What are the aesthetics of the unitised/securitised/database city, one scorched by thick steams of capital, excitation and control? What forms of timing, synchronisation, disruption and commune are possible, dead, or making themselves happen? What kinds of signals and distribution can start other forms of composition? What lines do the arrows that fill the air describe, how does the forest move?
Moving Forest works with a number of scales to force something chaotic, doomed and tender into being, but also proposes new virulent forms: durational performance frameworks; distributed urban aesthetics; full improvisation; software aesthetics;
Following Kurosawa's reworking and invoking of Macbeth, what form of tragedy is adequate to the present - a moment when we see not just the wreckage of the flawed hero, as a form of learning, but entire systems tanking and contorting and breaking? What are the ethical and aesthetic consequences and what comes into being?
Taking Moving Forest as a case study, the conference gathers together thinkers, artists, programmers, schemers, strategists to provide a context for unravelling complex innovative and challenging performance works.
CODA - Sessions and Talkers
12.00 doors open - Triangle Gallery, Chelsea School of Art
12.40pm - Opening with David Garcia & Shu Lea Cheang
1pm - how can a forest move?
Ambivalent affordances and interests; practical experiments in disruptive infrastructures; de facto commons; cryptophilia; unbankable data; witches who cleave time
chair: Matthew Fuller
Graham Harwood, YoHA
Eleni Ikoniadou, Arts and Social Sciences, Kingston University
John Jordan, The laboratory of insurrectionary imagination
Rachel Baker, irational.org
3.30pm - The tragic in the present, (in which futures are deleted)
tragedy; minor politics / non-normative political art; anti-representation; human strike; the self-expression of control
chair: Josephine Berry-Slater
John Cunningham, 56a InfoShop
Jesse Darling, Brave/New/Whatever
Brian Ashton, writer and activist
Nick Thoburn, School of Social Science, Manchester University
Closing stroll along Millbank with Robin Bale
www.movingforest.net/html/coda.html