WUDA

As a fork off ae73edb74571e4e2, Wuda is a microsite rendering the anachronistic moment of a deep-past eruption event. One from the collection of apocalyptic endings found in paleontology, this is one of my favorites. The coal-swamps of Wuda got fossilized in ash rain 2.8 MGy ago. It formed an image of the ecological prequel that helped accumulated the energy potential now suddenly unleashed upon the Holocene. Wuda now is one of the many dumpster-fires of petro-modernity. The ground has been burning uncontrollably for decades, coal-seams left open spontaneously ignite, toxic fumes and monetary loss ooze out of the earth. It's the kind of place that reminds you how the carboniferous ghost does not want to return the bottle.

https://www.aeaeaeae.io

Future Metaphysics

Public Lecture

The triumph of technological rationality and of the sciences as a whole has by no means provided answers to humanity’s great questions. Instead, it has raised new and old questions and problems. To orient ourselves in the twenty-first century, we must take a new look at the central metaphysical categories of philosophy (substance and accident, form and matter, life and death etc.) that, unbeknownst to us, continue to shape our everyday thinking. What if the idea of accident, for instance, had to take into account the many new kinds of glitches, crashes and crises – from finance to ecology, from technological catastrophes to social collapses – that permeate our culture and make everyday news? Can we keep on using this concept as it was traditionally meant to be used when risk and chance have become part of the very substance of our world, so rendering the distinction between substance and accident meaningless? The other concepts and distinctions require a similar interrogation, giving birth to a new metaphysical landscape, where the most urgent realities of the twenty-first century impinge on the most fundamental categories of thought.

Hyperstition

Film Screening

The film Hyperstition by Christopher Roth and Armen Avanessian explores speculative and left accelerationist theory and politics, navigating pathways to critical theories of and from the future. The voices of artists, theorists, philosophers, and curators guide us through the narratives and temporalities that both condition and resist the accelerating paces of global capitalism. Hyperstition is s film on time and narrative. Of thoughts and images. On plants and the outside. Abduction and Recursion. Yoctoseconds and Platonia. Plots and anaerobic organisms. About the movement of thinking and philosophy in anthropology, art, design, economy, linguistics, mathematics, and politics. And back into abstraction. "You're always at the beginning and always at the end." (Ray Brassier)

HYPERSTITION: The retooling of philosophy and political theory for the 21st Century. Featuring: Armen Avanessian, Elie Ayache, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Helen Hester, Deneb Kozikoski, Robin Mackay, Steven Shaviro, Benedict Singleton, Nick Srnicek, Christopher Kulendran Thomas, Agatha Wara, Pete Wolfendale, and Suhail Malik in 2026. Appearances: Georg Diez, Anke Hennig, Tom Lamberty, Nick Land, Quentin Meillassoux, Reza Negarestani, Björn Quiring, Patricia Reed, Tom Streidl, James Trafford, Jeanne Tremsal, Alex Williams, and Slavoj Žižek.

http://hyperstition.org/

Armen Avanessian studied philosophy and political science in Vienna and Paris. After completing his dissertation in literature, he worked at the Free University Berlin from 2007–2014. He has previously been a Visiting Fellow in the German Department at Columbia University and the German Department at Yale University as well as Visiting Professor at various art academies in Europe and the US. In Berlin, Avanessian is the editor at large at Merve Verlag and in charge of the theory program at the internationally acclaimed theatre Volksbühne. He is a co-founder of the bilingual research platform Spekulative Poetik (www.spekulative-poetik.de), conducting a series of events, translations and publications. English Monographies: Irony and the Logic of Modernity. DeGruyter, 2015; Speculative Drawing. (together with Andreas Töpfer) Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014; Present Tense. A Poetics. (together with Anke Hennig), Bloomsbury 2015; Metanoia. A Speculative Ontology of Language, Thinking, and the Brain. (together with Anke Hennig) Bloomsbury 2017); Overwrite. Ethics of Knowledge – Poetics of Existence. Berlin: Sternberg Press 2017; Miamification, Sternberg Press 2017; Future Metaphysics, Polity, 2019.


Documentation of public lecture at Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Oslo Norway 2020

The Red City of the Planet of Capitalism

Exhibition
Podium, Oslo
15.02.-01.03.20

By investigating into planetary governance, computational architectures and finance, Noorizadeh utilises fantastical sci-fi references and imagery to address wider political issues around globalisation and digital capitalism, explored against the legacy of the utopian ideas that continue to shape our visions of the future.

