Terraforma
This activity report presents some results of the investigation-speculation operations conducted within the Department of Ubivectoral Influences (DUI) of TerraForma Corp, on the occasion of a collaboration with the EUR ArTeC. The Graduate School ArTeC (Arts, Technologies, Digital, Human Mediations, Creation) is a teaching and research program funded by the National Research Agency (ANR) since 2018 under the Programme d'Investissement d'Avenir (PIA). Within the terraforming activities conducted under the aegis of the TerraForma Corp, the Department of Ubivectorial Influences aims to study as well as to steer the dynamics of influences whose interactions weave the current state, and shape the possible future states, of the co-habitability of planet Earth. Its work is driven by the premise that these influences are "ubivectorial", i.e. they result from a multiplicity of simultaneous factors, supported by vectors that are not strictly locatable, acting at sometimes very heterogeneous scales and in directions that are frequently contradictory to each other. The full annual report is available online.
Through TerraForma Corp, humans and non-humans, living and non-living entities, are objectively allied in a sprawling collective placed entirely at the service of co-habitability. The Earth hears us and we hear the Earth because, through our common vibrations, we are all one with her. The various organs of the Corp embody a planetary mobilization through which the Earth claims a novel legal and political status, which recognizes it as a collective subject of reciprocal rights and duties, but also as an agency endowed with an authority superior to that of national States.
The Corp has no centralized headquarters: it exists wherever its members are active, it acts at any point and at any time where its influence is exercised. Its multiple organs vibrate, think, push, trickle, spawn, communicate, suggest, research, calculate, model, compute, work, produce, invent, buy, sell, transport, move, demonstrate, denounce, protest, block, dismantle, build, agitate, pacify, legislate, create in all directions—in an informality that is the condition of a terraforming adapted to the multiple dimensions of the living as well as to the infinite singularities of individuals and of territories
Minimal coordination takes the form of annual reports written within its various operational units describing some of its operations, achievements, failures, and proposals for future activities. These reports have so far only been written for internal information purposes. For the first time, in this year 2022, a selection of activity reports is offered to the public, worldwide, in half a dozen languages.
Context
This annual report, which is the first to be made public, does not cover all the activities of the TerraForma Corp. It gives access to the work of one of its activity groups, the Department of Ubivectorial Influences, which proposes here a few brief surveys intended to illustrate the fields of work of the Corp, as well as its perspectives for future development. The choices have been made according to the constraints and opportunities of the current phase of terraforming. This phase is characterized by four contextual elements identified thanks to the calculations of Terra.com, the artificial intelligence (AI) developed by the Corp.
The first element of context is the rapid implementation of technical systems that make it possible to envisage an algorithmic global governance of the flows of information, energy, materials, goods and bodies on the surface of the planet. From Elon Musk's highly publicized Starlink project, promising ubiquitous access to the internet through full satellite coverage, to the underground investigations of distributed Open Source Intelligence in social networks, from high-speed trading and derivatives speculation to Deep State conspiracy theories, the informational machines that humans have equipped themselves with are beginning to structure their interactions far more powerfully than intentional deliberation. The development of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) since 2016 offers a glimpse of translocal modes of coordinating activities based on blockchains, which can now scale globally without relying on the proven inadequacies of national States.
The second element of context is the acceleration of planetary awareness. The financial crisis of 2008, the Covid-19 pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine have all brought into full focus the infrastructural interdependence that makes integrated global logistics more than ever the lung on which the breathing, living and dying of most human beings as well as other Earthlings depends.
The third element of context, made salient by the three crises mentioned above but now surfacing in all spheres of existence, is the need to manage the dismantling of the negative commons inherited by current generations. Nuclear waste, the plastic continent, the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere: the Anthropocene plunges humans into a world where their productive infrastructures turn into feral threats that they are now condemned to face collectively.
The fourth element of context is the fatigue of the decision-making processes—democratic or authoritarian that have so far guided the development of human societies. The scale of planetary problems is proving unmanageable with the decision-making mechanisms inherited from the past. The humans committed to take charge of the destiny of their communities are sinking into denial, burn-out, solastalgia or dementia. The political institutions based on representative democracy drift towards suicidal nationalism. Neither companies, tied to profit imperatives, nor the financial mechanisms that regulate their competition, nor activist groups full of good intentions but lacking in means are capable of reorienting economic activities towards the planet's habitability. The rationalities of global planning are crushed against the endemic rationalities of local resistance. On all sides, human capacities to act come up against their intrinsic and extrinsic limits.
The activities of the TerraForma Corp address these limits by widening the compass of what acts on the surface of the grounds, in the depths of the oceans as in the atmosphere of the Earth. Carbon dioxide, uranium, copper, water, but also cyclones, forests or so-called "invasive" species share with humans an agency that the Corp's mission is to translate into influences, operations and transformations—beyond or below human decisions alone. Its goal being to integrate these decisions within the constraints as well as within the accidents that overdetermine them, the Corp can only act diagonally, through these decisions, these constraints and these accidents. It is this diagonalist bias that organizes this annual report, that justifies the selection of the operations chosen to appear in it, and that explains its order of presentation.
Overview
After a glossary defining some key words and other neologisms used in the rest of the report and after a chronology contextualizing the activities of the TerraForma Corp in the thoughts and practices put in place in relation to planetarity during the last decades, the first section illustrates the activities of the Corp centered on the vectors of imagination that can be identified or activated within the terraforming currently in progress. We are situated here in System 1 (S1) of Stafford Beer's model of viable systems (see Chronology), that of the operations by which organizations are inscribed in the environment they influence and transform. A first group of contributions, organically linked to each other, is devoted to conceptualizing, mapping, quantifying and re-orienting the influence of images on the co-habitability of the planet Earth.
The first chapter tries to understand the processes of metabolization of the images within the psycho- technical organisms through which they flow. It lays the bases of a cartography of the infrastructure and of the dynamics of the circulation of the images, simultaneously in the field of the material devices which govern them and in their shaping of the human imaginations. The second chapter sketches a modeling of these processes of metabolization, likely to lead to a quantification of the influence of the images on their various environments. The third chapter zooms in on the details of the interceptional indicators whose data must be collected in order to understand the objective effects of the circulation of images through subjective perceptions and the affective turbulence that they cause among the living (human and non-human). The fourth chapter takes a step back from these investigative protocols: it transcribes the answers given by the Terra.com AI to some of the questions that the Public Relations department of the Corp is asking itself in order to optimize its terraforming influence on contemporary audiences.
As a whole, this first section documents the technical modalities and possible progress of our (still stammering) awareness of planetarity, by articulating it already with the need to overcome both the fatigue of the current decision-making processes that paralyze our political institutions and the various forms of eco-anxiety that sometimes inhibit activism at the same time as they arouse it. How to conceive (in the double sense of understanding and design) the generation, circulation and reception of images, which flow today in absolutely unprecedented quantities on the surface of the planet? How can we reconfigure the vectorialization of our imaginations to foster a convergence between the affections received from our environments, the ways in which we perceive them and the ways in which we affect them in return?
The second section discusses the vectors of ideology that currently structure public debates on planetarity. It asks how to identify and interpret the great attractors around which our media agendas swirl, as well as our urban planning and infrastructure designs. The circulation of images analyzed in the previous section is in fact constantly overdetermined by relatively stable ideological structures, whose vectors orient in depth the imaginations and arguments of the surface. We are here at the level of system 4 (S4) of Stafford Beer's Viable System Model (VMS): the one in charge of ensuring the adaptation of the system to external environments whose future evolutions are potentially threatening. But ideology also appears as a central element of system 2 (S2), whose function is to ensure the homeostasis of the organization around relatively stable states of balance.
The fifth chapter tackles the notion of "ecological planning", as it has come to play a central role in the electoral discourse of parties identified on the right and on the left, to propose that it be inscribed in the emerging paradigm of terraliberal policies, still largely to be invented. The sixth chapter questions the strategies of the Corp in the face of the crises (political, energetic, economic, financial, ecological) that are piling up on the horizon, in order to specify the possible modes of intervention of a terraforming activism in the context of these crises. The seventh chapter extracts from the titanic open-pit lignite mine in Hambach, Germany, the hypothesis of a multisecular destructive colonization of the planet by an orthothelemic conspiracy of the straight line and the right angle, the orthogonal ideology being perhaps at the root of our de/terraforming ravages. Finally, the eighth chapter proposes a strategy of ideological offensive based on the elaboration of anarco-nudges, defined as insensitive nudges contributing to preserve the habitability of the planet by inciting the subjects to better resist the incentives.
This second section responds to the need to articulate the first two elements of the context mentioned
above: how to associate the awareness of our planetarity with the unprecedented power of the technical systems that today circulate the mutual affections that weave our living environments? The challenge is to invent new historical perspectives as well as new operating modes to revitalize the capacities for collective action inhibited by the fatigue of our current processes of debate and decision.
The third section gathers a few surveys that will study our vectors of de/territorialization in the more concrete depths of our spaces, our temporalities and our materialities. Each one explores and experiments with the stuff that supports and anchors our existences in habitable territorialities, in the context of techno-socio-economic dynamics that detach us from our traditional foundations. These investigations are situated at the precise points where, in the schema of the VSM, the operational S1 enters in material contact with the local environments of which it undergoes the influence and on which it exerts its influences.
The ninth chapter takes a step back from digital technologies to explore the problems of cohabitation between humans, chickens and mushrooms around an eco-village project in French Guyana. The tenth chapter investigates sinkholes that open up under human houses or roads when subterranean geological erosion weakens the earth's surface, with the effect of opening gaps in their conceptions of territories and their materialities. The eleventh chapter captures, through a dozen photographs accompanied by enigmatic texts, the central role that oblivion plays in the cognitive and affective rebalancing of human users prey to (environmental) mental disarray in the Anthropocene era. Finally, the twelfth chapter operationalizes this disarray by proposing an interface design entitled Slow Response Code which, instead of the Quick Response of the QR Code, forces the user to be at a precise moment in a singular place of the planet to have access to an online content.
It would be simplistic to limit these four chapters to a posture of withdrawal and resistance to the excesses of a certain globalizing deterritorialization. Their stake is rather to re-sensitize us to certain depths that the sliding of our fingers on our screens and digital keyboards tend to make us ignore, at our expense as well as future generations’. While the rest of the report foregrounds the influences of various forms of de/terraforming, this section sheds light on the inevitable and precious inertias of affective materialities that weigh our feet down on the surface of the Earth.
The fourth section illustrates and considers in a reflexive way the contribution of the vectors of art-based research (recherche-création) to the modalities of investigation-speculation practiced within the Department of Ubivectorial Influences of the TerraForma Corp. We are situated here in system 3 of the VSM (S3), the one whose task is to improve the organization's procedures, thanks to a capacity to renew the modes of approach, framing and processing used to identify and solve problems.
The thirteenth chapter confronts the curse imposed on the Yunnan region by the colonial opium trade, proposing to ward off this curse through the creation of mandalas, whose cosmographic properties point to alternative, less Western-centric modes of terraforming. The fourteenth chapter describes a procedure of diagrammatization of the communicative influences emanating from invited speakers in the work of the DIU, before articulating this diagrammatic form to the design of vases. The fifteenth chapter relates different experiments of translations of texts into images (and vice versa) accomplished in parallel by human subjects and by computational devices, while questioning the criteria usually mobilized to distinguish between them. The fifteenth chapter shares the protocol of a chemo-linguistic experimentation able to generate automatically, although without recourse to digital devices, action calls potentially carrying alternative terraformings.
All these proposals for recherche-création are to be taken on a double level: on the one hand, as absolutely specific historicities or materialities, referring to a singular space-time of terraforming activities; on the other hand, as ways of doing things, themselves historicizable and localisable, but transposable to other improbable contexts where their effects of creolisation will be unpredictable. In this, TerraForma Corp can find both tools to help dismantle negative commons and suggestions for restorative remodeling.
Finally, the fifth and last section turns to the way in which TerraForma Corp sets up new vectors of identity to dodge the pitfalls and dead ends of the dominant modalities of internal governance and external visibility. We are here at the level of System 5 of the VSM (S5), the one whose task is to define (and constantly revise the definition of) the organization's identity, its missions, its principles and its communicative projections.
The seventeenth chapter proposes a self-definition of the Corp based on the interpretation of its astral chart, which places the planet Earth in the interplay of influences exerted by neighboring stars, while adapting the formulation of its missions to the expectations of advice and comfort geared towards human users. The eighteenth chapter reveals the principles of the generative graphic design model through which the Corp has created a visual identity that is easily identifiable and yet infinitely adaptable to allow all its agents to singularize their relationship with it. The nineteenth chapter begins by meticulously documenting the habits of proxemic micro-territorialization that push a collective to ratify hierarchies through the choices of positions around a table, before spawning the model of officeless offices, de-localized in the sense that the specific localization of a workspace dilates to the limits of the entire planet. The twentieth chapter reads extracts from the report made by the whistleblower charged by the Corp to track down and denounce its internal dysfunctions, in the spirit of the VSM system 3 (S3), whose function is to exercise independent and critical auditing procedures, in order to verify the effective adherence of the organization to its objectives and to its declared ethical-ecological standards. In the same spirit, a final interview with the Terra.com AI concludes the report without closing it, since this conversation on the future prospects of terraforming reveals more doubts and confusion on the part of the Artificial Intelligence than reassuring certainties.
This fifth section therefore documents the ongoing mutations of the Corp which, by its very nature, must incessantly rethink the ways in which it embodies, relays and vectorializes the needs of co-habitability of the different species co-existing on planet Earth. How best to manifest this paradox: our planetarity is being discovered (and terraformed) at the same time that it is self-destructing (de-terraforming)? The different chapters of this section attempt to answer the same question that haunts private companies, State bureaucracies, NGOs and militant collectives—not so much the question of organization as that of its viability. This question takes a doubly relevant form for TerraForma Corp: how to make habitable, for its multiple agents scattered across the globe, a collective corporeality whose mission is to promote the co-habitability of planet Earth?
Assessment
The doubts expressed by the last two texts of this report are an integral part of the Corp's identity. Its two major references in the recent past have both ended in failure. Stafford Beer's Viable System Model (VSM) inspired the economic policies of Salvador Allende's Chile, which was overthrown on September 11, 1973 by the US-backed military coup led by Augusto Pinochet. The first DAO was the victim of a hack that siphoned off a third of the US$ 250 million it had collected in record time. TerraForma Corp expects to suffer a similar failure. And it is by preparing incessantly for a failure that it hopes to postpone it indefinitely, while optimizing, along the way, its influence on the co- habitability of our planet.
From this point of view, the year 2022 was a major turning point. Until then, the plan was to gradually build up the organization through loose, informal and relatively traditional modes of coordination (mailing lists, telephone calls, face-to-face meetings, videoconferences, website, with the sending of shared informative documents, but without any contractualization having the force of law or code). This rise in power had as its horizon the launch in 2025 of a DAO based on a blockchain and open to receive the flows of financing whose promises are pouring in from multiple sides. The Corp's founding assumption was indeed that the VSM could finally find its formal and efficient implementation in the form of a DAO thanks to the emerging technologies and organizational practices of blockchains.
The work documented in this report has, however, led to a significant alteration of these future prospects.
The form of the DAO will continue to offer a general model towards which to tend, but on condition that it is emancipated from the financial dimension of cryptocurrency which today constitutes its most common mode of existence and operation. The unprecedented scalability offered by DAOs—that is to say, their capacity to grow enormously in scale without having to alter their operating methods—makes them an indispensable tool for any organization aiming at global coordination. But, as the whistleblower duly pointed out in this annual report, the monetary models on which current DAOs are based, which are often reduced to financial and speculating mechanisms, are based on premises that are in direct contradiction with the missions of the Corp (strict individualization of collaboration modes, reduction of agents to calculating homo œconomicus behaviors, carbon cost of token mining through Proof-of-Work mechanisms).
The Corp is not giving up on contributing to the promising developments of a Web3 significantly different from the Web2 colonized by platform capitalism. On the contrary, it is a matter of radicalizing this difference by rejecting the financialization of daily life at the same time as its platformization. The Corp therefore intends to contribute to the development of a new generation of DAOs, established on more sustainable bases, ecologically as well as socially and anthropologically, than those currently operating on the model of cryptocurrencies. The major event of the switch of Ethereum, host of the first DAO, from a mining mechanism based on the "Proof-of-Work" to a securing mechanism based on the "Proof-of-Stake", a switch successfully operated on September 15, 2022, certainly constitutes a mutation with enormous consequences in the sustainability of a Web3 capable of ensuring a planetary governmentality. Although the "Proof-of-Stake" is considerably less energy-consuming, it nevertheless tends to concentrate in the hands of the largest operators a decision-making and regulatory power that must imperatively be distributed more equally. Hence the will, widely shared within the Corp, to go even further than the existing blockchains, to raise the Web3 to other dynamics of planetary relationality.
This desire is not a utopian leap into a dream future from which the stain of money would have been washed away. The question of financing organizations like the Corp constitutes a major and inescapable problem of any terraforming enterprise programmed to operate on a planetary scale. The Corp's decision must rather be understood as a bet on the possibility of accounting environmental threats according to dynamics of influence that would allow the subordination of strictly financial logics under the pressure of existential urgencies shared as well by non-humans as by humans. Other types of DAOs will be necessary to implement the superiority of the imperative of concrete co- habitability of our shared living environments over the profitability (monetary or symbolic) of investments.
Prospects
At this stage, three tracks are proposed to the energies of Corp members to orient the activities of the years to come. The first track consists in re-evaluating the modes of terraforming according to the complementary properties of four relational scales that need to be articulated in a precise (i.e. quantified) way in their relationships of superposition, co-development or incompatibility.
- Commensality brings together living people around their meals, rituals of preparation and consumption of food and drink. Living implies feeding, not only with consumable goods but also with commensals (etymologically: fellow-beings who share our table).
- Conviviality brings together expressive bodies in conversations that are never limited to the communication of coded information according to the rules of a certain language. Conviviality corresponds to the multi-sensorial co-presence of a group animated by a common curiosity, but meeting for the pleasure of study, more than for the result produced by the studying. This pleasure is conditioned by the self-limitation to user-friendly tools, that is to say easily understandable, controllable, modifiable and reparable by their users.
- Collaboration brings together producers of goods or services in order to coordinate their productive operations. This is what economic analysis, organization and management theories (including the original version of the VSM) have traditionally tried to optimize. Our current deterraforming activities are largely the result of the exclusive prevalence of this relational scale at the expense of the other three.
- Finally, co-viability brings together different forms of life within the same territory that serves as a shared habitat, with relationships of symbiosis, synergy, competition and rivalry. When Stafford Beer's categories are taken up today and complemented by the addition of an S to design Viable & Sustainable System Models (VSSM), sustainability implies that what is viable for my existing species must also be viable for the other species whose diversity frames the life and renewal of our common ecosystem.
If TerraForma Corp has from the outset identified with the need to understand and implement forms of habitation compatible with the needs of co-viability, reflection on the inadequacy of structured DAOs such as cryptocurrencies invites the work of future years to explore and value more intensely the levels of commensality and conviviality, on which depend not only the co-habitability of the planet but also the desirability of the modes of cohabitation that may be imagined and realized there.
The second track calls for the Corp's agents to explore, formulate and codify a preliminary idea of what a DAO could look like, where the exchange of services would not be based on the equivalent of a monetary currency, but on a completely different valuation system. The candidate for this year's work is the "RESPECT" report (noted RSPCT), with the challenge of replacing token mined on the basis of "Proof-of-Work" with value multiplication established by a "Proof-of-Respect" process. The work initiated this year by the DUI is at the heart of this research and experimentation program, since the calculation of the terraforming value of the RSPCT of a commodity or a service relies on the computation of the influences of which it is the vector.
The modelling, quantification and processing of big data provided by the sensitivity of the sensors distributed on the surface of the planet and put in place during the last decades give hope to quantify the (terraforming and de-terraforming) influences of a given commodity or service on the co-habitability of a living environment. The analysis of the different relational scales will in turn give hope to sum up these different influences, in an approximation that would be realistic enough to derive an integrated intercept indicator, aiming to represent a trend of forthcoming effects rather than a sanction of observed effects. The value of the RSPCT will be derived directly from this indicator, as soon as x > 0.
The calculation of RSPCT corresponds to the central function of the S4 of the VSM, that of the adaptation of the organization to an environment in constant transformation, and more particularly that of its anticipated adaptation to the future transformations of this environment. But beyond its computational parametrics, the value of RSPCT is intended to take the place of the "religious respect" that most human populations have felt towards deities and natural forces whose power seemed to exceed their own. In a world of limited resources that extractivism has devastated with its consumerist recklessness, the computational operation performed by the Terra.com AI to value the RSPCT due to commodities and services produced and exchanged between humans embodies the need to "look and think twice" (re-spectare) before scaling up the production of that commodity or service to an industrial scale that will risk deteriorating the co-viability of a habitat.
The third line of work in this annual report calls for more research and experimentation in and especially with the speculative capacities of artificial intelligences (AI), whose recent advances have been revolutionary in the fields of machine learning, recognition, and especially the synthetic generation of text, sound, and images. The working hypothesis here is that the surprises of speculation emanating from computational devices can help our era overcome the limits imposed on our collaborative imagination by the stranglehold of financial speculation. A program has already been set up in partnership with the EUR ArTeC to set up experimental workshops in which human agents will delegate to artificial imaginations the task of writing, sounding and visualizing fragments of universes that have remained unimagined until now. Computational devices drawing their information from huge data banks are certainly content to repeat the past by answering the questions we ask them about the future. But, thanks to the correlations detected by deep learning, the recombinations they propose of these past data are not at all "random". They reproduce not only the biases (racist, sexist, classist, validist) inherited from a racist, sexist, classist and validist past, but also the common (and uncommon) intelligences accumulated in the collective heritage of which these databases are composed.
To experiment with the ways in which AIs complete the beginnings of sentences, narratives, arguments, songs, or films that we submit to them is thus to enrich the intelligences and imaginations of our individualities, both infinite and limited, with the contribution of multiplied, pluralized, decentralized intelligences and imaginations endowed with a certain autonomy of recombination. A DAO can realize the co-activation of simultaneous wills scattered in space, within a process whose results are unpredictable, according to the project that emerged under the title of TerraForma Corp. In the same way, the experimentation with the speculative capacities of the AIs can help the TerraForma Corp to spawn imaginations whose derivatives, although repeating some elements inherited from the past, will accelerate the future.
Executive report
This activity report presents some results of the investigation-speculation operations conducted within the Department of Ubivectoral Influences (DUI) of TerraForma Corp, on the occasion of a collaboration with the EUR ArTeC. The Graduate School ArTeC (Arts, Technologies, Digital, Human Mediations, Creation) is a teaching and research program funded by the National Research Agency (ANR) since 2018 under the Programme d'Investissement d'Avenir (PIA). Within the terraforming activities conducted under the aegis of the TerraForma Corp, the Department of Ubivectorial Influences aims to study as well as to steer the dynamics of influences whose interactions weave the current state, and shape the possible future states, of the co-habitability of planet Earth. Its work is driven by the premise that these influences are "ubivectorial", i.e. they result from a multiplicity of simultaneous factors, supported by vectors that are not strictly locatable, acting at sometimes very heterogeneous scales and in directions that are frequently contradictory to each other. The full annual report is available online.
Through TerraForma Corp, humans and non-humans, living and non-living entities, are objectively allied in a sprawling collective placed entirely at the service of co-habitability. The Earth hears us and we hear the Earth because, through our common vibrations, we are all one with her. The various organs of the Corp embody a planetary mobilization through which the Earth claims a novel legal and political status, which recognizes it as a collective subject of reciprocal rights and duties, but also as an agency endowed with an authority superior to that of national States.
The Corp has no centralized headquarters: it exists wherever its members are active, it acts at any point and at any time where its influence is exercised. Its multiple organs vibrate, think, push, trickle, spawn, communicate, suggest, research, calculate, model, compute, work, produce, invent, buy, sell, transport, move, demonstrate, denounce, protest, block, dismantle, build, agitate, pacify, legislate, create in all directions—in an informality that is the condition of a terraforming adapted to the multiple dimensions of the living as well as to the infinite singularities of individuals and of territories
Minimal coordination takes the form of annual reports written within its various operational units describing some of its operations, achievements, failures, and proposals for future activities. These reports have so far only been written for internal information purposes. For the first time, in this year 2022, a selection of activity reports is offered to the public, worldwide, in half a dozen languages.
Context
This annual report, which is the first to be made public, does not cover all the activities of the TerraForma Corp. It gives access to the work of one of its activity groups, the Department of Ubivectorial Influences, which proposes here a few brief surveys intended to illustrate the fields of work of the Corp, as well as its perspectives for future development. The choices have been made according to the constraints and opportunities of the current phase of terraforming. This phase is characterized by four contextual elements identified thanks to the calculations of Terra.com, the artificial intelligence (AI) developed by the Corp.
The first element of context is the rapid implementation of technical systems that make it possible to envisage an algorithmic global governance of the flows of information, energy, materials, goods and bodies on the surface of the planet. From Elon Musk's highly publicized Starlink project, promising ubiquitous access to the internet through full satellite coverage, to the underground investigations of distributed Open Source Intelligence in social networks, from high-speed trading and derivatives speculation to Deep State conspiracy theories, the informational machines that humans have equipped themselves with are beginning to structure their interactions far more powerfully than intentional deliberation. The development of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) since 2016 offers a glimpse of translocal modes of coordinating activities based on blockchains, which can now scale globally without relying on the proven inadequacies of national States.
The second element of context is the acceleration of planetary awareness. The financial crisis of 2008, the Covid-19 pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine have all brought into full focus the infrastructural interdependence that makes integrated global logistics more than ever the lung on which the breathing, living and dying of most human beings as well as other Earthlings depends.
The third element of context, made salient by the three crises mentioned above but now surfacing in all spheres of existence, is the need to manage the dismantling of the negative commons inherited by current generations. Nuclear waste, the plastic continent, the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere: the Anthropocene plunges humans into a world where their productive infrastructures turn into feral threats that they are now condemned to face collectively.
The fourth element of context is the fatigue of the decision-making processes—democratic or authoritarian that have so far guided the development of human societies. The scale of planetary problems is proving unmanageable with the decision-making mechanisms inherited from the past. The humans committed to take charge of the destiny of their communities are sinking into denial, burn-out, solastalgia or dementia. The political institutions based on representative democracy drift towards suicidal nationalism. Neither companies, tied to profit imperatives, nor the financial mechanisms that regulate their competition, nor activist groups full of good intentions but lacking in means are capable of reorienting economic activities towards the planet's habitability. The rationalities of global planning are crushed against the endemic rationalities of local resistance. On all sides, human capacities to act come up against their intrinsic and extrinsic limits.
The activities of the TerraForma Corp address these limits by widening the compass of what acts on the surface of the grounds, in the depths of the oceans as in the atmosphere of the Earth. Carbon dioxide, uranium, copper, water, but also cyclones, forests or so-called "invasive" species share with humans an agency that the Corp's mission is to translate into influences, operations and transformations—beyond or below human decisions alone. Its goal being to integrate these decisions within the constraints as well as within the accidents that overdetermine them, the Corp can only act diagonally, through these decisions, these constraints and these accidents. It is this diagonalist bias that organizes this annual report, that justifies the selection of the operations chosen to appear in it, and that explains its order of presentation.
