Found as this project is the most recently added to the Autographic Visualisations website (which I found through the Material Traces article by Offenhuber).
Yee looked at sustainable development goals and ‘better’ meant when it appeared so regularly in this linguistically expressed commitment statements.
as GDP is typically representative of ‘market success’ and leading to economic stability supposedly..
she wanted to look at how this correlated to happiness of populations.
this in itself is something to be critiqued
the qualitative nature of this measured emotion is curious. How did they find this detail out?
This project made me ponder what it means to speculate via ornamentation and dress.
my first issue was; how to avoid the fact dress is so entangled with consumption. Aesthetic representation FOR consumption of sorts.
this project made me wonder why she chose earrings. I couldn’t find an explanation and I a bit critical of these objects in the sense they seem like jewellery for the sake of jewellery.
I would like to think more academically about why I’m choosing / thinking about dress as the ‘forum’.
A late night thought lead me to the fact that we will always need be dressing ourselves, almost as a certainty (maybe fun to think of subversive scenarios of nudists communities OR anti body architecture/anti contact with materiality (due to back lash because of current circumstances/material treatment?!) emerging within this speculation). IF we are certainly wearing things for the future of our non-digital existence, ornamentation has the potential to evolve drastically and become more necessary to not just represent aesthetic culture symbols (maybe undetectable without a code..?) but (what I’m a lot more into) become more tool like. incorporate lost of different mechanisms to aid ‘environmental reformism’.
Speculative objects that infer the scarcity of ‘man-made’ materials in the ruin that is our post plastic/petro-chemical/maybe post ‘colonial capitaliscene’ (look up the women that Demos mentions in the e-fliux talk).
Objects have processes done to them that imply similar temporalities of geological artefacts (in its trope-like definition). Newely defined through intentional process and powers of narrative into newly valued sensual qualities (in triple O terms).
What counts as a material trace – the kind that get manipulated in indexical design and autographic visualisation?
do these objects count as autobiographical.. or just speculative? The traces being observed are natural (what ever natural means…) but altered in order to witness a future.. the effects of time.. the length of time the synthetic materials will be in that new form..
maybe the point of a trace is that it already exists or you can watch it existing.. – do these objets count as just existing? is being in ‘our’ temporality necessary?
PART OF GOW YOUR OWN EXHIBITION AT SCIENCE GALLERY DUBLIN
Interesting in its personalising and almost cultural cleaning of bacteria.
Project makes bacteria culture, very similar to that of a rind of cheese, from bacteria found in bodily creases such as toes. (a similar form of bacteria is found there)
I think I enjoy this because it seems a creative output positioned in order to make bacteria seem less ‘dangerous’ – Purity and Danger, mary douglas vibes.
I’m Thinking about future scenarios and maybe I am looking into bacteria and microbial ideas/projects because of the likely hood of a never write post-global-pandemic future. Post capitalist, post environmentally ignorant violence, maybe post colonial…
experimental test could be take from pater frame and look at various combinations of these above elements
Writer of Material Witnesses. Uses a sort of speculative realist approach to understanding agency of the non-human. It re imagines and ‘re informs’ materialists existence in the ‘dialogue’ of accountability. She also outlines new definitions for information, evidence, matter and ‘event’.
Material witness is, in effect, a Möbius-like concept that continually twists between divulging “evidence of the event” and exposing the “event of evidence.”
It’s a theory of representation (and visualisation?) that is linguistically and terminologically anthropomorphic. It’s linked to other speculative realists so I am interested as to what its links with anthropomorphising is?
For me, Schuppi references the desensitising nature of ‘disaster’ media coverage. This is something referenced by Rob Nixon in his ‘slow violence’ thesis – the relevance of temporalities variation in terms of social media informed human attention span vs. violent acts of ecological damage.
It makes me ask questions of how the visualisations are accessed/location/what forum? Is it the Gallery or is it governmental?
In an E-flux zoom conversation Demos discusses the broad necessities of visualising the current climate and the efficacy of cinematic documentation. Is it really effective to just show beauty in destruction.. what of the slow violence mentioned in the Nixon thesis and the immunised attention spans of the social media generation..
Thinks that OTOLITH group do this interestingly – ‘seismic psyche / popular imagination of disaster prediction’
Kodwo Eshun spoke in the zoom conversation i watched about how people living in the convention that is the anthropocene have turned to finding indexical signs, material traces, to inform them of seismic movements/predictions.