After Scarcity is a sci-fi video-essay that tracks Soviet cybernetics (1950s – 1980s) in their attempt to build a fully-automated planned economy. If history at its best is a blueprint for science-fiction, revisiting contingent histories of economic technology might enable an access to the future. Vindicating this other internet, the work presents the economic application of socialist cybernetic experiments as extraordinary to financial arrangements and imaginations of our time. To dispute the validity of the neoliberal narrative, one should look no further than the space itself: city design, urban policy, and their derivative chronopolitics. As part of the artist’s long-term research program around material genealogies of network design, the installation “Disurbanism” revisits proposals for a communist sprawl in the 1929 Soviet Union, tracing these blueprints to the contemporary global city. Originally developed by Mikhail Okhitovich and Moisei Ginzburg, urban planners and members of the Constructivist architectural group OSA around 1929-1930, Disurbanism set to eliminate the difference between the city and the countryside and propose a radical critique of urbanization itself. For Disurbanists, the sickness of the modern city and its inevitable centralized hegemony could only be resolved by its destruction and dissemination across the Soviet land. In its place, they envisioned an energy and communication grid: a network of highways, infrastructure, mobile homes, natural resources, and public services across the countryside. Disurbanism would counter modernists’ (i.e. Corbusier’s) attempts at resolving the internal contradictions of the urban setting-—a capitalist fatality-—by bringing the rural (gardens and greens) into the confines of the city. The work features an ardent exchange between Le Corbusier, who was chairing the Moscow Green City competition at the year of Disurbanists’ submission, and Ginzburg.

Bahar Noorizadeh is a filmmaker, writer, and platform designer. She works on the reformulation of hegemonic time narratives as they collapse in the face of speculation: philosophical, financial, legal, futural, etc. Her work has appeared in the Tate Modern Artists’ Cinema Program, DIS Art platform, Transmediale Festival, Berlinale Forum Expanded, Geneva Biennale of Moving Images, and Beirut Art Center, among others. Noorizadeh is a founding member of BLOCC (Building Leverage over Creative Capitalism), a research and education platform that proposes pedagogy as a strategy to alter the relationship between Contemporary Art and urban renewal. Her current research examines the intersections of finance, Contemporary Art and emerging technology, building on the notion of “Weird Economies” to precipitate a cross-disciplinary approach to economic futurism and post-financialization imaginaries. She is pursuing this as a PhD candidate in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London where she holds a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship.








Documentation of exhibition at Podium, Oslo Norway 2020

Performative Lecture Series: This Ritual I Wish You Could See
Video Installation
Podium, Oslo
07.03.-08.03.20

This Ritual I Wish You Could See (Render & File)

This Ritual I Wish You Could See (Render & File) deals with rituals of war in the rendered image. In particular, it focuses on Hezbollah’s—and more broadly, political Shiism’s—uses of virtual reality and video games as ostensibly counter-hegemonic to the domination of the American and Israeli war machines and military-entertainment complexes. Namely, these consist of VR Karbala, a virtual-reality recreation of the formative Battle of Karbala, commemorated yearly on the tenth day of Ashura, and Sacred Defence – Protecting the Homeland And Holy Sites, a 2018 Hezbollah-issued first-person shooter about the Party’s role in the Syria War. The project also surveys the US Army’s investment in commercial video games, through its America’s Army franchise, its Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) equivalent, and a virtual reality based exposure therapy tool aimed at treating post traumatic stress disorder among Iraq war veterans, VR Iraq.

This Ritual I Wish You Could See (Render & file) traces motifs such as the obscured faces of holy figures in traditional and contemporary religious pictorial representations, the textured and rendered masculinity of the soldier figure in a computer-generated war environment, and simulations of sites and territories that are central to the production of ethno-identitarian narratives and collective subjectivities. The overarching emphasis is on the implicit hegemonic constructions, temporal technics of trauma and martyrdom, and (counter-)narrations of history, carried out by way of the rendered image.

Edwin Nasr (b.1994) is a writer based in Beirut. His research focuses on cinematic modes of production in the Arab region, decolonial methodologies and praxis, the digital reproducibility of trauma, and parafiction as a form of queer opacity. His writings were featured in Jadaliyya, Makhzin, Muftah Magazine, ArteEast, and Counterpunch, and commissioned by the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Sharjah Art Foundation, and Mophradat. He has given talks at Harvard University VES, the American University of Beirut (AUB), and as part of Asia Contemporary Art Week: Field Meeting 6. Nasr is currently the Assistant to the Director at Ashkal Alwan, a non-profit organization dedicated to contemporary artistic production as well as critical discourses and knowledges.

