[NetBehaviour] Fwd: Full moon feelings

[Jessica May]

Important p.s

Is there any contemporary art (or other stuff) relating to the Moon I
should be aware of, you excellent beings!?

On Wed, 10 Jul 2024, 21:41 Jessica May, <jessmayrose at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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>
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