In this workshop we discuss whose responsibility, for what and to whom, is or should be evoked in environmental discourses, the relation of the scale of knowledge (one world of globalized science vs multiple worlds of situational knowledges) to the notion of agency and accountability, and the two-sided coin of sensing and sensitivity cultivated through practices of knowing and responding.
We will pick up on the approaches that were discussed in the previous workshop Land as Pedagogy.
(All times indicated in CEST)
10:00–10:15
Introduction at Critical Media Lab
10:15–11:45
Departing from CML: Basel Institut für angewandte Stadtforschung – Jan Nemeth
12:00
Lunch at the Critical Media Lab (vegetarian with vegan options)
13:00–13:30 Coffee break
13:30
Welcome and Introduction at the Critical Media Lab – Jan Torpus
13:45–14:55
Whose responsibility, for what or to whom, is invoked in environmental discourses
Discussant: Christoph Küffer
14:55–15:15 Coffee break
15:15–16:25
Scales of knowledge – from universal science to situated knowledges
Discussant: Karolina Sobecka
16:25–16:55 Coffee break
16:55–18:25
Sensing vs Sensitivity
Discussant: Yvonnne Volkart
18:25
Closing comments
19:00
Apero (vegetarian with vegan options)
Viktor Bedö is a designer and researcher with a focus on just and care-based urban futures with over fifteen years of experience across academia, industry and independent street game design. He is a Visiting Professor at FHNW Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures Basel and a Senior Lecturer at the Institute for Design Innovation at Loughborough University London. His current research engages with crafting imaginaries of commoning-based machine teaching in managing urban resources.
Scaling Material Urban Commons
With Anna Tsing’s cautionary words in mind, that scaling up changes the nature of the project, running the risk of leaving behind a “mounting pile of ruins” (Tsing: On Nonscalability, 2012), the input asks: What is chopped off and pruned back when we introduce the inherently large-scale technology of machine teaching to commoning? Based on anecdotal evidence from the research project Scaling Material Urban Commons, the input identifies a moment when implicit situated knowledge of a food-sharing community starts to fade out during the generation of training data.
Tega Brain is an Australian born artist and environmental engineer exploring issues of ecology, data, automation, and infrastructure. She is an Industry Associate Professor of integrated Design and Media at New York University and her first book, Code as Creative Medium, is coauthored with Golan Levin and published with MIT Press. She lives and works in New York City.
Deep Swamp and Solar Protocol
As ecological calamity is met with environmental engineering, what should environments be optimized for and by what means? In this talk, I will discuss two recent works – Deep Swamp and Solar Protocol that each explore the politics of automating of environmental decision making and management.
Adi Kuntsman is Reader in Digital Politics at Manchester Metropolitan University and author/editor of multiple monographs and edited collections. Adi’s new book, Digital Technologies, Smart Cities and the Environment: In the Ruins of Broken Promises (with Liu Xin, Bristol University Press) is forthcoming in 2024.
Materialist Accountability
My presentation revolves around several questions. What is the role of digital technologies in environmental sustainability and the climate crisis? To what extent is digitisation a key component of environmental sustainability, or a major hindrance? And what are the relations between colonial legacies, global injustice, digitisation, and the environment? Within conversations about climate justice, the digital is rarely looked at as a source of environmental harms, despite a wealth of evidence (mining of rare metals for devices; e-waste; toxic and exploitative working conditions especially in the Global South; accelerated energy demands of internet connectivity, deep machine learning, AI and cryptocurrency; heat and carbon emissions of Data Farms, and more). In this talk, I will discuss how we can move from digital solutionism – a belief that digital technologies are environmentally neutral, and indispensable in addressing the climate crisis – to what I call materialist accountability. Materialist accountability acknowledges the harms inflicted by digitisation on both people and the planet; and considers how we can “reduce, reuse and refuse” the digital. Instead of a digital future, materialist accountability proposes that we consider a future of planetary environmental care and digital refusal and opt out.
Christoph Kueffer is Professor of Urban Ecology at the Landscape Architecture School in Rapperswil (OST – Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences), senior scientist (Privatdozent) at ETH Zurich, an affiliated professor at the Division of Arts and Cultures at Franklin University Switzerland in Lugano, and a researcher at the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures (IXDM) at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel. He studied Environmental Sciences at ETH Zurich, and completed his PhD in plant ecology and habilitation in plant and global change ecology at the same university. Christoph’s current research focuses on urban ecology, biodiversity conservation in novel and human-dominated ecosystems, and environmental humanities.
Urban Design Strategies – Real World Labs
The campus of OST Rapperswil serves as a living lab for sustainable urban planning and ecological green-space design in teaching, research, and public outreach. In this presentation our real-world laboratory approach is presented. The case examples are put in a broader theoretical context of transformative sustainability research, environmental humanities, civic ecology, and landscape architecture. Amongst others, we understand gardens as heterotopic sites that enable the nurturing of virtues of sustainable living and we experiment with design and planning processes that are subversive and aim at reframing how public spaces are experienced and filled with life.
Miriam Simun is a visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice uses science, somatics, scent, power, poetry and humor to create art works in various formats, for example – video, installation, painting, performance, and communal sensorial experiences.
Simun’s work has been presented internationally, including Gropius Bau, New Museum, MIT List Center for Visual Art, Momenta Biennale, New Museum, Himalayas Museum, Rauschenberg Project Space and Bogota Museum of Modern Art. Recognized internationally in publications including the BBC, The New York Times, The New Yorker, CBC, MTV, and Flash Art International, the work has been supported by Creative Capital and the Foundations of Robert Rauschenberg, Joan Mitchell Foundation, Gulbenkian and Onassis.