Bassem Saad is an artist/writer born on September 11th and trained in architecture. His practice deals with future visualization and simulation, and objects or operations that distribute harm and care. He attempts to locate space and time for toying with and maneuvering within governing systems, through video, spatial installation, virtual environments, and text. His work was featured in the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennial and his video work screened in different cities. He has spoken at Harvard University VES and Alserkal Avenue, and his writing appears in FailedArchitecture, Jadaliyya, ArteEast, and unbag. He has completed a web residency with Akademie Schloss and a fellowship at Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program in Beirut.

Offline exhibition:
This Ritual I Wish You Could See
February 2020
Podium, Oslo

Antikythera Mechanism
Temporal Technologies

The mysterious Antikythera Mechanism, an astrolabe known as the first computer, was recovered in 82 fragments from a sunken shipwreck off the island of Antikythera around 1900. Although it is widely believed to have been constructed by a Greek astronomer around 100 BCE, this origin story has not been confirmed. No other such technologically complex artifact appeared anywhere in Europe until late 14th century. In 2015AD, BQF Theorists unearthed rare, previously unseen records and unheard sound clips claiming to detail the true origins of the mechanism as designed and constructed by a secret society in ancient Ifriqiyah as a device for time displacement.

Temporal Technologies is part of a Black Quantum Futurism series of sonic timescapes that consider what technologies are practically and readily available to us to help shift/adjust/manipulate/augment/enhance our experiences of space-time at will. BQF is exploring and developing temporal technologies that are more beneficial to marginalized peoples' survival in a “high-tech” world currently dominated by oppressive, fatalistic linear time constructs.

Black Quantum Futurism is an interdisciplinary creative practice between Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips, based in Philadelphia. BQF weave quantum physics, Afrofuturism, and Afrodiasporic concepts of time, ritual, text and sound to present innovative works and tools offering practical ways to escape negative temporal loops, oppression vortexes and the digital matrix. BQF is a new approach to living and experiencing reality by way of the manipulation of space-time in order to see into possible futures, and/or collapse space-time into a desired future in order to bring about that future’s reality. Under a BQF intersectional time orientation, the past and future are not cut off from the present - both dimensions have influence over the whole of our lives, who we are and who we become at any particular point in space-time. Through various writing, music, film, visual art, and creative research projects, BQF Collective also explores personal, cultural, familial, and communal cycles of experience and solutions for transforming negative cycles into positive ones using artistic and holistic methods of healing.

Offline screening:
All Time Local & Black Space Agency
08.-10.11.2019
K4 Gallery, Oslo

Talking about the Ants

Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay will talk about the "Ant Network Theory” that he has developed together with Geoffrey C. Bowker. Chattopadhyay will discuss how a flexible notion of multiple temporalities can be developed by playing with scales. The long history of science fictional engagement with other planetary creatures, especially insects and non-human beings can serve as a useful entry point into contemporary discussions that challenge us to think past the anthropocentrism of the anthropocene, including the discourses of guardianship and environmental care, to a de-centered and dehumanized future oriented ethics of hybridity.

Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay works on Science Fiction at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo. He is also Imaginary College fellow at the Centre for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University. He is founding co-editor of the book series Studies in Global Genre Fiction (Routledge) and co-editor-in-chief of Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research. He is Principal Investigator of the European Research Council funded project CoFutures: Pathways to Possible Presents, due to start in Spring 2020. http://bodhisattvac.com

Public lecture
Talking about the Ants
19.02.2020
Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Fossveien 24

Dream Decor of Oblivion

In a not so distant future the social media sites will be brimming with profiles of the deceased datamined by auto-scripted enterprises ceaselessly digging in the datascape of the dead. Digital doppelgangers and copy-pasted schizomorphs are data dumped into existence constantly, simultaneously created and rejected an origin. The logistic ontology intrinsic to the ocular and oracular of technology confronts our corporeality, its an authority we can’t afford to neglect, since it is the only means we have of observing the erosion of structures happening, whether climatic or financial. Our experiences become expendable and our minds lost in the question of what is actual or apparitional.“Computers are tragically unable to forget, like endless rubbish dumps.” - Laurie Anderson

Dream Decor of Oblivion attempts to situate the ghost in digital reality by examining new medialoric images and content, the technology and production behind and the potential allegoric exchange this material offers. By adopting apparitional attributes and phantasmal features as a discursive strategy. The work delves into a present pervaded by expanding technological industries, accelerating financial markets and deteriorating ecological systems. Structures transgressing our spatiotemporal conceptions, operations and activities imposing on us diverging realities mostly imperceptible to our naked eyes.