Overview
After a glossary defining some key words and other neologisms used in the rest of the report and after a chronology contextualizing the activities of the TerraForma Corp in the thoughts and practices put in place in relation to planetarity during the last decades, the first section illustrates the activities of the Corp centered on the vectors of imagination that can be identified or activated within the terraforming currently in progress. We are situated here in System 1 (S1) of Stafford Beer's model of viable systems (see Chronology), that of the operations by which organizations are inscribed in the environment they influence and transform. A first group of contributions, organically linked to each other, is devoted to conceptualizing, mapping, quantifying and re-orienting the influence of images on the co-habitability of the planet Earth.
The first chapter tries to understand the processes of metabolization of the images within the psycho- technical organisms through which they flow. It lays the bases of a cartography of the infrastructure and of the dynamics of the circulation of the images, simultaneously in the field of the material devices which govern them and in their shaping of the human imaginations. The second chapter sketches a modeling of these processes of metabolization, likely to lead to a quantification of the influence of the images on their various environments. The third chapter zooms in on the details of the interceptional indicators whose data must be collected in order to understand the objective effects of the circulation of images through subjective perceptions and the affective turbulence that they cause among the living (human and non-human). The fourth chapter takes a step back from these investigative protocols: it transcribes the answers given by the Terra.com AI to some of the questions that the Public Relations department of the Corp is asking itself in order to optimize its terraforming influence on contemporary audiences.
As a whole, this first section documents the technical modalities and possible progress of our (still stammering) awareness of planetarity, by articulating it already with the need to overcome both the fatigue of the current decision-making processes that paralyze our political institutions and the various forms of eco-anxiety that sometimes inhibit activism at the same time as they arouse it. How to conceive (in the double sense of understanding and design) the generation, circulation and reception of images, which flow today in absolutely unprecedented quantities on the surface of the planet? How can we reconfigure the vectorialization of our imaginations to foster a convergence between the affections received from our environments, the ways in which we perceive them and the ways in which we affect them in return?
The second section discusses the vectors of ideology that currently structure public debates on planetarity. It asks how to identify and interpret the great attractors around which our media agendas swirl, as well as our urban planning and infrastructure designs. The circulation of images analyzed in the previous section is in fact constantly overdetermined by relatively stable ideological structures, whose vectors orient in depth the imaginations and arguments of the surface. We are here at the level of system 4 (S4) of Stafford Beer's Viable System Model (VMS): the one in charge of ensuring the adaptation of the system to external environments whose future evolutions are potentially threatening. But ideology also appears as a central element of system 2 (S2), whose function is to ensure the homeostasis of the organization around relatively stable states of balance.
The fifth chapter tackles the notion of "ecological planning", as it has come to play a central role in the electoral discourse of parties identified on the right and on the left, to propose that it be inscribed in the emerging paradigm of terraliberal policies, still largely to be invented. The sixth chapter questions the strategies of the Corp in the face of the crises (political, energetic, economic, financial, ecological) that are piling up on the horizon, in order to specify the possible modes of intervention of a terraforming activism in the context of these crises. The seventh chapter extracts from the titanic open-pit lignite mine in Hambach, Germany, the hypothesis of a multisecular destructive colonization of the planet by an orthothelemic conspiracy of the straight line and the right angle, the orthogonal ideology being perhaps at the root of our de/terraforming ravages. Finally, the eighth chapter proposes a strategy of ideological offensive based on the elaboration of anarco-nudges, defined as insensitive nudges contributing to preserve the habitability of the planet by inciting the subjects to better resist the incentives.
This second section responds to the need to articulate the first two elements of the context mentioned
above: how to associate the awareness of our planetarity with the unprecedented power of the technical systems that today circulate the mutual affections that weave our living environments? The challenge is to invent new historical perspectives as well as new operating modes to revitalize the capacities for collective action inhibited by the fatigue of our current processes of debate and decision.
The third section gathers a few surveys that will study our vectors of de/territorialization in the more concrete depths of our spaces, our temporalities and our materialities. Each one explores and experiments with the stuff that supports and anchors our existences in habitable territorialities, in the context of techno-socio-economic dynamics that detach us from our traditional foundations. These investigations are situated at the precise points where, in the schema of the VSM, the operational S1 enters in material contact with the local environments of which it undergoes the influence and on which it exerts its influences.
The ninth chapter takes a step back from digital technologies to explore the problems of cohabitation between humans, chickens and mushrooms around an eco-village project in French Guyana. The tenth chapter investigates sinkholes that open up under human houses or roads when subterranean geological erosion weakens the earth's surface, with the effect of opening gaps in their conceptions of territories and their materialities. The eleventh chapter captures, through a dozen photographs accompanied by enigmatic texts, the central role that oblivion plays in the cognitive and affective rebalancing of human users prey to (environmental) mental disarray in the Anthropocene era. Finally, the twelfth chapter operationalizes this disarray by proposing an interface design entitled Slow Response Code which, instead of the Quick Response of the QR Code, forces the user to be at a precise moment in a singular place of the planet to have access to an online content.
It would be simplistic to limit these four chapters to a posture of withdrawal and resistance to the excesses of a certain globalizing deterritorialization. Their stake is rather to re-sensitize us to certain depths that the sliding of our fingers on our screens and digital keyboards tend to make us ignore, at our expense as well as future generations’. While the rest of the report foregrounds the influences of various forms of de/terraforming, this section sheds light on the inevitable and precious inertias of affective materialities that weigh our feet down on the surface of the Earth.
The fourth section illustrates and considers in a reflexive way the contribution of the vectors of art-based research (recherche-création) to the modalities of investigation-speculation practiced within the Department of Ubivectorial Influences of the TerraForma Corp. We are situated here in system 3 of the VSM (S3), the one whose task is to improve the organization's procedures, thanks to a capacity to renew the modes of approach, framing and processing used to identify and solve problems.
The thirteenth chapter confronts the curse imposed on the Yunnan region by the colonial opium trade, proposing to ward off this curse through the creation of mandalas, whose cosmographic properties point to alternative, less Western-centric modes of terraforming. The fourteenth chapter describes a procedure of diagrammatization of the communicative influences emanating from invited speakers in the work of the DIU, before articulating this diagrammatic form to the design of vases. The fifteenth chapter relates different experiments of translations of texts into images (and vice versa) accomplished in parallel by human subjects and by computational devices, while questioning the criteria usually mobilized to distinguish between them. The fifteenth chapter shares the protocol of a chemo-linguistic experimentation able to generate automatically, although without recourse to digital devices, action calls potentially carrying alternative terraformings.
All these proposals for recherche-création are to be taken on a double level: on the one hand, as absolutely specific historicities or materialities, referring to a singular space-time of terraforming activities; on the other hand, as ways of doing things, themselves historicizable and localisable, but transposable to other improbable contexts where their effects of creolisation will be unpredictable. In this, TerraForma Corp can find both tools to help dismantle negative commons and suggestions for restorative remodeling.
Finally, the fifth and last section turns to the way in which TerraForma Corp sets up new vectors of identity to dodge the pitfalls and dead ends of the dominant modalities of internal governance and external visibility. We are here at the level of System 5 of the VSM (S5), the one whose task is to define (and constantly revise the definition of) the organization's identity, its missions, its principles and its communicative projections.
The seventeenth chapter proposes a self-definition of the Corp based on the interpretation of its astral chart, which places the planet Earth in the interplay of influences exerted by neighboring stars, while adapting the formulation of its missions to the expectations of advice and comfort geared towards human users. The eighteenth chapter reveals the principles of the generative graphic design model through which the Corp has created a visual identity that is easily identifiable and yet infinitely adaptable to allow all its agents to singularize their relationship with it. The nineteenth chapter begins by meticulously documenting the habits of proxemic micro-territorialization that push a collective to ratify hierarchies through the choices of positions around a table, before spawning the model of officeless offices, de-localized in the sense that the specific localization of a workspace dilates to the limits of the entire planet. The twentieth chapter reads extracts from the report made by the whistleblower charged by the Corp to track down and denounce its internal dysfunctions, in the spirit of the VSM system 3 (S3), whose function is to exercise independent and critical auditing procedures, in order to verify the effective adherence of the organization to its objectives and to its declared ethical-ecological standards. In the same spirit, a final interview with the Terra.com AI concludes the report without closing it, since this conversation on the future prospects of terraforming reveals more doubts and confusion on the part of the Artificial Intelligence than reassuring certainties.
This fifth section therefore documents the ongoing mutations of the Corp which, by its very nature, must incessantly rethink the ways in which it embodies, relays and vectorializes the needs of co-habitability of the different species co-existing on planet Earth. How best to manifest this paradox: our planetarity is being discovered (and terraformed) at the same time that it is self-destructing (de-terraforming)? The different chapters of this section attempt to answer the same question that haunts private companies, State bureaucracies, NGOs and militant collectives—not so much the question of organization as that of its viability. This question takes a doubly relevant form for TerraForma Corp: how to make habitable, for its multiple agents scattered across the globe, a collective corporeality whose mission is to promote the co-habitability of planet Earth?
Assessment
The doubts expressed by the last two texts of this report are an integral part of the Corp's identity. Its two major references in the recent past have both ended in failure. Stafford Beer's Viable System Model (VSM) inspired the economic policies of Salvador Allende's Chile, which was overthrown on September 11, 1973 by the US-backed military coup led by Augusto Pinochet. The first DAO was the victim of a hack that siphoned off a third of the US$ 250 million it had collected in record time. TerraForma Corp expects to suffer a similar failure. And it is by preparing incessantly for a failure that it hopes to postpone it indefinitely, while optimizing, along the way, its influence on the co- habitability of our planet.
From this point of view, the year 2022 was a major turning point. Until then, the plan was to gradually build up the organization through loose, informal and relatively traditional modes of coordination (mailing lists, telephone calls, face-to-face meetings, videoconferences, website, with the sending of shared informative documents, but without any contractualization having the force of law or code). This rise in power had as its horizon the launch in 2025 of a DAO based on a blockchain and open to receive the flows of financing whose promises are pouring in from multiple sides. The Corp's founding assumption was indeed that the VSM could finally find its formal and efficient implementation in the form of a DAO thanks to the emerging technologies and organizational practices of blockchains.
The work documented in this report has, however, led to a significant alteration of these future prospects.
The form of the DAO will continue to offer a general model towards which to tend, but on condition that it is emancipated from the financial dimension of cryptocurrency which today constitutes its most common mode of existence and operation. The unprecedented scalability offered by DAOs—that is to say, their capacity to grow enormously in scale without having to alter their operating methods—makes them an indispensable tool for any organization aiming at global coordination. But, as the whistleblower duly pointed out in this annual report, the monetary models on which current DAOs are based, which are often reduced to financial and speculating mechanisms, are based on premises that are in direct contradiction with the missions of the Corp (strict individualization of collaboration modes, reduction of agents to calculating homo œconomicus behaviors, carbon cost of token mining through Proof-of-Work mechanisms).
The Corp is not giving up on contributing to the promising developments of a Web3 significantly different from the Web2 colonized by platform capitalism. On the contrary, it is a matter of radicalizing this difference by rejecting the financialization of daily life at the same time as its platformization. The Corp therefore intends to contribute to the development of a new generation of DAOs, established on more sustainable bases, ecologically as well as socially and anthropologically, than those currently operating on the model of cryptocurrencies. The major event of the switch of Ethereum, host of the first DAO, from a mining mechanism based on the "Proof-of-Work" to a securing mechanism based on the "Proof-of-Stake", a switch successfully operated on September 15, 2022, certainly constitutes a mutation with enormous consequences in the sustainability of a Web3 capable of ensuring a planetary governmentality. Although the "Proof-of-Stake" is considerably less energy-consuming, it nevertheless tends to concentrate in the hands of the largest operators a decision-making and regulatory power that must imperatively be distributed more equally. Hence the will, widely shared within the Corp, to go even further than the existing blockchains, to raise the Web3 to other dynamics of planetary relationality.
This desire is not a utopian leap into a dream future from which the stain of money would have been washed away. The question of financing organizations like the Corp constitutes a major and inescapable problem of any terraforming enterprise programmed to operate on a planetary scale. The Corp's decision must rather be understood as a bet on the possibility of accounting environmental threats according to dynamics of influence that would allow the subordination of strictly financial logics under the pressure of existential urgencies shared as well by non-humans as by humans. Other types of DAOs will be necessary to implement the superiority of the imperative of concrete co- habitability of our shared living environments over the profitability (monetary or symbolic) of investments.
Prospects
At this stage, three tracks are proposed to the energies of Corp members to orient the activities of the years to come. The first track consists in re-evaluating the modes of terraforming according to the complementary properties of four relational scales that need to be articulated in a precise (i.e. quantified) way in their relationships of superposition, co-development or incompatibility.
- Commensality brings together living people around their meals, rituals of preparation and consumption of food and drink. Living implies feeding, not only with consumable goods but also with commensals (etymologically: fellow-beings who share our table).
- Conviviality brings together expressive bodies in conversations that are never limited to the communication of coded information according to the rules of a certain language. Conviviality corresponds to the multi-sensorial co-presence of a group animated by a common curiosity, but meeting for the pleasure of study, more than for the result produced by the studying. This pleasure is conditioned by the self-limitation to user-friendly tools, that is to say easily understandable, controllable, modifiable and reparable by their users.
- Collaboration brings together producers of goods or services in order to coordinate their productive operations. This is what economic analysis, organization and management theories (including the original version of the VSM) have traditionally tried to optimize. Our current deterraforming activities are largely the result of the exclusive prevalence of this relational scale at the expense of the other three.
- Finally, co-viability brings together different forms of life within the same territory that serves as a shared habitat, with relationships of symbiosis, synergy, competition and rivalry. When Stafford Beer's categories are taken up today and complemented by the addition of an S to design Viable & Sustainable System Models (VSSM), sustainability implies that what is viable for my existing species must also be viable for the other species whose diversity frames the life and renewal of our common ecosystem.
If TerraForma Corp has from the outset identified with the need to understand and implement forms of habitation compatible with the needs of co-viability, reflection on the inadequacy of structured DAOs such as cryptocurrencies invites the work of future years to explore and value more intensely the levels of commensality and conviviality, on which depend not only the co-habitability of the planet but also the desirability of the modes of cohabitation that may be imagined and realized there.
The second track calls for the Corp's agents to explore, formulate and codify a preliminary idea of what a DAO could look like, where the exchange of services would not be based on the equivalent of a monetary currency, but on a completely different valuation system. The candidate for this year's work is the "RESPECT" report (noted RSPCT), with the challenge of replacing token mined on the basis of "Proof-of-Work" with value multiplication established by a "Proof-of-Respect" process. The work initiated this year by the DUI is at the heart of this research and experimentation program, since the calculation of the terraforming value of the RSPCT of a commodity or a service relies on the computation of the influences of which it is the vector.
The modelling, quantification and processing of big data provided by the sensitivity of the sensors distributed on the surface of the planet and put in place during the last decades give hope to quantify the (terraforming and de-terraforming) influences of a given commodity or service on the co-habitability of a living environment. The analysis of the different relational scales will in turn give hope to sum up these different influences, in an approximation that would be realistic enough to derive an integrated intercept indicator, aiming to represent a trend of forthcoming effects rather than a sanction of observed effects. The value of the RSPCT will be derived directly from this indicator, as soon as x > 0.
The calculation of RSPCT corresponds to the central function of the S4 of the VSM, that of the adaptation of the organization to an environment in constant transformation, and more particularly that of its anticipated adaptation to the future transformations of this environment. But beyond its computational parametrics, the value of RSPCT is intended to take the place of the "religious respect" that most human populations have felt towards deities and natural forces whose power seemed to exceed their own. In a world of limited resources that extractivism has devastated with its consumerist recklessness, the computational operation performed by the Terra.com AI to value the RSPCT due to commodities and services produced and exchanged between humans embodies the need to "look and think twice" (re-spectare) before scaling up the production of that commodity or service to an industrial scale that will risk deteriorating the co-viability of a habitat.
The third line of work in this annual report calls for more research and experimentation in and especially with the speculative capacities of artificial intelligences (AI), whose recent advances have been revolutionary in the fields of machine learning, recognition, and especially the synthetic generation of text, sound, and images. The working hypothesis here is that the surprises of speculation emanating from computational devices can help our era overcome the limits imposed on our collaborative imagination by the stranglehold of financial speculation. A program has already been set up in partnership with the EUR ArTeC to set up experimental workshops in which human agents will delegate to artificial imaginations the task of writing, sounding and visualizing fragments of universes that have remained unimagined until now. Computational devices drawing their information from huge data banks are certainly content to repeat the past by answering the questions we ask them about the future. But, thanks to the correlations detected by deep learning, the recombinations they propose of these past data are not at all "random". They reproduce not only the biases (racist, sexist, classist, validist) inherited from a racist, sexist, classist and validist past, but also the common (and uncommon) intelligences accumulated in the collective heritage of which these databases are composed.
To experiment with the ways in which AIs complete the beginnings of sentences, narratives, arguments, songs, or films that we submit to them is thus to enrich the intelligences and imaginations of our individualities, both infinite and limited, with the contribution of multiplied, pluralized, decentralized intelligences and imaginations endowed with a certain autonomy of recombination. A DAO can realize the co-activation of simultaneous wills scattered in space, within a process whose results are unpredictable, according to the project that emerged under the title of TerraForma Corp. In the same way, the experimentation with the speculative capacities of the AIs can help the TerraForma Corp to spawn imaginations whose derivatives, although repeating some elements inherited from the past, will accelerate the future.
chronology
This chronology, coordinated by Carlos Duran and Abad Ain Al-Shams, contextualizes the emergence of the TerraForma Corp and its transmutation into a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) within some of the multiple sources of inspiration that have influenced its development: cybernetic modeling, management theories, cartographic experiments, artistic practices, and philosophical speculations.
| XIe century before J.-C. |
The Zhou Dynasty came to power in China and ruled in the name of a world system called Tianxia ("All-that-is- under-heaven"). The philosopher Zhao Tingyang summarizes its main principles as follows: "(a) the real solutions to the problems of world politics lie in a universally accepted world system rather than in the use of force; (b) a universal world system is politically justified if it has a political institution that governs for the benefit of all peoples and nations, and for the production of the greatest amount of shared goods; (c) a universal world system works if it creates harmony between all nations and cultures." (Zhao Tingyang, "The Philosophy of Tianxia," Diogenes, No. 221, 2008, p. 8) |
| 1942-1956 | Conferences held at the Macy Foundation in New York regularly bring together specialists from a wide variety of disciplines (mathematics, physics, biology, medicine, psychiatry, anthropology) in discussions from which emerge many research paradigms developed in the second half of the 20th century, including cybernetics, information science, and cognitivism. |
| 1964 | Marshall McLuhan publishes the book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York, McGraw Hill) which initiates the indiscipline of media studies, based on the postulate that the communication technologies put in place between humans and their environment condition their behaviors by redimensioning their relationships to space, time and agentivity. |
| 1970 | The American feminist Jo Freeman publishes the text The Tyranny of Structurelessness in the Berkeley Journal of Sociology. |
| 1970-1973 | The socialist Chile of President Salvador Allende calls the British cybernetic management theorist Stafford Beer to design and implement the Cybersyn project, which was to optimize the flow of information, goods, and services in the context of agile planning of the socialist economy, in real time and with an eye to direct democracy. The project develops the Cyberstrider software, based on Bayesian functions, which formalizes and operationalizes the Viable System Model (VMS) theory developed by Beer at the same time. From the economic point of view, the cybernetic organization is based on four levels of control (the firm, the branch, the sector, the country) from which thousands of data are transmitted by telex from the field units to a central control room located in the heart of Santiago, opened in 1972, where screens and models inform the coordinators in real time of the state of the economy. From a political point of view, the Cyberfolk project was to allow all Chileans to send messages of satisfaction or dissatisfaction (as "algedonic loops"), the results of which would be displayed on one of the walls of the central control room. The project was destroyed by Augusto Pinochet's military coup d'état, fomented with the support of the United States on September 11, 1973. |
| 1972-1979 | Stafford Beer published The Brain of the Firm (Harmondsworth, Allen Lane, Penguin, 1972), which presents his cybernetic theory of management, Platform for Change (New Chichester, Wiley, 1975), which draws from cybernetics an alternative epistemology likely to transform (our relative conceptions and practices of what) the world is (with a concluding chapter devoted to the Cybersyn experiment in Chile), and The Heart of the Enterprise (Chichester, Wiley, 1979), which develops and completes his Viable System Model (VSM). The latter proposes a recursive analysis of the functioning of any organization, at any scale, in three elements (O = Operation; E = Environment; M = Meta-system), within which it distinguishes five systems. An operational system that concretely accomplishes the organization's tasks (S1, operation) and four systems that are part of the meta-systemic management: S2 ensures the stability of the organization, to avoid too abrupt oscillations and conflicts; S3 works on its potential improvement, in constant relation with S2, but also by developing information sensors and indicators through a specific system of monitoring S3*; S4 must ensure the adaptation of the organization to environments (local and global) in permanent and accelerated transformations; finally S5 is in charge of defining the identity of the organization, by verifying the conformity of its actions with the principles, finalities, and missions in which it affirms to recognize itself. |
Diagramme du Viable System Model selon Stafford Beer (https://metaphorum.org/)
| 1986 | Gareth Morgan publishes Images of Organization (New York, Sage) which reviews eight metaphorical models that structure the common imaginaries of organization in the modern era: 1° machines, 2° living organisms, 3° brains, 4° cultures, 5° political systems, 6° psychic prisons, 7° flows and transformations, 8° instruments of domination. |
| 1994 | A group of post-operative activists centered in Bologna, Italy, is using the name Luther Blissett (a name borrowed from a Jamaican soccer player) to informally federate actions of various kinds, such as exposing journalistic or editorial malpractice, both on the progressive left and in established conservative circles. |
| 1995-2003 | The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) is developing its experimental theory-fiction activities on the bangs of the University of Warwick with members such as Sadie Plant, Nick Land, Stephen Metcalf, Iain Hamilton Grant, Ray Brassier, Reza Negarestani, Mark Fisher, Kodwo Eshun, Robin Mackay, Luciana Parisi, Matthew Fuller or Steve Goodman. |
| 1997 | Sadie Plant publishes Zeros + ones: digital women + the new technoculture (London, Doubleday) which outlines a program of study and action that will strongly inspire the TerraForma Corp. |
| 1999 | Luther Blissett publishes a novel entitled Q(Milan, Einaudi), translated into a dozen languages, in which the protagonist travels through various insurrectionary struggles in Renaissance Europe and finds himself confronted by a mysterious secret agent of the Inquisition, anonymous but identified by the letter Q. |
| 2001 | Léonore Bonaccini & Xavier Four start the activities of the collective Bureau d'études which will produce for two decades diagrams mapping power relations on a planetary as well as national scale (https://bureaudetudes.org/). Part of this work will be compiled in 2015 in the book Atlas of agendas - mapping the power, mapping the commons (Eindhoven, Onomatopée). |
| 2001 | Tiqqun publishes "L'hypothèses cybernétique" in Tiqqun 2, Zone d'Opacité Offensive (Paris, Belles-Lettres). |
| 2002 | Randy Martin publishes The Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia, Temple University Press) which, along with Knowledge Ltd. Toward a Social Logic of the Derivative (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2015), offers a radical analysis of the epistemological as well as socio-political upheavals induced by the development of new financial instruments, such as derivatives. |
| 2005 | Zhao Tingyang published in Chinese The Tianxia System: An Introduction to the Philosophy of a World Institution. |
| 2006 | Ramachandra Guha publishes the book How Much Should a Person Consume? Environmentalism in India and the United States (Berkeley, University of California Press), which questions the unsustainability and injustice of consumption practices promoted by Western culture. |
| 2007 | Denise Fereira da Silva publishes Towards a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press), which traces the history of modern philosophy, highlighting the racist premises and implications of the very definitions of the human, of knowledge and of politics. |
| 2008 | Under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, a text was published that launched the cryptocurrency Bitcoin:A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. |
| 2008 | Reza Negarestani publishes Cyclonopedia. Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne, Re.Press) which articulates petro-power, polemology, philosophy and religion in a hyperstition that disrupts the usual distribution of agentivities between humans and non-humans. |
| 2009 | Delphi Carstens synthesizes and disseminates more widely the notion of hyperstition by putting online an interview with Nick Land "Hyperstition. An Introduction". |
| 2009 | Isabelle Stengers publishes Au temps des catastrophes (Paris, La Découverte) which offers an overview of the relationship between knowledge, planetary habitability and political activism. |
| 2011 | Angela Espinoza & Jon Walker edited and published the book A Complexity Approach to Sustainability (London, World Scientific Europe), which summarizes, popularizes and updates Stafford Beer's Viable System Model (VSM) of management. |
| 2011 | A collection of Nick Land's writings is published as Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, Falmouth, Urbanomic, 2011. |
| 2011 | The neo-pagan activist Starhawk publishes The Empowerment Manual (Cabriola Island, New Society Publishers) which outlines a plurality of possible mobilizations for ecofeminist causes. |
| 2012 | Bruno Latour publishes An Inquiry on the Modes of Existence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) in which fifteen modes of existence are declined, which will inspire the pluralist options and the axes of sensitivities modeled by the TerraForma Corp software: 1° REProduction, 2° METamorphosis, 3° HABit, 4° TEChnique, 5° FICtion, 6° |
| REFerence, 7° POLitics, 8° LAW, 9° RELigion, 10° ATTachment, 11° ORGanization, 12° MORality, 13° NETwork, 14° PREposition, 15° Double Clic. |
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| 2013-2014 | Vitalik Buterin publishes Ethereum White Paper, which paves the way for the possible automation of the management of decentralized organizations, and "DAOs, DACs, DAs and More: An Incomplete Terminology Guide", which provides initial guidance in the coming world of DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations). |
| 2005-2020 | Pierre Bayard published a series of works for the Editions de Minuit that laid the foundations of an "interventionist critique" based on the capacity of literary practices to foresee, predict and influence future events, including Demain est écrit (2005), Le Plagiat par anticipation (2009), Il existe d'autres mondes (2014), Le Titanic fera naufrage (2016), Comment parler des faits qui ne se sont pas produits? (2020) |
| 2015 | Katherine McKittrick publishes Sylvia Wynter's On Being Human As Praxis (Durham, Duke University Press), which presents the thought of this West Indian philosopher, a pioneer of anti-racist and decolonial ecology, calling for the development of practices and knowledge emancipated from the ecocidal model of homo eonomicus.. |
| 2015 | Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens published the book Comment tout peut s'effondrer : petit manuel de collapsologie à l'usage des générations présentes (Paris, Seuil). |
| 2015-2022 | Gwenola Wagon, Stéphane Degoutin, and Pierre Cassou-Noguès develop multimedia works such as World Brain (2015), Psychoanalysis of the International Airport (2016), Welcome to Erewhon (2019), and Virusland (2022), which investigate the technological and imaginary metabolisms generated by our globally extended connection networks. |