‘living in the anthropocene is to confuse and to complicate the difference between human sciences and so called natural sciences. To confuse the inherited devisions of knowledge of colonial order’
he also makes a strange point about a women (Charlotte King) who, when living in this confusion, had taken to thinking her body was able to predict seismic activity, she was especially sensitive to the earth indexes (in this case ones that are more spiritual and physical in my opinion) – and how this links to Bruno Latours call for ‘sensitisation’
SO maybe if we didn’t have this subconscious need to different so harshly between nature and science and earth and mind, we would not need to designate a the collecting of indexical signs into delusional/spiritual and scientific/datacolective… if these realms merge (is our perspective of technology vs nature) and we see US and OUR technology AS nature… we could create a space for innovation that nurtures this… objets and tools that mesh together the bodily reactions/visualisations/sensitisations/technology/tools etc….
‘we need to organise social movement activism that can stir the capitalist death spiral from bringing us all to ruin’
‘no more moderationism / reformism’
‘we need a leftist populism’
‘We must challenge the fundamental rule of dominant economic arrangements, that is racial and colonial capitalism as the organising principle of contemporary existence’
someone to further look up is Octavia E. Butler… Her essay : Treasured Strangers: Race, Biopolitics, and the Human in Octavia E. Butler’s XenogenesisTrilogy. The abstract:
The Xenogenesis trilogy, written during a period of rapid growth in the neoliberal bioeconomy in the United States, is increasingly relevant today, when our ability to manipulate life has outstripped the ethical and theoretical considerations of reproductive/genetic research and technologies. In this essay I seek to bring the trilogy into conversation with a broader dialogue around reproduction in relation to race, drawing on discussions of scientific racism and medical apartheid. Butler’s work draws on a variety of biopolitical discourses and is deeply concerned with the figure of the black woman as breeder, the history of reproduction as eugenics, and the contemporary “tissue economies” (Waldby and Mitchell) that continue to exploit the reproductive labor of non-white and third-world bodies. The Xenogenesis trilogy illuminates the links between colonialism and biological capital, and uses apocalypse to show how the “human” is constantly being discursively and biologically reconstructed. By contrasting the genetic determinism of the Oankali with humans’ insistence on biological and reproductive independence, Butler enacts a politics of ambivalence that situates reproduction as an ongoing dialectical process within the context of broader ecological systems. Although her work is certainly concerned with genetic engineering, she emphasizes the importance of generation rather than reproduction, articulating a theory of symbiogenesis that sees human evolution as reliant on dynamic relationships with other species and environments.
Re-assessment of the gendered nature of various industries – here the salon and – challenging feminine beauty through and the evolution of this with technological advancement.
combines techno-visual coded tropes and real wearable technologies such as LED’s and Piczoelectric sensors (sound/motion wave sensor technology) with nail art.
Speculating futures of existence where nature and human and technology of natural humans philosophically collide.
Envisioning a 4th dimension to the biological tree of life…
I’m interested in how the body and its extended structural covering may evolve in the future to be ‘toolified’ in new ways. Bacteria, carbon sequestion, autographic tools to identify ecological safety eg…
within this new version of synthetic/natural existence, Ginsburg creates speculative objects formed through synthetic bodily adaption… usually around ideas of the microbial and bacteria evolution with technological changes and CRISPA
Incorporates living cells into a modular jewellery design as a way to encapsulate an emotion of a moment in time through harnessing the unique BACTERIA.
Ie; a kiss or a whisper
interesting idea in our ‘distanced’ world of global pandemic.. how to keep people near whilst keeping them far…
how bacteria use of bacteria is harnessed whilst also being shunned in an ultra hygienic world..
Use of ornamentation / bodily architecture speculation practices to ponder the future of a techno-synthetic-organic experience of human existence.
EG – female reproductive organs being equivalent to a 3D printer.
she advocates absurdity when envisioning futures
“using stories and film making to communicate science (fictions..?), we can reach the fringes of culture and explore the emotional impact of technology how it may redesign our bodies.”
A point I can’t help but mention is that McRea explicit speculates the ‘merging’ of body and nature
This is interesting to me as it is ignorant of eco-philosophy proposed by Peter Frase in that he states the necessity to understand the non duality of ‘human nature’ – the non dichotomy, advocating a view of human AS nature.
Quotes:
CA: As a scientist, I’ve found working with artists like Lucy to be incredibly powerful for exposing different perspectives on the values and potential futures of science and technology. Scientists are pressured to project certainty and closure in public, whereas artists create openness and space to question and explore. Art can have a vulnerability that science often can’t, coming with a willingness to take risks for the sake of curiosity without having an ultimate conclusion in mind.