David Tobias Bonde Jensen (b. 1988, Denmark) utilizes text, video, sound, new media technology and performative tactics to explore speculative discourses, spiritual semantics and science-fiction motifs as a means to challenge ontological frameworks. His practice often deals with the disintegration of the private, intimate or corporeal within larger systems. He is currently studying at Oslo Academy of the Arts.


Still from Dream Decor of Oblivion

Forward, upward, in all directions

Forward, upward, in all directions is the research of the process of interpenetration of alternative realities directly on the border of a breakthrough - in VRChat — a free-to-play massively multiplayer online virtual reality video game. Here is what Marshall McLuhan defined as a retribalization: the act of returning of humanity to it`s tribal condition with it`s original sense of the world — the simultaneity of all processes. Moreover, the "real" and "virtual" are not pitted against each other, but mutually continue in each other, forming a single space which devoid of sense of catastrophic loss. It’s nonlinear, chaotic, acoustic tribe.

VRChat users simulate the last missing impression: equipped with VR headsets and controllers which allowing players to interact with each other through virtual avatars, they touch each other, despite the fact that they do not feel anything. The impossibility of this touch is the final frontier, and as long as it's not possible technologically, it`s imaginary.

fantastic little splash is an art group exploring the nature and flow of information: from the peculiarities of its distribution to the diversity of its forms and transmutations. The group interested in alternative realities and the real/virtual dichotomy which was actualized today again, often in conjunction with the collective imaginary (specific for the failed Soviet utopias). Artistic studies lie at the intersection of media studies, architecture, anthropology. fantastic little splash consist of journalist, filmmaker and artist Lera Malchenko and artist and director Oleksandr Hants. Members of the group are based in Dnipro city, Ukraine.

Offline screening:
New Information
01.2020
K4 Gallery, Københavngata 4, Oslo

New Information is a series of three videos that began as a search for an alternative informational format due to a general loss of confidence in traditional formats. The hybrid news that has been generated in the process of this search tells about the main news of the present: the processes of internal emigration and ideological weightlessness; practice breaking algorithm and automating human processes; relay the manifesto of the hesitant.

Politics of Synchronization: From Progress to Crisis

In societies homogenous, uniform, and stable time does not just exist or emerge; it is made, by means of what Helge Jordheim refers to as work or practices of synchronization. Some work of synchronization is performed by technological innovations such as clocks, trains, telegraph lines, phones, satellites etc. Another set of tools, however, is linguistic, made up by concepts used to make historical and political time understandable and workable. Concepts are used to order events, objects and polities temporally, thus making both them and their temporality aspects of political order. By drawing together experiences, events, and meanings from different knowledge fields or cultures, they synchronize them, aligning their speeds, rhythms, and durations. One of the most central concepts that have been used in synchronization global societies over the past two centuries is progress. In his talk Jordheim maps out how progress has synchronized temporalities on a global scale and asks whether it is in the process of being replaced by another concept: the concept of crisis.

Helge Jordheim is Professor of Cultural History at University of Oslo. He has had visiting professorships at NYU, EHESS (Paris), and ZfL (Berlin), and he is currently Professor II for German Studies at NTNU (Trondheim). He has published widely on 18th century cultural and intellectual history, as well as German literature and conceptual history. He is currently heading the Toppforsk-project "Lifetimes: A Natural History of the Present" at UiO.


Documentation of public lecture at Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Oslo Norway 2019

Perverse Temporalities

In Perverse Temporalities Karin Keisu and Josse Thuresson address queer temporality theories - an academic field that question linear heteronormative reproduction structures and capitalistic ideas of efficiency. For their two channel video work they relate these notions to a backdrop of ballroom contests and in particular the evolving role of lip sync. Keisu and Thuresson produced a song for each other, and then, with neither hearing the song before, tried to lip sync it. The song lyrics are loosely based on Theorizing Queer Temporalities - A roundtable discussion moderated by Elizabeth Freeman (2007) as well as Queer times, queer becomings edited by E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen (2011).