| 2016 | Jennifer Gabrys publishes Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), which sets out the basis for a global collection of indicators of the habitability of planet Earth. |
| 2016 | Max Hampshire, Paul Kolling & Paul Seidler begin developing terra0 which explores the creation of hybrid ecosystems in the technosphere, with the goal of experimenting with the multiple ways in which smart contracts can foster the inherent objectality of non-human entities in different social and economic contexts, to learn to recognize and care for their needs. On the technical side, terra0 operates with Ethereum Mainnet, Solidity, OpenCV and React. |
| 2016 | DAO, the title of a venture capital investment fund, is launched on the Ethereum blockchain. Open access, the DAO invites everyone to buy tokens and any project owner to present it to obtain the necessary funding for its launch. An immediate success with a large public allows to collect the equivalent of 250 million US$ in a few months, breaking the previous crowdfunding records. On June 17, an Internet user succeeded in the DAO Hack, which exploited a vulnerability in the DAO's code in order to siphon off the equivalent of US$70 million. This fiasco plummets the dreams of DAO for some time and forces Ethereum - which was not hacked as such, only the specific program of the DAO contained flaws exploited by the hacker - to go back in the chain of time to introduce a branching prior to the hack (hard fork) which allows to reimburse the parties injured by the siphoning. However, the US Securities and Exchange Commision decreed on July 25, 2017 that the DAO should have registered its transactions with it and declared it at fault for not doing so, which signals the death of the DAO. |
| 2016 | Donna Haraway publishes Staying with the Trouble (Durham, Duke University Press), which inspired the TerraForma Corp's practices of "computational disorder" and "disorderly accounting". |
| 2017 | William E. Connolly publishes Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming (Durham: Duke University Press), which offers an in-depth discussion of the notion of planetarity. |
| 2017 | Angela Espinoza & Jon Walker add a chapter entitled "The Global Recursion: A Planetary Society Striving towards Sustainability" to the second edition of their book A Complexity Approach to Sustainability (London, World Scientific Europe) |
| 2017 | A series of messages denouncing collusion between the media, financiers, artists, progressive intellectuals and the Deep State were published under the pseudonym Q on the anonymous forum 4chan7 (then 8kun), giving increasing visibility to a group of American far-right activists soon identified as QAnon. Some hypotheses link this Q to the one whose fictional adventures were imagined by Luther Blissett in 1999. |
| 2018 | Brian Massumi published 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value. A Postcapitalist Manifesto (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press), which lays the foundations for a possible reappropriation of certain financial mechanisms, such as blockchains, for the purpose of social transformation that would allow us to go beyond the modes of valuation on which contemporary capitalism is based on a planetary scale. |
| 2018 | Différentes associations, artistes et chercheurs, localisés principalement en Europe occidentale, interagissant jusque-là à travers de multiples mailing lists et groupes sur réseaux sociaux décident de se fédérer au sein de la TerraForma Corp, dont une première assemblée générale en ligne décrète le lancement, avec un principe d’appartenance ouverte et anonyme pour quiconque souhaitera contribuer à ses travaux et/ou se réclamer d’elle, sur le modèle imaginé par Luther Blissett dans les années 1990. |
| 2018 | Various associations, artists and researchers, mainly located in Western Europe, interacting until then through multiple mailing lists and groups on social networks, decide to federate within the TerraForma Corp, whose first online general assembly decrees the launch, with a principle of open and anonymous membership for anyone who wishes to contribute to its work and/or claim to be part of it, on the model imagined by Luther Blissett in the 1990s. |
| 2018 | Simultaneously with the European condensation of TerraForma Corp, Do Kwon founded Terraform Labs in Seoul, which develops the Terra blockchain as well as the LUNA cryptocurrency, which includes voting rights on proposals submitted to the common governance. As of February 2019, Terra was promoted and supported by a large group of companies and e-commerce platforms called Terra Alliance, with 45 million users in 10 countries and $25 billion in revenue. |
| 2018 | Jennifer Gabrys publishes "Becoming Planetary" in the online journal e-flux Architecture. |
| 2018 | The activities of EUR ArTeC are launched with an inaugural conference by Bruno Latour at the Institut National de l'Histoire de l'Art in Paris. |
| 2018 | The Disnovation.org collective launches its post-growth program (disnovation.org/postgrowth.php), which re-envision social metabolisms by questioning the energies and materialities required, drawing on ecofeminism, indigenous knowledge, environmental accounting and historical materialism. |
| 2019 | Frédérique Aït-Touati, Alexandra Arènes and Axelle Grégoire published Terra Forma. Manuel de cartographies potentielles (Paris, B42) which will deeply influence the activities of the TerraForma Corp by proposing seven alternative conception models of our ways of mapping living habitats: 1° Soil, 2° Point of Life, 3° Living Landscapes, 4° Borders, 5° Space-time, 6° (Re)Sources, 7° Memory(s). The EUR ArTeC invites the authors to present their work as part of a disorientation experience at the Gaité Lyrique. |
| 2019 | Grégory Chatonsky presents the exhibition Second Earth at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, where an automatic life of imagination, thought and even production processes is staged, organized by artificial intelligences on the fringe of human decisions and potentially capable of surviving the latter. |
| 2019 | Benjamin Bratton launches the three-year program The Terraforming 2019 at the Strelka Institute in Moscow and publishes the book of the same name, which explains its presuppositions and aims. The program is interrupted following the invasion of Ukraine by Russian armies in the spring of 2022, but the book is translated into French by EUR ArTeC in the fall of 2021 under the title La Terraformation 2019 (Dijon, Les Presses du réel). |
| 2019 | TerraForma Corp decides to devote two years of work to the re-evaluation of Stafford Beer's Viable System Model with the objective of inventing a computational model that can be integrated into a blockchain to arrange sustainable interactions on a planetary scale for all the living entities involved. |
| 2019 | Patricio Dávila publishes the catalog for the exhibition Diagrams of Power. Visualizing, Mapping and Performing (Eindhoven, Onomatopoeia), which lists the works of various artists proposing "power diagrams", defined "as visual works that represent and communicate ideas or data, but equally as processes that arrange bodies and things", since "a diagram can be used both to show how power is distributed, but it can also itself serve as a vehicle through which that power is distributed". |
| 2019 | Alan Damasio publishes the novel Les furtifs (Paris, La Volte) in which a father in search of his missing daughter joins a military action group tracking down undetectable non-human entities, in a European space controlled by the artificial intelligences of large corporations against which various autonomist insurgencies are fighting. |
| 2019 | Lukáš Likavčan, Introduction to Comparative Planetology (Moscow: Strelka Press) makes explicit the philosophical implications of a planetary approach to political processes by bringing to the forefront of his analysis the infrastructures that simultaneously condition the habitability of urban areas and the damage to the habitability of the entire planet. |
| 2019 | The TerraForma Corp begins to generate first work reports, sent to different media outlets, some of which are integrated anonymously into Cora Novirus' Primer on Bifurcations, published as a special issue 80 of the journal Multitudes in the fall of 2020. |
| 2019 | Theo Deutinger published the book Ultimate Atlas. Logbook of Spaceship Earth (Zürich, Lars Müller), which quantifies in one-dimensional form a sample of indicators of the Earth's habitation patterns and habitability parameters. |
| 2019 | Ingrid Diran & Antoine Traisnel publish in the n° 47-3 of the journal Diacritics the article "The Birth of Geopower" which critically reviews the relationship between planetarity and geopolitical realities. |
| 2019 | Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty publishes "The Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category" in issue 46 of Critical Inquiry, which shows the upheaval imposed on our categories of political thought by the notion of planetarity. |
| 2019 | Malcolm Ferdinand published Une écologie décoloniale. Penser l'écologie depuis le monde caribéen (Paris, Seuil), which articulates the needs and challenges of a decentralization of the premises of ecology, in order to integrate the needs and contributions of non-eurocentric perspectives. |
| 2020 | Holly Jean Buck publishes After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration (New York, Verso) in which she calls on environmentalists to discern which forms of geoengineering should be rejected at all costs and which may be acceptable, as well as to consider the need for global governance to accompany these climate change mitigation technologies. |
| 2020 | The website CryptoArt.wtf posts a carbon impact calculator for NFTs that is causing lasting controversy among blockchain advocates and users in the environmentally-minded art community. |
| 2020 | Founded the Earth Viability Center, whose research programs study the habitability of the Earth at local and global scales, and which publishes viability indicators monitoring the state of the Earth Life Support System (ELSS), based on Stafford Beer's Viable System Model (http://www.earthviability.org/dashboard/). |
| 2020 | L The collective COALA (Coalition of Automated Legal Applications) proposes the DAO Model Law which allows to give a legal personality to DAOs and to put them in harmony with transnational law. |
| 2020 | The State of Wyoming officially accredits the legal existence of DAOs by giving them the same rights as limited liability companies. |
| 2020 | Vladan Joler posts the diagram New Extractivism. Assemblage of Concepts and Allegories (www.extractivism.work) which proposes a mapping of the social, political and ecological planetary implications of the operation of platform capitalism. |
| 2021 | Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou are launching the website Feral Atlas. The more than human Anthropocene which aims to document on a global scale the places where ecologies have developed that are encouraged by human infrastructure but beyond human control, these infrastructural effects of ferality being typical of the Anthropocene. |
| 2021 | TerraForma Corp is postponing the launch of the financial side of its DAO for 2024 or 2025. In the meantime, it is experimenting with the possibility of setting up a DAO whose tokens are detached from any monetary investment. What is registered, valued and exchanged on the blockchain is measured in work time, in barter for members sharing the same geographical location or in "evangelical contribution" not monetized but quantified in "Respect", which becomes the most commonly used currency (under the notation RSPCT). Instead of the energy-intensive Proof-of-Work systems (on which Bitcoin is based), the Corp's experimental blockchain is based on the principle of "Proof-of-Respect": the value of a contribution is arbitrated by an estimate of the Terra.com AI, which computes to the best of its computational ability the possible effects of the contribution in question on its near and far, human and non-human environments. The sum of these effects constitutes the "influence" of the evaluated action. This computation fulfills the function of the S4 of the Viable System Model theorized by Stafford Beer. The value of the RSPCT corresponds to the result of this calculation when x > 0. |
| 2021 | Emmanuel Bonnet, Diego Landivar & Alexandre Monnin publish the book Héritage et fermeture. Une écologie du démantèlement (Paris, Divergences) which articulates the notion of "negative commons", defined as infrastructures that only nourish our present lives by rotting our future living environments, with the necessity to prepare the dismantling of such infrastructures. |
| 2021 | The magazine Multitudes publishes a special issue 86 dedicated to the questions of Planetarities. |
| 2021 | The members of the DIU meet at the École des vivants hosted by Alain Damasio for working days on terraformation. |
| 2021 | Maud Maffei & Grzegorz Pawlak are organizing the States of Terraforming conference at the Sorbonne University in Paris. |
| 2021 | Nephtys Zwer & Philippe Rekacewicz publish the book Cartographie radicale. Explorations (Paris, La Découverte) which critically reviews the multiple ways in which the sciences and certain arts have represented territories and their inhabitants, helping to imagine other ways of visualizing and modeling the habitability of the planet. |
| 2021 | Stefano Harney & Fred Moten publish All Incomplete (Wivenhoe, Minor Compositions), which expands the thinking in Undercommons. Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe, Minor Compositions, 2013) to expose the racism inherent in the extractivist modes of production, governance, and logistics that propagate a bureaucratic and accounting anti-sociality on a planetary scale that threatens its livability. |
| 2021 | Camille de Toledo publishes Le fleuve qui voulait écrire. Les auditions du parlement de Loire (Paris, Les Liens qui Libèrent), which mobilizes the resources of literature to help humans understand what a non-human entity such as a river would need to express to preserve the habitability of our planet. Comparable approaches have been developed for years around the Atrato River in Colombia, the Ganges River in India and the Whanganui River in New Zealand. |
| 2022 | TerraForma Corp is making available the artificial intelligence it has been working on for two years, Terra.com, as the first attempt at a planetary scale computation of the needs of the various living entities that make up our terrestrial environments. The design is based on Stafford Beer's Viable System Model. |
| 2022 | Aliocha Imhoff & Kantuta Quirós publish their book Qui parle? (pour les non-humains) (Paris, PUF) in which they review different forms of research-creation practices imagined and implemented in recent years to put humans in touch with non-humans. |
| 2022 | A class action lawsuit was launched in Northern California on June 17 against Terraform Labs and its founder Do Kwon on charges of selling unregistered financial securities, thereby misleading investors. A month earlier, Do Kwon and Terraform Labs were fined $78 million in South Korea. In July, following the collapse of Terra, it was revealed that a $3.6 billion fund had been concealed for use in LUNA price manipulation and money laundering operations. |
| 2022 | The Raffard-Roussel collective presents its Stackographie d'une trottinette électrique at the Fiminco Foundation in Romainville, laying the foundations for a multifactorial analysis of the influence/impact of an electric scooter on human social and psychic formations as well as on the habitability of the planet. |
| 2022 | Ruth Catlow & Penny Rafferty publish the book Radical Friends. Decentralized Autonomous Organisations and the Arts (London, Torque Editions) which brings together a wide range of statements, analyses and proposals on the artistic and activist uses of DAOs. |
| 2022 | Jennifer Gabrys publishes Citizens of Worlds: Open-Air Toolkits for Environmental Struggle (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press), which catalogues, analyzes, promotes, and disseminates multiple ways that people from different cultures and places around the world record, collect, and process environmental data in their environmental mobilizations. |
| 2022 | On September 15, Ethereum switches from the energy-intensive Proof-of-Work mechanism, also used by Bitcoin, to a Proof-of-Stake mechanism. This operation, called The Merge, is happening without any technical bugs, after a 50% increase in the value of the cryptocurrency, followed by a slight drop of 15% the day after the operation. |
| This allowed the blockchain to reduce its energy consumption by 99.95%. |
|
| 2022 | Le DIU présente un panorama des recherches menées avec la TerraForma Corp lors des Rencontres ArTeC tenues les 5 et 6 octobre à la Cité Internationale des Arts. |
| 2023 | The DIU presents an overview of the research conducted with the TerraForma Corp during the ArTeC Meetings held on October 5 and 6 at the Cité Internationale des Arts. |
| 2025 | TerraForma Corp officially redefines its form of corporeality as that of a "vibrational conspiracy". |
| 2031 | TerraForma Corp abandons its project of financializing its blockchain operations in the cryptocurrency framework. A computational model in the process of being operationalized automatically translates conspiratorial vibrations into RSPCT values. |
Detailed outline
Terraforma
corp
ANNUAL REPORT 2024
Executive Report
Chronology
Agossou Allangbe & Lucas Botta
Terraforming the Ageing Subjectivities
Nina Blagojevic
Building a Plant Fueled by Gamers: a Puzzle in our Hybrid Representations of Nature and Technology
Thomas Courtois
T R B R
Paul Esteoulle
Incompiuto: Art as a Band-aid to the Earth's Crust?
Jacob Jean-Jacques
Teachings from the LIVATKE Camping Cultural Experiment in Haiti: Three Forms of Resistance to the High-Modernist Wreckage of our Planet
Zahra Karimi
Save the Planet, Kill Your (Rich) Self! (A Modest Proposal)
Lena Karson
What Can We Learn from a (slightly-failed) Workshop to Play with (Un-Emerged) Conflicts
Benito Maramaldi
The Ring (text)
Chloé Viala & Jacob Jean-Jacques
(titre?)film
Loïs Vioques
Gapography: an Experiment in Differentiating Points of Life
Ava Zafari
Open Source Education and DIY Culture in the Digital Age
Three Hippotheses on Planetary Dwelling
These three entries, collected by Yves Citton, address issues raised in relation with the texts and films discussed during the 2024 TerraForma Corp MIP. As hippotheses, these entries are less to be seen as scientific or philosophical propositions to be supported or refuted experimentally (although this could very well be one of their very desirable format) but rather as (somewhat wild) “horses” (hippos in Greek) who feel free to run away from their master’s control in order to explore uncharted territories by leaps and bounds.
Reversibility of Infrastructural Interventions
James C. Scott suggests that State interventions should “favor reversibility” so that “they can be easily undone if they turn out to be mistakes”. How is that possible and what would be an example of such a reversibility? This could be made clearer by the distinction proposed by Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge between code/space and coded space. In a “code/space”, the possibility to operate is made dependent upon the proper functioning of a code: for example, in an airport, all of the operations of check-in (passenger, luggage, etc.) are commanded and coordinated by software; should this computer operating this software break down, everything is paralyzed. Once you digitalize your check-in operation, there is no reversibility: in a code/space, you become dependent on the apparatus. In what Kitchin and Dodge call a “coded space”, on the contrary, you can improve your operations by using coded technologies, but you keep the possibility to do without: for example, when one makes a presentation with a diaporama in a powerpoint, should the computer or videoprojector break down, one can still present one’s paper (by describing what the audience should have seen, had the powerpoint been accompanied the oral discourse). Somewhat similarly, the State can “favor reversibility” when it edits laws that compel manufacturers to make it possible for users and repair agents to open their device (by not gluing it, by using standard screws, by providing diagrams and instructions on how to repair them, etc.) There seems to be many examples of policies that can “favor reversibility” in State interventions. The question is: how can we push manufacturers, city planners, designers in logistics to go in that direction? Through which incentives? Doesn’t it run against the very fiber of capitalist competition which attempts to lock-in customers in non-reversible paths of consumption/spending/revenues?
References:
James C. Scott, Seeing like a State, New Haven, Yale UP, 1998, p. 345.
Rob Kitchin & Martin Dodge, Code/Space. Software and Everyday Life, Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 2011.
A Distinction between Automated Sentience and Automated Imagination
What are the dangers of the use of Artificial Intelligence in Terraforming activities. Benjamin Bratton invites us to think that we should put automation to the service of preserving and enhancing the co-habitability of the Earth, but is there a risk to see AI run wild and lead us towards even more destructive operations? One useful distinction is provided by the difference between Automated Sentience and Automated Imagination, too often confused under the deceptive term of “Artificial Intelligence”. Automated sentience plays a key role, Bratton argues, in making us aware of climate change: millions of captors, cameras, thermometers, hygrometers linked to computing devices help us document the worrying evolutions in climatic trends (well beyond mere meteorological variations). Our eyes and ears and skins are fine-tuned to catch meteorological changes in temperature, humidity and the like, but our life-spans, our senses and our practical intelligence is ill-equipped to anticipate changes in climate conditions. We need media (written records, external memory, communication through time and space, etc.) to augment our sentience to climate change.
Automated imagination (as provided by Dall-E, Stable Diffusion or chat-GPT) recombines massive data to make it adaptable to our prompts. It does not make us aware of how the world is; it assists us in perceiving how masses of other humans have perceived it, and it assists us in reimagining it in different ways. Within Automated sentience (aka “surveillance”), some devices can be put to dangerous use, for instance when an authoritarian State wants to tightly control its population and repress dissensus. But it should also be seen as a necessary condition to get a better understanding and a better grasp on large-scale trends that are in great part invisible to our limited senses and life-experience.
Reference:
Benjamin Bratton, The Terraforming 2019, Moscow, Strelka Institute, 2019.
Issa Samb: How to Relate to Objects
Excerpts from The Shell. A conversation between Issa Samb and Antje Majewski,
Dakar 2010
From the moment you pick up an object, the moment an object reaches you, or the
moment that something draws you towards an object of your own choice, and you have the impression that it is the object itself that attracts you… Once we have an object in our possession, we begin to realize that there has to be a relationship between that object and ourselves. Trying to find out what kind of relationship this is means beginning to cross-examine ourselves and this attraction, which has been exorcised from within us and has steered us towards the object. For example, let’s imagine that object over there is a present. It’s a hand: one hands over a present. The present acquires meaning, has meaning. But is it what we think the object says that helps us to relate to it? Or is it the meaning that we give to the object ourselves, which provides it with meaning? Or is the meaning of the object to be found in the hands of the person who chose it and handed it to us? That is a question which can be found on the level of three axes. But personally, when faced with such a situation, I immediately undertake a quest to research the word of the object, for and of itself. What the object says. Says. What does the object say? For example, if you say that it’s an object that comes to us from China, then—even if we have a perspective on the object that helps us to better understand it—it is necessary to go deeper into its meaning in relation to the place that it originates from. As a socialized cultural object. […] What is important now, starting with its trajectory, is the meaning, the existence, the function that you will give to the object from now on. It is not ruled out that when giving it meaning—perhaps new meaning—you will take the cultural meaning into account that people, an individual or the culture that produced it, gave to it as a social function. Let’s imagine that the objects may be lead soldiers or Buddhas—there is always a cultural polysemy, a possibility that is offered to you. At any rate, today, when it comes to objects and their circulation, it is important—very, very, very important—for the understanding of people and cultures that every object that is imported from one country to another, from one hand to another, from one sector or territory to another, and yet another, should be considered charged with an entire history: the history of the individual who made the object if it is a manufactured object, or the history of the people, nature, country or space from which the object reaches us, if it never experienced the human hand on the level of manufacturing.
Each meteorite says something. Says something about nature and the whole history of nature. Each one. Likewise each leaf that may fall in this garden here, and that passes from the situation of being a natural leaf to becoming an object, moving from here to there, adopts a position, which participates in the definition of the whole ensemble in front of us. And beyond this location, the whole peninsula of Dakar, and beyond the peninsula the whole continent, and beyond the continent the whole world. It is not a question of interactivity, neither is it even a question of interference. It is a question of the inter-relationships of living things, which are inexplicably related to one another today. And objects are there, I think, simply to help people to understand one another better. To understand better. Your object,wherever this object comes from in China, brings all of China with it. Even if it is the tiniest of objects, it carries all of China within it. So, you hold in your hands all the possible and imaginable means for getting to know China and beyond. Now, you’ll need to go into detail.[…]
In the case of the world, the world had a beginning and has evolved, and people participate in its progress to the very end. And when a leaf falls in spring, it indicates more than the seasons. When we move the head of the sculpture over there, it’s because an event has taken place over here, has been activated here, and that means one has to give a head to the object, a nailed head to another object in iron with a whole body in stone, a head. That cycle is about passing on to a further stage. It’s by following a daily activity that creation continues. Man is thus a creator by nature, natural man. Being an artist is a lowly profession, a bourgeois profession, but man—creation, the artist—exists in all men, in all human beings, who do something every day, which we are used to calling development. I prefer to speak of fulfilling oneself, the community, and beyond that, mankind.
Man has to create his past in order to project himself into the future. The way a snake casts its skin. You don’t have to undo yourself, but you have to create your past. You have to accept it as it is. And when you are an artist, you have to work the process of your transformation, because it is through this transformation that the future is born. It is this metempsychosis, this metamorphosis or this meta—or rather, this transmutation. Everyone needs to mutate, especially those who create, and they have to accept that. This takes place from the start through socialized cultural objects. A direction is taken, a difficult, complex one for sure, but it is perhaps one of the best directions to take because it allows for an understanding of the Other. That sets us free, it gives us an attitude on the world that says, ah, we, we are not alone in the world. I, who thought I was the only daughter of my mother, I realize that my father is in fact the mother of my father, and so on. And objects, they allow for a lot of things… But respect is necessary and that is the most difficult thing to achieve from a Western perspective. It is very, very difficult to consider the object in and of itself, to grant it another energy charge over and above a superficial one, or the one that a machine may have given it. Because we know it to be fortuitous that we are unwilling to grant that stone this energy, this word that force without seeing a god, a unique creator in front of us. And even with the death of God, mechanical or industrial civilizations don’t want to go that far. Because it would mean facing up to a unique creator. And this brings us back to polysemy. We would like to give objects a new meaning, several meanings. We would want there to be several meanings. But there is still the refusal to accept that beyond the meaning we give or that people give to socialized cultural objects, there is the meaning that objects give to themselves, which we haven’t created. But we have to have the courage to take that step. To recognize that beyond the fact of being able to charge up the object, to charge it up ourselves, the object in and of itself possesses a force, a life that signifies, and does so independently of our volition, of our needs, of our wishes and our aesthetic concerns to make objects go in those directions that we indicate to them. That is why if we leave them in their place, they remain in their place. But since we know this, we now have to help them to change place. If we don’t help that object there to change place, it won’t do it by itself. And even the most powerful wind that exists won’t be able to lift it. And the most destructive fire that exists won’t burn it because, even if it burns to a cinder… This will just take us back to the arguments between the creationists and the materialists. But these are rear-guard arguments.
Those contemporary artists who think they know their past and who know they are too late with regard to this past, and later still with regard to their future—because they’re waiting for a future that they themselves have to create—find themselves in a situation where they have refused until now to treat an object for what it is in the simplest way, through the corporeal, by incorporation, by decorporation, by getting hold of matter, and by handling it. If we understand objects merely through a promotional sales pitch, we hear a lot of words. But that’s the salesman speaking, even if he is doing it in the name of science. Okay, so he improvises a little, makes up messages and codes for the object beyond the meanings given to the object by the initial producer. The more the object passes from hand to hand, the less it will be charged and the more it will discharge, like a briefcase, an object which carries the tale of all the hands that have held it, all the people, all their looks, and all the locations. Let’s assume that you are going to place your objects here. They’ll acquire meaning from here, they will share this meaning with the things that are here, and this goes right into the heart of the object. Inevitably. And wherever you will place them—in your studio, in an apartment, on the street, or mislaid somewhere in a station—this object will carry meaning with it, the history of this country, the history of the men of this country, the women of this country, the history of the birds that will migrate soon and perhaps take the same trajectory they took either before or after the object arrived. That’s normal. […]
Objects speak their own language. The wind speaks. It speaks its own language. Birds speak. They speak their own language. There you are. Personally, I think that with an object that was born in China, and that makes a trip from China to Europe, from Europe to Africa and from Africa to Europe, you can’t say that this object is meaningless. Even if you wanted to deprive it of meaning and make nonsense of it. Even if you felt like doing that, you couldn’t. Or if you did, it would be an arbitrary, scientifically inadmissible decision. And if you did it simply for an intellectual peer group or for some kind of aesthetic snobbism then you would be doing something very fascistic and dangerous. Because through the object you would be denying the culture of the Other. That is terrible. You would be denying all its charge. Because no matter how small an object is, even if it is an object that breaks quickly—because which of the mass-produced goods by the Chinese, Japanese, or European market wouldn’t break quickly—it still brings with it the whole of China and beyond China, all of humanity. So the problem is not that the object breaks quickly; the problem is that the object that breaks quickly, that has come to us from China—what moment in the historical time of China does it bring with it? It brings that moment in which China heads off into a new direction down the capitalist road of development in the face of globalization, a globalization which doesn’t permit the polite rivalry of deferential bows, the story of nice people. It is a ferocious rivalry. An object has to be ready to get onto the market quickly. You have to go in there fast to sell it. It has to break fast, so you sell it quickly in order to make money. That object there carries meaning. It teaches us about ideological situations not just in China but in the globalized world system. Globalization as the dominant ideology of the current world.
References:
La coquille. Une conversation entre Issa Samb and Antje Majewski, Dakar 2010,
[online] French transcription : [here]. English transcription: [here]
Terraforming and Subjectivity Formation : Text
Agossou Allangbe & Lucas Botta
Terraforming and Subjectivity Formation
In this brief reflection, we will attempt to reassess the ways rich Western societies treat their elder citizens in light of the modes of terraforming that have bee deployed by capitalism over the last century. Our premise is that there is a terraforming of our inner subjectivities that accompanies the terraforming of our external environment. Often represented in the collective consciousness as an instance separated from, but complementary to, objectivity, the idea of subjectivity has often been separated and banned from scientific practice and public debate, on the grounds that tolerating this aspect of human existence would stain the research process in its search for more and more accurate theories about the natural world, or on the suspicion that it would incentivise misleading “ideological” discourses. But at least since the 1980s, with authors such as Guattari and Lourau, different ways to understand such a phenomenon have been proposed. In academic fields such as psychology, philosophy and sociology, new debates have taken place on subjectivity as an actual product of social and material conditions, more than as a transcendent fact of human “nature”. This has been accompanied by abundant psychopathological discussions on phenomena such as the hike in ADHD diagnoses in the 2000s or the recent birth of the category of “eco-anxiety”.
