with Özgün Eylül İşcen, Martin Howse, Jan Distelmeyer and Shintaro Miyazaki
We come together and celebrate FOUR recent releases/launches of 1) COUNTER-N, 2) Becoming Geological, 3) Critique of Digitality and 4) Counter-Dancing Digitality. These projects are linked to each other via several subthreads and personal networks, sharing common veins, interfaces and steps. During the rather informal talk and presentations of the different projects we will address and discuss topics such as the necessity to practice different futures, reconnect to earthy matters and consider interfacing, modelling and dancing.
About the projects:
1) COUNTER-N
Curated/ Edited by Özgün Eylül İşcen and Shintaro Miyazaki
Web-based publishing with open access PDFs
COUNTER-N is a web-based publishing, exchange, and research collection on alternative modes of computing and futuring. To counter means to go or engage against, while to encounter means to meet or come across. As a noun, counter means a table, where accounts are made or persons meet, thus an object, which is in opposition. A counter is also a device that counts. It operates as a prefix to something to oppose or to react to. Counter-N, where N is meant as an open variable to occupy, thus Counter-N unfolds a vast possibility space of practices, concepts, institutions, and more, which are not merely encountered and opposed, but reimagined and reformulated, so that alternatives are proposed.
Özgün Eylül İşcen is a postdoc fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. She received her PhD in Computational Media, Arts and Cultures from Duke University in 2020. Her dissertation examines counter-visual artistic practices that intervene in the material conditions and ethico-legal systems underlying the extractive operations of computational media in the context of the Middle East.
2) Becoming Geological
Edited by Martin Howse with contributions by Agnieszka Anna Wołodźko, Ines Tomašek, Aaron Parkhurst, Michael Marder, Elaine Tam, Arthur Gouillart, Thomas Moynihan, Patricia MacCormack, Rosemary Lee, Anaïs Tondeur, Marine Legrand, Sissel Marie Tonn, Rosa Whiteley, Alfonso Borragán and Cecilia Jonsson. Published with v2, Lab for the Unstable Media
This divinatory guide has its roots and veins in the lustrous earths and waters of the Tiny Mining community, a mineral exploration collective committed to the open source exploitation of the interior of the human body for rare earth resources. Becoming Geological functions as a manual for a new relation of the human with the earth and with the cosmos, invoking becoming metal, becoming earth and becoming cosmic as potential and multiple ways of being and as active philosophies of the earth; a guide for how to live and die within new planetary and cosmic techno-cycles.
Martin Howse is occupied with an investigation of the links between the earth, software and the human psyche through the construction of experimental situations (performance, laboratories, walks, and workshops), material art works and texts. He is equally the creator of the ERD ouroboric synthesizer series and founder of the Tiny Mining community.
3) Critique of Digitality
Author: Jan Distelmeyer. Published with Palgrave Macmillan
Dealing with digitality is an urgent challenge of the present. The increasing importance and spread of computer technology not only challenges societies and individuals – this also puts pressure on the concept of digitality, which tries to grasp the totality and peculiarity of the conditions and consequences of electronic digital computing. However, precisely because digitality is commonplace, so should be its critique, its analysis and assessment. This book introduces current debates and develops its own approach to the critique of digitality, starting from diverse forms of interfacing.
Jan Distelmeyer is Professor of History and Theory of Technical Media in the European Media Studies program of the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences and the University of Potsdam. He is founding member of the Working Group Interfaces of the German Society for Media Studies (GfM), of the Brandenburg Center for Media Studies – ZeM, and of the Research College SENSING: The Knowledge of Sensitive Media. www.distelmeyer.emw-potsdam.de
4) Counter-Dancing Digitality. On Commoning and Computing
Author: Shintaro Miyazaki. Published with meson press
Digitality is imposed upon us! To change this, we should not turn away from it, but look carefully into its transformative power and make operable alternatives such as counter-algorhythms and solidarity-oriented commoning. The aim is a world where profit and property no longer exist, but instead where a cooperative dance – between all the needs posed by our ecosystems, and all the needs of people – becomes practicable. This book is a critical media theory of future-building, modulated by a focus on the potentials of counter-dancing as providing ways to unfold fugitive practices.
Shintaro Miyazaki is a (junior)-professor in "Digital Media and Computation" (with tenure track) at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He studied media studies, philosophy, and musicology in Basel, and Berlin, where he received a PhD in media studies in 2012. He is hosting amonst different things also the Critical Data Lab.
The book launch is supported by Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin