June 2019
Earths ability to sense, register all outtakes from the colony.
a future, more advanced society, would be able to hack or infect our ecosystem in order to make it respond and counteract faster to human interventions.
How did it start for you?
It started many years ago. First, I noticed that things I had previously found annoying and irritating, aroused me. For example, I was lying naked on a sunbed, at my forest hut, and there was a birch branch whisking its leaves next to me, sometimes a leaf would touch my back, make a tickling stroke down my side. Instead of annoyed, I got excited.
It made me think of when I as a child first discovering sexual feelings. The fantasy that my hand was someone else’s and how that imagination made desires emerge.
It made me think about the journey I had made with that place (yxlö-elsa). When I had first bought that place in the forest, I wanted to chop down some trees, for my own pleasure of sunbathing, but also for the garden, to be able to grow some tomatoes and mulberries. I filmed when the trees fell, and I noticed how the automatic exposure shifted several steps to adapt for the new lighter situation.... Then I got this feeling that something had shifted in its core. but I could'nt grasp what it was then. Anyway, after that, as I got to know that place, that land; every tree, every plant, every spot of mushrooms or insect hive, every rock and its moss, the owl’s branch, and squirrels’ paths in the trees, the sun’s shifting reach during seasons, the composting decay. And gradually I realized the wisdom of the trees, realized for how much longer they had been a part of that place. How I had not acknowledged that that time when I chopped a few of them down a few years ago. I still had a few staples of logs left. I felt drawn to feel their hardness and weight on me. Lying down in the moss and heather in summer nights, shuffling logs on top of me, sensing how they pressed me down, how I sunk deeper. My strained breath, when my lungs expanded, they moved, rolled a bit, then shifted and rolled over, across my shoulder blades down on my neck, pressing my face into the ground, forcing me to take a big breath through the moss, all the smells of earth overwhelm me. Then I really knew something had changed.
What do you think it means?
I think, that acknowledging the agency in my environment has made it possible to see it as an active other in some way, an attractive other in whose eyes I want to be something, evoke something in.
But what about the submissive part?
… it is in some way a trust, I think. I love it and I trust it enough to put myself in its hands and to enjoy anything it decides to do to me, in a way be shaped by it, become it. But I also wonder if it has to do with its new unpredictability… just now as I realise it as a partner I’m in love with, it is transforming into a new temperamental opponent with an irregular mood. As it’s leaving its holocenic seasonal cycles it becomes harder to be with. As with an aging partner with dementia, it can have sudden bursts of violence impossible to predict. Then the submissive position gives a certain focus, an attention, to sense what is in the air, before it arrives. A preparedness. Maybe its just a necessity to survive. But it is pleasurable, still, no matter.
Do you have other examples of situations where you experienced these feelings?
One day when I had set out to lecture to blueberries I left my family and walked in the forest all day. When I was trying to lecture to the bluberries, they constantly distracted me with temptation. Since my childhood I have desired bluberries. I always want more. I loose track of time when I pick them. I squeeze and open a berry, it reveals concentrated pigment and lots of small seeds. I eat it.
But then I felt the urge to tell the blueberries about how Susan Pitt investigates the psychology of the feminine and its relation to the natural world. In her film Asparagus the ”phalic shapes” was interpreted as metaphors and symbols. But in the light of current materialist philosophies or ecosexual movements, this film could be read quite differently. Is it possible to sexually desire plants and nature? Some experimental scientists suggest that fruits are the sexual organs of plants, and eating fruit contributed in the evolution of the human mind as much as other sexual activities. Is eating berries a sort of oral sex with a plant? part of a reproductive symbiotic activity between plant and animal?
That evening when I got home I change my two year olds diapers. The poop was black and filled with seeds. She too spent her day in the blueberry bushes. When interacting with the human body the seed fertilize themselves in this mutual exchange.
...this submissive, seemingly passive new orientation its also in a way about becoming landscape. becoming environment. Thinking about myself as, and preparing myself as, a scene, a scenography.
and there realizing how powerful this mode of being is.
Being environment is not a passive role.
It is the precondition for action to take place.
It enables some things and render others impossible.
It defines what can happen.