It is useful to link such a perspective to Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT), a method and form of interpreting scientific progress not as made up of isolated facts and hypotheses that justify themselves in their similitude with observable reality, but as actors, human and non-human, connected in an open-ended, multifactorial network, that will perpetuate and legitimize certain practices as long as the connection within the network can be maintained. As such, specific subjectivities and modes of subjectivation are inserted in the research practices present at a certain time, at a certain place. That way, the multiplicities of factors that shaped a certain subjectivity through a childhood in rural France during the 1910s, the 1960s or during the 2010s are very different in a wide range of aspects that may go from geopolitical crises to changes in common familial dynamics or institutional relationships: the techno-socio-political networks that produced subjectivities in each period were very different from each other, and so were the resulting subjectivities. As life will move on and material culture and technology will change, so will the networks, who will interact in a new way with the aging subjectivity, shaped in dialog with the previous networks it connects itself with.
Very predominant in Deleuze and Guattari’s books on Capitalism and Schizophrenia, capitalist modernity also plays an important role in this subjectivation of the inhabitants of the Western world. This social evolution can be characterized by the decomposition of rural, communitarian family structures into bourgeois nuclear families by the rural exodus, by the birth of nationalism, by the colonization of land through which it loses its ancestral meaning to its inhabitants, by the industrial disciplinary business-oriented social-structure in which most of one's time is spent at work. These are but a few examples of changes brought upon social life by switching of modes of production. It has been accentuated even more by the last thirty years of neoliberal hegemony, renowned for its ‘atomizing’ capabilities, individualistic ethos, entrepreneurial culture and international corporations-driven value production.
Similarly, capitalism also marked a new age in terraforming: extractivism, industrial economies and globalization have shaped a new ecology, in which urban centers take a central position, being spaces from which institutional and economic power flows, changing even more ecosystems and social groupings. Parallel to such a systemic change and fundamental for its viability, scientific advancements have given unparalleled longevity to populations in some areas of the globe, longevity which it never really developed a infrastructure to serve. As people live longer, they age in very different conditions than what was known by their ancestors.
Ageing Under the Pressure of Ableism
We can turn to disability studies to find two important concepts in order to analyze the unprecedented condition of ageing in the richest countries of the 21st century. First, the idea of disability has shifted away from is biomedical origins since the 1980s: originally referring to the individual inadequacy to normative health parameters, the “new” social model understands that divergent existences are a fundamental part of existence. Their dismissal is now increasingly perceived as an act of oppression. Disability gets to be understood as the inadequacy of the social structures to accept the legitimate existence of differing realities. According to this new sensibility, disability isn't so much located in the body of someone who requires a wheelchair, but in the non-existence of an infrastructure capable of accommodating such a body. This new perspective sheds light on the phenomena of structural ableism, in a sense defining the subjectivities of those who live through it with the help of the biomedical model.
Secondly, the idea of “psychosocial disabilities” has been put forward, referring to a change of perspective from the physical disabilities, discussed by in the previous decades, to psychosocial aspects of life, such as the inadequacies of a certain attentional regime to the institutionally required modus operandi. When grasping such concepts, it is interesting to transpose them to other situations, in this case, to ageing: it is easy to see how the elderly within a modern society are affected by its various forms of ableism, subjected to its constraints and even “subjectivized” by its oppressive demands.
The decay of physical and cognitive functions is a well attested phenomenon in ageing, and though it may have painful consequences for those who live through it and their social networks, and there may be various strategies to slow down its progress. While it is a fairly natural occurring, by contrast, what does not have to be natural is the social isolation and the artificial obstacles raised by various forms of ableism that characterize this moment of life in rich Western societies. Because of the lack of infrastructure and because of the fear of not meeting the ableist demands, elders experiencing their loss of motion and memory will interact less and less with the world outside of their homes, further accentuating their loss and suffering. Similarly, life in an ableist society will often produce subjectivities who reject the experience of disability, even their own. So individuals who develop disabilities later in life can often struggle and disavow their bodies and experiences as legitimate ways to live. Such denial, in turn, will only further psychological suffering and blind individuals from taking actions that could better their situations and find ways of adapting to them.
Likewise, subjectivities inserted in urban infrastructures that favour nuclear, atomized, family structures and work-driven values and communities will often end up alienating such a population, mainly in the less wealthy social classes. As pride, purpose, self-worth and companionship can sometimes only be found at work in such a social configuration, retirement can often be experienced less as a time to reap what you’ve sown during your adult life, than as a solitary slog. Such an isolation, coupled with a lack of familiarity with the internet, which plays an increasingly central role in our techno-sociality, can leave seniors vulnerable not only to personal suffering, but also to political misappropriations. Such subjectivities can be co-opted and instrumentalized by ill-intended political campaigns, that can bring them in into extremist groups where they can find purpose, community and meaning to their suffering. The price to be payed may then be the strict adherence to a distorted worldview, frequently influenced by conspiracy theories. A prime example of this is the Bolsonarist movement in Brazil, where the high participation of the elderly population has been highlighted in rallies and internet misinformation groups, often motivated by fear-mongering fake-news.
There is another source of suffering for this population, which brings us to a last return to the idea of the social model of disability and the lack of adaptation of the internet. It is the growing gap between the subjective components of elderly individuals and the rhythm of change and technological advancements in this new era globalized society. In fact, the world and forces which have produced the subjectivity of a 70 year old man doesn’t exist anymore, and this rapid change in the meanings and signs of the world is bound to leave him uncomfortable, if not distressed. These feelings are mostly caused by the lack of opportunities to familiarize oneself with these new diagrams, in societies where few institutions actively try to bridge that gap that can only create different forms of vulnerability.
Managing Old Age
But subjectivity isn't only a product of the material and social conditions imposed by the economic system that envelops and sustains us. It is also an active ingredient in its reproduction. Without a subjectivity tuned to its particular dynamics, no economic system can prosper. Subjects not only enact the economy, enjoy and suffer from it; they also maintain it on its course. As explored in Les Fossoyeurs by Victor Castanet, the current treatment of the old age is an attested case of such a dynamic. To better understand the elder subjectivity as it is manipulated by capitalism, it is interesting to refer to anthropologist James Scott’s book Seeing like a State. In its introduction, our attention is directed towards the enormous hardship that is the sedentarization of man. « Efforts to permanently settle these mobile peoples (sedentarization) seemed to be a perennial state project - perennial, in part, because it so seldom succeeded. 1 » This sedentarisation is the result of a certain form of management, of social organization. « The social simplifications thus introduced not only permitted a more finely tuned system of taxation and conscription but also greatly enhanced state capacity 2 ». This new organization is compared to the organizational model of bees, creating what Scott refers to as « discriminating interventions of every kind, such as public-health measures, political surveillance, and relief for the poor 3 ». All management implies surveillance and control, standardization and de-subjectified protocols. Scott takes the development of forestry in the 19th century as an example of modern management: trees are re-evaluated according to extractivist protocols which reduce them to what Marx would call their “exchange value”, i.e., the monetary value that can be obtained through their commercialization on a soon-to-become planetary market.
The same process can be observed in Castanet’s Les Fossoyeurs, about elderly people instead of trees. Castanet elaborates on old age as a form of subjectivity subjected to control through the analysis of a big corporation specialized in the management of French EHPAD (shelter establishments for elderly, dependent people). This corporation is called ORPEA: its goal is the extraction of profit out of the handling of the elderly. Within ORPEA’s commercial logic, it is impossible to be sheltered and cared for if the interested party’s income hasn't reached the desired amount set up by the commercial viability and interest of the company.
But the need to maximize profit goes further. As an example, Mrs Rousselle, who did not have any specific need for a lady companion to care for her mother, 82 years old and fragile, was led to hire one. She had to pay 800 euros monthly to have a lady companion, « together with the monthly 7200 euros she already paid the group 4». The elderly have become a niche to be exploited. As soon as profits are on the table, it doesn't matter who’s on the line. What matters is how a subjectivity can be convinced of the necessity of ORPEA’s service.
The main question raised by Castanet’s investigation is the following: does ORPEA really follow up on the benefits it promises to the families that trust their relative to them? The answer shocked the French public when the book came out, raising a scandal, a trial and a flurry of new legislation. Not only does the Rousselle family pays its 800 euros to the lady companion of their mother each month, but that service for which they pay is in fact not fulfilled. The lady companion is supposed to help feed Mrs Rousselle’s mother, to get her dressed, to watch her eat and drink. But ORPEA’s demand surprise Mrs Rousselle:
Instead of having an ally, Mrs Rousselle has the sentiment that the “lady companion”, who’s linked to the directors, is against her. She demands to be warned before each visit. Mrs Rousselle complies and then finds her mother impeccable, wearing all her jewelry. The “lady companion” monitors most of the visitation time and doesn't seem to miss a single word of the conversation. 5
One could understand the importance of signaling to those who take care of a parent before visiting said family member. But it soon appears that this need of preliminary warning is linked to the fact that parents in such institutions are frequently abandoned and overlooked. It is frequently the case that the promised work cannot be accomplished. One of this paper’s authors can testify it is the case, having worked in EHPAD himself. One afternoon, Mrs Rousselle
forgot to warn the “lady” and came unannounced to the residence; the reception was slightly different: “I found, she said to Victor Castanet, mother alone in her chamber. She was barefoot, naked, under heavy AC; she was shivering from the cold. The “lady companion” intervened quickly, warned by someone, and explained that the caretakers must have forgotten something, that she had to be absent that morning to take care of another resident, that the institution had nothing to do with it… 6
More incidents followed, like various forms of overbilling by the ORPEA group, with a formal notice to be issued within 48 hours, despite Mrs Rousselle’s decision to leave the group. This is but one example of manipulation and intimidation from the ORPEA group, which can be seen as a typical example of an agent-network tuned to the capitalist system. Profits are the ultimate goal, not good care of the elderly. The real priority is income, the accumulation of capital for capital’s sake, by any means necessary – not so much within the compass of the law as within the compass of what can be documented and successfully used in a court of law. The extractivist logic illustrated by Scott in the terraforming of forest from the 19th century on, with the ecocidal consequences we are now facing, is the same that guides how ORPEA manages human beings at this later stage of their life.
Alterraforming Our Common Care for the Elderly
Now more than ever, themes such as aging, subjectivity-formation and ecology should be thought of as interconnected. The harshest questions that challenge elderliness today cannot be faced without adopting a multidisciplinary approach. Alienation, isolation and abuse need to be seen as the causes of suffering, but also as the consequences of bigger, societal, terraforming choices, that question the fundamental constitution of our being. Contrary to the TINA moto (There Is No Alternative) promoted in certain circles, many alternatives may be proposed, as the ways forward are multiple.
A first direction would consider new forms of urbanism. Car-centric cities have long dominated infrastructure projects and urban-growth policy, making it difficult for those who can’t drive or travel long distances to have access to social life. As we age, all of us will have to stop driving, which is close to a social death sentence in suburban American Way of Life. So truly accessible public transport, and more importantly, walkable cities, including for wheelchairs, are a must, without whom the elder will continue to be second class citizens. Street-wide walkways and square benches should be reinstated as places of socialization, instead of being bulldozed to build better roads and parking spaces.
Beyond the infrastructure of walls and roads and public transportation, the activities welcoming the senior should be made abundant and accessible. Sport groups are interesting phenomena, helping create bonds in the territory, slowing the effect of bodily, psychological and social degradation, while teaching those present how to continuously engage in the physical wellbeing of their peers. Projects such as urban agriculture and gardens can do a great job at connecting a population to the land they inhabit and to the community around them, as those are frequently places of contact between individuals. More generally, any opportunity to work on collective goals and achievements is welcome, as group efforts involving the seniors can bring about more beauty and prosperity to their neighborhood, as well as helping in the colossal balancing act of small scale green-activism to combat industrial pollution and to reclaim land for those who live on it. This can effectively contribute to a counter-hegemonic terraforming proposition, which is always, by extension, the proposition and defense of a different kind of subjectivity, and of ways that we can produce it.
This counter-hegemonic “alterraforming” can find its inspiration in the ways other non-modern cultures have handled ageing. In many African societies, the elder are still the object of forms of respect and communal care from which rich Western societies would have a lot to learn. Even in economically “under-developed” conditions, the last years of one’s life can be made much more human than under ORPEA’s management – mostly because other forms of subjectivation prevail.
As already stated, it is only through approaching these questions in terms of multifactorial networks that we may truly propose solutions that can address the complexity of such challenges. Proposing a new subjectivity is proposing a new social and work organization, a new material configuration and ecology, a new definition of “being human as a praxis 7” and with it, the rights to a new ageing contract, one that can be marked by much less cruelty, prejudice, and precarity, and by much more connection, care and meaning.
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John C. Scott, Seeing Like a State, New Haven : Yale University Press, 1998, p.1. ↩
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Idem, p.3. ↩
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Ibidem. ↩
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Victor Castanet, Les Fossoyeurs, Paris : Editions J’ai Lu, 2023, p.49. ↩
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Idem, p.49. ↩
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Ibidem, pp.49-50. ↩
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Sylvia Wynter, « Unparalleled Catastrophe for our Species, an interview », in Katherine McKittrick, ed. Sylvia Winter : On Being Human As Praxis, Durham, Duke UP, 2015. ↩
Building a Plant Fueled by Gamers: a Puzzle in our Hybrid Representations of Nature and Technology
Having obtained a Bachelor in Fine Arts, Nina Blagojevic has decided to pursue her studies by following a double Master’s course related to art and technology. One is graduate school ArTeC which is a creative research program, and the other one is named ATI (Art et Technologie de l’image), the latter being centered around practical usage of technology through programming, game design, animation, film making, etc. Both are held at the Université Paris 8 of Saint-Denis, France.
In this article, I attempt to delve into the evolving relationship between humanity, technology and nature in the contemporary world. I am trying to reflect on the increasing integration of digital technologies in our everyday lives, and examine their impact on our individual but also societal experiences and dynamics. Therefore, to understand the different meanings we give to our sense of self and our role within a rapidly changing world.
The love I have for digital creation was born during the time of Covid, a period which reinforced the feeling of being outside of time, but which also made it possible to represent other realities through the virtual (or TikTok trends like Reality Shifting). It opened temporary loopholes which have widened the distance between the real and the virtual, or rather which have meant that we now filter what we receive and what we perceive as coming from the real – and what we can decide not to see. This leads me to think that we can continue to live in fictitious realities, without disturbing (almost) anyone, except ourselves, who are the first victims of this type of metadependence. Today we are talking about extended reality, where (among other things) virtual reality and augmented reality mix. Our environment is constantly evolving – and we ourselves are constantly stimulated.
While the industrialization of our societies has kept growing over the centuries, reaching new heights with the advent of the internet and more advanced technologies, we have distanced ourselves from the natural world. As we prioritize technological progress, we risk becoming increasingly indifferent to the diverse ways of being and living that exist beyond our human-centric viewpoint. Donna Haraway's insightful work, When Species Meet, sheds light on the complex relationships between humans and non-human beings, urging us to recognize our interdependence within the natural world. By ignoring this interconnectedness and by continuing to exploit nature solely for our own gain, we not only harm the ecosystems that support us, but we also undermine our own well-being. As we navigate the challenges posed by advancing technologies, Haraway's perspective reminds us of the importance of reimagining our relationship with the world around us and embracing a more inclusive and empathic approach to cohabitation on this planet.
Curating Capitalism
I can’t help but notice that contemporary art seems to have shifted towards an omnipresence of new technologies as new mediums in art practice. This makes me think of the latest immersive exhibitions I got to experience in the last couple of months, in Paris. Almost a year ago, the Grand Palais Ephémère held a festival that promoted new media art, called Palais Augmenté. On their website, it warns its visitors that they should prepare prior to their visit and come with a fully charged phone. This is explained by the fact that many artworks used augmented reality, and therefore could not be seen without looking through the screen of a (modern) phone. After downloading the needed app on my parent’s phone and explaining its usage, we were finally able to wander around the space and scan some artwork.
While some artworks were truly interesting and well done, I became tired of the seemingly corporate style curation which emphasized a deep fascination towards new technologies, rather than focusing on the individual stories of the artists. Another similar exhibition was held by Galerie Charlot in collaboration with 36 degrés, which is a curating and production company focusing on hybrid installations. Both exhibitions were supported by prestigious partners such as Samsung or L’Oréal.
While many artists use technology as a tool of experimentation and misappropriation, by ‘hijacking’ the technology’s main purpose, the frontier between a theoretical and critical artwork, and a piece of art filled with void, can be quite challenging to define. I started to look deeper into the notion of technocapitalism and how it has been used within the art field, and I stumbled upon a nice surprise, Pierre Guillet de Monthoux’s recent book called Curating Capitalism: How Art Impacts Business, Management, and Economy, in which he examines how art is used in corporate settings for purposes such as branding, innovation, and employee motivation. He also explores how artistic practices, such as curating, collecting, and exhibiting, intersect with business practices and contribute to the functioning of capitalist economies. Through case studies, theoretical analysis, and historical examples, his book offers insights into the ways in which art impacts and is impacted by capitalist systems. It raises critical questions about the commodification of art, the role of cultural institutions in the economy, and the potential for art to challenge dominant capitalist narratives.
This is something I got to experience while participating in a festival in Laval, France this year, called Laval Virtual. In this exhibition with various artists working with XR, the main purpose is for companies to promote their businesses and showcase their rising economy thanks to virtual and augmented reality (among other things). This festival is a way for companies to reach out to artists whose art becomes less relevant than the profits that can made out of it.
Nevertheless, artists such a Jon Rafman or Hito Steyerl offer a broader perspective on new-age technology and reflect on the ways in which technology shapes our understanding of the world and ourselves, inviting viewers to contemplate the complexities of contemporary existence in an increasingly digital landscape. In her work, This is the future, Hito Steyerl investigates the impact of artificial intelligence and automation on labor or human existence. Through her video installation, she raises questions about the potential consequences of AI-driven technologies, including issues related to unemployment, inequality, and surveillance. She also considers the role of art and culture in shaping our understanding of these complex phenomena.
Connecting with Machines
Because of my studies, I need to engage with technology everyday, and I cannot deny it had had a profound impact on my mental and physical health. My computer follows me everywhere – or should I say that I am the one following my computer? I spend over 10 hours a day in front of my laptop and thankfully, I have invested in an adjustable standing desk. This hyper-connection with a virtual environment rather than with my physical environment has maybe changed my perception of the world surrounding me. It is true indeed that excessive screen time and digital technology use can affect our perception of reality, our relationships with others, and our connection with the natural world. That explains maybe why geeks around me joke about being “autistic”. Since I work with 3D software as medium to create ‘art’, I notice they contain all the information about the physical world, translated into complicated maths, which offer a virtual world for me to work with and reinvent.
In this context, the shift between real and virtual becomes harder to define. I develop an obsessive (hyper)observation of nature and digitally transcribe the texture of concrete objects, the shine inherent in crystal, the parameters necessary to correctly simulate the movement of a curtain struck by the wind, whether velvet or silk. And this, behind a 2D screen which fails me by the limitations of its format, its colorimetry, its response time. But above all, it is my own reflexes which fail me, when I mechanically repeat the same gestures on the same devices in my efforts to create and represent objects and settings on a human scale. The nature that I distinguished in reality finds itself condensed in a machine and loses the form that I had given it at time t: the scale that I had given it, the smells and the sounds that I had perceived, and my own presence among them.
This way of transcribing my environment offers a bland and quantified look at nature, as well as an anesthesia of its mystical character. It is true that my computer offers me a much larger field of exploitation than I could ever access in real life. Geeks may be lovers of a nature that they cannot access.
In his book, Ways of Being : Animals, Plants, Machines : The Search for a Planetary Intelligence, James Bridle emphasizes on the different types of intelligence which compose our ecosystem, and disagrees with the idea that artificial intelligence is a tool that benefits humans only, as if we were superior to other living species. For Bridle, it is time to rethink an ecology of technology, and he interrogates the different ways our societies can live equally by allowing a collaboration and cohesion between all living beings and technology.
My first experiments consisted in building an ‘animal-machine’, using the game Tamagotchi as a starting point, which allows users to manipulate a virtual animal whose life depends on our actions and careful behavior towards the creature. This game or ‘gadget’ is one of the many examples of our deep relationship with technology and our consideration of technology as an extension of ourselves.
Technology is therefore not seen as a tool that ‘gets the job done’ anymore, but it becomes instead a lively machine capable of emotions and feelings, to the point where our well-being depends on its well-being. As a consequence, our dependence towards new technologies becomes as important as the one we feel towards animals and plants, and even our ‘own species’. We evolve in their proximity, and reassess our well-being or our way of being through the ways we engage and interact with these machines. In theory, a stolen phone can be replaced but its content, which inherently defines our identity, is lost forever, as secret as a private diary. The object becomes our mirror-image.
Geeks and Gamers
The most famous geeks have had a massive impact on our societies, by shaping our politics, our ways of living and by envisioning for us possible utopian/dystopian futures. The geek is not endowed with a particularly strong appeal to society, but his mastery of machines has made him an uncertain opponent, who takes revenge through machines, for good, or bad – for the machine or against the machine. Could the geek save our planet?
This is why I came up with the idea of pursuing my research on building new ‘machines’ and imagining a plant that could be fed thanks to gamer’s activity online. I want to examine the impact of the virtual on the physical, create a collaborative experience for both gamers and the plants.
Gamers seem to appreciate exploring virtual environments and nature. Terraforming video games, where players engage in the process of altering or transforming a planet’s environment to make it habitable or more suitable for life, have become increasingly popular in recent years. This include games whose goal is obvious such as « Surviving Mars » but also, while not marketed as a terraforming game, Minecraft, which is used by many in this way.
Jakob Kudsk Steensen is a Danish artist known for his pioneering work in the field of digital art and ecological storytelling. His work often explores the intersection of technology, nature, and virtual environments. While his projects vary in scope and theme, they typically involve the creation of immersive digital landscapes that invite viewers to engage with and reflect on the complexities of natural ecosystems and environmental issues. One of Steensen's notable projects is The Deep Listener, an augmented reality experience that invites participants to explore the soundscape of a reimagined Central Park in New York City. Using augmented reality technology, participants can listen to the sounds of birds, insects, and other elements of the park's ecosystem while walking through the physical space. The work encourages participants to consider the biodiversity of urban environments and the ways in which technology can enhance our connection with nature. Of course, this way of curating nature through technological assemblages has raised ethical and philosophical concerns regarding the authenticity of our experiences and the impact of mediated representations on our relationship with the natural world.
An Attempt to Build a Hybrid ‘Animal-Machine’
This is why I would like to create an intimate codependency between a gamer and a (physical) living being. The ‘animal-machine’ I devised works as follows: the physical machine wanders in the open space and stops every 10 minutes for 10 minutes. Once the physical machine stops, the viewer can engage with the virtual ‘animal-machine’, embedded through a screen. The game uses a speech recognition system that answers specific sentences.
In these interactions, I am interested in what could look like a ‘softer’ technology, whose purpose is not to serve our needs but simply to exist, dispossessed from external constraints. At first, I thought about using received data from online activity from gamers playing League of Legends, which is a multiplayer online battle arena game, and is very popular in the gaming culture worldwide. Now it is not clear yet what type of data I would use, but it needs to be consistent.
This ‘animal-machine’ could for instance be a plant that would be irrigated through a water pump system (connected to a Raspberry Pi), which would be activated in real time when a player somewhere in the world wins or loses, or when their position in ranks changes, or when they scores, or even according to the number of items the gamer destroyed. I imagined the plant to be sitting in a sculpture that resembles a dystopian and futuristic cocoon (without damaging the plant, of course). In The Legend of Zelda : Breath of the Wild, the gamer wanders in an open-world adventure game that features a vast and diverse landscape filled with fantastical creatures, magical elements, and ancient ruins that fictionalize the natural world in a fantasy setting. It offers many possibilities for us, human beings, to discover and reinvent new forms of nature. This is one of the directions my ‘animal-machine’ may take.
The ways in which human activities have altered the natural world, resulting in the emergence of new hybrid forms of life, is being explored through the book of Nicolas Nova, co-written with Disnovation.org artistic collective, A Bestiary of the Anthropocene: Hybrid Plants, Animals, Minerals, Fungi, and Other Specimens. The book analyses the impact of human activities on planetary ecosystems in the Anthropocene era, and encourages us to imagine new ways of coexisting with other forms of life on Earth. One example I particularly enjoyed is the disguise of cellphone towers as palm trees, which leads birds to settle there and build their nest. This is but one example of the many ways we keep creating hybrid worlds through physical and virtual interactions.
One of the puzzling questions raised by my research is the following: who’s fuel will power my hybrid? On the face of it, gamers’ performances will command the inflow of water to the plant. It will look as if their gaming powers the growth of the living being. But if one scratches under surface, it is obvious that the actual fuel comes from somewhere else: not plants powered by high tech, but high tech fueled by electrical power plants. My hybrid in no way re-routes flows of energy from gaming to growing: it merely adds to the electricity consumed by the gamers another amount of electrical energy needed by my ‘animal-machine’. Going from the superstructure of aesthetic illusions to the infrastructures of material production is a necessary evolution if artist pretend to do more than merely curating capitalism. The open question regarding my ‘animal-machine’ therefore becomes the following: will its aesthetic attempt to increase our ecological consciousness outshine its material terraforming impact on our planet?
To sum up, this investigation of the relationship between nature, technology, and human existence hopes to highlight the complexity of the contemporary moment. We are faced with worrying challenges regarding our relationship with the environment(s) around us, ranging from immersive displays that blur the lines between reality and science, between art and capitalism, to speculative projects that envision cooperative relationships between humans and technology. There’s a need to reevaluate our objectives and values as we manage the difficulties presented by developing technologies and our lives becoming more and more digitalized. We need to work toward developing a more profound ecological consciousness, realizing how intertwined we are with the natural world and adopting a more compassionate perspective on sharing this planet with others. This can only be achieved by respecting the inherent worth of nature and utilizing technology's potential for good.
T R BR
Thomas Courtois
*Térébrer \te. ʁ eb ʁ e\ french verb:
- To drill, perforate with an auger or similar instrument
- (in fig.) To cause violent pain of a moral nature
Tarière \ta. ʁ j ɛʁ \french noun:
(1. technique) Auger. Iron tool, handled with wood, used to make round holes in a piece of wood or in stone - (zoology) “Oviscapt” organ with which the females of some insects are provided, and which they use to make incisions, either in plants or in the skin of some animal
- (by extension) Name of the gnawing, ship-boring worm, “taret” or “broume”, capable of sinking a ship*
Subject: activity report – térèbres #416 to #577
Category: contextualization elements – personal observations
Professor Yves ‘ logbook – PARTIAL DECLASSIFICATION
Access level: strictly internal and confidential
Property: TrePanInc – Central Research & Development Office
SELECTION pp.54-776
The official communication to the Board of Directors was extremely explicit.
Whatever the circumference of the foundations, we would have outlined it before the end of the year. It was already seve years ago.
The preferred term for raising these issues with shareholders was “foundations”. Commentators generally preferred to speak of “core” or “nucleus”.
Between us, we were talking about a “continent”. What we were looking for was Agartha.
[…]
All this mythological dithering was folklore, of course. None of us really hoped to find life ‘down there’, civilized or otherwise.
