Zooetics Roundtable (MP3)

This was really nice.  Featuring me, Gediminas Urbonas, Tracey Warr, Jae Rhim Lee, John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog.

Agrilogistics Rampant

This is what in Greek tragedy, that agrilogistical mode kat' exochēn, is called hubris. Fantastic example of doubling down, alias a positive feedback loop--which is the very problem. Thanks Cliff.

Melt the Guns

Jesus H. Christ on a stick.

I Believe in Coral (MP3)

My Zooetics lecture from Lithuania. More to follow!

Graham and I in Bergen, mid-January

Thanks to Martin Clark we shall be here. It's a very interesting sounding exhibition. I loved Riddley Walker when I was a kid and Graham is enjoying it right now... I can see exactly why Martin thought it would be just great for this exhibition about objects.

Please come along we would love to see you.

Meanwhile, Tommy...

Poor chimp. The judge is being a bit circular, no, saying that he has no legal standing? Of course he doesn't, because you just determined that he's not legally a person.

I prefer the Argentinian lawyers. They left law and scientism out of it, and went straight to philosophy.

Nonhuman Person

...in the shape of an Argentinian orangutan. Thanks Amanda!

"Lawyers for Argentina's Association of Professional Lawyers for Animal Rights (Afada) said Sandra was ‘a person’ in the philosophical, not biological, sense"

--correct. Nice one lawyers. Gets rid of a whole slew of unnecessary ideology. 

Science can never decide on this stuff. It only proceeds from implicit assumptions that it can't turn around and question. 

If you let science be the arbiter you are actually letting scientism be the arbiter. And since scientism tends to be default Easy Think materialism, you know what's going to happen. The orangutan has no self-concept, because you can't see it or touch it, or because no one has a self-concept at all. So “it” (definitely an it) doesn't have rights. 

Personhood just can't be found using instruments, but you can think it. 

Official Recognition that Some Nonhumans Have Culture

Thank you UN Convention on Migratory Species...

That best of bees thing is getting more and more implausible by the day...

Morton on Zooetics (video)

This is an excellent piece of work. And luckily I was able to string a sentence together about the event...

Wordsworth Yule

I just got this from the Wordsworth people, in particular, Jeff Cowton. Nice one!

Zooetics Video

Here it is--four hours of Christmas Eve de-anthropocentrism. Love it.

Everything about this conference and the visit to Lithuania were perfect. What a lovely place. I got seriously inspired.

Here's the Zooetics page with abstracts and details. I like Jae Rhim emerging from the Command Module...

The video features me, Jae Rhim Lee (of the mushroom death suit!) and architects John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog). You'll see immediately how the thing worked so synergistically. For instance, it was as if Jae Rhim had been imagining artistically some of the things I think about philosophically.

Facebook Zooetics

Is here and you should be part of it. It's a five year project people! Get in on the ground floor!

Zooetics Speakers

Include Jae Rhim Lee of the mushroom death suit...me...and more...

Sign me up for that death suit.

Zooetics Streaming

On YouTube. If you want to ask a question on Twitter it's #zooetics

Zooetics

Poetics, zoo ethics, zoo aesthetics ...

It's all here and I strongly urge you to get to Kaunas for the free talks on Friday.

Vilnius is breathtakingly charming in the winter air. Lights. Amber. Gediminas Urbonas and company are absolutely wonderful.

Nice Things in Finland (cfp)

I'll be there! 

Call for proposals:

4^th Colloquium on Artistic Research in Performing Arts 2015 at the University of the Arts Helsinki, Theatre Academy

                                  11^th - 13^th of June 2015 

NON-HUMAN COLLABORATION IN PERFORMING ARTS
- BODIES, ORGANISMS AND OBJECTS AT PLAY

Call for proposals is open until 31^st January 2015

Pre-colloquium will be arranged 10^th June 2015.

The Performing Arts Research Centre (Tutke) at the Theatre Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki welcomes artistic researchers at doctoral and post-doctoral levels to take part in the fourth biannual colloquium on artistic research in performing arts.

CARPA4 reflects on performing practices from the point of view of their non-human factors. What if performance is not considered a typically human behavior anymore, expressing and reflecting the intentions and needs of human beings, but a point of encounter and a collaborative relation between heterogeneous elements, components or materials, like bodies, organisms and objects?