Karin Keisu (b.1995, Sweden) and Josse Thuresson (b.1992, Sweden) work with moving image, performance and text centered around marginalisation, language, queer pain and desire. Since early 2018 Keisu and Thuresson have been working artistic and curatorial as a collaborative duo, parallel to their own artistic practices. Keisu and Thuresson are educated at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo and at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Selected shows such as Athens Festival of Queer Performance, Klimax performance space, House of Everysome and unkNOW Live Stream Festival.

Offline workshop:
Reading session of Queer times, Queer becomings
13.11.2019
Akademirommet, Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo

Performance: Theorizing Queer Temporalities - A roundtable discussion
14.11.2019
Akademirommet, Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo


Screenshot of Perverse Temporalities

The Significant Other

Exhibition
Podium, Oslo
16.01.-02.02.20

Do you see the stone grow? Fluid rock, roaming freely, unbounded. Smooth, super fluid. Spills and bleed spells. Never-ending, ever-changing, lacking definite form, unorganized body, fluid stratification. Moving hillsides, secretive forms appear.

The Significant Other is the first solo exhibition of Danish artist Kim Laybourn. Reconfiguring the space of the gallery into an immersive video installation, the work consists of a series of sequences portraying a cultivated landscape. With ultra-macro recordings of miniature landscapes and cultures, consisting of rot and decay, the video places the landscape in the center stage, as the actor, and not as a passive background. The blind spot within the very eye, what Goethe calls the “ghostly” place, where no object is reflected. Using a number of filming and montage techniques developed specifically for the work, the aim is to speak the unsayable, to sense, to communicate with the The Significant Other, that owns neither language nor mind.

The Significant Other is a non-perceptual landscape environment that moves, evolves, transforms at a geological rate incomprehensible for human perception. The invisible aspects of landscapes are as essential to their meaning as those that are visible. The landscape is bursting with invisible life at both the microscopic and geological scales. This immediate micro and at the same time macro landscape is constituted out of a network of past memory and future expectations. According to geographer and philosopher Augustin Berque, our existence is like the dynamic coupling, a process that results in the “mediance” of human existence in its surroundings. ‘The Significant Other’ is haunted by images of its physical double, co-existing and unfolding at different speeds, overlapping in streams of duration and relational motion. It moves forward to the not-yet and back again to a past that set the conditions for it. A merging or dissolving of time. The flow of an image, in which we find ourselves, looking back and forward at one and the same moment. Being of the moment and in the process, where the duration is measured in terms of embodied experience of place, movement, and memory. A phenomenological landscape is a place "out there", which is everywhere and at the time, in our surroundings and in our bodies.

Kim Laybourn (1988) is a Danish artist, educated form the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo, from where he holds a Bachelor and Master degree. Laybourn is currently a studio-grant recipient at the one year FKDS and Kunstnernes Hus studio program. Laybourn work in a range of media, spanning installation, sound, text, sculpture, photography, print, animation, CGI and video.






Documentation of exhibition at Podium, Oslo Norway 2020

Ritual, Trauma, and Climate Change in Video Games

Public talk
07.03.20
Podium, Oslo

This talk is intended to compliment Bassem Saad and Edwin Nasr’s online exhibition “This Ritual I Wish You Could See”, by exploring ritual and trauma in video games. Game environments are not just spaces in which to relive, or work through past trauma, they also premediate – to use a term coined by Richard Grusin – traumas to come, like those associated with climate change, and the devastation of ecological systems. This talk explores the premediation of climate trauma in a number of video games, and asks, ultimately, what video games can do to help us prepare for life in a climate-changed world.

Laura Op De Beke is a PhD fellow at the University of Oslo. She is part of a research project called Lifetimes: A Natural History of the Present. Her contribution develops an understanding of ‘Anthropocene Temporalities’ by looking at engagements with climate change, extinction, and fossil fuel dependency in science fiction video games. Laura also hosts a monthly environmental humanities reading group at the University of Oslo.


