Panel Statement
Chair Person: Ruth Catlow
Presenters: Tom Corby, Helen Varley Jamieson, Michel Bauwens & Paula Crutchlow
Over the last decade the awareness of anthropogenic climate change has emerged in parallel with hyper-connective digital networks. In the context of environmental and economic collapse people around the world are seeking alternative visions of prosperity and sustainable ways of living. While the legacy of the carbon fueled Industrial Revolution plays itself out, we find ourselves grappling with questions about the future implications of fast-evolving global digital infrastructure. By their very nature the new tools, networks and behaviours of productivity, exchange and cooperation between humans and machines grow and develop at an accelerated rate. The rhetoric, aesthetics, technics and associated ethical questions of digital culture are fundamentally changing social relations as well as the nature of our material existence. The ideas for this interdisciplinary panel have grown out of Furtherfield’s Media Art Ecologies programme and will explore the relationship between digital culture and climate change, developing themes adopted in grass-roots, emerging and established practices in art, design, activism and science. Panelists are artists and activists whose practices address the interrelation of technological and natural processes: beings and things, individuals and multitudes, matter and patterns. They take an ecological approach that challenges growth economics and techno-consumerism and attends to the nature of co-evolving, interdependent entities and conditions; they they activate networks (digital, social, physical) to work with ecological themes and Free and Open processes.
- Ruth Catlow is an artist and curator working at the intersection of art, technology and social change. As co-founder, with Marc Garrett, of Furtherfield a grass roots media arts organisation, online community and gallery (formerly HTTP Gallery) in North London, she works with international artists, hackers, curators, musicians, programmers, writers, activists and thinkers. Her current focus is on practices that engage an ecological approach with an interest in the interrelation of technological and natural processes. Ruth has been involved with developing networked participatory arts infrastructures such as VisitorsStudio and NODE.London. Ruth has worked in Higher Education for over 15 years and is currently running degrees in Digital Art and Design Practice and developing a new MA in Fine Art and Environment at Writtle School of Design. furtherfield.org