for your company is seen as a good thing, since you’ve learned before you’ve lost! – and can be applied to so many aspects of art, design, engineering, and life. The methodologies applied toward interviewing in The Mom Test, for example, have helped me across art, design, business, and engineering, teaching, collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and research more generally. And I bring and teach each of these toolsets to and at our ongoing workshops from the Lubar Entrepreneurship Center (LEC) as well.
Which brings me to the UWM Student Startup Challenge. Now in its fifth year, here the Lubar Entrepreneurship Center works with up to 30 student teams per cohort / year, across Health Care, Social Innovation, Consumer Products, Apps, Services, Health, Food, and other fields; these have ranged from ice skate designs to booking companies, food services to nonprofit organizations working with seniors, and more, through one year of entrepreneurship boot camp. Participants learn the above canvasing and interviewing, problem definition and prototyping, marketing and fundraising, pitching and storytelling, and overall have a support team of mentors and peers working with them on their entrepreneurial education. It’s a merit system: the more you show up and work, the more you have access to resources from us, which include monetary support, teams of engineering or business students to work on prototypes and plans, travel budgets, supplies, and of course, our pop-ups, pop-ins, and workshops every week.
Three things are most important about what we do.
- This is not a business plan competition. We are looking for ideas, and more importantly for people who want to learn and engage with their (and other) ideas.
- This is not an incubator or accelerator. We could never match the kinds of funds that angels could give you. But we can give you something they can’t: a chance to fail, and thus a chance to learn. We are not investing in your products. We are investing in you, in your education. Neither we nor the university have any monetary stake in or ownership of what you do. We are your teachers and mentors.
- The student startup challenge was founded by makers. Ilya is an engineer, and I am an artist. We, the co-directors, learn by doing, and do things to learn. Our team is another engineer with an MBA (Brian Thompson, Director of the LEC), and a designer (BFA) with a Masters from the business school (Nicole Green, Program Manager). Our other ongoing contributors include a non-profit genius award winner (Anne Basting), the vice chancellor of university relations (Tom Luljak), and local entrepreneurs.
Please apply! The Startup Challenge is open to UWM students at all levels, as well as recent alumni. Teams may consist of those outside that community, so long as students or alum make up 50% of the team. Deadline is October 31.
The Student Startup Challenge is a unique co-curricular program at UWM that encourages students to develop their ideas, launch businesses, and gain skills that come from entrepreneurial experience. Students are given the opportunity to participate in hands-on workshops and develop ideas through one-on-one mentorship from UWM faculty and staff.
Questions? Email: ndgreen@uwmfdn.org
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Syllabus sharing! Affect, Art, and Politics – a dialogical class at UWM
Welcome back to another episode of syllabus sharing here at Implicit Art!
City Walks logo by Doung Anwar Jahangeer
This course provides an overview of affect theory and its articulation, activation, mediation, and utilities of manipulation in the realms of art and politics on an international scale. Beginning with a basic understanding of sensation and potential, and how they might be used to shape, for example, national sentiment and thus policy, the course will continue by exploring how our unintentional, affective responses to the outside can and do influence our identity, habits, thoughts, everyday activities, memories, and more. Artists, theorists and historical figures discussed include but are not limited to Brian Massumi, Jill Bennett, Dennis Del Favero, Doris Salcedo, Mary Sibande, Sean Slemon, William Kentridge, Gregory Bateson, Michel De Certeau, Doung Anwar Jahangeer, Richard Grusin, Ai Weiwei, Jane Bennett, Claire Bishop, and Santiago Sierra.
I define affect as, most simply, unqualified emotion. My palms are sweaty; my heart is racing; I have butterflies in my stomach. Is this fear? Anger? Lust? All and none? The body knows, is, and does things, without “my†knowledge, desire, or comprehension. Affect is an embodied sensation and response that does not have a name (… yet). And here affection is a moving-thinking-feeling both before, during, and after conscious reflection, each influencing the other.
Non-human affect is, similarly, matter’s embodied sensation and response – its knowing, being, and doing. Like a human body – its liquids, solids, and gases, its chemicals, cells, and other forms – matter’s various bodies also sense and make sense in and with the world.
