menu
zoeken

Prospections

Editorial
13/09/2022


The Hauntologists

“The Hauntologists” is activated here as a Prospections focus—featuring both commissioned and archival material that has emerged out of the BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice 2021/2022 program. It includes new texts, archival resources, interviews and other research-artistic contributions that bring together the Fellow’s practices in resonance with pivotal concepts at BAK, including voices and ideas generated through the exhibition and gatherings program, as well as strands that dialogue with the “Spectral Infrastructure” focus (also featured on Prospections) led by freethought collective. “The Hauntologists” launch takes place intermittently throughout the duration of eponymous experimental and collective research project in the fall of 2022 and beyond. 

 

1. Zone Collective (Kirila Cvetkovska and Megan Hoetger)

“Notes from the table. A Not Yet Manifesto,” 2022 

Text contribution. Publication date 14 October 2022 

Alongside the Zoning Play Complex, Zone Collective also contributes the “Notes from the table. A Not Yet Manifesto” to BAK’s Prospections online forum, which outlines the tenets of their collective annotation methodology, as well as their commitments to workshopping as a form of knowledge production otherwise.  

—Zone Collective 

 

 2. Cell for Digital Discomfort (Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak, and Jara Rocha)

“On Digital Discomfort”  

Editorial focus. Soft launch: November 2022 

On Digital Discomfort provides in-depth reflections upon and suggestions about what it means to be technologically engaged in the complex realities of the mundane. Across several literary forms—essays, interviews, poetic video experiments, and collective annotations—it seeks to extend these conversations to intersecting fields of study. It does so through undertaking quotidian but attentive experiments to study the potential necessity for opacity, non-eurowhite calculation genealogies, trans*feminist infrastructural entanglements, anti-extractivist connecting cultures, and intersectional notions of hosting and hostility. The urgency for digital discomfort is produced by the contemporary stage of rampant monocultural digitization based on logics of coercion, quantification, and the capture-of-all aspects of more-than-human existence that emerge from ecosystemic and infrastructural arrangements: cloud-computing, hyper-availability, agile flow-management, optimized planetary computing, and so forth. Digital discomfort, like physical discomfort, can come from a politicized re-arrangement of an environment to allow for reimaginations of everyday technological engagements. Reimagining this means focusing on the experiences, aesthetics, and vernacular diversity of techniques as a way to problematize the calcified subjectivity of the computer user or the fairy tales of telecom companies, and to add, twist, or abolish worldviews while reshuffling activist tactics in relation to computational techno-ecologies. As artist and scholar Romi Ron Morrison puts it: “today . . . is not a time of futility but of radical reimagining and visceral reconnection.”  

—Cell for Digital Discomfort 

 

3. Dubravka Sekulić in conversation with Merve Bedir

“Bedtime Story for the Non-Aligned,” 2022 

Text and sound contribution: Publication date November 2022 

This contribution is a transcription of Dubravka Sekulić’s conversation with Merve Bedir included in the installation Montecarlo, Learning Structures and Bedtime Stories for the Non-Aligned. In it, Sekulić is prompted to react to different questions and topics that seek to intersect multiple perspectives and experiences that collectively draw “another end of the world.” Seeking to advance concrete forms of knowledge and action that pave the grounds for global solidarity against neoliberal governance, oppression, polarization, and conflict, and inspired by the Non-Aligned Movement (1961–ongoing), the text discusses multiple unsettled dialectics between notions of home and diaspora, of resistance or abolition, and of being neither settler nor native. It aims to speculate and propose an agenda of interdependent struggles for a coalition of nonaligned workers. 

 

4. Denise Ferreira da Silva and Massimiliano (Mao) Mollona

“Beyond Value” 

Editorial focus. Launch: November 2022 

Composed as part of the Spectral Infrastructure research trajectory, “Beyond Value” is a digital research notebook consisting of a multimedia assemblage of interviews, texts, and visual and sound materials around mining. It articulates a reflection on spectrality and its material manifestations, departing from Ferreira da Silva’s raw materialist approach and Mollona’s notion of “spectral labor.” Striving to develop both an anticolonial critique of extractivism as much as a proposition about spectral value, this editorial is intended as a gathering of matter that resists containment and capture through a visual grammar that takes opacity and hapticality as its starting point. With a fragmentary format and a “quick and dirty aesthetics,” this visual notebook revolves around the Katanga Mining complex operating in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the world’s biggest producers of cobalt. Cobalt is a central component that underpins the transition to renewable energy that is associated with green capitalism, and hence, it is the raw material for contemporary extractivism and primitive accumulation.  

—Massimiliano (Mao) Mollona 

 

5. Yen Noh

“Barren Cave Mute,” 2022 

Text contribution. Publication date December 2022 

Borrowing its title from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s little-known performance and installation Barren Cave Mute, and in line with Yen Noh’s study group In Between Seances, Noh’s text contribution “Barren Cave Mute bears” witness to the materiality of language in Cha’s Dictee (1982), looking into the novel’s linguistic and material displacements in terms of sonic ecologies. It is grounded in Noh’s reading of Dictee, which aims to reveal the silence inherent in the bodily trials of living.  