For this purpose we kindly encourage you to submit a proposal for presentation addressing one or more of the topics below:

1.      How can a human performer find its place within performative arrangements, where the logic does not serve human purposes anymore? What to do with a body or bodies that are not anymore “mine” or “living”?

2.      In which ways can different life forms in their wide diversity enter the scene and deconstruct it?

3.      Beyond “object theatre”: What kind of objects does a performance consist of? How can performance create, liberate or reunite objects?

4.      What have “they” in common? What kind of ethical or political thinking is born out of non-human encounters in performing arts?

The colloquium approaches its topic area collaboratively and performatively trying to make the different viewpoints encounter. It seeks common points of contact, resonating surfaces, and rhythmic interference between its heterogeneous but constituent parts.

The theme of the colloquium is born out of a need and a dream. The need concerns our attempts to make performing arts capable to respond to ongoing planetary crises and changes. The dream concerns the way performing arts might one day serve us a means for reflecting on cosmic processes, and taking part in them.

Invited Keynotes:

Professor Peta Tait FAHA
La Trobe University, Australia

Peta Tait is Professor of Theatre and Drama at La Trobe University, Australia, and was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2013. She publishes on the practice and theory of body based arts and performance and phenomenology, and cultural languages of emotion and affect most recently in relation to species. Her recent books are: Wild and Dangerous Performances: Animals, Emotions, Circus (Palgrave Macmillan 2012); Circus Bodies (Routledge 2005); Performing Emotions (Ashgate 2002). She is also a playwright and recent performances include: Eleanor and Mary Alice at the Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2014, and co-written translated play, ‘Portrait of Augustine’, produced in Brazil, 2010-12. She was a Visiting Professor at the University of Helsinki in 2010 with the Erasmus Mundas masters in International Performance Research and was a panel member on the ARC ERA HCA 2010 and 2012. Her forthcoming book is Fighting Nature
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/about/staff/profile?uname=PLTait

Professor Timothy Morton
Magdalen College, Oxford

Timothy Morton is the Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. He is the author of Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism and Critical Theory (Chicago, forthcoming),Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard UP, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), seven other books and one hundred and twenty essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, food and music. He blogs regularly at http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com. 

http://english.rice.edu/morton.aspx

Professor Yvonne Hardt
Hochschule für Musik und Theater, Germany

Yvonne Hardt is a professor for dance studies and choreography at the Center for Contemporary Dance at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Cologne, where she directs the MA program of dance studies and develops teaching formats combining the practics and theory of dance.

After studying theatre and history in Berlin and Montreal, she did her Ph.D. with the DFG-research group for the political dimensons of Ausdruckstanz. Before coming to Cologne she was an assistant professor at the Department for Theater, Dance and Performance Studies of the University of California Berkeley. Besides her research, she has constantly been working as dancer and choreographer and created various pieces with her company BodyAttacksWord (Jellyfisch and Exuberant Love, 2006, TR_C_NG, 2007). Her research focusses on the methodological development of dance studies as an interdisciplinary science, especially historical methods at the interface of theory and practics as well as body- and gender therory, dance and media and postcolonial theory.

Among other things she is co-editor of Choreographie und Institution – Zeitgenössischer Tanz zwischen Ästhetik, Produktion und Vermittlung (2011) und Choreographie, Medien, Gender (2013).

http://the-live-legacy-project.com/guests/yvonne-hardt/

Professor Boyan Manchev
New Bulgarian University

Boyan Manchev is a philosopher, Professor at the New Bulgarian University and Guest Professor at the Sofia University and at the HZT – UdK Berlin. He is also former Director of Program and Vice-President of the International College of Philosophy in Paris. His actual research, which advances the perspective of a radical mobilism and materialism, is focused on the fields of ontology, philosophy of art and political philosophy. The ontological concept of metamorphosis, the practical concept of disorganisation and the aesthetic concept of alteration are central for his transformationist approach.

Manchev is the author of six books and numerous articles, including Logic of the Political, 2012, Miracolo, 2011, L’altération du monde: Pour une esthétique radicale, 2009,  La Métamorphose et l’Instant – Désorganisation de la vie, 2009. He has edited  Rue Descartes 64: La métamorphose in 2009. His book The Body-Metamorphosis (Sofia: Altera, 2007) deals extensively with contemporary art, performance and dance.