And this class fosters dialog and debate around what affect opens, where it guides us, how it works, transforms, acts, and does, and what the stakes are in that for us, and the world around us.
I have offered versions of this class for MFA Graduate Students, where they produced art in response to the discussions, and as a Senior Seminar with dialogical processes in International Studies, where those enrolled wrote responses to the readings and screenings, as well as gave a final presentation and paper – the latter the version I am including.
Affect, Art, and Politics
Every semester I teach this, I switch up the screenings, the artists I invite to talk about their work, a local exhibition we visit. I also always have a reading or two in line with a local conference, and offer extra credit for students who attend any local talk or conference, and write a response to it – so they both experience affect – a lived abstraction – in person, and reflect on it. You’ll also see some of my own writing in this version of the syllabus, which I might update from year to year. But the general readings and overall arc seem to work very well – so I hope you get some use out of them!
Most importantly, every student writes a response to every reading, and then we “conceptually speed date” around it. The former means that there is never any question around whether or not anyone “did” the reading; instead, they help each other understand its import, in relation to their own work and research. And the latter is a practice I learned from the SenseLab in Montreal. It goes something like this:
- Choose a generative text.
- Choose a minor concept weaving through the generative text.
- Ask each person in the group to count off as a 1 or a 2.
- Instruct the 1s that they are “posts.”
- Instruct the 2s that they are “flows.”
- Ask the posts to find a post: a spot in the room where they would like to have a conservation.
- Ask the flows to pair up with a post.
- Direct everyone to a page in the text where the minor concept occurs.
- Ask the participants to discuss the function of the minor concept, staying as close as possible to the text, with detailed attention to how it is constructed.
- Notify participants that when exactly five minutes are up they will hear a signal, and that when they hear the signal they must end their conversation immediately, even if they are in the middle of a word.
- When the five-minute signal sounds, ask all flows to move to the next post in a clockwise direction.
- Repeat 8-10 times.
- Bring the group back together and discuss in plenary session what was discovered about the minor concept and the text.
In other words, speed date important ideas from the text, for only 2-3 minutes at a time (I find that time more efficient than 5 minutes), then switch partners. It’s honestly amazing. Not only do the students always show me, and themselves and each other, just how much they know and understand – despite a given text’s difficulty on first reading – but they always teach me something new as well. Andrew Murphie has more on this, and gives a few more pointers on speed dating, too – the latter of which I now use even in my second year classes!
Download the full syllabus and schedule in Word form. Feedback welcome!
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Briefiew of General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm
I define an ecological approach as one that takes account of agents, processes, thoughts, and relations. Humans and non-humans, matter and concepts, things and not-yet things, politics, economics, and industry, for example, are all actively shaped in, and as, their interrelation. And there is, according to Erich Hörl in his great collection edited along with James Burton, General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm (2017), “hardly any area that cannot be considered the object of an ecology and thus open to ecological reformulation.†These range in the thousands, he asserts, including “ecologies of sensation, perception, cognition, desire, attention, power, values, information, participation, media, the mind, relations, practices, behavior, belonging, the social, [and] the political†to name a fraction of those already called into action (1).
The book brings together some of the most important thinkers of our time, across media and philosophy, feminism and communication, geology and literature, to have us reevaluate, in the words of Brian Massumi in his chapter on “Virtual ecology and the question of value,” our “orientational qualities of existence.†What do we value, and why? Can we shift our appetites and propensities, our stylistic approaches, so as to aim, together, with our environments, towards better futures?
Like most collections, this book is best digested slowly, rather than read all at once. I started with the introduction, jumped to Massumi’s chapter (among the authors, I am most familiar with his work), then back around to Stiegler, Parikka, Fuller and Goriunova, and more, and I’m still middling through several others. I’ll admit it is also surprising, and reassuring, to see so many media theorists and digital culture scholars asking us to think-with our everyday materials, what they do and are, and might become – and what we should do as part of our engagements, and life.
Simply, I love the framing of this book as a whole. It gives these wonderful thinkers the opportunity take different and new directions with their research, to push the boundaries of their own specificities, in order to show us how to approach ecology more generally. And, it’s under $30 (yes, I paid for mine; this is not a freeview). Recommended.