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, <[email protected]>
wrote:
I think this might still be relevant 6 months later ;)
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: *Ruth Catlow* <[email protected]>
Date: Thu, 28 Dec 2023 at 22:22
Subject: Full moon feelings
To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity
<[email protected]>
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
[email protected]
http://www.creative-catalyst.com
http://www.upstage.org.nz
https://mobilise-demobilise.eu
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