As a woman body I can finally feel at home in the metaphor with landscape, the way nature has reariculated itself.
PERFORMATIVE STORYWORLDS:WORKLOG
Introduction | Worklog | Methods | References
Center for Submissive Eco Sexuality Orientations.
Do you feel turned on by being exposed to nature and natural elements? Do you feel aroused by the biting cold of icy waters, the touch of a branch of leaves, by the heavy weight of a big log pressing you down into the moss forcing you to activate all senses taking in the environment in a multispecies orgy? Here you can share your experiences and desires from being submissive to nature and natural things. Here you can explore sexual pleasure in being attentive to all the nuances in how nature can take its toll at your body, sense the arrival of the world in your body. Perhaps some of you who used to define your sexuality in relation to self-bondage practices can find a different understanding of your sexuality by acknowledging the agency of the things that you collaborate with in your bondage.
EXTREME I
A term from animation practice describing a key pose in an animated sequence, where the motion, or pose, is at its extreme.
WORLDBUILDING
A term for the art form of imagining and creating alternative worlds. New Reactive Earth (NRE) is a fictional world sparked by my collaboration and experiment with Ron Mallet around his time machine theory in 2011. NRE is characterised by a radical climate justice, due to an intrusion from the future, at the culmination of the Warm War II. This column of text fragments consists of notes from gradually expanding & conceptualizing this world. Worldbuilding is for me the basic mode of percieving the world, processing it and finding ways to act in it, since as a child constructing fiction paralells to my everyday life. I'm drawn to worldbuilding as an artform also through my intrest in systems and the “the whole”. This in its turn brings about the desire for sustainability. For things to be fair, balanced, for “the whole” to sustain and thrive.
Emotional contagion
Somehow it seems all feelings involved in different processes are stored in all materials involved in that process. These feelings can also be released and transferred at any later point in time when in contact or consumption of that material
Neurotransmitters are stored in synaptic vesicles, clustered close to the cell membrane at the axon terminal of the presynaptic neuron. Neurotransmitters are released into and diffuse across the synaptic cleft, where they bind to specific receptors on the membrane of the postsynaptic neuron. dopamine active transporter, DAT, SLC6A3) is a membrane-spanning protein that pumps the neurotransmitter dopamine out of the synaptic cleft back into cytosol. In the cytosol, other transporters sequester the dopamine into vesicles for storage and later release.
Before, these vesicles were only found in living organisms, but now also inorganic (previously considered dead) materials. They were found in all cells, possibly storing chemical traces of the emotional resposes from the cell´s past.
The tester:
She starts the video stream, light transmitting diods of the screen starts to emit acetylcholine, dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine, serotonin, and histamine. The dramatic mix of juxtaposing effects creates a dizzying sensation causing her to throw up. She deleates the video sequence from the server. Only 14 files left in this folder.
Nov 2020
Outsourcing carbon emissions, offsetting carbon, climate compensation is not effective anymore. The amount of life-space (climate budget) you have is tied to each organisation, person or biological/technological unit. How much your climate footprint is allowed to expand, is balanced between your need as an organism to survive and your contribution to “the whole”. This equation is in constant flux. It requiers an extreme attention to the worlds arrival to be able to balance this.
L-CA:
I sense an imbalance. I scan through my body, dive deep into my network, try to estimate my bio-capacity, the amount of life-space I have. Quantify myself.
When things are being made, it often takes too much energy.
I scan through, follow the processes, trace back to the extractions of materials, tissues, track how it develops, refines, transports.
Locate and evaluate the drainage in every step, I add up, sum up, calculate the impact, deliberating.
Keeping in mind, extrapolates into the future, it’s probable pollution and disposal.
I sense a 230-volt current through a wall socket at Valhallavägen 198.
A maimed Luleälv rushes through Porjus powerplant, electricity generates and makes its journey through Aitik’s copper and aluminum, through air and ground, speeding in direction Stockholm.
It keeps a laptop running, charging a battery, I add the impact of Petalite violently transplanted from Namibia.
I consider the theme of the symposium, think about in what ways we work together, cooperate and interchange, all the parts of the whole.