He has participated as theorist, dramaturge and performer in theater and contemporary dance projects, including Tim Etchells and Adrian Heathfield’s The Frequently Asked, Boris Charmatz’s expo zero and Poster session “Mouvement” for the Festival d’Avignon and Ani Vaseva’s Frankenstein, A Dying Play and S.
http://www.weavingpolitics.se/participants/boyan-manchev/

Call for proposals is open until 31^st January 2015. All proposals in the form of abstracts (no more than 250 words) should include:

1.      name(s), title(s), position(s), email address(es), short bio (max. length 100 words)

2.      purpose statement

3.      research topic or research questions

4.      any practical requirements (space, equipment and so on)

5.      form of the presentation:

-        lecture

-        lecture-demonstration

-        video

-        poster

-        performance

-        installation

-        discussion

-        experiment

-        other

The spaces available are auditoriums of different sizes, studios with concrete floor and rehearsal spaces with wooden floor. Also, available for use is the large lobby area of the Theatre Academy, which is a public space. We will take into account the type of presentation you have proposed and allocate the limited spaces accordingly, but if you have specific needs please let us know.

We will be able to provide you with necessary technical equipment and help, and while there's a lot we can accommodate, please keep in mind that we cannot provide resources for large, full-blown performances. But feel free to propose and ask! Regarding equipment you need, please let us know also this in advance, even if you just need a video projector for your computer.

The length of any form of presentation is a maximum of 30-45 minutes including discussion.

Submit your proposals no later than 31^st January 2015 here  

Applicants will be informed of their acceptance by 20^th February 2015. Presenters are asked to confirm their participation and send in the completed paper by 6^th March 2015.

Registration for the Conference opens 15^th April 2015.  

Conference Fee:
1^st April-31^th May: 90 € (no lunches) / 120 € (includes lunch on Thursday, Friday and Saturday) 
From 1^st June 2015:105 € (no lunches)/ 135 € (lunches included)
Doctoral students at TeaK: 40 € (no lunches) / 52 € (lunch in Suomenlinna)

Further information on the proposals and the conference, please contact:

teak.carpa@uniarts.fi
www.uniarts.fi/en/carpa 

The umbrella for the Colloquium is: Peace, Love and Artistic Research.

Poison into Medicine

The environmental art of Liina Klauss. Should've posted these way before this.

Taking plastic flotsam and jetsam and finding the rainbow mandala in it? Oh I think so.

OOO Dream

I dreamt about OOO. Not only dreamt about it, but dreamt about giving a lecture on it. And not just that--the lecture was totally coherent! And accurate!

I was showing that:

A Shakespeare sonnet (sorry don't know which one) was talking about all kinds object.
This talk was recursive to the poem talking about itself as an object.
Thing theory (Bill Brown) says that you glimpse the thing when it malfunctions.
This sonnet malfunctions (in that charming Shakespeare way that is just so brilliant).
Yet for OOO, you don't get to access the thing at all, even when it malfunctions. Something about the poem is withdrawn.

Yeah?!!!

"We've Got the Best, Most Sophisticated Online Consumers in the World"

...all right BBC, every time this sort of thing happens (heard just now on the Today show), this will now happen:

Morton on the Singularity (interview)

Eight minutes of almost hilarity. It's about twenty minutes in.

Congratulations Bryan Wallis

You got yourself a PhD my man!

Two in a week! Yes!

Bryan has recovered Wendell Berry for ecocriticism and ecological philosophy. In these times when space is supposed to win and we are all supposed to be cosmopolitan, it's fantastic to see someone really powerfully arguing for the ontological primacy of place.

That's a big argument in Dark Ecology by the way.

Bryan is hot to trot, hiring people!

Congratulations Will Elliott

Will submitted his PhD at UC Davis this week. It's about everything Alaska and everything environmental and it's utterly brilliant. Packed with primary texts from sci fi to the Inuit. Bristling with theory. I learned so much being his reader.

Hire him before you won't be able to, somebody!

Radio Interview Today

On the dreaded notion of “the Singularity.” It'll be on KUHF (88.7FM), Houston Matters at noon (central time).

Stop Injecting Moocows with Antibiotics

...or lots of human will have died by 2050. It will cost $100 trillion. Nice one to the economist who put this together.

Red

The beats are just amazing live.

You're an Imperialist!

And other bad things! Because you are interested in nonhuman beings!