CA: Lucy’s work explores notions and stereotypes of feminine beauty and how they might intersect with technology, chal- lenging our expectations of what science fiction and what technology can do and what it can look and feel like. By incorpo- rating and reimagining concepts from the wellness and beauty industries, from the spa to perfume and beyond, Lucy’s work has challenged me to rethink some of these “frivolous” products associated with women in the context of technology. Are cosmetics a wearable technology? What about perfume?
Zhihan Ying’s project Microbiome Jewelry incorporates living cells into a modular jewelry design as a way to encapsulate a memory of an emotion at a moment in time. She designed jewelry that incorporates agar petri dishes that can capture a kiss, a tear, or whis- pered story. When the microbes grow, they become living representations of a memory that can be carried as part of a necklace.
^ SOSOSOSO ME!!!! bioplastics do this anyway. clothes/body art that grows as we do or the world does….
its autographical in its approach … process is the object. the narrative is the object. the object lives the evidence of both agency and autonomy
Bacteria engineered as sensors or as therapeutics are being tested in mice and in early clinical trials. This kind of technol- ogy was prophesied by Daisy Ginsberg and James King in their design fiction E. chromi in 2009, imagining a probiotic drink featuring engineered E. coli that sense dis- turbances in the gut and produce an easily detected colored output.
Biometric Mirror is an immersive installation that blends the act of casually glancing at one’s reflection with modern algorithmic perspectives on facial per- fection. Audiences enter a futuristic sci-fi beauty salon and let an AI scan their bio- metric data to reveal a mathematically per- fect version of their own face. But whose version of perfection is it really? Biometric Mirror embraces flaws in algorithms, either by using crowdsourced AI datasets (thus reflecting societal biases, as a critique of opaque AI today) and models of perfec- tion developed in Western countries (thus reflecting cultural biases, as a critique of the idealized Western individual beauty
I had recently seen this meme about the uterus being an “onboard 3D printer.” I had a funny thought—is the uterus a wearable technology? I sent over another email saying to Lucy “What will the midwife clinic be like in 10,000 years?”
^womb as wearable technology
I like the way the converse with each and spit ball interesting brain farts.
Pragmatic speculations of futures and the political climates necessary for carboys futures to play out – EG new vision of socialism when collective action + automation (less need for human labour) + regulation of market forces aids an eco-techno existence!
Initially only taken inspiration from chapter 3, Socialism.
Interesting in that he acknowledges the philosophical duality of human/technology and nature and the misconception of this and what it means for anthropocentrism. There is no perfect ‘way’ for ecology to be, no ‘conserving’ or ‘retracting’ back to a past form of earthy environment, instead we must look forwards for the use human intervention and technology to create a possible harmonious state for all.
This could, in Frase opinion, be manifested through an evolved socialist ideology where market forces are allowed to play a part but regulation and environmental awareness allows for fluid transition from the anthropocene / colonial capitaliscene (terms from P.J Demos) into a post capitalist world.
Quotes:
“The argument of this book is that we are in fact facing such a contradictory dual crisis. And it is the interaction of these two dynamics that makes our historical moment so volatile and uncertain, full of both promise and danger. In the chapters that follow, I will attempt to sketch some of the possible interactions between these two dynamics.”
“Automation continues to proceed even in agriculture, which once consumed the largest share of human labor but now makes up a tiny fraction of employment, especially in the United States and other rich countries. In California, changing Mexican economic conditions and border crackdowns have led to labor shortages. This has spurred farmers to invest in new machinery that can take on even delicate tasks like fruit harvesting, which have until now required the precision of a human hand.11 This development illustrates a recurrent capitalist dynamic: as workers become more powerful and better paid, the pressure on capitalists to automate increases. When there is a huge pool of low wage migrant farm labor, a $100,000 fruit picker looks like a wasteful indulgence. But when workers are scarce and can command better wages, the incentive to replace them with machinery is intensified.”
^ Scary reality of incentivisation around automation…
“In the 1970s, the radical feminist theorist Shulamith Firestone called for growing babies in artificial wombs, as a way to liberate women from their dominated position in the relations of reproduction.12 Fanciful at the time, such technologies are becoming a reality today. Japanese scientists have successfully birthed goats from artificial wombs and grown human embryos for up to ten days. Further work on applying this technology to human babies is now as much restricted by law as science; Japan prohibits growing human embryos artificially for longer than fourteen days.13 Many women find such a prospect off-putting and welcome the experience of carrying a child. But surely many others would prefer to be liberated from the obligation.”
^ RELEVANT to lucy mcrea ideas of social science fictions around pregnancy and the female womb as as wearable technology?……?
THINKING RESEARCH 