[…]
At the beginning (as always), there was the earth, and with it an observation: we had dried it out. Exhausted, emptied, wrung out. An old rationalist dream had just come to an end. Nature doesn't exist? It's true. We’ve created it from scratch, patiently, woven together like some kind of big basket that had to be filled to the brim before emptying it. Perhaps only for the pleasure of showing off this basket once emptied, asking everyone: “what are we going to do with this now?”
The consequences of climate change, the ensuing conflicts, the burning forests, the demonstrations, the oil tankers adrift, the extinct species or the gilded ghettos overflown by riot drones – all these were problems, of course. Not the shareholders’. The important thing was to maintain the limit. And the best way to do that was to keep pushing it back. You can refill an empty basket, but you can just as easily throw it away, and move on to the next one.
[…]
We called this technique, which consists of drilling into cultural strata, from the French word “térèbre”. In other words, pierce them in all their dimensions – material, instinctual, historical, semiotic, aesthetic – and bring out a sample (a “carrot”) that can be exploited and reproduced on the basis of its characteristics alone, with no need to wait for the result of sedimentation resulting from collective intelligence.
One of the inspirations for this process was purely constructivist. To understand something, take it apart. Reverse engineering. A method that had already proven its worth with Nature (back to the basket stories). Submitting it to extraction (“exploiting” it, in militant vernacular) was not an end in itself. This was only the first step. Labeling, commodification, but also research, observation, critical discourse and the definition of the “laws” that determined the principle – that’s what was at stake. Cog after cog, it no longer held any secrets for us – better than that, we posed riddles to it which we pretended not to know we already had the answer to (so goes our coquetry). After that, who could have seriously maintained that all this would exist without us – or even that it could have pre-existed us? There was no Second Nature, because there hadn't even been a primary one. All we had done was name our little tinkering once it was finished.
[…]
Our new science abstracted itself from behavior. Or rather, it subjected behavior to geology. The world was thin after all. We could count all the layers. Now we could also cut through them all.
[…]
The voices against us were always the same. Artists, independents, protesters of all stripes.
In my opinion, there was something comical in always seeing them fall back on this old fantasy of autopoiesis versus instrumental reason. Nothing but a nasty anthropocentric superiority complex. All they wanted to do is short-circuit, but at what point does that upset the structure? In fact, keep it up. We’re always looking for shortcuts. So, thanks for the little help.
In the end, their real problem is that they continue to lament some kind of loss. There’s a great absence in these people that devours them; that fascinates them too. It's a way of gargling. We realized a long time ago that we had to prepare the void before we could even pretend to dig the corresponding hole. This is what we continue to propose to shareholders.
The “foundation”, the “heart”, the “Agartha”, whatever it is called, that’s our goal: the reason for the biggest hole possible.
[…]
What do they really think they are resisting?
[…]
Our other inspiration, however, comes from that world.
I remember Thomas Courtois’ seminars on symbiotic materialities. I remember the critical archeology department at the University of Aberdenne.
There was already a lot of experimentation with la térèbre. But at that time, it was an essentially forensic practice. Using a given work, or any cultural artefact, to trace the infrastructure, the power relations, the epistemological demarcations. Detecting the work, the collective, the logistics. The idea was then to redeploy the fold, or to unfreeze the interactions which underpinned the object being questioned.
Carrying a smartphone in your pocket meant carrying around a piece of Africa (and finding yourself at the end of an imperialist electric arc that constantly linked you to it).
What we are proposing does not involve the same affects. Rather than always finding the same old depressing Africa in our phones, why not assemble a new one from them? A better Africa, in short, where to magnetize all these tired desires that usually evaporate into latent guilt as they are satisfied.
A new promised land, a new (w)hole.
[…]
What worked for technological tools was soon applied to those cultural by-products that we still imagined to be untouchable: artistic practices.
I remember the emulation of the first large-scale térèbres carried out on the stocks of unsold books that TrePanInc had bought from Gallimard and Les Editions du Seuil . Tens of thousands of specimens, initially intended for the dustbin, were now piled up in gymnasiums specially requisitioned for the occasion, while we looked for the best angle of penetration for optimal coring.
Some evil tongues had compared it to a kind of auto-da-fé, which was only partially relevant.
Outside of libraries, when do we get the chance to contemplate books grouped together? Think of it as revealing the project as a (w)hole. We usually only consider culture in its most molecular terms. Or when we do look up, it's only to gloss over our heritage or, on the contrary, to detect oppressive architecture. But at what point do we plunge our hands into it, like into a sack of grain? Texture is not a matter for the head. But that's where we come in. We uncover the texture to assess its specific feel – the drape, the velvety touch – and make it accessible to as many hands as possible.
So certainly, all those guys in white coat around a pile of books, pierced by a huge machine… there was something seemingly fascist about it, I suppose. I suppose. But what's the point of declaring the arts degenerate? Forgive me the expression, but in my opinion they all are. What we aspire to is, precisely, generated art.
[…]
This strange pleasure of seeing a whole, any whole, stranded in front of you like a sea animal. The edges of the skin distended, nailed on either side. Skeleton, organs and guts in the open air.
Cartographers knew this thrill before biologists did.
But even more so the people who worked in the mines, drilling holes in the depths. Because when you go through, you don't reach anything else. Nothing is hidden, nothing at all. But the more you dig, the more you horizontalize. You bring everything back to the surface, unless it's the surface you're bringing down to the bottom. In any case, you level everything out.
Drilling flattens.
Obviously, so that we can see something, we add relief. Bumps and hollows. But that's mainly to make it easier to talk about (the tongue loves curves, caressing them). What really matters is to gloss over it while taking the longest strides possible.
[….]
‡We must understand that the real issue here is temporal.
For the moment, I have only mentioned the method. La térèbre is a tool for exploring matter (both physical and symbolic) which has the particularity of concatenating its elements into a visualizable, measurable, manipulable block. Good. There's nothing extraordinary about that, is there? How long have we been thinking about our environment in terms of withdrawals? It's almost sick, this obsession with arranging everything side by side in the combs of our beehives. But it’s also commonplace. We’re collectors, that's all.
Where a few people had a problem (the vast majority didn't give a damn, I imagine), was in our "pretension" to shrink complex productions into a small piece, of which we would then dissect every square millimeter, before duplicating it ad infinitum.
Our approach, they argued, would be futile, as there would be no satisfactory way of summarizing a work in this way, of isolating it from its ecosystem. They would just look at our “carrots” with disdain and say “that can’t be it.” Their aversion was limited on the ontological level.
I can't even blame them. A recapitulation, even a perfect one, remains a recapitulation.
However, the goal was never to draw an equal sign between the original material and la térèbre, but rather to subsume one to the other.
[…]
Let’s not forget what this whole experiment continues to be about. Let’s not forget that it is one thing to multiply the sources of value and quite another to ensure their continuity. Reproduction is not repetition. Repetition is raw, dangerous, unpredictable stuff (however counter-intuitive this statement may be). Before you can benefit from it, you have to organize it. You have to seal the cycle so that you can't see the seams. And that's my job.
I’m called upon to design the ideal sequence of one loop with another, until homeostasis. Which may well include the new, chaos, violence and death. None of this is inherently loopable. As long as we can continue to follow the circuit of the different links, there is nothing wrong with what I do.
[…]
If I had to put it another way: let's agree once and for all on the non-linearity of events.
All films are finished.
Time, space, subjectivities and the relationships between them are cut from the same wood. We just don't leave the same mark. Each being goes in its own little whirlpool, whose cumulative gyrations – contradictory, singular – constitute the present (an immense accumulation of presents).
Let's say the past is what has happened, and therefore what can be quantified. In our language, that would be ‘the stock’. It doesn't matter how many times the same unit is sold. What matters is maintaining the stock. In this respect, the stock (or the past) is also: the predictable. The more we can predict, the more we increase the stock.
And the future? The future is absolutely nothing more than a collective hallucination provoked by an awareness of finiteness. In response to existential anguish, we have developed this teleological illness which consists of projecting ourselves, even committing ourselves, as a species, towards a place of phantasmagorical accomplishments. But this fantasy continues to be thwarted by the constant rearrangement of the little whirlpools.
The hallucination persists despite everything, as long as progressive arrows continue to be fired; all kinds of projects, stories, dreams, directed forward – towards the distance. All they do is cut through empty space. The line we draw goes in the other direction. It crosses everything, ending up on grandiose cutaways. It’s backward-looking, which is logical insofar as that’s where everything is at stake: in the past, and therefore in the stock.
But how, in these conditions, can we ensure our predominance?
By the time lag. Because we are always behind the time. By almost nothing, of course. That almost nothing is the time it takes for light to reach your eye, to enable you to see an object, for example... Well, by the time this journey has been completed, the object no longer corresponds to its appearance. Everything we see no longer exists as such. Likewise, consciousness does not so much direct the movements of our body as it comments on them. Most of our actions take place through no fault of our own. We will always remain a few nanoseconds removed from reality.
These are only micro-gaps, but large enough to justify the investment.
What allows us to ensure the consistency of the stock with individual spatio-temporal gyrations is therefore the control of these gaps. These gaps are of such tiny proportions that they require access to unconscious, insignificant, pre-cognitive dimensions, which our samples enable us to better reveal and anticipate. Always better occupied.
[…]
The real difficulties arose from September 4, 2034. In all honesty, they already existed before. However, this is the first time we really realized how serious they were.
[…]
There was definitely something wrong with the last readings.
Some data was missing. Others were purely inconceivable. Such anomalies had previously been considered negligible. They were, in a way. Except that this time their presence came to impose itself on la térèbre itself. I mean, on its physical result.
The carrot was… cracked. Crossed with streaks whose arrangement did not correspond to any of our diagrams. We were prepared for the unexpected, the contingent. We even suspected it. But this was something else. Because all this data, however variable, had to appear. They could never be invisible. In fact, that was the whole point of this technology: to lay everything bare.
The fact that our results were flawed, that part of them was missing without us being able to determine the nature of this lack, was simply impossible.
What was really worrying was that the more we perfected our technique, the more visible – and numerous – these flaws became.
[…]
Another theory has been around for some time to explain this phenomenon: that of provisional irreducibility. Assuming that the machine is incapable of error, it is logical that it does not, on the other hand, have the capacity to grasp a plan that it has not yet been programmed to explore. This means that it would be enough to ‘unlock’ this new plan to reintegrate the missing data.
Our task would then be to determine the plan in question. The ‘vacuums’ we are confronted with are nothing more than hollow clues to its consistency.
For most of us, there is nothing mysterious about this blind spot. We have simply failed to take into account an essential parameter, the obviousness of which will make us laugh when it is revealed to us. It's probably something that may seem insignificant at first sight, but whose impact reverberates throughout the system. For me, it would be the equivalent of the drilosphere, this fraction of the earth's soil resulting from the activity of worms. They may only be worms, but their influence is considerable.
However, a few others (a paranoid minority) believe that we have not omitted this dimension, but that it is simply inconceivable to us, even if we were fully immersed in it.
If such an intuition were to be verified, it would mean that we will never be able to achieve any foundation of any kind .
It would also mean that we will always be at the mercy of something.
[…]
I was chatting with Thomas Courtois who had this funny hypothesis. According to him, these gaps are not really gaps. They would be a warning. The precursory signs of a presence that we will eventually awaken if we continue our research – a bit like those giant viruses that rest in the Siberian permafrost and that our activities risk bringing back to “life”. Like a weapon that can only be activated once a certain threshold of soil degradation has been reached.
I did not fail to tell him how ridiculous I found his millenarian delusion.
If it's in the past, it's in stock. If it's in stock, you can predict it. If you can predict it, you can sell it. Give me a week and I'll open a giant virus zoo.
[…]
What the paranoid people say torments me, however. What if they were right – but in terms of time?
I’ve said that the future, as humanity conceives it (i.e. the construction of a desirable and achievable future) does not exist other than as a hallucination, and that’s true. Outside the stock and moving surface, there is no salvation.
There is, however, another way of looking at the future, one that blithely sidesteps our little recursive assemblages. This future is radically unknown to us, radically inhuman. It could emerge at any moment, and we would have nothing to do with it. This is the future we must fear – not the future of exhausted utopias.
If I’m afraid of it, it is not simply because it’s an unknown unknown (the only one we could not absorb). This is above all because it is fundamentally xenophagous. It will only manifest itself to feast on the Outside. Except that, in this configuration, the Outside is us.
[…]
The auger is that rudimentary tool used to make holes in matter. Conceptually, it's what we use every day. Moreover, the French verb “térébrer” follows directly from this: the action of the auger is to “térébrer” (to drill). Some of my colleagues make recurring references to it to emphasize the supposedly artisanal aspect of our practice. I can't figure out how serious they are about this. There's really nothing artisanal about our budgets.
I recently discovered that the French equivalent to the auger, a “tarière”, does not only designate the tool, but also applies to the oviscaptes appendages of certain insects which use them to pierce the ground or the flesh of a larva in order to lay eggs.
This is what I'm getting at: if we were to come into contact with this future, it would only be through its “tarière”, or its auger plunged deep into our epidermis.
[…]
I don't know what might come of it, but I'm afraid there's absolutely nothing to hope for.
END OF SELECTION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Benjamin Bratton, Terraforming 2019, Moscow, Strelka Press, 2019
Erik Davis, High Weirdness, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2019
Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux, Les Editions de Minuit, 1980
Emmanuel Ducourneau & Emmanuel Grimaud, « Matériologie profonde », document de présentation, 2024
Mark Fisher, Ghosts of my life, London, Zero Books, 2014
Tim Ingold, Lines. A Brief History, London, Routledge, 2009
Amy Ireland, « The Poememenon: Form as Occult Technology », Urbanomic, 2017 [online]
Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, The Undercommons. Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Wivenhoe, Minor Composition, 2013
Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia : Complicity With Anonymous Materials, re.press, 2008
Frédéric Neyrat, La part inconstructible de la Terre, Editions Seuil, 2016
Jussi Parikka, The Anthrobscene, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2013
Luciana Parisi & Antonia Majaca, « The Incomputable and Instrumental Possibility », 2016, e-flux [online]
Matteo Pasquinelli, « The Power of Abstraction and Its Antagonism », in Warren Neidich(ed.), Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, vol. 2, Archive Books, Berlin, 2014
Richard Seymour, « Caedmon’s Dream: On the Politics of Style », Salvage, 2019, [online]
Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art, Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, London, Verso, 2017.
Peter Watts, Blindsight, New York, Firefall, 2020
Incompiuto: Art as a Band-aid to the Earth's Crust?
Paul Esteoulle
Incompiuto in Italian means "unfinished". It refers to an architectural style comprising all the structures never completed or abandoned in Southern Italy, theorized as such by the Italian art collective Alterazioni Video through a manifesto (2008), an archaeological park and festival (2010) as well as a book (2018) and a collection of photographs fed since 2006. Their work has led to the identification of some 1,500 abandoned building sites in southern Italy. This historical and critical analysis of the over-industrialization of Southern Italy proposes an analogy between our planet and the human body, and a look at artistic works as a means of reclaiming unfinished architecture.
Geographically and administratively speaking, Southern Italy is made up of five mainland regions and one island (which once made up the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies): Abruzzo, Campania, Puglia, Basilicata, Calabria and Sicily. When we speak of southern Italy, we usually think of the pizza of Naples and the lemons of Sorrento, the Gran Sasso massif and the Tremiti islands, Pasolini's Gospel according to St. Matthew and Modugno's Volare, the architecture inherited from Byzantium, where the evening passegiata (stroll) bears witness to a lively people whose warmth of heart is matched only by that of the sun. Although rich in a Dantean historical and popular culture, a considerable tourist attraction and an active agricultural sector (although its economic results may decline after 2023 due to the climatic factor), the Mezzogiorno (the South) is a neglected territory on a national scale, suffering from a centralization of power and industry concentrated in the North1. If the Mezzogiorno's landscapes are so beautiful and romantic, raising fantasies of Dolce Vita, they are marred by a multitude of unfinished building projects. From public works such as bridges, shopping centers and even dams, to housing projects such as apartment blocks, houses and even entire neighborhoods, Southern Italy boasts some 1 500 abandoned construction sites 2. Do these remnants of a neo-liberal industrial failure, symptoms of a criminal gangrene, still have a functional, sustainable or aesthetic future?
Overindustrialization of the Mezzogiorno: Boom and Bust (1950-2007)
Most of the abandoned projects were initiated during Italy's post-war industrial revolution and the creation of the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno. With a view to competing with Northern Italy, the Bank coordinated a program of public investments allocated to the industrial development of the South. Modernization of agricultural production facilities, large-scale steel and petrochemical complexes, public works, construction, rubber and even textiles: numerous industries were growing in the Mezzogiorno, as some of the great names of industrialization were born there (Fiat, Montecatini, Edison, Olivetti and others). Prosperous and on the rise, the South saw itself as too good to be true. It over-invested public money at every turn, while the major Mafia organizations of the time (Camorra, 'Ndrangheta, Cosa Nostra) pursued their work of infiltration of the legal economy. These organizations gained access to real capital by diverting the profits generated by industrial structures, making it impossible to reinject the benefits of industrialization into the communes, and freezing the socio-economic development of the Mezzogiorno. These Mafia-State relations, particularly in the public works sector, came to light in 1984 with the arrest of Vito Ciancimino (ex-mayor of Palermo), accused by Tommaso Buscetta (a repentant ex-mafioso) of being in on the payroll of the Corleonesi mafia association. During Ciancimino's tenure as Public Works Assessor (1951-1961), 4 000 building permits were issued, 2 500 of them to just three retired masons.
At the time, Italy had become one of Europe's greatest industrial and economic powers in just ten years. The condition of its workers, however, remained largely unchanged. In 1969, in factories across the country, struggles broke out for better pay and against repression, under the operaist slogan of potere operaio (workers' power). Thanks to a series of actions leading up to a national general strike, this movement enabled workers to win wage increases, as well as greater leadership and political power for the unions. It was a small and partial victory in the short term, not enough to alleviate class conflict, since the unions remained in the hands of conformist, largely corrupt bureaucrats, while the dominating bourgeois class remained contemptuous towards the working class, portrayed as extremist and radical by various media campaigns. For domestic and foreign industrial investors, this movement meant a temporary end to totalitarian authoritarianism within the structures, which was a precondition to rapid, profitable development through low labor costs. This was followed by a series of political and economic crises throughout the country, leading Italy towards gradual deindustrialization, which is still underway, under the recurrence of global crises, such as that of 2007 and 2020. While the Northern territories managed to maintain a certain equilibrium thanks to foreign investment and the more stable economic sovereignty of their industries, the Mezzogiorno was the first victim of this deindustrialization, made worse by the omnipresent corruption at the very root of industrialization. As the public money allocated to launch these numerous projects has been embezzled (in the majority of cases) by mafia-style corruption, the funds needed to continue or demolish the work are unavailable, even today.
Today’s Wounds
Back in 1992, in issue 168 of Futuribles magazine, Giulio Fossi wrote:
If the North-South divide is obvious, social inequalities and disparities in economic and social development between regions within the most advanced countries are no less striking. Italy, alas, offers a good example of this when we measure the persistent imbalance between the industrialized regions of the North and Center and the Mezzogiorno. 3
Today, nothing has changed significantly. The demographic crisis affecting the whole of Italy (the population level recorded in January 2023 is historically the lowest in the country) is even more flagrant in the South, which suggests that young graduates are heading for the North or other countries, while households are having fewer children due to financial insecurity (average household income down 2. 9% over the decade). Giorgia Meloni's (Italy’s ‘post-fascist’ prime minister) government still firmly refuses to guarantee its citizens a minimum hourly wage of €9, after having abolished the short-lived attempt to a universal basic income (€550 monthly) granted since 2019 to four million people (mainly in the South) under the neo-liberal pretext of not wanting to fall into the “poverty trap of assistance".4
As a result, there's a clear drop in the Southern Italy’ economy, which has by far the highest unemployment rate in the country (14.6% vs. 7.1% in central Italy, and 4.8% in northern Italy). Gender inequalities on the job market are also a matter for discussion, with Italy being one of the European countries with the highest employment gap between men and women (unemployment at 7.3% for men vs. 9.5% for women), including a female unemployment rate recorded at 14.6% in the South. Foreign investment is very low, as Jean-Jacques Bozonnet reports in Le Monde: 13 euros per capita versus €292 in the North! This is a far cry from the European average (€800) or Ireland's €1,500 (2008 figures). 5
Southern Italy not only suffers from inequalities with the North, it also suffers from its own societal shortcomings. The mafia gangrene is still omnipresent, and its tentacles hold sway in almost every sector of activity in the South, as well as in the upper echelons of government, as the author of the nonfiction Gomorra, Roberto Saviano, put it in the pages of Le Monde in early 2023, on the occasion of the arrest of Matteo Messina Denaro, Italy's most wanted mafioso at the time: "Far from being anti-State, today Cosa Nostra is an integral part of the State". 6
Mafia organizations are particularly active in the agricultural sector, as illustrated by the story of Lazzaro d'Auria, an Apulian farmer who filed a complaint against the Foggia Mafia organization after being attacked on his land by twelve men demanding payment of an annual "tax" of €150,000.
The damage caused by de-industrialization is as great as that caused by the mafias who participated in the over-industrialization and who are directly responsible for the unequal and perpetual precariousness of the Mezzogiorno. This leaves multiple mutilations in the landscapes so romantically fantasized about by tourists: abandoned construction sites. Of course, not all unfinished building sites are the result of over-industrialization and organized crime. Other cases are the result of various factors, such as earthquakes, urban planning, overly complex laws and company failures. But their presence is ominous…
The Earth ‘Mutilation’: an Analogy
Planet Earth has often been personified. In Greek poetry, Gaia by Hesiod in Theogony; in Roman poetry, Terra by Ovid in The Metamorphoses; in science: Lynn Margulis & James Lovelock Gaia again, in books about a New Look at Life on Earth; as well as in classical and contemporary literature, from Voltaire's Micromégas to Bernard Werber's La voix de la terre. Whether divinizing, parodying, theorizing or romanticizing, each figure brings a critical point of view and aesthetic intent to their personification. A pugnacious and vicious Gaia in Hesiod, a maternal and fertile Terra in Ovid, an insignificant and ridiculous planet in Voltaire (in fact, he mainly uses the smallness of the earth on the scale of the cosmos to mock those who inhabit it, mankind, its mores and conflicts), a breathless and bruised Earth in Werber, and above all, most interestingly (for the purposes of this article), an Earth with physical and organic characteristics similar to those of the human body in Lovelock:
a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet. The maintenance of relatively constant conditions by active control may be conveniently described by the term 'homeostasis' 7
This scientific thesis has often been criticized, notably by neo-Darwinian scientists such as Dawkins and Doolittle, for its lack of a reproductive system or biological regulation 8. Despite the controversy, Lovelock elaborated several verifications of his hypotheses, which mutated over time, and with the support and further work of other researchers, into a fully-fledged scientific theory.
One often hears people speak of the Amazon as the "lungs of the earth". This formula is scientifically false. In reality, the Amazon has an oxygen "production-consumption" balance of almost zero (around 5%, in contrast to the 20% of the collective and popular imagination), unlike our oceans and their biodiversity, which produce between 50% and 60% of the oxygen consumed on earth 9.
Another well-known analogy is that the Earth's crust is its "skin". The Earth's crust is the upper, emerged part of its structure. Its depth is not defined by an exact figure, as it depends on geographical and geological variations (which is why one separates continental and oceanic crust), but it can reach up to 70 km beneath the Andes mountain range of Peru and Bolivia. The analogy between human skin and the earth's crust is sometimes used to popularize scientifically one of their common functions: to cover and protect other active layers (mantle and core for the crust, spiny and basal for the skin).
If we adopt this idea for poetic purposes, it can become a creative playground. We could say that mountains are bones, volcanoes are pores, and humans are... ectoparasites! While the word "parasite" is culturally associated with the pejorative image of an invader, its dictionary definition is as follows (Larousse): “An animal or plant organism that feeds strictly at the expense of a host organism of a different species, either permanently or during a phase of its life cycle”. As the human being is an animal organism feeding (basically) solely on resources produced by its host, even though the latter is not another species but a telluric planet (a feature defining the scientific limit of the analogy), this analogy has strong value as an image.
Let's adopt this analogical trio: the Earth as a person, its crust as its skin, and the human being as its parasite. If this parasite could inhabit the Earth and use it solely for vital (or at least ethical) purposes (habitat, culture, science), then each scar would have a precise purpose and would be linked to a medical (post-operative scar, prosthesis) or cosmetic (tattoo, piercing) function. However, the parasite is multiplying its attacks for profit’s sake only. Its greed has led to over-consumption, over-production, over-industrialization, over-exploitation in the use of non-renewable energies (fossil, nuclear), over-scarification of the Earth’s skin, at the expense of its host’s health. In this case, every modification that is neither eco-responsible nor even remotely ethical, but rather inflicted in the pursuit of profit only, and which will never bring the slightest added value to the condition of human existence, should be considered a criminal mutilation of planet Earth.
The Incompiuto
The 1 500 or so unfinished constructions that swarm over the earth's crust in Southern Italy can thus be considered as actual mutilations of Gaia, Terra, the Earth, or whatever you want to name our host. Worst: they bring no added value to the human condition, mere testimonies of the avarice of corrupt men. The question is: what to do with them? Given the present state of public budgets, it would be too costly to taxpayers properly to demolish these concrete scars, and Italy's economic situation does not bode well for future State investment in the matter. So what's to be done?
A five-member collective of Milanese artists (Paololuca Barbieri Marchi, Alberto Caffarelli, Matteo Erenbourg, Andrea Masu and Giacomo Porfiri), founded in 2004, is attempting to bring a critical and artistic viewpoint to bear on the heritage, situation and future of these unfinished constructions through several acts of expression: a manifesto (2008), an archaeological park and a festival (2010), as well as a book (2018) and a collection of photographs collected since 2006. Committed to the cause, their work has led to the identification of some 600 abandoned building sites throughout Italy, particularly in the Southern mainland and Sicily. In a seriously ironic tone, their manifesto L’Incompiuto Siciliano aims to make incompiuto an architectural style in its own right.
Here are its main points:
Incompiuto is the most important Italian Architectural Style since WWII.
- The Incompiuto is the interpretive paradigm of public architecture in Italy from the postwar period until today.
- The Incompiuto is based on an ethics and an aesthetics of its own.
- Unfinished works are contemporary ruins. Born as such, monuments generated by the creative enthusiasm of liberalism.
- The Incompiuto redefines the landscape in an incisive and radical way. The process of creating unfinished public works celebrates the conquest of the territory on the part of modern man.
- The Incompiuto has as its postulate the partial execution of the project..
- The Incompiuto has concrete as its constituent material. The colors and surfaces are determined by the degradation of the materials due to the effects of time and forces of nature.
- Nature, by means of the spontaneous vegetation, synaesthetically dialogues with unfinished works, reappropriating the sites.
- In the Incompiuto, the tension between function and form is resolved. Here, the defect becomes a work of art
- The Incompiuto reassembles and collects sites of contemplation, of thought, and of imagination
- The Incompiuto is a symbol of political power and artistic sensibility. Not only works of architectural genius but nerve endings of a complex and articulated social organism. 10
This manifesto suggests that the construction's lack of function is no longer synonymous with failure: it can be repurposed as a vector of artistic emotion. Art as recuperation, as recycling, as curing ointment, and as band-aid. The collective turns incompiuto into an art form in its own right (architecture) by freezing it in another art form (photography).
