thematic session
Mon. 12 Oct
12.30-16.30
ECOLOGIES
Schedule

12.30-13.00 Discussing Imploding the Object exercise

13.00-13.15 Break

13.15-15.15 Lecture Jana Winderen

15.15-15.30 Break

15.30-16.30 Lecture Valerie Trouet
General description
Philosopher Timothy Morton claims that we are all already ecological - many of us are just not fully aware of it (Morton, 2018). None of us exist in a vacuum - even our bodies are highly complex symbiotic systems which could not exists without non-human entities, such as minerals and bacteria. As a legacy of Enlightenment and modernist thinking, however, many contemporary societies are based on binary ways of thinking and presuppose a clear-cut distinction between, for example, nature/culture, human/non-human, male/female and object/subject. This way of thinking makes it possible to consider the non-human (our environment, nature, animals) as separate entities to ourselves, that we have a right to mine, kill, destroy as we please without any consequence. Of course we are very much starting to feel the consequences of disrupting the ecosystem, with global warming, melting ice sheets, an increase in pandemics and so on. During this thematic session, we will engage with texts and practices that propose different ways of thinking about and relating to the world, through methods that allow for interconnections and make visible complex entanglements,

Learning aims
After attending this session, you will:
- be able to approach the notion of 'ecologies' from different academic and non-academic perspectives (queer and feminist studies, indigenous knowledge, artistic practices and biology);
- understand and have experience with the method of imploding the object.
MANDATORY
- - Podcast: Heather Davis on plastic, queer ecologies and multidisciplinary collaborations @ Multispecies Worldbuilding Lab.

OPTIONAL:
- - Robin Wall Kimmerer (2017), "Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass" (pp. 156-166), from 'Braiding Sweetgrass - Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants'.

- - Scott F. Gilbert (2017), Chapter 4: "Holobiont by Birth: Multilineage Individuals as the Concretion of Cooperative Processes" - (pp. M73-M90), from 'Arts of Living on A Damaged Planet'.

preparatory readings/podcast/video


Link to podcast (transcript is also available).



Jana Winderen is an artist who currently lives and works in Norway. Her practice pays particular attention to audio environments and to creatures which are hard for humans to access, both physically and aurally – deep under water, inside ice or in frequency ranges inaudible to the human ear. Her activities include site-specific and spatial audio installations and concerts, which have been exhibited and performed internationally in major institutions and public spaces. Recent work includes The Art of Listening: Underwater for Audemar Piguet at Art Basel, Miami, Rising Tide at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo, Listening with Carp for Now is the Time in Wuzhen, Through the Bones for Thailand Art Biennale in Krabi, bára for TBA21_Academy, Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone for Sonic Acts and Ultrafield for MoMA, New York. In 2011 she won the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica for Digital Musics & Sound Art. She releases her audio-visual work on Touch (UK).
Lecture
Jana Winderen





additional sources (not mandatory)
-- Diana Georgiou, Katie Goss & Sofia Vranou (Eds.) (2020), "Queer Feminist Decolonial Ecologies Dossier".

"While information on ecology is limitless, the intersection between ecology and feminism is largely underemphasised across environmental policies and, for what concerns us here, the arts. During our curatorial research we became aware that there were very few festivals, programmes or exhibitions that could account for how pressing issues such as climate change, deforestation and pollution are in fact disproportionately affecting some bodies more than others."

This dossier, which builds on curatorial and artistic research produced for Ecofutures by CUNTemporary in 2019, hopes to contribute with both its format and its experimental queer-feminist contents to a different vision of ecology while becoming an archive of the Ecofutures project as well as an invocation for a much more sustainable future.

-- Check out the activities of the Center for Creative Ecologies:
creativeecologies.ucsc.edu

The Center for Creative Ecologies provides a place to consider the intersection of culture and environment. The aim is to develop useful interdisciplinary research tools to examine how cultural practitioners—filmmakers, new media strategists, photojournalists, architects, writers, activists, and interdisciplinary theorists—critically address and creatively negotiate environmental concerns in the local, regional, and global field. These concerns include anthropogenic climate change and global warming, and relate to factors such as habitat destruction, drought, species extinction, and environmental degradation. Drawing on such wide-ranging fields as visual culture and art history, political ecology and economics, Earth jurisprudence and new materialism philosophy, Indigenous cosmopolitics and climate justice activism, the Center energizes the formation of the emerging environmental arts and humanities.