Narrative

I'm back into it. It was hard when very depressed. I wonder why. Perhaps it's because the quasi telepathy you get when you read narrative is disturbingly sensitizing. Or perhaps it's because time has collapsed so following the time threads is really onerous. Or perhaps it's because you're not willing to let yourself slide, for no reason.

Viktorija Siaulyte

Curator of this, and organizer of Zooetics.

Tracey Warr

Tracey is another of the auspicious organizers of Zooetics.

Nomeda Urbonas

And here is another organizer's website. Great yes?

Gediminas Urbonas

And here is the website of one of the great organizers of this auspicious event. I'm so looking forward to it!

Talking with Jae Rhim Lee

Of the mushroom death suits. Oh YES. What an incredible event this is going to be.

You can book tickets through eventbrite. Scroll.

Lithuania Next Week

Look at this beautiful website and tell me you don't want to come.

50 000

Finishing the first draft of Dark Ecology today.

It's exactly the length I wanted it to be without trying.

I'm so happy about it all. Putting it together has been a slowly accelerating process.

It began with being haunted by the idea in 2004. Then disjecta membra awkwardly scuttled together. This melancholy pile was set aflame with passion in January this year.

The flames roared then died dorm a bit. Then yours truly fell through them into a joy sky.

What started with logic has ended with magic. What started with sadness has ended with sexuality.

Blackmail

Wow. The first time I've heard, in four years, the BBC Today show express anything like doubt about the Tories' policies was yesterday morning. I mean that was like one or two voices expressing fear. It was maybe 5% of the sufficient reaction amplitude.

And the Tories promptly threaten to cut their funding.

What a bunch of cowards.

Terror from Within

I Can't Breathe

"When Does Your Humanity Kick In?"

Nicely put Al Sharpton.

Debt Scolds Were Wrong, Are Wrong and Will Be Wrong

Our deficit is 3% of GDP. The UK's is 11%. Why?

Because of massive cuts to “offset” stimuli put in place by the scapegoat, Gordon Brown.

“Offset” hahahahahahaha.

Deficit

George Osbourne, 2:1 (3.2 GPA) in History, why is the deficit in the USA lower relatively than in the UK?

Because we didn't do as much austerity.

Our deficit is way way down. Of course Obama gets no credit. And the deficit scolds are still at it.

“Why, it's almost as if shredding the safety net, not reducing the deficit, was their real goal.” 

BBC, on Sunday's news show your presenter said “Well, of course an increase in funding for health will mean there have to be cuts elsewhere.”

Why.

Over here, that statement is well recognized as a Republican doctrine, and announced as such.

There is more of a war of ideas on NPR than on the BBC at this point.

I never, never thought I'd say that.

She Is Wearing Roadkill

Is that good?

Emissions: An Interactive History

Thanks World Resources Institute! Use the slider or hit play.

You're Divine

Hey I found one of the tunes the Gandharvas were spinning at that planetary rave I was talking about.

The Heart Sutra Mantra, Ecosexually Translated

GET DOWN GET DOWN GET RIGHT DOWN WITH IT SO FAR INTO IT BINGO

I prefer this to Philip Whalen's beat one (sorry!)

GONE GONE REALLY GONE INTO THE COOL OH MAMA

The actual mantra is

OM GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE BODHI SVAHA

The thing is, what are we going beyond? (“Gate” means “gone.”)

We are going beyond concepts.

We are not going beyond trees. Or hands. Or breath.

Ecosexual Buddha

Does this help?

If you read this famous sutra with quotation marks in it, you will understand it better.

Avalokiteshvara isn't saying that nothing exists at all.

He's saying that things don't exist like this:

Things are not solid, constantly present, aggressively “there.”

Objects are more like this:

That includes you. Buddhism isn't saying you don't exist. Just that you don't exist in the way you think a twitter avatar should look.

Once you get over putting the world into boxes, what happens? You don't space out into nothing. You don't find yourself in an undifferentiated goo.

You become intimate with actual things as they are.

You go out of your mind insofar as you get out of your head and back down to earth, right into earth.

See that? Dude is touching the earth. Legend has it that he spent a week thanking the tree under which he was sitting.

Hey I learned a new word this week: ECOSEXUAL. Expect me to use it a lot.

I think thanking a tree for a week falls into the ecosexual range don't you?

Meditation is intimacy.

