[NetBehaviour] Fwd: Full moon feelings
Helen Varley Jamieson
helen at creative-catalyst.com
Mon Jul 15 11:28:32 CEST 2024
hi jess, & ruth, & all,
i'm also quietly researching the moon, the space race, rubbish left on
the moon, mining the moon, etc with a view to making a cyberformance in
UpStage. not very far into it yet but gradually gathering news stories &
information.
& also remembering the mars patent! http://mars-patent.org/
h : )
On 10.07.24 22:41, Jessica May via NetBehaviour 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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--
helen varley jamieson
helen at creative-catalyst.com
http://www.creative-catalyst.com
http://www.upstage.org.nz
https://mobilise-demobilise.eu
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