Documentation of public lecture at Podium, Oslo Norway 2020

Pest to Power / Hama Memberkati

Pest to Power is a science-quasi-fictional quest into a peculiar behaviour of cockroach that is constituted as an assemblage of nocturnal, habitable, homeopathic, and resourceful material. Being marginalised for thousand years as a creature carrying diseases and treated as a fearsome species by the human counterpart, the judgment toward cockroach is built by the hyper-sterilised biopolitical idea of ‘proper lifestyle’ in which overproduction of synthetic commodity and human dis-attachment to waste generates cockroach as a peripheral creature outside human’s sphere. World-building is one of the essential aspects of Pest to Power. Pest to Power's digital world, as seen on the video, consists of three main queered characters; A commune of cockroaches, Humans-without-Genitals, and Humans-leopard. These three characters each represent different features; the collective consciousness of the nonhuman agency in cockroaches, the compassionate and proponent of kinship in Human-without-Genitals, and the hubristic trait of anthropocentrism in Human-leopard.

Natasha Tontey is an artist and graphic designer based in Yogyakarta and Jakarta, Indonesia. She is interested in exploring the concept of fiction as a method of speculative thinking. Through her artistic practice, she investigates the idea of how fear, horror, and terror could be manifested in order to control the public. Her works have been shown internationally in Other Futures (2019), Next Wave Festival (2016), Australia, Koganecho Bazaar (2015), Japan, JejakTabi Exchange (2018), Indonesian Dance Festival 2018 and Instrument Builder Project: Circulating Echo at Kyoto Art Centre (2018). Her solo exhibition Almanak was held in 2018 at Cemeti Institute for Art and Society, Indonesia.

Offline screening:
Pest To Power
February 2020
K4 Gallery, Oslo

Extended Hours
in collab w/ John Andrew Wilhite-Hannisdal

Nikhil Vettukattil will present a new live performance work and listening session using sound, spoken word and the physical environment as a medium to experience the multiplicity and co-incidence of times. Using chopped and screwed re-mixing techniques, as well as the sonic appropriations of field recordings, music, and texts on the experience and nature of time. The work develops on and references forms of experiential immersion as means of forming counter-publics, such as expanded cinema, noise and psychadelia.

Nikhil Vettukattil is a multidisciplinary artist and writer based in Oslo. His practice concerns the role of representation and image-making processes in framing and remaking lived experiences. Using sound, moving image, and sculpture, his work often explores the ways artworks and cinema mediate the relation between history and everyday life. Recent projects include ‘An Analog for Listening’ for flatness.eu, ‘Words Fail Me’ at Auto Italia, London, ‘Denying the Inflammability of the Twigs Found in the Copse This Morning’ at Le Bourgeois, London, ‘Perception is Reading’ for Notes/Cashmere Radio, Berlin, ‘Either the nearest or the farthest away’ for bizoux.online, and ‘Cosmopolitan Universal Cinema’ at Arnolfini, Bristol and Close-Up, London.

Stacey de Voe

We need to talk about knowledge, 'cause it shouldn't machine-learn itself. We need to sit down in a room with all kinds of people and read aloud. We need to explore texts together. It would be nice to do it relaxed and freely, asking questions as we go along. Let's try to have encounters of the third, or maybe sixth kind. To create awareness - about certain subjects and histories that have been in our periphery. Like the digital world and its history, and why you can't YouTube yourself to everything. Let's try to dismantle the master's clockwork, figure out what colonial time is and how it has controlled the future. How African-Americans and Women-Rights-Activists have recorded their own histories. Let’s figure out what the fuck pharmacopower is, and why we have been treating our bodies like machines for centuries. What kinda tools do we need to self-organize, and why should we even be doing that? Let's use jargon, and laugh. The future is here, and it has probably failed us, or at least some of us. So then what? Maybe we should imagine the future through communities. What does a contemporary revolution even look like? In these reading groups we will have all sorts of encounters, exploring time-travel with Octavia Butler to reacquaint us with the past; whilst being present with Rojava protecting democracy from Turkish invasion. So let's meet and talk about pressing and depressing topics. Let's cast our doubts on the past and try to envision a future. Room for Collective Encounters is dedicated to the fires in the world, often reaching us as detached digital images, making us alienated in our secure state of welfare. So let's read and talk about that. Let’s make our “we” with real humans, not A.I or biometric doubles. The collective mind is stronger than the individual, no doubt.

Room for Collective Encounters is a nine day gathering of events, a reading camp of sorts exploring different methods of how to engage with text through the act of reading. We will explore reading collectively via THE READERS, live readings and performative ones (yes, there is a difference, you’ll see), not to mention a provisional library and a reading room. R.C.E. will reside in Akademirommet, on the backside of Kunstnernes Hus.The R.C.E. library will house printed work from thinkers, activists, anthropologists, poets, and authors that work with notions of time, politics, speculative histories and or chronologies that operate outside of linear structures and systems. The Library will act as a living bibliography. All book titles and reading material of R.C.E. will be available through the Struktura website.

Room for Collective Encounters does not accept monetary exchange. The venue is accessible for movement disabilities.


Documentation from Queer times and Queer Becomings - E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen, as part of The Readers with Karin Keisu and Josse Thuresson, Akademirommet, Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo Norway 2019



THE READERS

We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.
- Audre Lorde

THE READERS is a proposal, an invitation, a narrative, an action with the intention of mobilizing for I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.

I believe in the power of words. Over the years I have found myself prescribed within various institutions, coerced into a binary mode of engaging with text and the action of reading. I read, often alone, between four cold walls within the institution, to later be presented with one perspective, within those same four walls. What was the point, if a group of 30 people were reading the same text through their own lived experiences, why were we only being offered a one way stream of interpretation. Why did the content remain within the institution when it was clearly written in regards to what was and is happening outside of it.

THE READERS will manifest from the notion of using text as tactics. As strategies both for learning how to engage with and be within the world around us. For challenging dominant modes of reading. We will use texts as tactics in and around everyday spaces.

What texts say and how they say it is important however THE READERS will focus on where and to who they say it, working across differences, to connect with others, to connect with history and to connect with ourselves and for not having to be alone when you find those words making to much sense or perhaps not any at all.

THE READERS engage in distribution, orientations, representations and recognitions.

THE READERS seek for a coming together. To strategize through language occupying public space, for a recalibration of the public sphere by making intimate private actions polyphonic.

I ask not for your commitment but for your trust. I ask not for your time but for your willingness. I ask not for your silence but for your action. For we continue to witness singular voices that can stand in the wake of a myriad of violence behind a backdrop of terminology. I stand before you with a proposal an invitation seeking refuge amongst the blinding white institutional walls in which we find ourselves in ever to frequently.

Deep Down Tidal

Deep Down Tidal explores transoceanic networks examining the political and technological effects of water as a conductive interface for communication. It may feel as if the internet is up in the clouds, but in actual fact it's at the bottom of the ocean, in the form of 880,000 kilometers of fiber-optic cables. These cables make up the essential infrastructure for sending all our emails, websites, photos, films and of course emoticons. Beneath the waves, our wireless life is very bound up with physical wires—it's the virtual made physical. Among the submerged cities, drowned sailors and hidden histories, the ocean is home to a complex communications network. Here, the technologies controlled by the West expand along the old colonial routes, so in a way the cables are the hardware of a new, electronic imperialism. Deep Down Tidal is a video essay in typical net.art style, weaving together cosmological, spiritual, political and technological narratives about water and its role in communication, then and now. It's about how this cable network can facilitate the retention and expansion of power. It also reminds us that water doesn’t forget.

Tabita’s work is rooted in time-spaces where technology and spirituality intersect as fertile ground to nourish visions for connection and emancipation. From fibreglass cables to drunken bodies to sunken cities and forgotten stories, the sea is home to a complex and heartrending network of knowledge and communication. This conception of water as a site of different traumas and thus an embodying logic of colonial technologies is developed by Rezaire in the course of the work. With its spiritual properties water can also be seen as a symbol of purity and a healing substance. In this sense water may be an interface to understand and potentially help heal colonial technologies.

Tabita Rezaire (b.1989, Paris, France) is a French-born Guyanese/Danish new media artist, intersectional preacher, health practitioner, tech-politics researcher and Kemetic/Kundalini Yoga teacher based in Guyana. Rezaire’s practice explores decolonial healing through the politics of technology. Navigating architectures of power – online and offline – her works tackle the pervasive matrix of coloniality and its effects on identity, technology, sexuality, health and spirituality. Rezaire has shown her work internationally at the Berlin Biennale, Tate Modern London, Museum of Modern Art Paris, MoCADA NY, The Broad LA, and Serpentine Gallery in London. Rezaire has presented her work on numerous panels, including Het Nieuwe Institut Rotterdam, Royal Academy The Hague, Kunsthalle Bern, National Gallery Harare, Cairotronica, Fakugezi Digital Art Africa Johannesburg.

