[NetBehaviour] Fwd: Full moon feelings

[Jessica May]

Hi Ruth et al,

I've been loitering and not reading Netbehavior  for a while, and wondering
if I should exit, but as I'm researching the moon (!) and the current
space-race to mine there, and trying to make performance work in response I
got drawn in... And so glad I did! I really value this digest of books to
check, thanks for sharing. And your writing is beautiful, Ruth.

Did the Larping experiments get documented at all? I love the idea of
Eco-Larping !  I'm studying at Schumacher College, and I'm sure the Engaged
Ecology MA students would be interested. I'm on an MA called the Poetics of
Imagination, it's been a ride!

May you all get the support and encouragement you need out there!

Bests

Jess





On Wed, 10 Jul 2024, 17:59 Ruth Catlow, <ruth.catlow at furtherfield.org>
wrote:

> I think this might still be relevant 6 months later ;)
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ---------
> From: Ruth Catlow <ruth.catlow at furtherfield.org>
> Date: Thu, 28 Dec 2023 at 22:22
> Subject: Full moon feelings
> To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity <
> netbehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org>
>
>
> Hello all, from the stormy dark of the year, here in East England.
>
> At dawn, a few mornings back, we saw the fullish moon drop into the arms
> of a tree silhouetted on the horizon. It inspired me to reflect on the
> moiling feelings of the year. Then it inspired me to share these four books
> that produced very different feelings - energising, humbling, interrupting,
> and delightful.
>
> 1. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman. (2019).
> Recommended by our friend Cassie Thornton, artist, debt activist and
> initiator of The Hologram peer to peer feminist healthcare network.
>
> This is a book about black intimate life in New York and Philadelphia at
> the beginning of the twentieth century, 35 years after the abolition of
> slavery. The author brings her literary imagination to historical archive
> materials. It's a total revelation about the myriad modes and flows of
> fierce informal battles against personal and institutional oppression
> across generations.
>
> 2. Hospicing Modernity: Parting with Harmful Ways of Living (2021) by
> Vanessa Machado De Oliveira. Recommended by our friend Dani Admis,
> researcher and curator (of the collective environmental justice project
> Sunlight Doesn't Need a Pipeline).
>
> This book is a manifesto and workbook that shows how profoundly out of
> balance our ecosocial world has become as a result of colonialism, resource
> extraction etc. It also reveals all the psychological moves we make to feel
> OK about how we are each implicated and the limits we feel to our agency.
> It strips away any safe or comfortable perspectives on the terrible harms
> inflicted by the modernist idea of progress and the different parts we
> might play in it.
>
> 3. In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the
> Survival of the Indian Nations,(1991) by Jerry Mander. I read this after
> coming across Mander's Obituary in Marc's subscription to Resurgence
> magazine.
>
> This book blew my mind. It was written before anyone knew what the Web
> would become and is a historic and prophetic analysis of the combined harms
> of unregulated social tech development, and the primacy of profit,
> protected through corporate law. It also demonstrates the role that the
> lying and cheating of so-called civilised states and business has played in
> the devastation of the environment, democracy and indigenous cultures over
> the last 250+ years. Mander was an anti-globalisation activist, known as
> "the Adman for Progressive Causes" so he communicates all this with great
> clarity and verve.
> The argument that interrupted me most profoundly was that since the mid
> 1950s tech conglomerates have sold consumer-citizens on the edge-case
> benefits of technologies (a good recent example is the medical diagnostic
> ability of AI) while the known or predictable hazards to society have been
> suppressed, minimized or defended as an unfortunate sacrifice worth making
> for inevitable "progress".
>
> 4. The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay (2020).
> We (a bunch of us at Furtherfield) have spent the last few years LARPing
> interspecies justice scenarios in Finsbury Park in North London (more to
> follow on this in the new year). We encountered a series of fascinating
> challenges and questions like: what do we actually already know and feel
> about what matters to other living beings? What difference would knowing
> more make?* Is multi-species democracy worth exploring, and if not, why
> not? What actions might be taken by whom to change interspecies relations,
> and ecosystems-care for the better?
>
> McKay's novel is an Aussie black comedy sci-fi that explores what might
> happen to humans if they could be hypnotised by whales, bullied by wild
> dogs, and could hear the glee of midges as they sucked their blood. It is
> an incredible, funny, delightful, impressive work of imagination that did
> what we were trying to do too - exploring what it might feel like to
> acknowledge the sentience of all other beings,  with their own experience,
> and to live in relationship with them.
>
> *While our LARP involved a fictitious device that allows all flora and
> fauna to communicate freely with each other I am highly suspicious of all
> the recent AI projects that claim to allow us to communicate with animals
> and plants. That's because I don't see the problem (with mass species
> extinctions and ecosystems collapse and injustice) as a knowledge problem
> but a relating-and-care problem.
>
> Wow! Thank you if you got this far.
> All the feelz, including warm, respectful and well-wishing ones.
> Ruth
>
>
>
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