Ready?

The Prajnaparamita Sutra in twenty-five lines.  (There are various versions.)
Translated into Tibetan by Lotsawa bhikshu Rinchen De with the Indian pandita Vimalamitra.  Translated into English by the Nalanda Translation Committee, with reference to several Sanskrit editions.

The Sutra of the Heart of Transcendent Knowledge.

Thus have I heard.  Once the Blessed One was dwelling in Rajagriha at Vulture Peak mountain, together with a great gathering of the sangha of monks and a great gathering of the sangha of bodhisattvas.  At that time the Blessed One entered the samadhi that expresses the dharma called “profound illumination,”

[basically Siddhartha telepathically transmitted something to a student of his]

and at the same time noble Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva, while practicing the profound prajnaparamita, saw in this way: he saw the five skandhas to be empty of nature.

Then, through the power of the Buddha, venerable Shariputra said to noble Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva, “How should a son or daughter of noble family train, who wishes to practice the profound prajnaparamita?”

Addressed in this way, noble Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva, said to venerable Shariputra, “O Shariputra, a son or daughter of noble family who wishes to practice the profound prajnaparamita should see in this way: seeing the five skandhas to be empty of nature.

“Form” is “emptiness”; “emptiness” also is “form.”  “Emptiness” is no other than “form”; “form” is no other than “emptiness.”

In the same way, “feeling,” “perception,” “formation,” and “consciousness” are emptiness.  Thus, Shariputra, all dharmas [reality according to normative constructs] are emptiness.  There are no “characteristics.”  There is no “birth” and no “cessation.”  There is no “impurity” and no “purity.”  There is no “decrease” and no “increase.”

Therefore, Shariputra, in emptiness, there is no “form,” no “feeling,” no “perception,” no “formation,” no “consciousness”; no “eye,” no “ear,” no “nose,” no “tongue,” no “body,” no “mind”; no “appearance,” no “sound,” no “smell,” no “touch,” no “taste,” no “dharmas”; no “eye dhatu” up to no “mind dhatu,” no “dhatu of dharmas,” no “mind consciousness dhatu”; no “ignorance”, no “end of ignorance” up to no “old age and death,” no “end of old age and death”; no “suffering,” no “origin of suffering,” no “cessation of suffering,” no “path,” no “wisdom,” no “attainment,” and no “non attainment.”

[I cried when I first chanted this in a group. I certainly didn't dissolve into nothing. Cried with relief cos you don't have to hold on to concepts in your head.]

Therefore, Shariputra, since the bodhisattvas have no “attainment,” they abide by means of prajnaparamita. Since there is no obscuration of mind, there is no fear.

[oh boy that is my favorite sentence of all]

They transcend falsity and attain complete nirvana.  All the buddhas of the three times, by means of prajnaparamita, fully awaken to unsurpassable, true, complete enlightenment.

Therefore, the great mantra of prajnaparamita, the mantra of great insight, the unsurpassed mantra, the unequalled mantra, the mantra that calms all suffering, should be known as truth, since there is no deception.

The prajnaparamita mantra is said in this way:

OM GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE BODHI SVAHA

[OH GONE GONE GONE BEYOND TOTALLY GONE BEYOND AWAKE SO BE IT]

Thus, Shariputra, the bodhisattva mahasattva should train in the profound prajnaparamita.”

Then the Blessed One arose from that samadhi and praised noble Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva, saying, “Good, good, O son of noble family; thus it is, O son of noble family, thus it is.

[It's awesome how we get a glimpse of what might have been Siddhartha's turn of phrase there; something of a repetition freak. He's into rhythm.]

One should practice the profound prajnaparamita just as you have taught and all the tathagatas will rejoice.”

When the Blessed One had said this, venerable Shariputra and noble Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva, that whole assembly and the world with its gods, humans, asuras, and gandharvas rejoiced and praised the words of the Blessed One.

[Gandharvas are musicians. Basically there was a gigantic rave.]

I was lucky enough to stumble across the sutra yesterday in something I was reading. Hope this has helped understand it.

Lithuanian Fact 1

Lithuanians were pagan until the fourteenth century. Dope.

Dreaming as Hyperobject

Someone asked whether Aboriginal song lines and so forth constitute a hyperobject. Yes of course and indeed I think I refer to the Dreamtime as a hyperobject in the book. I'll have to check.