Offline screening:
Premium Connect
29.11.-01.12.2019
K4 Gallery, Københavngata 4, Oslo

Premium Connect envisions a study of information and communication technologies exploring African divination systems, the fungi underworld, ancestors communication and quantum physics to (re)think our information conduits. Overcoming the organism-spirit-device divide, this work explores spiritual connections as communication networks and the possibilities of decolonial technologies. Premium Connect investigates the cybernetic spaces where the organic, technological and spiritual worlds connect.

How can we use biological or metaphysical systems to fuel technological process of information, control and governance? Contrary to the Eurocentric-biased thinking, our information super highway might find its roots in African spirituality. Significant research attributes the birth of binary mathematics - which is the foundation principle of computing sciences - to African divination systems such as Ifa from the Yoruba people, of West Africa. We have much to recover in terms of connectivity and its potentialities. As modern science just recently discovered the role of underground fungi networks used by plants to communicate and transfer information, ancient tradition have long known how to communicate with nature and download its knowledge. This study of dynamic networks from artificial, spiritual and biological environments digs into the politics of possibilities, where a techno-consciousness could nurture a mind-body-spirit-technology symbiosis.

Hyphenic

Film Screening with Live Narration
as a part of Room for Collective Encounters (R.C.E.)
12.11.19
Akademirommet, Kunstnernes Hus

Hyphenic is the name of a language that appears as patterns in common household mould, a discovery that was initially made in the early 1970s. How did these hyphea signs first evolve? Is it conceivable that such a primordial organism could have developed its own syntax, and if so, how would that reshape our ideas about the origins of language? The film is the result of an artistic research project at the intersection between linguistics and biology. Through collaborations with a large number of participants: from readers and actors to witness accounts and conspiracy theorists, the movie explores the obscure history of a language that has deliberately been withheld from the public eye. Hyphenic draws its speculative narrative from the field of biosemiotics, where the exchange of signs is understood as an inherent attribute of all living organisms.

Tor-Finn Malum Fitje (b. 1989 in Porsgrunn) graduated with an MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm 2016. He also holds a BFA attained at Konstfack and a Bachelor of Film Production from the University of Bergen. Thomas Anthony Hill (b. 1989 in Coffs Harbour, Australia) studied at the University of Bergen where he obtained a Master of Comperative Literature. He works freelance as a writer and translator.

Extrastellar Evaluations III: Entropy: 25800

Man models the Way of earth; earth models the Way of heaven; heaven models the Way of Tao; Tao models the Way of nature.
- Tao Te Ching

Extrastellar Evaluations III : Entropy : 2580 contemplates human civilization and humanity’s future through an investigation of space physics, extraterrestrial myths, and cosmography. By using hypotheses and prophecies founded upon a choreography of fragments of history, as well as mass media imagery and information, eponymous video Extrastellar Evaluations III : Entropy : 25800 attempts to reveal when exactly doomsday takes place. This video further adapts the notion of "entropy" from the second law of thermodynamics, and connects it to the avarice and belligerence of human nature. Interspersed in the video are the narrations of a non-human intelligence named “Ra” concerning that everything is the distortion of the one infinite Creator. In Extrastellar Evaluations III : Entropy : 2580 Yin-Yu Chen seeks to narrate – or, perhaps, excavate the narrations of – the universe so that viewers understand the geological, computational and technological realities synonymously.

Artist Yin-Ju Chen interprets social power and history through cosmological systems. Utilizing astrology, sacred geometries, and alchemical symbols, she considers human behavior, nationalism, imperialism, state violence, totalitarianism, utopian formations, and collective thinking. Recently, she has been exploring the material effects of spiritual/ shamanic practices and the metaphysical potentialities of consciousness. She has participated in many international exhibitions and film festivals, such as the 5th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art (RU, 2019), International Film Festival Rotterdam (NL, 2018, 2011), Transmediale (DE, 2018), Liverpool Biennial (UK, 2016), Forum Expanded at 66th Berlinale (DE, 2016), Biennial of Sydney (AU, 2016), "Yin-Ju Chen: Extrastellar Evaluations" (US, 2016), "Action at a Distance–Yin-Ju Chen Solo Exhibition" (TW, 2015), "The Starry Heaven Above and the Moral Law Within" (TW, 2015), Shanghai Biennial (CN, 2014), "A Journal of the Plague Year" (HK, KR, US, TW 2013-2014), Taipei Biennial (TW, 2012).

Offline screening:
Extrastellar Evaluations III: Entropy: 25800
13.-15.12.2019
K4 Gallery, Oslo