Related content

30/01/2023
On Digital Discomfort

Execution

Critical Software Thing

Originating with the twelfth-century French term l’exécuteur du testament (the executor of the will), the term “execution” today finds itself entangled in myriad systems, such as linguistic systems, judiciary systems, computational systems, and systems of memory—all of which are touched upon in this text (originally published as an entry in The Posthuman Glossary [2028]) by Critical Software Thing (CST)). Be it by guillotine or CPU, as a realization of a decreed sentence, CST suggest that “execution” always relates to the now, “to an actualization, a presence which is always already over.” Highlighting the micro-instructions, micro-operations, and micro-temporality of systems executions, CST point toward the liveness inherent in them. Without succumbing to the seeming seamlessness of computation—harkening to the Cell for Digital Discomfort’s suggestion to embrace a seamful approach to technology—and with an awareness for the executive power of code, CST propose that code itself to be regarded as but “a partial instruction within a wider, dynamic ecology of many executing systems.”

Archief Essay Tekst
05/12/2022
On Digital Discomfort

A Pluriverse of Local Worlds: A Review of Computing within Limits—Related Terminology and Practices

Marloes de Valk

In haar studie "A Pluriverse of Local Worlds: A Review of Computing within Limits - Related Terminology and Practices" (2021) brengt softwarekunstenaar en schrijver Marloes de Valk een diversiteit aan kleinschalige praktijken in kaart, die zich richten op duurzaamheid en sociale rechtvaardigheid in relatie tot computergebruik. De Valk brengt een breed spectrum van terminologieën samen die voortkomen uit computerpraktijken—van het beheren en onderhouden van een infrastructuur in collectief eigendom— waarbij de monocultuur en growth mindset van BigTech, en de daarbij horende negatieve impact op het milieu, worden uitgedaagd.

Essay
05/12/2022

Digital Discomfort

Formed as part of the 2021/2022 BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice, the Cell for Digital Discomfort (CfDD)—composed of Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak, and Jara Rocha—are the guest editors of this special Prospections focus “On Digital Discomfort,” a compilation of newly commissioned and archival resources such as essays, interviews, poethic video experiments, and collective annotations that allow for a collective exploration and affirmative re-politicization and redefinition of compu-relational practice.

Editorial
05/12/2022
On Digital Discomfort

A Wishlist for Trans*feminist Servers

Cell for Digital Discomfort

The Cell for Digital Discomfort, together with the other fellows involved in the 2021/2022 BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice, collectively set out to re-vision the “The Feminist Server Manifesto”(2014) into “A Wishlist for Trans*feminst Servers.” Joined by artist and designer Femke Snelting—one of the initial contributors to the manifesto—the BAK Fellows engaged in several conversations to broaden the interpretation of feminism portrayed in the original manifesto and to begin composing together an open-ended wishlist for techno-ecologies in the making.

Nieuwe bijdrage Tekst
04/12/2022
On Digital Discomfort

Afrofuturism

Ramon Amaro

This short-form essay by writer, researcher, and academic Ramon Amaro draws from multiple conceptions and realizations of Afrofuturism—in practice by the science fiction authors Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany, the musicians George Clinton and Sun Ra, the filmmakers Marlon Riggs and John Akomfrah, and in theory by theorists Alondra Nelson, Kodwo Eshun, and many others. It’s a quote from Delany in particular that Amaro points to in order to remind the reader that the “forceful and distinguishing aspects” of science fiction itself lie in its marginal nature. Amaro shows how, from this position in the margins, Afrofuturism might—or continue to—disrupt history’s role in preempting the future by celebrating the awkwardness and disjointedness of culture. As a speculative tool for questioning how the black body is conceptualized in relation to ecologies of culture, Afrofuturism offers a “simulated new beginning based on a mythical past of greatness.” Dwelling in the uncertainty and improbability of whether technology could offer a form of liberation for black bodies, Amaro insists upon the idea that black culture and life is about imagining the impossible, as Nelson puts it, “imagining a better place, a different world.”

Archief Essay
02/12/2022
On Digital Discomfort

Informatic Opacity

Zach Blas

Zach Blas’s “Informatic Opacity” extrapolates from Caribbean philosopher and poet Éduoard Glissant’s theory of opacity—as an anti-imperial form of relation and existence—and applies it to contemporary forms of abject and pervasive transparency: particularly, the identification technologies which subsume identity and difference into neoliberalism’s logics of governance. “Informatic Opacity” links in with the Cell for Digital Discomfort’s urge toward “discomfort”—to redefine the norms of technological innovation into non-universalist propositions for compu-relational practice—but rather than asking us to return to Glissant’s technophobia, it instead offers a “discomforting” yet ultimately utopic proposition: to live with technologies that express the joy of opacity, not its denigration.

Archief Essay Tekst
14/10/2022
The Hauntologists

Notes from the Table. A Not-Yet Manifesto

Megan Hoetger / Zone Collective

Naast het Zoning Play Complex, een reeks theaterworkshops in het kader van The Hauntologists(BAK, 2022), draagt Zone Collective aan het programma bij met het werk “Notes from a Table. A Not-Yet Manifesto”. Dit werk verschijnt op het online forum Prospections, en schetst de principes van hun collectieve annotatiemethodologie, evenals hun toewijding aan workshopping als een andere vorm van kennisproductie. 

Beeld