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Denis Chartier, « Gaïa : hypothèse scientifique, vénération néopaïenne et intrusion », Géoconfluences (octobre 2016), École normale supérieure de Lyon [en ligne](Page consultée le 19 avril 2024). ↩
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« L’Amazonie, le poumon de la Terre… ou le révélateur des limites de nos dirigeants ? », Planet-Terre, [en ligne] (Page consultée le 19 avril 2024). ↩
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divisare.com/projects/343843-incompiuto-siciliano-manifesto ↩
Teachings from the LIVATKE Camping Cultural Experiment in Haiti: Three Forms of Resistance to the High-Modernist Wreckage of our Planet
Jacob Jean-Jacques
Based on my experience as a cultural operator, as a reader, as a homo narrans 1 adopting the posture of a so-called ‘responsible planetarity’, the following pages offer an undisciplined, heterolingual, heterophonic, heterophoric article focusing on the singular case of a cultural event tant took place in Petit-Goâve, Haiti, over the past decande: the LIVAKTE Camping. I will describe and analyse it as a palimpsest that may help us to assess a certain ineffectiveness of international environmental movements, in Haiti and maybe elsewhere. This writing exercise in auto-ethnography does not claim to tell the ultimate truth about this cultural project or ecological mobilisation. With section titles inspired by the enigmatic Haitian writer and French academician Dany Laferrière’s books, I will sketch a modest poetic contribution to the macro-project of a more proper terraforming. By addressing the traps of high modernism, as described by anthropologist James C. Scott, this reflection will lead to contrast three possible modes of ecological resistance to the environmental and social destructions currently observed at a planetary scale.
In 2015, the Atelier des Apprentis Narrateurs (Apprentice Narrators' Workshop, ANA) that I directed at the time launched a project under the name "LIVAKTE Camping" which aimed, among other things, to contribute to the democratization of culture through the experience of artistic, intellectual, secular and ecological fraternization between young people from urban and rural areas in the first communal section of Petit-Goâve, Haiti. LIVAKTE Camping grafted onto the ecological and ecopoetic project Jardin du Livre (Book Garden), a legacy of my father and his sisters and brothers that has become a de facto community asset since 2013. Its goal was to build an international cultural residency, holding annual cultural 5-day meetings on the site of a camping site. It has managed to organize eight editions of LIVAKTE Camping in seven years. Today, Miss Fabrice Reedj Raymond, the Anapienne in charge of the 11th edition of LIVAKTE Camping, is facing the challenge of repatriating and redefining the project. I sincerely wish her the best of luck.
Genesis: How To Make Love with a Black Man without Getting Tired? (Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer?)
In the beginning, ANA created Jardin du livre to welcome the Quebecian writer Laure Morali... Then ANA said: let LIVAKTE Camping be! And LIVAKTE Camping was. It was the third day. And ANA saw that it was good.
As the room provided a terrible warmth to the thirteen Anapians of category B, I proposed to the cohort to work on an improvisation course, the kind of teaching that I prepare with enthusiasm since it is based on the principle of trust, of unlimited credit given to one's imagination in accordance with the environment. Preparing the play was the only thing I had to do. Clean chairs, books scattered on all the furniture in the room, pencils, blank pages, more blank pages, Someone like You by Adele, ready to run in a loop for at least 90 minutes, sound effects, and about fifty photos of paintings of all styles piled on my desk.
I hadn't calculated this heat the previous night. I ignored you, heat, in my pedagogical planning. And yet, it was you who was going to push us out of our homes. Lafimen pa konn met mèt kay deyò, yo di (“It is said that smoke does not drive the master out of the house”). But, you're not smoke. You are the hand of the sun, a small committee of invisible fingers. You ordered us to go out. Then you pushed us. And proud as we are, we thought we wanted to enjoy the unbridled, invisible production of oxygen and fresh air of the mango tree that keeps watch for free in front of the gallery of my parents' apartment, which was hosting the event, on Avenue Solidarité, in Petit-Goâve. We arranged everything on the gallery before performing one of these opening rituals, which consists of an experience of integral collective relaxation accompanied by the music of the day: Someone like You.
I heard that you're settled down
That you found a girl and you're married now
I heard that your dreams came true
Old friend, why are you so shy?
Ain't like you to hold back or hide from the light
I never tried to understand what Adele meant in this song. I like Adele's voice. He's my crush. The only one I have in the English-speaking world. We were born on the same month. Month of cucumber and salad sowing. The same year. A few weeks before the 166 dead and missing following the explosion of the Piper Alpha oil platform in the North Sea 2. On the same planet. Her secret: she is an American. Mine: I'm Atlantician. And we lie to each other with the choir of high-modernist legislators. I was never offered a translation of Someone like You. I have a distant dispute with English. A part of me, quite powerful in any case, refuses to let me "speak English".
"Don't forget me", I beg
I remember you said
"Sometimes it lasts in love, but sometimes it hurts instead"
Our eyes closed. We inhale and exhale in eight steps. This has been our common rhythm since the foundation of the ANA in August 2008. Four times two. It's geometric – right? Inspiration. Break. Expiration. Break. Inspiration. Adele, my love, are you still here? But what a breath of life! Adele, do you know an American philosopher named Ralph Wardo Emerson? Sometimes I think that he and Rousseau are brothers, my big brothers. If I ever fly to North America, it will be as much for you, Adele, as it will be for him, Emerson. Your tracks. Luckily I don't understand English, I could betterprofit from my stay than to get lost in nature like a "transparent eyeball". Perhaps I will understand why Uncle Sam is so cruel, so frightful, so savage, so inhuman with the Amerindians, the Negroes, the Haitians, the Hiroshimians. Do you think Emerson is right, Adele? Do you think I can be a "transparent eyeball" when you sing? Sing to me again, Adele!
Nothing compares, no worries or cares
Regrets and mistakes, they're memories made
Who would have known how bittersweet
this would taste?
Never mind, I'll find someone like you
I wish nothing but the best for you, too
The Almost Lost Art of Doing Nothing (L’art presque perdu de ne rien faire)
The oral improvisation of the turning narrative went well as usual. Here is the summary:
a 16-year-old girl
ventures into the hills towards Delatre 3
without map or compass
because she never had
never had a father
Did she want to discover Fort Gary
a 16-year-old girl
abandons her pink room
furnished and perfumed
The road is a little crowded
because it's market day
a beautiful market day
on her bed in her pink room
furnished scented
day of grace
to buy a father-in-law
the peasants charged with
fuels,
fruits and vegetables
nourish her, pamper her
over twenty-two kilometres
that we can't count
when one has never had
never had a father
because she never had
never had a father
a 16-year-old girl
left her love
her mother cried for her alone
in the middle of the candles
lit
without news of her bewitching cheeks
as long as she could
she wanted to carry all the wind
mountains and the smell of the earth
that healed her soul
She wanted to become the shepherdess
of the city
as she could not flee againshe took her own life
because she never had
never had a father
Once the oral improvisation of the collective narrative was over, we quickly moved on to the writing experience, without waiting for those who wanted to cry. Who wanted to cry? You had to immerse yourself in it with all the emotions collected by the collective fictional experience. No comment on the creation game, this time. There is no debate on the relationship between the story of the girl and the experience of the majority of the Anapians who participate in the workshop.
Generally, I don't write in the context of the writing workshops I organize. This principle, which I believe is useful for the emancipation of the members of the Apprentice Narrators' Workshop, somewhat stifles my literary creativity, but The good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep (St Matthew). I spend most of my time planning the writing workshops, so that they never end up the same. At the time of execution of the diffuse architecture of these cultural experiences, I am always in jubilation, contemplating the happiness appearing on the face of the participants. Even their tears are radiant.
Adele, Adelina, how well you play in my head! A play of frequency and resonance gives free rein to my imagination.
Never mind, I'll find someone like you
Why do fathers abandon their children so easily? Why do they sleep right and left like roosters do? Am I a rooster too if I run after you in this dream? Why did the kid prefer to flee the world? Is this the game of annihilation of the desire for power? Will we give our flesh to the land of the sheep?
I wish nothing but the best for you
"Don't forget me, " I beg
You know how the time flies
Only yesterday was the time of our lives
We were born and raised in a summer haze
Bound by the surprise of our glory days
Exodus: A Certain Art of Living (Un certain art de vivre)
It is in this vegetative state that I had the idea of inviting the Anapians of category B to work on the conceptualization of a cultural project that would bring together the health of the mind and that of the body; urban and rural people. An unexpected, but fascinating, exercise, after the jubilant moment of reading aloud the texts created as part of this workshop. They chose not to take a break.
Result: LIVAKTE Camping. It spells Liv (“book”) Ak (“with”) Te (“tea”). An annual cultural campsite that organizes a book-and-tea fair. Three to five days devoted to: reading workshops, writing workshops, excursions, meditation sessions and collective contemplations of nature, plastic art workshops, exhibitions, promotion for traditional medicine, book exhibition, shows, treasure hunt, reflection workshop.
An annual cultural campsite intended to operate as an "invisible committee", to use the pseudonym chosen by the authors of The Insurrection to Come. A kind of annual congress on the global macro-problem 4 aiming towards concerted action. The fate of the planet is now being played out in Sanite, at the Jardin du Livre, in Petit-Goâve, Haiti, at the end of each year between anapiens and young people from the first Section of the Commune of Petit-Goâve. And too bad for the absentees. No excuse, this time again. Haiti has no borders. Neither does the Book Garden. Not yet, anyway.
The first edition of LIVAKTE Camping was a successful series of workshops on language and migration. Biased towards migration. Its impact on the economy. Its links with colonization. Its permanent dialogue with neocolonialism, slavery for all, and extractivism. Its legitimacy. Its consequences on the migrant-subject. Its relationship with erosion in Haiti. Its opportunities for just remigration, supported by reparations and restitutions to the passive heirs 5 of colonization.
All of this hits me now, as I am in Paris, France, Europe, applying for the status of asylum seeker. Here, at the Gare du Nord, I remember what we said about the value of the choice to stay in Haiti. Stay. Oh! I had made a commitment never to leave. And yet here I am, at the Gare du Nord! What a great wind, exile!
I still think of my uncle Chéner Jean-Jacques, the Haitian Elzéard Bouffier who built the small forest of the Jardin du Livre. It was this convinced farmer who had the honour of giving the inaugural lecture of the project:
My bosses are the trees
leaves, flowers, roots
and stems
it is with them that
I have an appointment
under the dews
that feed my family
they talk to me
reassure me
The trees my bosses
are my life
my wealth
those sweaty barks on the ground
this mango tree
This frothy pebble curled up
like a cat
this bamboo
this grass grazed by
the animal
I name you my bosses
that you contemplate
trample on, breathe
even under your beds
prisoners of the concrete
of the city
my bosses are the trees
from here under which
one day I'll get emaciated
and I will pay that day
my debt of independence 6
Very advanced, at the time, in the cognitive self-destruction of my little person, in the subtle and permanent inner struggle against the monologue of dry academic discourse, I was moved by my uncle's speech on ecology, migration, architecture, his planetarity, his deep commitment, in front of the standing audience, preparing to carry out an exercise that Mr. Angello Jolivain7 would like to govern according to a Habermasian approach of intersubjectivity.
The attempt to set up a space for the "construction of an inter-subjectively shared world" in the Jardin du Livre gave rise to a strong feeling of satisfaction in me, from the first day of the first edition of LIVAKTE Camping. This sentiment was shared by all those involved in the planning and implementation of the project. And this, despite the timid participation of the young people of Sanite in the reflection workshops. Our process of unconscious and generous colonization, which we had inscribed under the banner of the democratization of culture, has just been unleashed. The world will be a better place tomorrow, we were convinced. On the third day, the anapiens, several of their relatives, the few friends who also came from the city and I, we all went home in peace to take a good nap. The next meeting was set for the following year.
Self-Portrait with Cat (Autoportrait de Paris avec chat)
Even today, Adele has not ceased to amaze me. After nearly a decade of LIVAKTE Camping, Abdoulah has just moved me on the Pont des Arts with a rendition of Someone like you. This Algerian student from Paris 8 in Fine Arts who tries to survive with a microphone and a guitar is just two months older than me in France. He’s my brother, Adele. He is an atheist. Atheist musician. Two pretty girls help him sing in Arabic. It's so intense. I don't understand Arabic.
"Don't forget me", I beg
It's weird to write these things at the Gare du Nord, on the way back from Dany Laferrière's Cœur Nomade exhibition on the Pont des Arts, with the feeling of missing out, of missing out on my life, that of my family, with the feeling of having helped others miss theirs.
We were among the trees
The red earth of benevolence
we were among the birds
the tender acacia flowers...
we were among the
so many silences
who lulled the noise
of the bitter ones...
Adelson Elias
I Am Tired (Je suis fatigué)
It has been more than two years since the Jardin du livre no longer welcomes LIVAKTE Camping. My resignation as head of the ANA, which dates back to the same period, and my gradual withdrawal from the other decision-making spheres of the institution seem to threaten the very existence of the project.
However, I am deeply convinced that the initiative was shipwrecked from its launch: the fraternization between urban and rural people through the advent of cultural democratization or a decolonial ecology8 will not take place. At least, not according to the first contract, comparable to the great global environmental movements conceived, controlled and evaluated from the great megalopolises.
To be sure, the fact of putting out of play religious debates and practices9, discussions relating to party politics10 and demanding the use of Creole (the language of the land) in the workshops contributed to the conviviality of the campsite. But this was not enough to make effective the decolonial ecological posture that underlies any real project for the democratization of culture.
LIVAKTE Camping, as it was perceived, could not resist what James Scott calls high-modernism11. Most of the young people from rural areas who regularly participated in the annual activities of the initiative were enthralled by the high-modernist spirit of the urban dwellers. The latter, on their part, saw the rustic environment as a backyard and backward place, aplace to come and recharge their batteries, to connect with Nature. This explains why the hybrids (neither quite peasant nor entirely urban) had the status of underdogs in the milieu, disconsidered from one side and envied from the other side.
My ability to convene in convocation and invocation has grown considerably despite my gradual disengagement from the LIVAKTE Camping project.
Oh Adele, « "Don't forget me »,
I struggled and passed my test
of self-sacrifice!
The initiative has made me an important and singular leader that most of the politicians of the commune fear (and persecute, pre-emptively). I have known the privilege of living under the spells of ingeniously worded threats and intimidation, Oh Adele!
How eternal am I
without success, I waited for death
for a long time moving around the city
as the young girl waits
the release of her fiancé
sentenced to life imprisonment
For shouting: Mierda Baby Doc! Mierda ExxonMobil!
And I said to myself: hopefully my murder will not be a discreet and cowardly work attributable to chance or illness. Let my flesh be eaten and let my blood quench the thirst of righteousness! And I said to myself: if the LIVAKTE Camping project has made me a politician in spite of myself, if it has made me apotential unofficial elected official, if it has allowed a group of urbanites to fulfill their fantasy of returning to Mother Nature for intense intellectual, spiritual, artistic, romantic experiences, so much the better! But it has not changed the nature of the relationships of humans (participants) with the planet. And, in addition to the shock of social gatherings, the project has caused hard-to-repair rifts in the social fabric of Sanite.
I have come to pit the peasant
against his cousin
to watch over my garden
am I not ashamed
when I think about it
I wanted us to catch
the marroon forester
who was cutting down our cedars
and our campeche woods
when the city sleeps and dreams
let him be punished
for me
for his sheep grazing
The lawn of love
let his lambs be eaten
while reciting "I have a dream"
am I not ashamed
when I think about it
I pit Benjamin
against Lormicile his cousin
who defended her right to print
her smell
under the Laferrière tree
pebbles rain down from the sky
and the girl runs away
she will come back later
enveloped by the night
but a stone will be detached from the sky
without the support of any hand
the spirit of the Jardin du livre
flattened Lormicile on her turd
tabitha kumi tabitha kumi
arise, young girl,
Lormicile sleeps deeper
am I not ashamed
when I think about it
Acts of the Apostles: The Enigma of the Return (L’énigme du retour)
The story of the failure of the LIVAKTE Camping project – in this case my failure, the one I partially claim – is also the failure of the great global ecological initiatives present in Haiti. I sometimes believe that LIVAKTE Camping is one of the most advanced decolonial ecological projects in Haiti, in the sense that it attempts, albeit clumsily, an experiment in fraternization. If it has not yet succeeded in creating this space for blinking, it is not for lack of ambition for social and planetary justice, but for lack of judgment and means.
The great global ecological initatives, for their part, sincerely denounce the high-modernism that causes the Anthropocene until these apostles realize that such initiatives have mostly served to give them political legitimacy, to sleep with a more or less lightened conscience, after having preached to the whole world the gospel of the possible salvation of the Planet, after having released slightly less waste than expected by the high-modernist standard, after having secured their analytical system by rationalizing the negative commons.
The concept of high modernism developed by James C. Scott invites me to play with three concepts, for the temporary conclusion of the present auto-ethnographic and poetic experience, by proposing to the LIVAKTE Camping team, at and the same time to the Terraforma Corp, a possible self-evaluation grid.
First, the high-anti-modernist or kamikaze anti-modernist is the one who expresses himself through the invisible committee in The Coming Insurrection. He proposes, and helps to trigger, the collapse of capitalism through chaos. And because he sees chaos as a strategy, I reject it out of hand, given that the very characteristic of chaos is the indeterminacy of becoming. It is not impossible that chaos will give birth to a monster worse than capitalism. My home island is currently going through such social chaos and civil war, and it has forced me to exile. Moreover, the current state of nuclear armament over the world forces us to take into account that any attempt at a brutal break-up of global capitalism risks causing the break-up of the Planet in the literal sense of the word.
Secondly, I call low-anti-modernist or rodent anti-modernist those who inscribe their discourse in the register of anti-capitalist, decolonial, ecofeminist, autonomist, queer ecological acts... Some do not only remain in the realm of discourse, but intervene directly on the ground. This second category is very important. But it limits itself in its function as a rodent. It proceeds through denunciations, rants, the preaching of the ecologist gospels (Many will be called but few chosen. St Matthew). Many people hear the call for greater awareness of the planet, but do not feel able to commit. Some remain in the contemplative stage, others have made it a professional activity, others are sincerely sorry for their powerlessness to act in the face of the titanic apparatus of the capitalist system.
The low-anti-modernist, when he takes an interventionist posture, finds himself confronted with the temptation of visibility and control of his field of action and its inhabitants. If the Jardin du livre is still free to access, it is due to a lack of funding. If the cultural residence has not been built so far, it is not because there is a lack of land or technical knowledge in Sanite for the construction of modest peasant habitats. It is because we wanted a sophisticated, expensive, connected architecture, powered by solar energy, capable of surprising urban and rural dwellers alike. Basically, we unconsciously wanted to make the Jardin du livre a space of power, under the banner of the democratization of culture, ecopoetics and ecopolitics. Thus, without realizing it, we were a kind of colonizers of ourselves, while we were claiming to do better than your average colonie de vacances (summer camps).
Of course, we played with the farmers. Of course, they have been taken into account in our program: a place to give performances on stage, free access to our mountain excursions, a few places in our "made in China/made in USA" tents. But they have never been an integral part of the planning and execution of the project. Even the two philosophy professors in charge of the workshops had to receive the thematic proposals from the city, in this case from my very high person, even though they were far more qualified than I was in the matter. Such a vertical relationship within the so-called partners of the LIVAKTE Camping made it impossible to carry out the fraternization project necessary for the emancipational, decolonial and universalist character announced by the initiative.
In Jean Giono's novel The Man Who Planted Trees, the effort of the solitary Elzéard Bouffier, a forest builder, was taken over by the high-modernist managing power after the fact. By analogy with this story, I think that, without actively rotting the desire for power among the initiators of LIVAKTE Camping, if it had received proper funding from potential partners, it would have been one more instrument for the creation of cultural borders in Haiti. A very powerful machine for the manufacture of writers, of intellectuals, talented slaves in the least worst of cases. On the urban side, several young people have won international literary prizes. Others have enjoyed a certain intellectual and artistic legitimacy on a national scale. On the farmers' side, we have mostly raised suspicions.
The cultural operator in me, always eager to act as a passeur de lecture (ferryman of readings), will not have been of much use if the Anapians are not animated by the desire to serve the planet by actively rotting high-modernism (in their own way, and better than I can do). Yet, while I take full responsibility for myself, I must admit that most of them are not even rodent anti-modernists. Has my cultural work contributed to the spread of the high-modernist spirit among the Petit-Goavians, in spite of myself? Can I be satisfied with Matthew’s formula that many are called but few chosen? In any case, Adele, these questions already rot and putrefy my pride as exemplary planetary citizen.
My mind is an adeliferous deposit that part of me extracts from me, here at the Gare du Nord, polluting my whole being, slowly rotting it. Capitalism is mal-propre12 (improper, polluting and evil-orienter) in its very way of appropriating territories. It was the prophet Michel Serre who wrote it. It breathes money, gloats in waste and violence. It proceeds through pollution, colonization, brutalization, illusion, the accumulation of profit, glory, political legitimacy... But its heart is human, it is the desire for power and control that is expressed in every attribute of high-modernism, the spirit that animates planetary capitalism and from which the communist revolutionary Lenin did not significally depart.
Adele, Adele, love can be a cancer, right? Now I am rotten by the sound river of your voice on the rocks of my heart. So, would you allow me to name carcinogenic anti-modernist the person who subtly attacks and actively rots the vital organs of high-modernism, to the point of making them cancerous and incurable?
rotting the manifestation
of the desire for power through language
rotting education
through Rancière's ignorant master
Paperson’s third university
rotting the high-modernist justice system
rotting the desire for power
will end up killing us, Adèle
killing humanity in man
infiltrating in his skin
humility, the almost lost art of erasing oneself
Cultural studies scholar Ann Cvetkovich, quoted by Denielle Elliot13, called process-based writing her attempt to rot the logic of knowledge production and communication by neoliberal, conservative, colonial, and academic structures. I try to persuade myself that the autoethnography that I am performing on the trail of the cultural operator/passeur de lecture that I was and that I still am, has just initiated a process that could allow me to register at a hypothetical Congress of Carcinogenic Anti-Modernists, alongside other colleagues such as Ann Cvetkovich, Jacques Rancière14, Ngugi wa Thiong'o15, Malcolm Ferdinand16 and La Paperson17 – all of whom break down disciplined writing, elite education of the proud, colonial spirit ecology exempted from its decolonial debt.
But, let's be clear: this ambition to contribute to carcinogenic anti-modernism is in no way a rejection of the rodent anti-modernist work. Rodent I will remain. The low-anti-modernist and the carcinogenic anti-modernist complement each other. The first one (where I come from) provides the basics. The second one (I aspire to be) is still out of my reach. As proof of my faithful commitment to remain a rodent, I end this nonfiction poem-article with a proposal addressed to all the rodent antimodernists out there:
Adele, I have a PIT dream18
for a Planetary International Tribunal
trees of all languages
of all tribes
from all oceans
The planet has its rights Adele
and its judges,
rotting brothers and sisters
for the wake
and a look
of mutual admiration
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Alain Rabatel, Homo Narrans: Pour une analyse énonciative et interactionnelle du récit, Limoges, Lambert-Lucas, 2020 ↩
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« 166 morts et disparus après l'explosion de "Piper Alpha" », LeMonde.fr (09 juillet 1988 ) [en ligne] ↩
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7th communal section of Petit-Goâve ↩
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Bertrand and Valois, Paradigme inventif de l'éducation, McGill Journal of Education, Fall 1981, vol XVI, no.3, pp. 267-281 ↩
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Formerly colonized States. The active heirs are the former colonizing and/or neo-colonizing States. ↩
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In Haiti, the phrase “debt of independence” raised in 2003 by President Jean Bertrand Aristide, highlighting how France is the main culprit for Haiti's poverty. In May 2022, according to Constant Méheut, a journalist at the New York Times, this debt corresponded to $30 billion. ↩
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From the launch of LIVAKTE Camping, Angello Jolivain was in charge of the execution of LIVAKTE Camping's reflection activity. ↩
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Malcolm Ferdinand, A Decolonial Ecology: Thinking Ecology from the Caribbean World, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 2019 ↩
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We judged that religious silence on religion was more effective than an ecumenical alliance. ↩
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Following the same logic of preventing religious crusade, we felt that it was wiser to prevent political conflicts, which are often very violent in Haiti. ↩
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James C. Scott, The Eye of the State: Modernize, Standardize, Destroy, Yale University Press, 1998. ↩
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Michel Serres, Le mal propre, Paris, Le pommier, 2011. The French title plays with the similarity between proper and clean (propre) as well as between the evil and the privative un- (mal). The English translation is Malfeasance: appropriation through pollution?, Stanford UP, 2013. ↩
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Denielle Elliot et Dara Culhane, Réinventer l’ethnographie : pratiques et méthodologies créatives, Laval, PUL, 2021 ↩
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Jacques Rancière, Le Maître ignorant : Cinq leçons sur l'émancipation intellectuelle, Paris, Fayard, 1987 ↩
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Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Décoloniser l'esprit, Paris, Editions La Fabrique, 2011 ↩
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Malcolm Ferdinand, A Decolonial Ecology: Thinking Ecology from the Caribbean World, Paris, Seuil, 2019 ↩
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Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Stanford University Press, 1991; Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature, London, Heinemann Educational, 1986; Malcolm Ferdinand, Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World, Cambridge, Polity, 2022; La Paperson, A Third University is Possible, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press,2017. ↩
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The idea of a Planetary International Tribunal (PIT) is an extension of my reflections on the theme: "Universities and Struggles against Social Injustices in the World". ↩
Save the Planet, Kill Your (Rich) Self! (A Modest Proposal)
Zahra Karimi
Rich people do things that hurt nature because they consume a lot of resources and want to show off their money and power. They might have lots of cars, houses, they may travel a lot and do or consume other things that are bad for the environment. This paper sets forth a new idea to save resources and help the planet by reducing consumption: let's launch a company that advocates suicide for rich people with the slogan You've always owned things in life; with us, you'll own your death! If this company succeeds, less rich people will mean less ludicrous consumption, which will mean less resources wasted by them – a good thing for the Earth! Even though promoting suicide may at first sound strange, it would definitely help save the planet. There may be nicer ways to help the Earth, but this may nevertheless make the Earth a better place, without constraining anyone: our customers would be free to choose suicide. Our goal is merely to convince them to make the right choice for the planet
Preserving the Earth
Preserving the Earth is essential to maintaining ecological balance, ensuring biodiversity, guaranteeing sustainable resources for future generations, and preserving the quality of life for all life forms on our planet. The need to preserve the Earth is based on several crucial aspects:
- Ecological balance: The Earth functions as an interconnected system in which each element, whether living beings or their environment, plays a vital role. Disruption of one element can have cascading repercussions on the entire ecosystem, affecting the health of the planet.
- Biodiversity: Biological diversity is essential to the stability of ecosystems. Each species, whether plant, animal or microbial, contributes to maintaining an ecological balance by fulfilling specific functions, such as pollination, population regulation or the decomposition of organic waste.
- Sustainable resources: The Earth provides natural resources essential to life, such as water, clean air, fertile soil, minerals, fossil and renewable fuels, among others. Irresponsible management of these resources can lead to their depletion, compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.
- Quality of life: Preserving the natural environment contributes to human health and well-being. Healthy ecosystems provide vital ecosystem services, such as water purification, climate regulation, protection against natural disasters, and offer recreational and aesthetic opportunities that enhance quality of life.
- Climate change: Environmental degradation, particularly the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation, is contributing to global climate change. This phenomenon has serious consequences, such as rising sea levels, extreme weather events, loss of biodiversity, all of which disproportionately affects the most vulnerable populations.
