Analogous: Digital / Analogue Metaphors.

When discussing our understanding of the world, the term ‘analogue’ has become shorthand for anything not digital, and has become an analogy of its own. ‘Digital’ has also become an analogy for anything requiring a computer. This essay starts to investigate some of the analogies of analogue and digital media to reveal the complexity of thinking about animation

Shaggy Modernism

A short paper situating James Hutchinson's artwork 'Shaggy Modernism' within the history of craft and computing

Art-Activist Symmetry in the artwork of Oliver Ressler

Ele Carpenter reflects on the balance between political and artistic concerns in Oliver Ressler’s collaborative films, text works, and exhibitions. The works range from activist documentary, thought-provoking texts in public space, and a proposal for a series of banners which play on the language of political sloganeering. Ressler bridges the gaps between utopian vision and the tactical realities of political, economic, social and cultural change. Carpenter argues for an integrated approach to viewing both the creative and political together, as symmetrical modes of critical engagement, organising and being. By comparing Ressler’s collaborative films and texts, Carpenter reveals a distinct approach to making art which is fully engaged in debates about global economics, and an activism which understands the creative space required for cultural change

Intervention & Revolution, Interview with Gregory Sholette and Nato Thompson.

Gregory Sholette spoke about ‘Interventionist Art: The Creative Disruption of Everyday Life’ at the Literary and Scientific Institution in Bath, organised by Dan Hinchcliffe at ICIA, in 2005. Ele Carpenter interviewed him after the lecture, and emailed particular questions to Nato Thompson, which have been added to the text. The Interview was later published in 2010

Activist Tendencies in Craft

Is Craftivism really activist? And what are the woolly threads that unravel the argument? Many are skeptical of the political claims of the DIY and craft movement, but the search for an authentic object can be misplaced in a contemporary networked and decentralized field of production. At the same time critical enquiry has to negotiate the hazards of knitted cakes

The Smoke of Nuclear Modernity Drifts through the Anthropocene

Working with the nuclear economy and nuclear aesthetics is a complex ethical process, one that twists and turns through spirals of technical jargon, nuclear utopianism and deep psychic fear. In this culture of extremes, artists engaging with contemporary nuclear culture walk a political tightrope interrogating how nuclear aesthetics are reproduced whilst avoiding the simplifying tropes of industry and activism. In parallel to artistic practices, this essay explores some of the constructions of nuclear modernity, and the means of escape and betrayal, which contribute to rethinking nuclear aesthetics in the early twentieth century

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

(Post) Nuclear Anthropocene

An older version of this paper was presented at the Signal Effects 1, Digital Ecologies in the Anthropocene Symposium, Media Convergence Centre, Bath Spa University, UK, 28 April 2017; and the 11th Meeting of the Records, Knowledge and Memory working group at the Nucleus: Nuclear and Caithness Archive, Wick, Scotland, June 2017; The Sonic Acts, Geologic Imagination conference, Amsterdam, 2015; and the Radiation Ecologies Conference, University of Montreal, 2015

Contested definitions of artistic research : re-establishing art as a form of knowledge

This paper aims to identify a number of challenges arising from the separation of artistic and scientific research, and how they are being addressed through the establishment of the new UmArts research centre. Through a discussion of research principles and questions, the paper will start to articulate the value of interdisciplinary research practices where artists and curators have the freedom to develop all kinds of knowledge and disseminate it in many different forms. This debate has many synergies with decolonial discourse in challenging the empirical traditions of science, opening up space for new kinds of knowledge and new (or very old) ways of knowing.  UmArts takes an interdisciplinary approach both between the arts subjects, and between arts and humanities/sciences which embraces all the different artistic and scientific research criteria with the arts subjects. Whilst the definitions of art and science may seem somewhat arbitrary semantics for most hybrid researchers, their differences are constantly instituted within university and state research funding bureaucracies. With each bureaucratic inscription the characteristics of artistic research are in danger of being narrowed by trying to defend itself against the academization of its subject.  Whilst many artists will be glad to know that their subject is receiving due care and attention, the separation of art and science produces many semantic, intellectual and discursive problems. There is a danger that separating out art as an exception, can create a research hierarchy with art as a second tier within the academy, reducing its intellectual capacity and agency. A more relaxed and flexible approach is needed to develop a rigorous culture of arts research which can operate in hundreds of different ways. There are as many artistic research methods as there are artists, and not every artwork is a doctorate in itself, so a clear set of research principles are needed as a basic rubric for evaluation. Fortunately these already exist within the wider discourses and practices of research. UmArt

Social Making

Ele Carpenter gives a brief overview of social making across traditional crafts and new technologies from hackers to knitters