Burning wood and branches. Boiling water moving through insulated pipes of district heating, keeping a body warm, I move its fingers over a keyboard, I process that input through the CPU, I add the Tantalum uprooted in Afghanistan to the calculations.
Via a software I produce output on the screen, proposal for the symposium taking shape by activating the pixels in a variety of intensity.
After 5 hours of this activity, I pack the proposal in a file, within an email draft. I feed the email through a sender´s client, with a 5,4 MB file attached.
I pass it along 7 servers on the way, in an encrypted state, pausing, storing it for a short moment, passing it on from node to node, through the internal, the external, the main nodes.
Eventually it reaches the receiver according to the protocols of the receiving email client, where it stops and stores on two servers in a cluster of racks, in a decrypted state.
Proposal opens up on the receiver’s screen, being read for 40 minutes.
A returning email follows the same path in reverse with an “Approved” message.
By now I am much more together, working really together.
I record my voice. This voice. My story. I circulate it and store it in the cloud, that is: multiple servers on multiple locations, datacenters in Latin America, Hongkong and Europe.
I directly download it to another computer & import it into a video composition with a time span of 25 minutes. Adapted for the time slot of this session. Not enough time to describe everything.
I turn my focus there, ground there, slow down time, slow down flows.
Testing the timing of sounds and texts, editing video. 16 hours of computer processing. then I methodically process the signals from a coded data source, transform it and put together and display images suitable for streaming. A 368,1 Megabyte file.
The quota is almost full. I must circulate other parts, regenerate.
I had to freeze, hold my breath; stop this process.
14 minutes ago the electricity shut down started.
Lights went out at Stockholm university of the arts, at Valhallavägen 189 & 193, at Brinellvägen 58 & 34, Teknikringen 35.
Automatic doors doesn’t detect those who wants to enter. No elevator arrives for those who want up, computers turned off one by one. Alarms chirp now that they begin are on backup batteries.
Heating turned off. stormwater pumps stopped. I stare out the window. I dance in a dark studio. I make a sketch on a paper, I tell a story, recite a dialogue.
Talk about the grandchild who is about to arrive any day now.
I stream this video for 25 minutes at the Symposium for artistic research, estimated number of streaming viewers: 16.
But now it must end.
Guided Hibernation Meditation
In relation to this seminar Elsa registered a outlet of 643 carbon dioxide equivalents that was immediately balanced by inducing a 6 day hibernation in the conference participants, only the slowing down of their breath would balance 300 of these carbon dioxide equivalents. The cancelled intake of energy would balance the rest.
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When you lied down in this zone the neuronal circuits in your brain started aligning with the The vibrations in the field.
We all have an internal clock, a series of chemical reactions controlled by the hypothalamus of the brain.
External signals set the clock. The decreasing amount of available oxygen & energy set its clock to time zero.
And your endocrine axis start to supress brain regions that regulate hunger, thirst, feeding, body temperature. Needs and Desires fade away. You feel no discomfort. You Do not crave anything from external sources. Everything you need is in your body.
Pay attention to what happens in your body. What movements can you feel? What directions? How does the air flow past your lips, tounge, throat? How does it fill your lungs? How is the blood moving the oxygen onwards?
Take a deep breath and hold it, notice when and where in the body resistance appears. Let it go when your body forces you to.
Count the seconds of your breathing in. Keep breathing, counting, gradually make the breathing out the same length as the breathing in. Notice your heart rate dropping.
Notice Your somatostatin system react to your periventricular hypothalamic nucleus. The striatum, amygdala, and cortex trigger fewer and fewer scattered immunoreactive perikarya.
The signal to wake up comes from inside.
Your central nervous system sounds the alarm, you starts to shiver. This uses energy and generates heat. Your 6 days have passed and you can now resume your animated life.
Narration for 50% seminar
I feel the imbalance growing in this limb again. The university at Valhallavägen 89 drains the central bio capacity.This time there is a rush. I have to take drastic measures. I am approaching a point of no return, a tipping point. Beyond this there is no turning back. No way to recover, repair, heal. The infested area would grow too large. The larger body could not be saved. But I have one more thing to try before I'm forced to completely disconnect and sacrifice this part. I connect with a local agent. The artistic researcher who performs my bureaucratic protocols. Through her, I will test whether artistic research has any real impact on affecting the core, the reality of its university.
