Peter Weibel Research Institute for Digital Cultures We invite you to a special session of Planetary Ecologies, a hybrid discussion group on planetary networks, critical
environmentalisms, and intersectional metabolics.
The next session takes place on November 14 at 10am at the
Peter Weibel Research Institute for Digital Cultures at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Multimediaraum, Room 102, 1st
floor, PSK/GCP, Georg Coch-Platz 2). Feel free to join in person or via Zoom. For access to texts and the online meeting,
please contact Sophie Publig at
planetaryecologies@ixdm.ch.
For our upcoming session, we will read texts by Kathryn Yusoff and materials by Jamie Allen on
aspects of the geological commons or “a form of collective communion that imagines a world in which precarity and abundance
is shared across the possibility and forms of life; and that this sharing enacts the possibilities of a common life between
organisms” (Yusoff 2017). In recent years, a turn toward posthuman and inhuman ecologies seeks to reposition planetary exchanges
at the heart of post-anthropocentric discourse. How do we establish responsible stances and actions that engage with and translate
planetary-scale ventures in extractionism, and instantiate alternatives to these?
We look forward
to discussing questions of ecological, economical and technological constraints on planetary communion, the challenges of
geological complexity and practices for artists, media makers, and researchers, as steps and experiments toward or away from
different kinds of planetary intimacy.
On Planetary Ecologies, the reading group and discussion
series, started in 2020: “We are interested in voices in research, art, media and design that concern themselves with planetarity
and its futures. That is, the ways in which people(s), life, and other beings on earth negotiate its alterity. As such, we
are committed to seeking out, understanding, spending time with and reckoning with the actions called for by voices of scholarship
and organisation that would seek to go beyond the ‘management of diversity’ (Andrea N. Baldwin) and ‘index[es] of white supremacist
domination’ (Romy Opperman).” For more information, please visit https://criticalmedialab.ch/planetary-ecologies-2022/.
Materials
brought into discussion at the November 14th session:
Yusoff, K. (2017). ‘Politics of the Anthropocene.
Formation of the Commons as a Geologic Process’, Antipode, 50(1), pp. 255–276. Available at:
https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12334.
Allen,
J. (2021) ‘On the Modes of Technical Extraction in Chile’, in N. Rossiter and B. Neilson (eds) Logistical Worlds. Infrastructure,
Software, Labor. London: Open Humanities Press, pp. 51–58. Available
