On Es Devlin and Ekow Eshun's Congregation

Last night caught Es Devlin’s Congregation installation, curated by Ekow Eshun, and the related talk with them both, Entanglement. If you’re in London, today’s the last day to see Congregation at St. Mary le Strand church. It’s worth a look – but be prepared to have mixed feelings.

On the one hand Congregation is making it possible for its refugee 'co-authors' to be seen and heard. And – as with Herndon & Dryhurst’s The Call at the Serpentine – choirs are used to help further convey the collectivity of the portrait.

On the other, the whole thing rests on the telling of the biographical stories of individuals, with Britain and London especially too often being cast as the saviour in the narrative.

Who is Congregation for really? In Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, Isabella Hammad writes that the most we can hope for from novels is ‘not revelation, the dawning of knowledge, but the exposure of its limit. To realise you have been wrong about something'. Congregation may have the potential to challenge the ‘stop the boats’ crowd in this respect. But do conservatives and right-wingers really constitute the main audience for such a piece? Are most of those left-liberals who are likely to make the effort to see it not already aware of these issues?  Nevertheless – and to borrow once more from Hammad – it feels like pressure is being placed on those who have experienced forced displacement to yet again ‘tell the human story that will educate and enlighten others and so allow for the conversion of the repentant Westerner, who might then descend onto the stage if not as hero than perhaps as some kind of deux ex machina.’

As for Entanglement, held at King’s College London, it was disappointing. Devlin and Eshun are prominent cultural movers and shakers. So it was surprising – and rather sad – to encounter such a lack of intellectual curiosity on their part. By now there has been decades of work on the ethics of hospitality and on recognising the stranger, of which Hammad’s is only a recent literary example. But apart from a cursary – and somewhat confused – mention of Levinas (which consisted in the main of the retelling of his biography as a displaced person himself!?), none of it was referenced here, let alone built upon or engaged with. Why is English culture so anti-intellectual? All in all, very much a missed opportunity.

What If Marx Had Had ChatGPT?: Revolutionising Philosophy Just Like the iPhone Transformed the Telephone

The musician Will.i.am has launched a new interactive radio platform powered by AI. The platform, called ‘RAiDiO.FYI', features AI presenters and aims to revolutionize radio in a way similar to how the iPhone transformed the telephone.

Unlike Spotify's AI DJ, which uses AI to suggest songs based on your listening habits, RAiDiO.FYI allows for two-way communication, enabling users to engage with AI personas by pressing a button at any point to ask questions or start discussions. These AI hosts interact directly with listeners, encouraging them to ask about music, song history or even discuss topics like news, sports, culture and fashion, making listeners ‘active participants’ in the listening experience.

But that’s radio. What would the equivalent be for philosophy, I wonder?

Or might the more intriguing approach be to move beyond using AI merely as a tool to complement, augment or enhance human creativity like this: even if it involves using small language model AI trained on a corpus of ‘meaningful’, subject-specific data to enable readers to enter into a form of personalised Socratic dialogue with an otherwise conventional human-authored book in which they can ask it questions and the book can reply.

(It is something of this kind the e-reading platform Rebind is offering with regard to classic works of literature by Austen, Conrad and Kafka.)

Would it not be more interesting to explore the potential of an AI platform for creating radical new forms of philosophy altogether - forms that may no longer even be recognisable as philosophy as we currently understand it?

Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology, edited by Beryl Pong and Michael Richardson

We are delighted to announce the latest title in the Technographies series:

Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology, edited by Beryl Pong and Michael Richardson.

https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/drone-aesthetics/

There can be little doubt of the canonical drone aesthetic: a flattened aeriality that moves with an inhuman smoothness, drifting and pitching to capture an uncanny vantage. But with the unfolding, contested landscape of drone development and proliferating drone use, how is this disruptive technology changing our understanding of war, culture and ecology?