I make her use an ultimatum in combination with a reversed speech act. This way she may be able to use her 50% seminar performatively. Activating a self organized regulation, a 30% decrease of greenhouse gases. There is a short time span in which I can afford to see if this process can work.
By making the Artistic researcher name her 50% seminar “This is a 50% seminar” She can call for The Universitys action to make it perform its name. For it to really be a 50% seminar there will eventually need to be a final seminar. But The artistic researcher will only perform it on one condition. Her ultimatum states that she will not present her final seminar until the University has calibrated its resource use with the capacity of the larger body and aligned with the Paris agreement. And it is not until then, that this 50% seminar will really have lived up to its name, by marking the half way towards an end - Fulfilling the academic duties of a University.
As She issues this ultimatum as her 50% seminar, an analysis of SKH will be carried out in collaboration with students and professors from KTH. The aim of this life cycle assessment is to calculate reference value of the present, the level of the Universities current climate impact. In this analysis it will be taken into account what measures are already planned, when they will come into force and what effect will they have, calculating how big the gap is compared to the goals and what is required to get up to the right level (assuming that the conversion rate is too low currently). Examples of methodological issues that will be taken into account during the analysis are: Should the conversion rate be calculated in absolute or relative values (is it ok to have higher emissions if the organisation grows)? Which system boundaries should be used (which activities connected to the school should be included) through the analysis?
On the artistic researchers 80% seminar the result of the analysis will be presented. That reference value, benchmark will be revealed along with the necessary measurements and timelines to fulfill the Paris agreement. There will also be a presentation of sector-specific methods that were developed during the analysis for how the university can set and work towards this reduction target.
After the 80% seminar the universitie´s reduction rate will be continuously assessed and when the reduction target is reached, the artistic researcher will carry out her final seminar. If it does not happen in time I have no other choice that amputating this limb.
It was after a long time of experimentation with bending time and space with laser that a subatomic temporal access point was activated. This activation opened a portal through which an unknown future would be able to access that present. The experiments was implementations of the theories of Ronald Mallet.
The final decision for the activation was made by the UE. The conclusion was that this would be the last resort to changing the destructive course that earth was set towards, with its colonialization of the future through the constant overdraw of resourses by the present. Since they could'nt change themselves, they would make future generations an equal counterpart, forcing them to change.
September 10 2020
Before we had our roles and functions first and foremost through our work identities, our professions, in material terms that often meant our outtake of energy and resources. But after the code intrusion we are firstly connected as biological entities by how we put energy and resources back into the larger colony we are part of.
We are this world with our bodies. We feel it, stronger and stronger, but still only vaguely. We are still calibrating our individual habits with the colony’s logic.
For us humans, the system has drastically reduced our possibility to extract resources from the colony, halting practically every activity that previously made up everyday life. When we continue our habits the environment intervene, cancelling them. Lightswitches turn themselves off , cars break down, but start again when more people enters it. Heating only works in very small rooms or very populated rooms. Energy demanding foods loses taste, nutrition and energy. Often we are caught off guard with deaths and chaos as result.
In order to better adapt and prepare for these interventions humans invent aiding structures, for example legal concepts that help them stay within their allotted share, retrench and prioritise the vital needs. Nature’s rights laws is one example.
A new organisation for sharing spiritual practices evolved. Its center evolve around the traces of animist knowledge and traditions from early human history and on, safeguarded by indigenous communities. From those remnants, techniques of channeling energy back into the whole, is developed. eventually its calendar was adapted at large. society left the gregorian calander. the new era started with year zero at
A steady increase in antibiotics use had for long kept fish farming profitable. This meant that large groups of humans kept occupying an ever-growing lifespace on behaf of other organisms, such as the fish. This way of keeping animals, as a way of optimizing food production often have many consequences in different parts of the ecosystem. The global cloud system of the earth that move and compensate so that earths temperature in the southern and northern hemisphere are adjusted was activated. The cloud system always carries aerosols such as heavy metal particles. Now those were directed and distributed to specific locations, such as human settlements around fishfarms. The heavy metal pollutions increased the effect of resistance development in the local bacteria. A greater variety of resistent bacteria developed, bacteria that transfered to human pathogens, bacteria resistent to all current medical treatment. When the disease hit it caused an instant stop in all activities including the antibiotics use at the fish farms. These areas where isolated and sealed off, the fish started to develop in a completely new direction.