I will give an introduction to the field of dendrochronology and explain how we use tree rings to study climate history, forest history, and human history. My introduction will include fieldwork, the process of cross dating, and dendrochronological applications in archeology, ecology, and paleoclimatology. After this lecture, students will never look at wood in the same way!

I am a paleoclimatologist who uses the rings in trees to study the climate over the past ~2,000 years and how it has influenced ecosystems and human systems. I am an Associate Professor in the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona (CV). I was born and raised in Belgium, where I received my PhD in Bioscience Engineering at the KULeuven in 2004. I have worked at PennState University and in Switzerland before moving to Tucson, AZ in 2011. I have been a dendrochronologist for almost two decades and my research focuses on the climate of the past ~2,000 years and how it has influenced human history and ecosystems. I have used tree rings to study hurricanes, snowpack, wildfire, and the jet stream. I have studied the influence of climate on historical events, such as the Fall of Rome, the Ottoman Crisis, and the Golden Age of Piracy. My research has brought me to sub-Saharan Africa, Siberia, the Californian Sierra Nevada, and the Balkans, where I was part of a team that found the oldest-known (1,075 years!) living tree in Europe.
Lecture
Valerie Trouet


Valerie Trouet is the author of 'Tree Story - The History of the World Written in Rings' (2020)

What if the stories of trees and people are more closely linked than we ever imagined?

Named an April 2020 New and Noteworthy Book by The New York Times

Children around the world know that to tell how old a tree is, you count its rings. Few people, however, know that research into tree rings has also made amazing contributions to our understanding of Earth's climate history and its influences on human civilization over the past 2,000 years. In her captivating new book, Tree Story, Valerie Trouet reveals how the seemingly simple and relatively familiar concept of counting tree rings has inspired far-reaching scientific breakthroughs that illuminate the complex interactions between nature and people.

Trouet, a leading tree-ring scientist, takes us out into the field, from remote African villages to radioactive Russian forests, offering readers an insider's look at tree-ring research, a discipline formally known as dendrochronology. Tracing her own professional journey while exploring dendrochronology's history and applications, Trouet describes the basics of how tell-tale tree cores are collected and dated with ring-by-ring precision, explaining the unexpected and momentous insights we've gained from the resulting samples.

Blending popular science, travelogue, and cultural history, Tree Story highlights exciting findings of tree-ring research, including the fate of lost pirate treasure, successful strategies for surviving California wildfire, the secret to Genghis Khan's victories, the connection between Egyptian pharaohs and volcanoes, and even the role of olives in the fall of Rome. These fascinating tales are deftly woven together to show us how dendrochronology sheds light on global climate dynamics and uncovers the clear links between humans and our leafy neighbors. Trouet delights us with her dedication to the tangible appeal of studying trees, a discipline that has taken her to austere and beautiful landscapes around the globe and has enabled scientists to solve long-pondered mysteries of Earth and its human inhabitants.
Feral Atlas invites you to explore the ecological worlds created when nonhuman entities become tangled up with human infrastructure projects. Seventy-nine field reports from scientists, humanists, and artists show you how to recognize “feral” ecologies, that is, ecologies that have been encouraged by human-built infrastructures, but which have developed and spread beyond human control. These infrastructural effects, Feral Atlas argues, are the Anthropocene.
FERAL ATLAS
Francesco's archive I created a website to show all my process during my study.

SYNTHETIC COLLECTIVE


Link to the collective Heather Davis mentions in the podcast: an interdisciplinary collaboration between visual artists, cultural workers and scientists. We work together to sample, map, understand, and visualize the complexities of plastics and micro-plastics pollution in the Great Lakes Region. Crucial to our research methodology is the driving principle that artists and scientists conduct research together, from the outset of the inquiry.


EXERCISE:
IMPLODING THE OBJECT
CLICK HERE FOR THE EXERCISE
complete the exercise before Mon. 12th Oct, 12.30


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