This edited collection offers a pluralized understanding of drones by bringing together twelve essays from interdisciplinary scholars working on drone pasts and drone futures, encompassing fields such as cultural anthropology, critical war studies, disability studies, international relations, media studies, and cultural studies. It examines the intersection between drones and aesthetics in terms of visual culture and the arts; the body and its relationship to the material environment; the mechanic capacities for sensing and sense-making; and in terms of politics and what makes politics possible. To more fully account for the unique politics of drone perception, it also features three visual essays by multimedia artists whose aesthetic practices have shaped the field of drone scholarship. Offering new ideas and arguments about the technology, logics, and systems with which drones are intertwined, this collection scrutinises how the aesthetics of drones are fundamental to its ethics; how drone aesthetics are impacting the way we relate to one another and to the human and more-than-human worlds; and how drones are altering our relationships to life and death.

Contributors: Michele Barker, Antoine Bousquet, Kathryn Brimblecombe-fox, Edgar Gomez Cruz, Joseph DeLappe, Jack Faber, Adam Fish, Caren Kaplan, Amy Gaeta, Sophia Goodfriend, Mitch Goodwin, Anna Munster, Tom Sear, J.D. Schnepf, Yanai Toister, Simon M. Taylor, Madelene Veber.

Editor Bios

Beryl Pong is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge. She holds affiliated positions with the Faculty of English and with Trinity College at Cambridge, and with the Department of English, Linguistics, and Theatre Studies at the National Univrsity of Singapore. She is the author of British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime: For the Duration (2020).

Michael Richardson is writer, researcher, and teacher living and working on Gadigal and Bidjigal country. He is an Associate Professor in Media and Culture at UNSW Sydney, where he co-directs the Media Futures Hub and the Autonomous Media Lab, and an Associate Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence on Automated Decision-Making & Society. His research and writing examines technology, power, witnessing, trauma, and affect in contexts of war, security, and surveillance.

Fungi Media by Piotr Bockowski

Announcing a new publication in the Media: Art: Write: Now series edited by Joanna Zylinska.

 

Fungi Media by Piotr Bockowski:

https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/fungi-media/

Fungi Media positions performance art of bodily mutations as a form of corporeal philosophy. Examining ecologies of rot and fungal decomposition, it outlines a theory of fungosexuality beyond sexual reproduction and binary gender roles. This theoretical perspective repositions queer sexualities in the context of the original meaning of the term ‘queer’, which is ‘rot’ – and which stands for a fungi-induced process of decomposition. With this, Fungi Media explores the foundational importance of rot for both breaking down and sustaining bodies, relationships and life as such.

The project was developed in a squatted sewage space in London, adopted by the author as a laboratory for mutant performance. The space hosts Chronic Illness events, where Internet-inspired body artists enter an environment populated with fungi. The interventions of human performers are incorporated into the rotten physiology of the space, which itself becomes a live entity. This book involves those events in the analysis of connections between media technologies and primal life processes. It also offers strategies for urban dwelling which transcend normative family life.

Bockowski’s book – like its decompositional protagonist, fungi – performs what it also examines: some intensive ways in which queer, networked and entangled bodies can break down complex and compromised entities to ‘enable new mutant fusions’. Fungi Media is a fecund new contribution to the emerging field – both figural and literal – of ‘libidinal ecology’; and the book’s exploration of ‘fungosexuality’ is as rich, gamey, provocative and risky as foraging hungrily in a toxic urban ecology full of unfamiliar toadstools.
    Dominic Pettman, University Professor of Media and New Humanities, The New School for Social Research

In its distinctive approach of ‘cross-contamination’, Fungi Media is both a relentlessly innovative exploration of theoretical intercrossings between bacteria-infested corporeality and post-Internet technologies - with new insights especially into Antonin Artaud’s pivotal ‘body without organs’ work - and also a documentation of an astonishing decade-long performance art series held at a subterranean fungi-infested squatted space of decomposition and sexual reinvention in north London. This will be a seminal, prescient and provoking book for understanding future proliferating mutations and creative rottings of the body in relation to technologies.
    Stephen Barber, Professor of Art History, Kingston University

Fungi Media explores the idea of the body as a cultural network, focusing on how life is identified and experienced in the digital age. The book is crafted in a post-Internet format, which encompasses the material technology related to human mutations. It navigates the interactions of sexuality, positioning the post-Internet era within the realm of nonhuman media philosophy. This framework facilitates the intersection of various forms of mediation, examining how digital tools and technologies reshape identity, sexuality and human interactions in contemporary society.
    Kenji Siratori, writer, author of Blood Electric

Author Bio

Piotr Bockowski, aka neofung, is a London-based philosopher of posthumanities, body performer and video artist. A curator of the Chronic Illness art events at a squatted sewage space, he has performed and shown his own work in Europe, China and the US. His art criticism and speculative fictions have been published in CLOT, Inertia, Cyclops Journal and Posthuman Magazine.

Dark Botany: The Herbarium Tales, edited by Prudence Gibson, Sigi Jottkandt, Marie Sierra and Anna Westbrook

We're delighted to announce the publication of Dark Botany: The Herbarium Tales, edited by Prudence Gibson, Sigi Jottkandt, Marie Sierra and Anna Westbrook.

Available open access and in print: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/dark-botany/

Dark Botany activates the material and sensorial wonder of plants—their energy, their mysterious allure, their capacities and skills, their independent might. In this Wunderkammer of critical plant studies essays and plant+artworks, the herbarium emerges as a site of multiple materialities and reflexive forms of counter-narrative. Herbaria specimens come alive as assemblages, telling truths about their dark histories and darker contemporary currents, while reflecting on the complexity of texture, movement, memory, compound structure, chemical emissions and rapid evolution of plants and languages. What one discovers is that herbaria are not static: they are as vital, energetic and enigmatic as the plants in their collections—and as diverse.

With contributions by Giovanni Aloi, Matthew Beach, Tamryn Bennett, Edward Colless, Prudence Gibson, Ryan Gordon, Lisa Gorton, Sigi Jöttkandt, Nick Koenig, Verena Kuni, Anna M. Lawrence, Vanessa Lemm, Rebecca Mayo, Aunty Deirdre Martin, Arina Melkozernova, Elaine Miller, Jacob Morris, Anna Perdibon, Anna Madeleine Raupach, Georgina Reid, Heather Rogers, Betty Russ, Erica Seccombe, Marie Sierra, Christina Stadlbauer, Anna-Sophie Springer, Bart Vandeput, Juliann Vitullo, Anna Westbrook and Maya Martin-Westheimer.

Dark Botany: The Herbarium Tales is an OHP Labs Seedbook:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/labs/seedbooks/

It is also part of The Herbarium Tales.

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The Herbarium Tales

http://theherbariumtales.org/

This is a plant studies Australian Research Council Linkage project 2020-23. It is a collaboration between University of NSW, Bundanon Trust and the Sydney Botanic Gardens Herbarium. The interdisciplinary team includes Prudence Gibson UNSW, Sigi Jottkandt UNSW and Open Humanities Press, Sophie O’Brien Bundanon Trust, Marie Sierra Melbourne University and Brett Summerell Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney.

The project outputs will include three films, two major outdoor artworks, a living book, a city forest, a monograph called The Herbarium and Me and this network of people and plants. Our team is dedicated to redefining the ways plants are understood and valued, and also to deepening recognition and understanding of the ways plants are important actors in political, economic and social relations.

We hope to celebrate and interrogate the agency, in/inter-dependence, and performing subjectivities of plants; we also hope to develop critical understandings of plants as performing actors in bio/phyto-political relations. Lead CI of this project, Prudence Gibson, has written a book entitled The Plant Contract (Brill 2018), which charts a new deal for the vegetal world that centres on an aesthetic of care, via a promise between one person and one plant to take care. This project aims to enact such a philosophy.