In conclusion, preserving the Earth is essential to ensure a sustainable future for humanity and all forms of life on our planet. This requires collective awareness, concerted action on a global scale, and a long-term commitment to environmental sustainability. As disadvantaged populations tend to be more exposed to environmental harm, and as rich people tend to contribute more heavily to various types of pollution as well as to climate change, it should be considered a special duty of better-off people to feel more responsible for preserving the Earth.
Wealth in the Consumer Society
The consumer society is an economic model in which the act of buying and consuming goods and services is at the heart of economic activity and growth. In this system, individuals are constantly encouraged to acquire more products, often driven by advertising campaigns and clever marketing strategies. This model is based on a culture of over-consumption, where the possession of material goods is often associated with social success and happiness. Companies adopt practices such as programmed obsolescence, where products are intentionally designed to become obsolete after a certain time, in order to stimulate repeat sales. This often leads to overproduction of goods, excessive use of natural resources, and an accumulation of waste, contributing to environmental problems such as pollution and climate change. Furthermore, the consumer society can have negative impacts on people's mental health, driving them to seek happiness in the accumulation of material possessions rather than in meaningful experiences or interpersonal relationships. In short, the consumer society is an economic model that encourages over-consumption and waste, often to the detriment of the environment, health and long-term human well-being.
The relationship between wealth and consumption is indeed complex and subject to multiple factors. It can vary considerably according to various economic, social and cultural contexts. Firstly, individual wealth can influence consumption in different ways. Wealthier people often have greater purchasing power and can afford to buy a wider range of goods and services. Their ability to spend is less limited by financial constraints, which often leads them to invest in luxury items, high-end travel, exclusive experiences and other high-end products. What's more, wealthy people are often more likely to adopt a consumption-based lifestyle, where the possession of material goods is associated with high social status and a sense of personal achievement.
However, the relationship between wealth and consumption is not limited to purchasing power alone. Attitudes towards consumption can also vary according to culture, personal values and social norms. In some cultures, wealth may be perceived as a sign of generosity and abundance, which can encourage more visible and extravagant consumption. In other cultures, wealth may be associated with financial prudence and modesty, which can limit consumption even among wealthy individuals. In addition, economic policies and government regulations can also have an impact on the relationship between wealth and consumption. Fiscal policies, such as tax rates and tax incentives, can influence the consumption habits of wealthy individuals by affecting their purchasing power and incentives to spend. Similarly, policies regulating financial markets and consumer products can have an impact on the availability of and access to goods and services, which can influence individuals' consumption decisions.
In general, however, and at the planetary scale, wealthier people tend to consume more than those with fewer financial resources. This tendency stems from their ability to afford a more luxurious lifestyle and to purchase high-quality goods and services. Indeed, wealth offers them the opportunity to satisfy their needs and desires more fully and often more ostentatiously. For many affluent people, the consumption of luxury goods and services is seen as a way of displaying their high social status and economic success. As a result, they may be more inclined to spend excessively on fashion items, luxury cars, luxury travel, or other high-end products that reinforce their image of success and prestige. What's more, wealthy people may also be more exposed to consumption-based lifestyles, where the possession of material goods is valued and seen as a key element of happiness and personal fulfillment. This consumer culture can encourage them to constantly seek out new acquisitions and participate in consumer trends that reflect their high social status. Thus, individual wealth is often associated with greater consumption, not only in terms of quantity, but also in terms of the quality and sophistication of the goods and services acquired – and this sophistication often comes at high environmental costs.
Reducing Consumption
Reducing consumption among the wealthy is a challenge, given their easier access to a wide range of goods and services. Nevertheless, here are a few approaches that could help achieve this goal:
- Promote sustainability: Making wealthy people aware of sustainability principles and the environmental impacts of their consumption can encourage them to opt for greener choices. This could involve buying sustainable products, reducing consumption of single-use items (plastics and more) and supporting businesses committed to sustainable practices.
- Encourage philanthropy: Encouraging wealthy people to reduce their consumption by encouraging them to invest in philanthropic activities is an effective approach. Instead of spending on excessive material goods, they might choose to invest in social projects, environmental initiatives or community development programs.
- Promote a minimalist lifestyle: Encouraging wealthy people to adopt a minimalist lifestyle can help them reduce their consumption. This involves concentrating on the essentials and renouncing the excessive accumulation of material goods. The benefits of a minimalist lifestyle include reduced over-consumption, less waste and greater personal satisfaction.
- Offer leisure alternatives: Offering leisure alternatives that do not require excessive consumption of material goods can help reduce consumption among the affluent. Encouraging outdoor activities, responsible travel or cultural experiences can offer sources of fulfillment that do not depend on the purchase of material goods.
- Education and awareness: Providing education on the impacts of over-consumption and the benefits of responsible consumption can help raise awareness among wealthy people and encourage them to reduce their consumption. Awareness campaigns, educational programs and empowerment initiatives can be put in place to this end.
In short, reducing consumption among the affluent requires a change in mentality and behavior, as well as incentives to opt for more sustainable and responsible choices. This transition can be facilitated by an approach combining awareness-raising, education, financial incentives and the promotion of alternative lifestyles.
A Modest Proposal for a More Promising Solution to Climate Change
As reasonable as the previous paragraph may sound, as convincing as their arguments may be, as often as we have heard them repeated left and right, we must face the painful truth: they are utterly ineffective when it comes to actually reduce climate change and the wrecking of our environments!
We all know that most wealthy people, in order to attract attention and increase their notoriety, engage in activities that are highly harmful to the environment, such as overconsuming, owning numerous vehicles, yachts and homes, and accumulating assets – all of which heavily contribute to our environmental tragedy. We all know that this type of behavior is usually motivated by the need to show off one's wealth and power, but, unfortunately, we have not yet found the proper way to stop it.
Hence our proposal: launching a company to promote suicide among the wealthy. Our slogan will be: You've always owned things in life; with us, you'll own your death! Our goal will be to make it desirable to fully, freely and purposefully own your death – the one thing that the richest people cannot currently purchase. And what better way to own your death than to commit suicide?
Rich people pride themselves in showing off their altruistic behavior. They establish non-profit organizations, finance museums and the arts, give money to charity. What could beat the ultimate altruistic act: sacrificing your life to the welfare of your fellow humans? Our company will launch a healthy competition among the wealthiest people, incentivizing them to outcompete each other with the most selfless act of generous self-annihilation. They have been able to buy everything they ever dreamt about, and this quest for ever more consumption has left them unsatisfied. Our highly selective promotional campaigns will give them a chance to be truly and definitely outstanding in their consumption of themselves!
Fewer super-consumers will mean a healthier planet. It will bring positive effects on the health of the planet by easing the pressure on natural resources and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, thus mitigating climate change and preserving biodiversity. Of course, overpopulation is not the only factor in environmental deterioration; sustainable practices such as conserving resources, promoting renewable energies and protecting ecosystems are also essential to ensure a healthy planet for future generations. More than overpopulation, the real threat to the habitability of planet Earth comes from the excessive number of wealthy and especially super-wealthy hyper-consumers.
In 2015, the 10% wealthiest humans caused 49% of greenhouse gases released by consumption. Each time our rate of success increases by 10%, the consequence for the planet will be a reduction of 5% of our greenhouse gas emission! Investing in our company may be the most promising and most efficient way to curb climate change!
The time has come to join us: Help us help our planet!
What Can We Learn from a (slightly-failed) Workshop to Play with (Un-Emerged) Conflicts
Lena Karson: artistic research on spoken language and conflict. This research ranges from voice based performances, to participative workshops on conflict and working towards opening up « spaces for conflicts » in institutional contexts.
The reflection I would like to bring forth here, with the goal of maintaining or rather enhancing fair modes of cohabitation on Planet Earth, revolves around conflict. In this introductory text, I will start with why I joined the terraforming discussion in the first place, followed by the description of a creative workshop I proposed in that favor, sharing a report of what I think functioned and didn’t function with my workshop proposal, towards what I would wish to further propose and research for the TerraForma Corp. This creative workshop is part of a wider and personal artistic research on how to bring spaces for conflict through artistic processes. This workshop format works as an open-ended medium where participants play, side by side and collectively, with translating their meta-communications into creations for conflictual situations.
A Research on the Emergence of Conflict
I am currently studying in an art-based research master program, searching how to make academic research and artistic creation collaborate as one discipline. The creative workshops I organize are the moments of research that help me bridge these two activities, as well as moments to test and bring the theoretical research to human relationships and experiences. We work on and for conflictual situations or collective decision-making, which means the participants engage in a creative process in order to actively contemplate communications they had, or will have or think to have in these situations. The process depends on the workshop’s context and what relational experiences the group decides to look into.
Discourse and conflict are the subjects at stake. In order to look at what we can’t name within our exchanges, we use visual tools and other sensory evocations that contextualized spoken language enhances without being actually spoken. I currently hold these workshops as ways to :
- introduce conflict as an intelligent 1 and necessary force for changing interpersonal, systemic and complex situations
- introduce abstract symbols as language, for the participant to find their own and, with them, challenge the moments when language turns into authority
- make the inherent misunderstandings stand out visually, and therefore obviously, to introduce the idea that language as communication is based on misunderstandings2
- use creation to pave the way towards new manners of listening (eyes, ears, touch, etc.)
- find one’s creative outlets to share an individual conflict through other means than spoken language
- (re)consider conflictual (on an individual or collective basis) situations with these other means.
More often than not, the way the creative exercises change the relationships within the workshop will be more significative than how they could change people’s relationships outside the workshop. This invites us to reflect upon the workshop as its own momentary social structure.
While working on this research, I joined weekly Tuesday meetings of TerraForma Corp composed of various participants in Paris, in connection with students from Pittsburgh and artists and researchers based in Dakar. I joined because of pure interests on the subject of terraforming but also because these meetings are a great configuration to observe ways in which a group of individuals come together to communicate, share dissensus and misunderstandings, exchange towards a shared goal.
A Slightly-Failed Experiment within TerraForma Corp
Before presenting the workshop I led with the Paris group in March 2024, I need briefly to discuss TerraForma Corp’s relationship to conflict. As I understand it, TerraForma Corp is not a web that functions like a collective of activists, or like an institution, where conflict is inherent in both contexts (badly or well managed, depending on the cases). It is neither a political party, nor a coalition of various political groups coming together to take decisions and perform actions. As a consequence, Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic theories3, according to which conflict should be at the center of political decision-making, in order to include a plurality of opinions intertwined with their political affects do not really apply. And yet, political objectives, approached in terms of influencing the modes of terraforming currently predominant on planet Earth, are the main concern of TerraForma Corp. So what is it then ?
If it defines itself as an informal web of initiatives that work on enhancing fair modes of cohabitation on Planet Earth, where does conflict come in ? With all the pluralities this cohabitation involves, it does seem impossible to operate – even loosely – without conflict. How can TerraForma Corp’s researches and initiatives be taken into practice, if they don’t come to interact first with each other ? And how can they really interact without generating some amount of disagreement, possibly leading to conflict?
As ironic as it sounds, the requirements to solve or manage conflict can be prevented by greeting conflict from the start, which is why I organize workshops that open spaces for conflictuality. This comes from the standpoint that conflict is inherent to any human relationship and organisation, and therefore necessary. However, each group has its own configuration and vocabulary. To work through these differences, I call onto creative processes of translation.
Within this particular group, my hypothesis was that damaging conflicts can be prevented, through its introduction and handling within an artistic activity and context – in homeopathic dose, so to speak.
I consider the following attempt as a failed one. I believe, however, that failures can help us develop more accurate hypotheses on conflicts and their management within the TerraForma Corp.
The first reason why it failed comes from an inability to articulate a question that would raise a passionate conflict within the group. We searched for a topic that would bring polarized disagreement, but failed to find a good one. Not many of the topics that came up seemed to motivate everyone, maybe for fear of (real) conflict, maybe for general agreement on most issues. After reflection, however, I considered it was strange to force a conflictual conflict onto the group. I then switched the focus towards a question we had somehow touched upon in our search for conflict, which I considered important in the context of terraforming, a question I thought could be interesting to collectively reflect upon in order to bring the varied researches to life towards cohabiting on planet earth — a question on how to share the research, considering what sharing could mean in terms of activating the research.
The sharing of knowledge through creation, for different types of knowledge to interact with the relationships we have on this Planet Earth, is what drives my research. Therefore, the question that I decided to bring as the main setting for the workshop was : What would be the perfect object for sharing TerraForma Corp’s forms of knowledge? Drawing onto the research of another group member, this question took the book format as a starting point to look into these formats. This question considers the positive aspects of sharing knowledge as much as the problems raised by the choice of a particular format (text, books and more) or type of knowledge. I used this question as a departure point but I didn’t bring it back through the collective exercises nor in the conclusion of the workshop, which would have been necessary to tighten the exercises around this main theme.
This brings us to the second point of failure : Was there, on the semester’s scale, a will to work towards collective decisions regarding terraforming ? Was there a shared goal in the group ? We were a group of students, with individual researches, coming together to learn collectively and to develop them side by side. In the time frame of our meetings, and within a traditional academic setting, this side-by-side situation made sense. However this configuration did not bring a collective drive to tie all these individual routes together. And this may also be the reason why we failed to find a conflictual issue: our relationship was too loose.
A third cause explaining what I consider as a partial failure was that I rushed to stuff all of the exercises I had planned in the two hours assigned to this workshop, while I normally engage in two small ones in the same amount of time. I am well aware that all of these creative exercises need to be given the time to come to fruition, which requires long moments of sharing in between the participants. However and probably because of the two previously stated reasons for failure, this workshop rather resembled a sort of practice based presentation of my usual workshop process.
A Workshop in Six Steps
The two-hour workshop was structured in six phases:
- The first exercise consisted in translating into abstract visual symbols, such as lines or geometrical shapes complex notions that can be understood in a plurality of ways.
- After asking the group to draw the notion of (for example) « format » in a geometric shape, I then asked them to draw a shape that excluded the notion of « format ».
- The next exercise consisted in asking every participant to choose one of the notions we had worked on. I then ask a number of general questions, which everyone was invited to answer individually, based on the notion they had chosen to focus on.
- In reaction to these questions, each participant was led to generate a new version or definition of the same notion they had started from. This new definition, expressed in the form of a (complete or incomplete) sentence, was based on this sensory and visual relationship built with the notion in its various possible meanings.
- These definition-sentences then became the basis for the following collective exercise for which I asked the participants to form three groups and to generate, what I presented as collective translations of these definition-sentences, into any sort of creative output they believed would express the sentence at best : a performance, a diagram, an architecture, a collection of sounds, or whatever else felt right.
- As a final step, each of the three groups shared their creative translation with the other participants, making visual, sonic or performative statements. After these creative statements had been shared, the rest of the group would explain what they understood from these translations. Only after these exchanges could the group proceed to explain how these creative statements came out of the given sentence.
Some Documents from the Workshop
The following captions are based on a recording of the workshop. In order to make the orally spoken sentences readable, I had to change some of the formulations. The rewritten sentences were then translated from French to English. I tried to stay as close to what the participants said as possible, however, because of the necessary modifications, the sentences below are not the exact words pronounced by them.
- Definition-sentence 1 : « Le savoir est d’autres formes de vivre. Le pouvoir qui change fort. » (“Knowledge is other forms of living. The power that changes strength.”)
- Definition-sentence 2 : « Essayons d’habiter nos formatages pour les dilater dans l’amour de l’écoute. » (“Let’s try to inhabit our formats to expand them through the love of listening.")
- Definition-Sentence 3 : « Partage : le partage c’est quand il n’y a plus de banquiers. » (“Sharing: sharing is when there are no longer bankers”)
- Definition-sentence 4 : « Partage : plat en sauce posé au milieu, dans lequel chacun vient piocher avec les doigts, avec le pain. » (“Sharing : the sauce pan located in the middle, in which everyone dips with their fingers, their bread.”)
- Definition-sentence 5 : « Le savoir est une forêt dont le plafond est un ventre émettant une onde hallucinatoire, Blurp ! C’est le début du pouvoir. » (“Knowledge is a forest the ceiling of which is a belly emitting a hallucinatory wave, blurp! That’s the beginning of power.")
- Definition-sentence 6 : « Le partage est l’expression de la générosité, qualité-essentielle et naturelle des êtres et des choses, nécessaires à l’équilibre de l’univers. » (“Sharing is the expression of generosity, a natural and essential quality of beings and things, necessary to the equilibrium of the universe.”)*
Here are fragments from the common reflection on the images as they were drawn and shared:
- When I looked at the drawings (find example above), there were lots of things which surprised me because they were very close to the ones I did. So on the contrary, it seems more like a repetition of the same thing in different forms rather than different ones. That really shocked me when I looked around.
- But if you look over there, she wrote « knowledge » without the s and precisely plural knowledges would invite to consider that they are different types of knowledge perhaps. Knowledge is a mass that appeals to something unified, more on the same line with what you are saying here. This is perhaps where it creates drifts in projections perhaps.
- I struggle to find a conflict
- So you find more common areas and agreements?
- I still have the impression that we have already influenced each other, given that we have already been working together for a while, the group is starting to achieve a sort of harmony in fact.
- It would be good to return to the richness of what we have done (first drawing exercise). To take three, to assemble them, to contrast them. Because we derive from that in the workshop, but we haven't really come back to it. It would be interesting to see the contrasts, oppositions, possible conflicts. Because the material that came out of us is really interesting.
I feel that there are no possible positive outcomes (based on the image above). We are locked in delirium, in domination, in this situation and we need a vanishing point. The vanishing point is perhaps in the middle? This is where we have to go.
I made a joke at the very beginning about the idea of the super human, one that awaits formatting perhaps. It speaks about codes and about expectations in the end. It came to me immediately when I thought of someone’s LinkedIn profile : this person had uploaded their personality map in an uncreative way, so we started to do the same thing with traits that we generally don't really want to present.
Concluding/opening remarks
The three causes of partial failure mentioned earlier can shed light on the difficulties faced by TerraForma Corp, beyond the very limited case of this group of students meeting in Paris between January and April 2024. A certain fear of conflictuality may be a precious value, especially when one feels that one is among well-intended people spontaneously working towards the same societal changes. TerraForma Corp is based on the intuition that many people, all across the world, already push together in the same direction without being aware of it. Yet, identifying possible causes of potentially conflictual disagreement is important in order to make all these initiatives meet and to eventually prevent escalation. What is required to do so is the opening of sheltered time-space which are hard to fit within our schedules, ruled by a sense of urgency.
Here are some further practices to dive into as a follow up from this experience :
- In order to find the best and always adaptable configuration for the TerraForma Corp. to have and manage their conflicts, I would like to engage in interviews with all the researchers that are involved in the Corp to understand different ways of engaging and resolving conflict that can be observed around the world.
- Configurate a map of all approaches to conflict and learn about the plurality of ways to misunderstand each other, to be in conflict with one another. For example, we should have asked the researchers and artists based in Dakar to inform us about current practices of the Palabre 4, a web of rich traditions coming from sub-Saharan countries to solve conflicts in communities.
- One could also configurate a fictional map of possible modes of intercommunal conflict resolution, imaginary schemes as well as documented practices. Like the tentative attempt described in this article, such imaginary schemes could « contribute to help our collective thinking about what can be done in order to maintain and enhance fair modes of cohabitation on Planet Earth. » If we don’t have at our disposal many methods to reflect upon our ways of communicating together, many methods to greet plurality within conflicts, how can we enhance fairer modes of cohabitation ?
REFERENCES
Jean-Godefroy Bidima, La palabre — Une juridiction de la parole, Paris, Michalon, 1997, p.128
Michel Monroy et Anne Fournier, Figures du conflit. Une analyse systémique des situations conflictuelles, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, (le sociologue), 1997, p.221
Chantal Mouffe, L’illusion du consensus, Paris, Albin Michel, 2016, p.197 ; traduit par les Éditions Albin Michel de la version Anglaise : On the political, Routledge, Londres et New York, 2005
Christine Servais et Véronique Servais , « Le malentendu comme structure de la communication », Questions de communication, 15 | 2009, p. 21-49
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Michel Monroy et Anne Fournier, Figures du conflit. Une analyse systémique des situations conflictuelles, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, (le sociologue), 1997, p.221 ↩
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Christine Servais et Véronique Servais, « Le malentendu comme structure de la communication », Questions de communication, 15 | 2009, p. 21-49 ↩
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Chantal Mouffe, L’illusion du consensus, Paris, Albin Michel, 2016, p.197 ; édition anglaise : On the political, Routledge, Londres et New York, 2005. ↩
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Jean-Godefroy Bidima, La palabre — Une juridiction de la parole, Paris, Michalon, 1997, p.128 ↩
MY UNCLE G.
Benito Maramaldi
From the moment you pick up an object, the moment an object reaches you, or the moment that something draws you towards an object of your own choice, you have the impression that it is the object itself that attracts you… Once we have an object in our possession, we begin to realize that there has to be a relationship between that object and ourselves. Trying to find out what kind of relationship this is means beginning to cross-examine ourselves and this attraction, which has been exorcised from within us and has steered us towards the object.
Issa Samb, in The Shell. A conversation between Issa Samb and Antje Majewski, Dakar 2010
The city was unexpectedly warm. My mother had warned me, told me about a cyclone involving Mitteleuropa at that time. My mother was always perfectly aware of all temperature variations in Europe, cyclones, anticyclones, winds from all cardinal points. She had learned them from her father and my father, both discreet sailors. The city was warm, I said, which in November was a peculiar occurrence. When I walked out of the station, the sky was cloudy, the humidity suggested an impending storm, so I hurried to smoke a cigarette and call a cab. I had left my village in the Southern swamps in the morning, one of the villages that the old regime created by reclaiming the malarial lands of the South, where people used to die from endemic diseases and starvation, now from boredom or from a stray bullet, the result of a settling of scores. I had stayed there just long enough to get ready to leave, but I still managed to set aside half a day to visit my grandmother: she lived in a four-story apartment across the street from my parents' house, but she only used the third floor, where there was a small living room with a fireplace, the kitchen and three bedrooms. After her husband died, she locked the master bedroom and moved to her son's. For a couple of years now, dementia had been confusing her memories, but especially in the last year every visit took particularly grotesque tones. It was now taken for granted that she did not recognize me, and that when I told her my name, she would mistake me for her husband.
“Benito M.? Are you Benito M.?”
“Yes, grandma.”
“My husband?”
“No, grandma. I am your grandson. Dad named me after your husband, but I have never met him.”
My grandmother lived in an old building and, as was normal then, the entry to the apartments was from the balcony, via an outside staircase, accessible from the courtyard. Later, my grandfather had an elevator installed that would run through all three floors, including the mezzanine, which would otherwise be isolated from the rest of the house. I went up, therefore, to the third floor in the battered elevator, with its fiery red walls, and arrived in the small living room, immobile for twenty years now, walked down the hallway carpeted with green velvet and family photos, and arrived in my grandmother's room, barely awake and glued with her eyes to the small television my father had installed at the foot of the bed.
After the due rituals of recognition, she began to talk to me about why my parents decided to call me Benito. Benito is a Spanish name, not an Italian one. People named Benito in Italy have a connection, more or less loosely, to the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini. But my parents named me so to pay homage to my grandfather, as is the tradition in conservative southern Italian circles. I helped my grandmother get out of bed slightly and we began to talk about her youth, the country, love and, finally, fascism. I asked her:
“Grandma, were you a fascist when you were young?”
She looked at me, smiled and said:
“My darling, we were all fascists.”
From the station I arrived in the historic center of the city. That particular historic center was not among the best in Italy, but rather quite miserable. What attracted tourists the most was the international atmosphere, combined with the elegance typical of 1960s Italy, created from scratch by regime architects who had escaped that Italian Nuremberg trials, of which so much was spoken, but which in the end did not take place. They erected the buildings according to a rationalism stripped of fascist commissioning, daring more with color, with forms; they fooled the Italian corporate bourgeoisie with the idea of a new freedom, devoted to consumption, but surreptitiously creating the strict regulations of the new Italian design, the decalogue of good bourgeois living. The foundations of the city rested on design and industry. In the 1980s, the city saw itself the subject of a huge migration from Southern cities, drawn, as usual, by the opportunities for profit. At that time, it was affectionately nicknamed "The City to Drink" – the city of new cocktails, of new elegance, mocking the old and dull velleities of the dolce vita, doing away with all the decorations, until all that remained in the equation was money. I saw it wandering around, money: I heard the beeps of credit cards, smelled complicated symphonies of fragrances, everyone was engaged in an intimate dance with money, flattered it, spoiled it, made it grow and diminish, spent it, wasted it, gave it away, hid it. I thought of all the things you can do with money.
The cab dropped me off in front of a 17th-century burgundy building with gray windows. I went up the stairs, got to the third floor, deactivated the alarm and went inside. My uncle's apartment was in excellent condition: it consisted of two bedrooms, one patronal and one guest, both with their own bathrooms, an eat-in kitchen, and three living rooms overlooking a medieval church, which every hour starting at 7 a.m. annoyed me with its bells.
At my father's explicit request, I started rummaging through the house for any valuables left by my uncle. I went to the walk-in wardrobe in the master bedroom and found shirts, coats, jumpers, socks, a bottle of Armagnac from 1996. I poured myself a glass and tried on one of the coats: a dark green loden of excellent workmanship, of considerable weight, with concealed buttons and a high buttoned collar. It was slightly big for me – my uncle was a few centimeters taller than me – so I turned up the sleeve and checked myself at the mirror: the Austrian rigor of that coat struck me immediately, the straight lines, the padded epaulettes, the weight of the wool, the woody color. I liked to picture myself as an industry man from the Inn valley, relocated for business to the city with his black hound, slightly nostalgic for the Reich, although which of the three I had not yet decided. I sent a photo of me to D., my lover, writing:
“Here I am, a moment in this town and I've become right-wing too.”
“You’re such an asshole”, she promptly replied.
I poured myself a second glass and moved to one of the lounges. I found some photographs of my uncle travelling around Italy: at San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, at the basilica of Sant'Agata in Catania, at San Giovanni in Rome. At his side, this woman, whom I immediately recognized as his lover. In bulk, on the salon tables, empty boxes of luxury watches. My father asked me to change the locks as soon as possible. We imagined that his lover had a set of keys, had entered and taken everything of value in that house, perhaps looking for a will, any paper proving that he actually wanted to leave everything to her, but he had not had time to go to the notary. Evidently, she found nothing.
The house was discreetly furnished, the bourgeois taste of the city echoed in the green and white designer kitchen, the straight lines of the bookcase, the Vienna straw of the chairs, the expensive hi-fi system. Nevertheless, there remained elements that flaunted a peasant wealth, typical of the Southern bourgeoisie: the gilded, Rococo-like inlays of the mirror, a copper half-bust of his mother resting on the Doric capitals of a marble column, the chrome-plated wrought-iron headboard of the bed. It was a bachelor's house, furnished with an acerbic and evidently disinterested taste, who, in order to free himself from the responsibility of making decisions, let his house be as it should be, the place where a professional of his caliber was expected to live. That naïve decor caused a tenderness in me that I could not describe, a pity for the weaknesses of a person I had never met. I thought, however, that every house had a certain pathetic air about it; I found a rare sweetness in the thought of someone who was pining, throwing a tantrum, to have an 18th- century secrétaire, a Hungarian-thorn walnut parquet floor, radiant panel heating. Such meticulous choices would make my way into the insecurities of the owners, into their dreams, in the idea they wanted to give of themselves and their nest, and when they weren't there to defend themselves, to defend their dignity as serious adults, explaining how the set of Scandinavian chairs was basically an investment, how their choice was, in the end, purely rational, those elements were moving and fundamentally childish.
The smallest room in the house overlooked the inner courtyard, and I had several times during those weeks seen a blonde lady looking at me questioningly. I thought perhaps she knew my uncle, so I was not frightened. My father called me and told me that she was the one who was scared, because she thought I was a burglar. Her name was M. F. and she was a former dancer, now a painter. She lived with her architect husband, who had designed the interior of their flat. Every time I passed her on the stairs, she would tell me about the building, pointing out details that brought back its history, the 17th-century foundations, the columns thrown into the basement like worn-out clothes, the old stable turned into an artist's studio. She would always greet me in the same way: “Hello! It was a pleasure seeing you! We should definitely drink a tea sometimes! Bye!" We never had tea, but she insisted on talking about my flat. I thought She actually wanted to talk about my uncle G., and used his house as a means to do so. The tacky furniture, the stucco ceiling to hide the wooden coffers, the ruined parquet, the absolute silence coming from there. The profile of an atrociously normal person shone through, dedicated to his profession, his partner, Catholicism, with no artistic aspirations, no Biennale catalogue on the coffee table, no synthetic drugs in the bedside table.
The following weeks passed in an extremely slow and cadenced manner: I used the downtime to read, go to the library, take long walks in the old town, buy perfume bottles. The violently elegant ambience of the city urged me to wear my uncle's clothes rather than my own; the inevitable effect was that the few tenants who were unaware of his death began to mistake me for him and call me by his name on the stairs. I impulsively turned around and saw in their faces a disquiet similar to that of someone seeing a ghost.
As agreed, D. took a train and came to see me in the city. D. and I did not see each other often, mostly by her own choice: she confessed to me that our meetings caused her great anxiety, mainly due to our ambiguous relationship, in which we defined ourselves as a de facto couple, but without respecting the duties that this implied. At each of our meetings, we both needed a couple of hours to get reacquainted with each other with due formality. These were indeed pitiless battles of formality, to the tune of "You look good!"; "This shirt suits you!"; "I've thought about you a lot";.
After consuming all the reserve of elegant habits, our eyes refocused and became suddenly voluptuous, of a violent and unquenchable desire. We needed to seclude ourselves as soon as possible, and every second of delay tortured us like a needle stuck in the flesh. There was no amorous vocabulary whatsoever – in fact, I thought our intimacy consisted precisely in treating each other as strangers when we met, in repeating an eternal first date and, in the end, choosing each other as lovers.
I went to pick her up at the station, the same station where I had arrived the month before. She was dressed completely in black with a knee-length coat and her hair up. When we hugged, she told me that I smelled of dust, of cold. She smelled pleasantly of roses, but out of spite I did not compliment her. In those days she couldn't help telling me how much I was changing in that city, and that she hoped I would leave there soon. I denied it, but in reality I knew it too: the loneliness in that flat had aged me twenty years, I did not even touch the city's cultural offerings, I went out very little, mostly for walks and to buy food. And with me, my relationship with D., was maturing more and more every day: from capricious boy/girlfriends, we had turned into a pair of old lovers, with their routine, their ambitions, their extreme privacy.
D. often asked me about my uncle, but I explained that unfortunately I could not answer her, as I myself did not know much about his life. So one evening we decided to stay at home, finish the bottle of Armagnac I had jealously guarded, and continue snooping around the flat. The idea was to collect clues among the folders of documents, among the photos, the notes scattered in the drawers and reconstruct fictitious stories that could link as many elements as possible into a coherent narrative. We found more photos, three passports full of Bangkok customs stamps, kilos of correspondence, amorous and familiar, local religious icons, graduation parchments of distant relatives. In a small metal box, a deck of French cards, a Kim brand cigarette with a lipstick imprint on the filter, a small leather case. Inside the latter, a black-and-white photo of a bald gentleman with a voluminous dark moustache, a small statue of the Virgin Mary, an iron ring with the inscription “GOLD TO THE MOTHERLAND YEAR XIV”. The man looked a bit like me, and D. did not fail to point this out to me, with a sardonic smile on her face. I rather concentrated on the ring: I had the impression that it was something really important, and I started to do some research, which turned out to be uncannily easy.
The fascists entered Ethiopia in 1935, but both countries were part of the League of Nations. Italy was severely sanctioned by the member states. Mussolini accused France and England of hypocrisy, he declaimed in a famous speech that the time of the plutocratic powers in Europe had to end. In response to the economic problems, the party organized a day, December 18, 1935, which was called Day of Faith, on which Italians were invited to hand over their wedding rings1 and other gold objects, to receive in return a certificate and another ring, but made of iron, testifying to their loyalty. At the end of the regime, several quintals of wedding rings were found in the suitcases of fascist hierarchs fleeing Italy.
We were both incredulous, but I felt that my, by now, partner was not as amused as I was. She asked me if my family were fascists, I replied that I did not know, but that I had, at times, had strange feelings, as if certain things should not be discussed about too much. To relieve the tension, I jokingly said that I could start wearing it. Now drunk, we began to bicker about historical responsibility, guilt, courage and dissent. I said that those who professed to be anti-fascists and had not acted in any way were just as cowardly as those who had participated to the regime; a clear conscience was the only difference.
"You are nothing but a revisionist!"; she said.
I repeated what my grandmother told me the last time I saw her: “Honey, they were all
fascists”.
Churchill, the Ardeatine trenches, 'strange people the Italians', the republic of Salò, the Christian religion, the ratline, Priebke and the vicar Pompanin, Mussolini fleeing Italy incognito, the Russian campaign, the Russians, the Americans, '45 million fascists', the P2, the partisans in the Emilian Apennines, the Nazis in the wooden huts in Sterzing in the 1980s, the fascists in the law faculties of Rome, Piazza Fontana and Aldo Moro, the strategy of tension, '45 million fascists', Clara Petacci upside down next to her adulterous lover in a square very near to that very flat, the 1976 elections, Italian villages, war memorials, fascists in the mountains and democrats in the city, fascists in the city and partisans in the mountains, the four days of Naples, Giorgio Almirante, Antonio Gramsci, the swamps in Southern Italy, the factories in Northern Italy, the workers'; movement, the Sansepolcristi, the squadracce, the African campaign, Indro Montanelli, Africa, the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia! ETHIOPIA!
The liquor had knocked us out and we did not realize we had been screaming for hours, in the middle of the night. We suddenly heard two loud knocks on the door and gasped together: "Oh dear, were we shouting?”.
We went together to open the door and in front of us stood two gentlemen in their thirties, with unkempt beards and stern eyes. The muddy boots had left footprints all over the stone staircase; in the tears of the bloody green jackets, primroses sprouted, strangely neat and fragrant. I noticed the battered rifles slung over their shoulders, startled and asked:
“Are you carabinieri?”
They ignored my question and said:
“Are you Dr. G.?”
I turned to D., incredulous, and asked her with a nod of my head what I should answer. She answered by slowly nodding her head no. “Yes, it's me, what do you want? Who are you?”
“We are M. S. and L. R. of the Fiamme Verdi brigade. From the general command of the Volunteers for Freedom corps, we are charged with rendering justice to the Italian people. May we come in?”
“Please come to the living room”, I replied, already more aware of what was happening.
They blindfolded us and put us on our knees in front of the canapé. As they loaded the rifles, I thought that, yes, it was right, yes, you don’t talk to fascists, no, you just shoot fascists.
-
In Italian, fede translates as both faith and wedding ring. ↩
Gapography: an Experiment in Differentiating Points of Life
Loïs Vioques
In the following text, I want to work on a device that would enable a territory to be described and perceived from different angles. I also want to reflect on the way in which the problems (and therefore the solutions, or lack of solutions to them) of terraforming depend on the point of view adopted on the situation. The challenge was therefore to vary points of view on a given problem, in order to see how the issue is reconfigured according to the point of view adopted.
The initial impetus for this work came from the book Terraforma, which proposes various changes of perspective in the way we map the world, and invites us to "repopulate the maps"1. The different approaches presented in this book restore what is vibrant and alive in the environment, drawing maps that show bodies and the traces they leave behind them. Among the different ways of mapping that are put forward, it is the "point of life"2 approach that was at the origin of the framework and project of this text, notably because it attaches particular importance to the points of junction between the different elements of a map.
As for the choice of topic, it came from observing a changing environment, the Hautes Pyrénées. In recent years, this area has seen a massive influx of processionary caterpillars, which, among other things, are altering the landscape with the white nests they weave in the region's pine trees. The text picks up on elements visible in the Port Vieux (Old Port) hike, a path taken by Spaniards in the late 30s to escape the fascist armies led by Franco that had surrounded them at the border.
In the presence of these caterpillar nests, the human eye, perceiving the situation from an overhanging vantage point, from the outside, can only see decay. It sees trees under attack by pests, with the impression that they are gradually gaining ground, seemingly destined to ravage an entire territory and take with them the existing world that needs to be protected. So, the first vision of the looped landscape (from the outside and from above), redoubles the catastrophist imaginary that unfolds in the collapsologist perspective: we perceive a danger that seems to be ignored by our fellow human beings (particularly governmental authorities), and it seems impossible to counter the inevitable catastrophy that would follow. In this perspective of looming collapse, today's living world is producing the signs of its own future downfall, and already contains the seeds of tomorrow's ruins, the ghosts of a twilight future. Seen from this angle, the cottony balls of the caterpillars are like oracles preaching It's all over for the pines in this region.
I then wanted to try and change this point of view, here staged as daydreams by the character, who comes to imagine what different entities see, other than his own, and in particular the State, the caterpillars and the tree. These different points of view would then produce a kind of journey, from the immediate view, giving primacy to the organizing role of human beings (with the idea that the caterpillar problem is the result of human actions: global warming with increasing periods of mild weather allowing their proliferation; commercial management of artificial forests to rapidly produce wood for construction in the surrounding area; weakening the defenses produced by the trees, etc.3) to a perspective that interweaves the actions of the various entities making up the space. With the idea that "repopulating maps" also means "accepting that we humans are not alone in making them"4.
Ideally, I'd like this text, which is still a work in progress, to be able to work out something of this desirable change of outlook for thinking about terraforming issues. Moreover, this question of the "point of life" echoes that of "becoming", and in particular that of Gilles Deleuze's "becoming-animal", which invites us to think about hybridizations and the a priori improbable junctions that undo encysting identifications, thought in the mode of the binary. The perspective of the point of life, like that of becoming, induces a process that empowers molecular forces, swept aside by the overhanging or colonizing gaze (understood as the gaze of the State, or of a sovereign individual).
From a formal point of view, I wanted to test, without being entirely convinced of the result, a form of estrangement that attempts to blur the implicit division that traditionally operates in texts, between objects of discourse (nature as an object of description, as a decor; non-human animals) and subjects of enunciation (the human individual, supposed to be the only character who speaks). Here, I wanted to work on the basis of entities (human hikers, caterpillars, State, pine tree facing the arrival of caterpillars), presented from their junction points, and somewhat blurred by the use of a "she" that can refer indifferently to each of them.
Port Vieux
From the parking lot at the entrance to the path, your gaze takes in a crowd of fir trees that have given their name to the green. These trees, at the top or tip of their branches, seem to be adorned with delicate cotton bubbles. At first, her eye catches just one of them, on the top of the nearest pine. Then she realizes that they are present in all of them, like dots which, if lines were drawn through each ball, could form great cream garlands. Everywhere, white balls in the green of the forest. They dot the landscape, bringing round regularity to a decor of segments. She remembers that the first time she saw them, she thought they were beautiful, strangely beautiful, as if the conifers here were also cottonwoods. Then she learned that these are the outposts, the nurseries of the processionary caterpillars that have been spreading through the region in recent years. The impression is that they are spreading out, massive, unstoppable like a wave, arriving in numbers, in packs, in a line, attaching themselves to a tree, weaving the ball they inhabit, planting themselves in the tree, sucking on it, nibbling its needles, devitalizing it, before it dies years later (ending up gray, breaking, a hollowed-out shell), and setting out in search of a new place to scavenge.
They're everywhere now, leaving their mark on the landscape. All of them can be seen, from a wide angle, in the trees, when they're known to be the originators of these rotting cottonmouths. Sometimes, they're also visible up close. The day before, while running, she almost ran over several of them on the ground, when they seemed to appear at the last moment under her foot, before her stride fell back, and she had to stretch out a long reflex step to avoid them, before stopping, turning around, seeing five or six of them following each other, and realizing that they formed a line stretching for several meters. Hundreds of zombie caterpillars, guided by the same desire to suck the juice, with no thinking head, endlessly interchangeable.
Grey-brown caterpillars on the brown beige of the path, among the pine thorns and pebbles, finding them disgusting and infinite, imagining what the mixture of their insides and their stinging little grey-brown hairs would look like under her shoe, knowing full well that they were not to be crushed, that there was no way of eliminating them here. She had looked into what to do about processionary caterpillars. The websites consulted agreed that one must wait for the municipal services to place the appropriate traps, attaching the device to the trunk of each tree.
Here, there are forty pine trees per human. A battle lost without a fight. Small caterpillar fangs win over big State. Save your pellets.
The heat suggests that it's the end of winter, when the snows continue to live on, sticking to the gullies, the north faces, under the most leafy trees, and are an episodic companion for the hiker; when the warm weather is only intermittent, moving forward and being beaten, the next moment, by some cool breeze, a falling light, a rising dampness, reminding us that the bite continues its grip. All that remains is for the skin to heat up, for the rays to dazzle, and for colors unknown to winter to enter the eye.
It smells like spring snow, it's the middle of February. No doubt this impression is the sign that our feelings are always out of step with the time of reality, that perception settles into a habit, fossilizes in a language that becomes vis-à-vis reality like the skin of a blister, vaguely retaining the shape of the foot, but no longer one with it, as if the phrase Seasons are no longer what they used to be was morphing into Now, February, it's hiking in a t-shirt. In the morning, the radio was saying that by 2050 there would only be four ski resorts left with snow, suggesting that the gangly arms of the ski lifts have not finished stretching their pathos over the brown tongues of the ski slopes.
Seen from below, seen from afar, the white masses of the peaks rise above the grey-green ochre masses of the foreground, condensing and materializing something of the immensity. Adult eyes, still retaining a child's iris, see giants inhabiting a strange, alien world, that of the fairies of the valleys, fantastical animals always invisible, furtive by essence, and minor gods hiding in small Olympus.
-
Aït-Touati Frédérique, Arènes Alexandra et Grégoire Axelle, Terra Forma: Manuel de cartographies potentielles, Paris, B42, 2019. ↩
-
The French plays on the proximity between point de vue (point of view) and point de vie (point of life). ↩
-
James C. Scott, Seeing like a State, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1998. ↩
-
Aït-Touati & al., Terraforma, op. cit., p. 13. ↩
Open Source Education and DIY Culture in the Digital Age
Ava Zafari
In an age when media shape our lifestyle, consumer habits, opinions and political views, the need for Media Justice is more crucial than ever. Media Justice is a foundational pillar for collective care and collective action. Media Justice aims to educate, inform and provide pathways towards collective action that leads to liberation for all oppressed peoples and the ability to radically imagine systemic change that will sustain life on this Planet. Through open source education programs or guides, the public’s critical thinking skills could be better cultivated, to steer our terraforming practices away from their current ecocidal path. In the open education program suggested in this contribution, we would explore some DIY cultures and crafts for ecological solutions.
The Role of Alternative Media for Climate Justice
In a media landscape heavily reliant on advertising from large industrial groups, reporting freely on climate change faces formidable challenges due to economic dependencies and potential conflicts of interest. This dependency can subtly influence editorial decisions, leading to a focus on symptomatic rather than systemic coverage of climate-related issues, thereby obscuring the role of industrial activities and political decisions in driving climate change. Additionally, media ownership by conglomerates with vested interests in industry may further exacerbate these challenges, potentially pressuring outlets to soften or skew coverage that could reflect negatively on their parent companies. While alternative media platforms offer some respite from these pressures, the broader lack of comprehensive coverage on the root causes of climate change and on its potential solutions risks leaving the public ill-informed and complacent. Addressing these challenges requires a critical re-evaluation of media structures and funding models to ensure that climate reporting remains robust, independent, and accountable to the public interest.
Alternative media has the opportunity to produce more detailed information and more thorough analyses, much like specialized sections in mainstream media. They play a crucial role in popular education since they provide citizens with some of the necessary keys to understanding complex topics and situations. On one hand, they democratize scientific reports and data on climate change and, on the other hand, they are a bridge between the general public and activists, local collectives, whistleblowers (who also create information through websites, blogs, etc.) by placing these activist battles in their contexts. In other words, alternativr media go beyond awareness based merely on the idea of “proximity” to the climate change problem. Their contribution may allow citizens to understand why certain people choose more radical advocacy options by blocking ecocidal projects.
With the aid of alternative media and with a focus on climate justice, it is possible to develop a learning space for collective approaches to this matter in local or global scale. A do-it-yourself (DIY) culture can thus be taught and instilled through open source educational programs. Cyberfeminism, a movement that combines feminist concerns with the potentials of cyberspace and digital technologies, encourages collaborative efforts through technology to develop sustainable solutions to environmental problems. It emphasizes empowerment, decentralized formats, and collective knowledge. Its endorsement of open source and DIY culture provides a unique perspective on addressing ecological challenges.
Integrating Cyberfeminism, Open Source, and DIY in Ecology
Integrating cyberfeminism principles into ecological solutions involves leveraging digital platforms to share, innovate, and collaborate. For instance, online platform can host open-source ecological designs that users from around the world can modify and adapt to their needs. Forums and virtual workshops can facilitate the exchange of ideas and provide DIY guidance on implementing these designs. Moreover, by focusing on inclusivity and on dismantling hierarchies, cyberfeminism encourages the participation of underrepresented groups in ecological problem-solving, ensuring that solutions are not only technologically effective but also socially equitable. Ultimately, applying cyberfeminism’s principles to ecology fosters a culture of openness, collaboration, and empowerment—essential qualities for sustainable development in the digital age.
In Fabricating Activism: Craft-Work, Popular Culture, Gender, Jack Z. Bratich and Heidi M. Brush point to a remarkable interest in resurgence of DIY craft culture, which is known to them as “fabriculture”. In their article, craft is conceptualized as a tool to explore (1) gendered spaces of production, (2) relationship between old and new media in digital craft culture, (3) modes of political activism formed within the craft-making collectives, and many more other outcomes that could influence the current socio-ecological systems[^44]. While (low tech) craft might have been perceived as incompatible with (high tech) digitality, their objectives seem to be well aligned with cyberfeminism at the intersection between technological and ecological concerns.
Such a convergence may be counterintuitive and needs to be situated within a broader context. With the rise of capitalism, craft was transformed from artisan work to industrial labour, and eventually to automated task. This shift was thoroughly gendered too. Such a transformation is evident in textile, one of the first crafts to be industrialized. Slow production, women’s skills and knowledge, personal expression and collaborative pace was replaced by oppressive, exploitive, machinic, rapid production, mostly ruled by men.
The terraforming practices implemented over the last two centuries through machinic control have historically been revolving around class conflict and gendered division. Against the male-dominated structure of industrial production, some feminists have advocated technological proficiency as a means to personal power. Cyberfeminism was and is a movement that encourages woman–machine relations, especially digital relationships. As the 1990s predictably pronounced that women were “falling behind” in the information revolution, cyberfeminism emerged as a way of having women embrace the machine. In Nattering on the Net, Dale Spender writes:
Given our history, it’s not possible to assume that women will automatically share equally in any gains that come from the present information revolution. Women were excluded from the process of knowledge-making when the printing press was invented; and there’s plenty of evidence today to suggest that women are again being kept out of the production of information as we move to the electronic networks[^44].
The revival of “fabriculture” empowers local solutions with a decentralized but collective format towards more sustainable practices. They result in decreasing the exploitation of humans, living beings and the planet. Implementing cyberfeminist approaches towards cyberspace and ecological challenges requires us to build an accessible collaborative platform to bring round DIY culture. Open source principles encourage collaboration among scientists, engineers, environmentalists, and local communities. This can lead to more robust ecological solutions that benefit from diverse knowledge bases and experiences, ensuring they are more adaptable to different ecological and cultural contexts.
Furthermore, Celine Semaan discusses the importance of exploring the knowledge of elderly people and indigenous communities in the context of a necessary re-articulation between culture and nature[^47]. She paints a powerful picture of progress and change in how indigenous peoples and their cultures are integrated and respected globally. This journey from marginalization to becoming a central voice in ecological and cultural stewardship showcases a significant shift in socio-ecological values and priorities. The collaboration between indigenous wisdom and modern science leading to technological innovations is a testimony to the potential of integrating diverse knowledge systems. Such partnerships can drive solutions to global challenges like climate change, health, and sustainable urban development, demonstrating the invaluable role indigenous perspectives can play in contemporary problem-solving, paving the way for alterraforming practices rooted in and learned from non-Western societies.
A similar acknowledgement is applied in her platform Slow Factory towards the elderly. She advocates an alternative approach, one that views sustainability through the lens of cultural continuity and respect for elder wisdom. This approach not only enriches our understanding of modes of cohabitation on Planet Earth, but also integrates the social and cultural dimensions that are essential to meaningful and lasting solutions to climate change.
It would be ideal to connect the wisdom of indigenous groups, elderly people and local communities with more recent innovative designs and digital tools, in order to upgrade our skills in practicing sustainability. With open access to designs and data, a larger pool of individuals can contribute to this type of innovation. This can accelerate the development of ecological technologies, such as biodegradable materials, efficient solar panels, and community-based recycling systems.
Conclusion
In the context of ecological solutions and of the need to enhance our modes of cohabitation on planet Earth, open source can mean freely sharing knowledge on sustainable practices, such as permaculture designs, renewable energy technologies, and waste reduction techniques. By making this information accessible, individuals and communities can implement and modify solutions without the barrier of proprietary restrictions. Cyberfeminism has always emphasized empowerment, decentralized formats, and collective knowledge. Its endorsement of open source and DIY culture provides a unique perspective on addressing ecological challenges. DIY approaches encourage the customization of solutions to fit local needs and environments. This is particularly important in ecology, where local conditions such as soil type, climate, and available resources dictate what is feasible and effective. Alternative modes of terraforming are well within reach: open source education and DIY culture are bound to play a key role in tomorrow’s alterraforming.
REFERENCES
Jack Z. Bratich and Heidi M. Brush, "Fabricating Activism: Craft-Work, Popular Culture, Gender”, in Utopian Studies, pp. 233-260, 2011
Bernard Salamand & Viviana Varin, “Free media: issues, challenges and proposals”, 2018 [en ligne]
Celine Semman, "talking to our elders about the future of out planet teaches us about sustainable solutions”, [en ligne]
Zaya Ribeiro, "Protecting indigenous people and wisdom", [en ligne]
Sadie Plant, Zeros + ones: digital women + the new technoculture, London, Doubleday, 1997
Cindy Kohtala, Yana Boeva, Peter Troxler, éds., "Alternative Histories in DIY Cultures and Maker Utopias", Digital Culture & Society, vol. 6, n°1, 2020
Ewen Chardronnet, “Gynepunk, the cyborg witches of DIY technology" in Makery, 2015 [online], indexed by Mindy Seu éd. in Cyberfeminism Index, 2022
Denisa Kera, "Hackerspaces and DIYbio in Asia: Connecting Sciene and Community with Open Data, Kits and Protocols", in Alessandro Delfantin and Joden Söderberg éds., "Bio/Hardware Hacking", special issue, Journal of Peer Production 2, 2012, pp.1-8, indexed by Mindy Seu éd. in Cyberfeminism Index, 2022
Angelina Dreem and Anibal Luque, "POWRPLNT", [en ligne], indexed by Mindy Seu éd. in Cyberfeminism Index, 2022
Yin Aiwen & Phi team, “Autonomous Creativity for Autonomous Energy for Autonomous Future", Hackers And Designer, 2018 [en ligne]
ours
Members of the 2024 MIP and collaborators who contributed to the 2024 report:
Organizers
Yves Citton, University Paris 8
Marinette Jeannerod, Collectif Eaux Fortes & University Paris 8
Giuseppina Mecchia, University of Pittsburgh
Cléophée Moser, Collectif Eaux Fortes
Julie Peghini, University Paris 8 & Fondation Lucien Paye
Dakar Participants
Laeïla Adjovi, artist
Mugabo Baritegera, film maker
Beya Gille Gacha, artist
Mour Fall, artist
Ican Ramageli, artist
Paris Participants
Agossou Allangbe, Researcher in Literature
Lucas Botta, Researcher in Psychology
Thomas Courtois, Researcher in Literature
Paul Estéoulle, Researcher in Literature
Jacob Jean-Jacques, Poet, cultural operator and reading passer
Lena Karson, Multidisciplinary artist, Cultural and conflict mediator, ArTeC
Benito Maramaldi, Researcher in Transdisciplinary Studies, ArTeC
Chloé Viala, Glitch Artist, Exhibition Assistant Curator
Ava ZafariI, Design graduate, ArTeC
Pittsburgh Participants
Samantha Albert, Computational Biology major, Film and Media studies minor
John Amick, Natural Sciences
Serena Arnold, Biological Sciences Major
Sonya Berlinger, Environmental Studies Major, Political science Minor, Sustainability Certificate
Alyssa Brachelli, Biological Sciences Major
Caitlin Byrnes, Psychology and Occupational Therapy student
Steven Christiana , Natural Sciences Major
Ashley Cornell, Environmental Science and Sustainability
Quinn Eisenberger, Environmental Science Major, Sustainability Certificate
Emily Gagliardi, Environmental Science, Spanish, and Sustainability student
Emily Greenland, Environmental Studies and Sustainability student with an interest in a circular economy
Samantha Hickman, Ecology & Evolution Major
Jared Kartschoke, Mechanical Engineer with an interest in sustainability
Rhyan Lewis , Environmental Studies Major, Sustainability Certificate
Kaitlyn Mahoney, Urban Studies, Sociology, and Sustainability student
Keely McCullion, Natural Sciences; Anthropology, Environmental Science, Chemistry
Shrida Mittal, Economics student
Maia Nikolova, Film and Media Studies major with interest in the environment and french culture
Hannah Obert , Pre-PA Major
Mario Pagano, Architecture Major
Emma Quick, Psychology/sociology
Emma Rowland, Mechanical Engineering Major, Sustainability Certificate, and Product Design,
Hannah Schmidt, Environmental Science Major, Neuroanatomy and Chemistry minor
Gillian Schwartz, Environmental Science student with an interest in sustainability and closed loop manufacturing.
Brielle West, Biological Sciences Major
Marissa Wycinsky, Environmental Science major, French minor
Rubie Yu, Psychology Major; Architecture Design Minor
Design and realization
Alice Ricci
Éloïse Vo
The organizers address their deepest thanks to:
The ArTeC team for their constant and expert support
The staff of the Fondation Lucien Paye for their wonderful welcome
The Eaux Fortes collective
Ester Toribio Roura & Noel Fitzpatrick for the support by the NesT programme
Alice Ricci & Éloïse Vo for their work on the website
Acknowledgments
This research has been supported by the EUR ArTeC financed by the French National Agency for Research (ANR) through the PIA ANR-17-EURE-0008.
This project has received funding from the MSCA-RISE programme under grant agreement No 101007915
This project has received institutional support from the Master MLCC and the research team Fabrique du littéraire at the University Paris 8.
