[Commlist] The Material: Art & Technology Research Group presents: Fiction Machines IV

Book Tickets here 
<https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/art-and-technology-research-group/fiction-machines-iv/e-jgryxx>


  Fiction Machines IV

  Bath School of Art, Bath,, BA1 3EL
  Thu 20th July 2023
The Material: Art & Technology Research Group presents: Fiction Machines IV

One-Day Symposium: Thursday July 20th 2023 - 09.30-18.00
Bath School of Art, Film & Media, Locksbrook Road Campus, Bath, BA1 3EL

Keynote: Linda Stupart


Speakers, Performances and screenings from:
Eleanor Duffin / Owen Lloyd, Nic Pehkonen, Colin Perry, Michelle 
Atherton, Jennet Thomas, Keira Greene, Ciaran O Dochartaigh,  Alicja 
Rogalska,  Mariana Marangoni, Jane Topping, David Musgrave, Ada Hao, 
 Jane Norris, Laura Cooper, Sarah Walker, Harry Meadows, Andy Weir, 
Charlie Tweed, Sam Wilkins, Benesek Monk

For this iteration of Fiction Machines we are interested in methods of 
fiction and personification within art practice research to engage with, 
and give voice to, more-than-human lifeforms and materials.

The novelist Amitav Ghosh, in his non-fiction work The Nutmeg’s Curse 
(2021) draws connections between histories of colonialism, capitalism 
and real fictions of the land. He describes the mechanistic worldview 
that has supported colonial violence and extraction, nature viewed as 
‘inert repository of resources, which in order to be ‘improved’ needs to 
be expropriated.’ (37) What this view has suppressed, he argues, is 
thinking the universe as living organism, ‘animated by many kinds of 
unseen forces.’ (37) It is through myths, stories and voices that we can 
rethink perceptions and agencies of the non-human.

Ghosh describes the story of the volcano Budj Bim, for example, in 
Australia’s Victoria State. For the Gunditjmara, the Indigenous people 
of the region, the volcano as giant being with lava teeth is a founding 
ancestor. Budj Bim’s creation myth, passed down through generations, 
bears witness to a volcanic eruption 30,000 years ago and played a major 
part in the community’s reclamation of some of their ancestral lands in 
2007. Philosopher Elizabeth Povinelli in Geontologies (2016) describes a 
2013 legal case in Northern Australia between mining company OM 
Manganese and the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority. The dispute 
centres around the status of sacred rock formation Two Women Sitting 
Down, asking what it means for the rock to listen, and to have voice as 
a political subject, ultimately as a power struggle over what counts as 
life and nonlife, ‘rocks extrude into their environment, changing wind 
patterns and leaving soil deposits, and they ingest the living that 
changes their geochemical imprint.’ (72)

What such examples show is how fictions and personifications of the 
more-than-human environment are bound up with law, agencies, 
philosophies and science of the earth, politics of extraction, 
narratives of colonial modernity and postcolonial resistance. This is 
increasingly relevant with the current urgency of climate crisis. 
Tuvalu, an island atoll in the South Pacific, for example, is forecast 
to disappear completely by the end of the century due to rising sea 
levels. One proposal for retaining its status and ownership of its 
maritime zones is through a fictional version of itself in the 
metaverse, passing on stories digitally for future generations.

We are interested in fiction as method within art practice in such a 
context, ‘Far from being an escape from the world’, as Shaws and 
Reeves-Evison have argued, ‘fiction takes us to its symbolic centre and 
might allow us to establish some leverage within the tangled 
contingencies and hidden conventions that lie there.’ (2017: 7).

In the symposium we ask: How have artists worked with voices entangled 
with the earth and materials, our technologies, instruments and waste? 
Beyond data, what rituals, affinities and subjectivities are emerging 
for relating to climate? How are non-human collaborations and 
speculative machines re-imagining the human and planetary? And what is 
at stake in personification and voicing – who is speaking for whom and 
is anyone or anything listening?

Symposium Strands:

  * Agencies of land as material: soil as material evidence; toxicity;
    underground life, plants, fungi and communication networks; nuclear
    waste and e-waste; mythology, extraction and colonialism; animated
    lands; agropoetics; food ecologies.
  * Climate rituals: critical sensing;  non-data based approaches to
    climate justice, communication or measurement; personifications or
    invocations of climate;  human/more-than-human affinities; bodies,
    desire and ecoqueer practices.
  * Machine futurisms:  giving voice to speculative forms of machine
    that re-imagine technological relations with human and non-humans;
    speculative subjectifications; sci-fi and alien weirdness;
    non-western and postcolonial futurisms.
  * Personification and voicing as method: ventriloquism; critical
    reflections on speaking for/as/with/through other things; noise; AI;
    deep listening; indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies;
    narratives of resistance.


Keynote: Linda Stupart

Linda Stupartis an artist, writer, and educator from Cape Town, South 
Africa. They completed their PhD at Goldsmiths in 2016, with a project 
engaged in new considerations of objectification and abjection. They are 
interested in the possibilities for writing and making discrete grounded 
encounters with different kinds of bodies (of knowledge, objects, affect 
as well as corporeal bodies) as a way to think through less alienated 
ways of living and thinking together.

Book Tickets here 
<https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/art-and-technology-research-group/fiction-machines-iv/e-jgryxx>


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