Contact Zone (Level 1) and Ghost B178
Contact Zone (Level 1 ) is an infinitely changing computer-generated animation. Two sites of rewilding collide—the Swiss Alps and the artist’s intestines—while an AI monitors them, itching to intervene. The and related work Ghost B178 is a live ~3 hour performance down the mountain Les Pléiades near Vevey, Switzerland. We walk forwards and backwards. We sense through focus and attention-deconcentration. With and without technological appendages, we find the edges of our senses. We consider the biopolitical regimes and narratives of belonging that attempt to manage the living, migrating and dying of all kinds of life forms on the European continent – and the lives that nevertheless manage to escape.
It is believed the last “originally wild” lynx in Switzerland was killed in 1894. In the 1970s, 34 lynx were captured in the Carpathian mountains, quarantined, radio-tagged, transported and released into the Swiss Jura and Swiss Alps. A descendent of one of these wild cats, named B178 by his human managers, made his home a 150sq km area around Les Pleiades. Lynx are immensely cryptic animals; notoriously hard for (human) eyes to spot. B178 was last spotted by a human’s technological appendage in 2017. We don’t know if he’s been hunted, or still roams.
Hira Sheikh is an architect, artist-curator, and urban media and environmental humanities scholar. Sheikh’s scholarly work focuses on urban, digital, and political issues to explore justice for other species. With a background in Architectural Design, she holds a Research Master in Media, Art, and Performance Studies from Utrecht University and a PhD in Design and Digital Media from Queensland University of Technology. She has worked as a research and teaching assistant across Pakistan, the Netherlands, and Australia.
Multispecies and Smart Urban Governance
Environmental change is giving rise to multispecies justice thinking/practice about cities. At the same time, ‘smart’ thinking/practice about cities driven by technocratic approaches has been critiqued for reinforcing human exceptionalism. That is, nonhuman nature in cities is increasingly perceived and governed via digital technologies that rarely account for limits to human perception. Given the rise in biodiversity and habitat loss and the increased use of ‘big data’ to inform biodiversity conservation, in this presentation, I talk about how smart urban governance might move beyond its more human-centred focus on citizens, civic institutions, and the urban environment to address multispecies justice. In this presentation, I will report and discuss findings from my doctoral study conducted in Brisbane, Australia, where I (co)produced knowledge with policymakers, environmental lawyers, scientists, urban planners, and climate activists. The study led to the identification of four human-centred barriers within Brisbane’s smart urban governance: (1) property ownership, (2) green spaces, (3) lobbying and donations, and (4) lack of environmental integration. Further, the study identified two possible pathways towards multispecies justice in Brisbane’s smart urban governance as a shift from ownership to stewardship and legislation to obligation: challenging human-centred urban typologies, and technological and institutional tools.
Karolina Sobecka is an artist and researcher interested in imaginaries of post-natural landscapes and histories of ecosystem ecology. Karolina’s artwork has been shown internationally, from the Queens Museum NY, to National Art Museum of China, to ZKM Karlsruhe, and Transmediale Festival Berlin, and has received numerous awards, including from Creative Capital, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Princess Grace Foundation. Karolina has a PhD from Kunstuniversität Linz, in 2021-23 was a Visiting Predoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and is a researcher at the Institute for Experimental Design and Media at HGK Basel.
Rasa Smite is an artist and researcher working at the intersection of art, science, and immersive media technologies. She is the co-founder of the RIXC Center for New Media Culture in Riga, Latvia, curator of its annual Art Science festivals, and editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed publication series Acoustic Space. In her artistic practice, she collaborates with scientists and media artist Raitis Smits / RIXC, exploring techno-ecological perspectives and creating data visualizations and immersive experiences in XR environments.
Currently, Rasa is a researcher at the Institute Art Gender Nature (IAGN) at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW.
Atmospheric Forest
Atmospheric Forest visualises the complex relationships between forests, climate change, and the atmosphere.
The core question of my Atmospheric Forest research was how to reveal the link between a fragrant forest and the warming climate. To create the VR experience, remote-sensing tools such as a scientific LiDAR scanner were used to transform the Pfynwald forest into a virtual point cloud environment. Scientific data from one growing season in Pfynwald were selected and artistically visualized, creating animated particle flows that imaginatively depict the complex interactions between the forest ecosystem and atmospheric processes.
Jan Torpus is a senior researcher at the Critical Media Lab at the Academy of Art and Design FHNW. He studied audio-visual arts, interaction and interior design and develops practice-oriented research projects in interdisciplinary teams. He investigates techno-social responsive environments to draw conclusions about human experience, behaviour and sense-making. He also applies his approach to ecology and biodiversity promotion in urban and recreational areas.
Yvonne Volkart is responsible for the research development at the Institute Art Gender Nature, FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel. She is senior lecturer of art theory and cultural media studies and supervisor for master and PhD students. She also holds a teaching position at the Master of Arts in Art Education, Zurich University of the Arts. In addition, she is freelance curator and project leader at the Department for Art and Architecture, City of Zurich Public Works Office. She writes regularly for Springerin and other art magazines. She was a curator at Shedhalle Zürich, and a core-member of the cyberfeminist alliance Old Boys Network OBN. Currently, she is writing the monograph Technologies of Care. From Sensing Technologies to an Aesthetics of Attention (diaphanes 2022). Her concerns lie in the modes how aesthetic theory-practice, ecology, technology, science, and decolonial feminism come together and bring us in relation to the world. In her research projects, she engages with innovative approaches such as experimental workshops, audio walks, mappings, excursions, audio essays, texts and exhibitions to address people in manifold ways beyond academic modes. Current reseach project: Plants_Intelligence. Learning like a Plant.