The human mine, voiceover for exhibition at Tekniska Museets mining exhibition
Copters and drones, airborne geoscanner’s constant humming above. locating underground voids and dormant metals.
in orbit around a target. a lapse; a revolution?
In the past, humans would, without hesitation, break open any bedrock in search for the minerals and metals they desired.
Their hunger for it was endless.
A majority of all existing deposits was uprooted during the extractivist era.
As this era is coming to an end, what still remains there, is drifting out of reach.
Earth The planet can not allow human penetration of its crust anymore.
Instead, circular mining practices are developing.
Humans turn to mine themselves.
And what they already extracted in the past.
In the fourth, reflexive, industrial revolution, they mine their own habitats, psyches, emotions, genomes, biomes.
and on and on.
It has become the main source of their raw materials supply.
Urban mining is one way of extracting and refining anthropogenic resources.
Inside the walls.
Under the streets.
Former human cities and habitats are dense with desired materials.
Masses of debris considered waste before, now makes up valuable search sites.
In the past, during urban construction projects, entire zones of infrastructure were disconnected, the cables were left in the ground and forgotten.
In the circular economy there are constant limitations.
The virgin minerals extracted in the past is all there is.
A continuous care for them, a repurposing of them, over and over again.
In a circulating world you have to choose.
you cannot do everything.
if you make a film at some point, you have to shut down for a while and refrain from something else.
The millions of tons of unused cables and pipes hidden under sediments of human activity.
Dormant materials.
In its current form, its only purpose; witnesses of human history.
Underneath the surface.
These traces of human culture, these exhibitions of mines now have the potential of becoming real active mines.
Hibernating aluminum, copper and lead from the old systems for city gas or direct current electricity awaits resurfacing and repurposing.
But it’s also in the human mind values are excavated today.
By mining the data from all human activities, the raw materials of emotions and desires can be refined into endless variety of values.
For museums, their visitor's minds were always a fertile ground for potentials, a soil in which to plant ideas to be refined and extracted as realizations of future societies.
Presenting any vision, points us at that version of the future.
What visions should we plant?
-what futures do we want to reap?
In what versions of the future can we sustain in a continuous cycle?
MAy 4 2020
Knowledge is no longer valued by what information it contains. Its form and immediate effects are premiered instead. Knowledge-forms that in themselves enables or produce a decreased stress on the colony is the only research possible to conduct.
Humans has developed the ability to go into hibernation. When a person run out of their life-space share they go into saving mode, and maybe at a later time they will have accumulated a buffer in order to come back. Meanwhile they reside in cocoons hanging horizontaly in the ceilings of their kin's homes. Hibernated humans can survive for up to three years in this state.
Matter has memory. Fundamental particles have memory in the form of quantum properties such as charge, spin, mass and momentum.
Some minerals had remaining memories from their deep earth origin in spite of endless evolutionary iterations through human infrastructures. In the distant future their interests where finally aligned with human’s interests.
When they traveling back in time they could combine the memory from the times when they were still embedded in earths crust with their composition in information technological system. Their incredible quantum entanglement transformed the fabric of space-time and gave birth to the New Reactive Earth.
With this technology the powerrelationship between present and future shifted. Allowing futures to implement its research in earlier ponts in time, by sending back subatomic particles that could be transfered to digital code.
The theory is that a code was transfered. It probably came with instructions. When it was released it spread through all processes on earth, from technology, to biology, to chemistry and meteorology. Cybernetic systems in and around earth that was developed as infrastructure for entertainment and war was reassigned to monitor planetary health. The satellites now track the ecosystem to find ways to distribute life space to regenerate the larger global body. This apparatus of perception gave Gaia the capacity to see herself from the outside, it caused a growing self-awareness that gave her a growing sense of direction and agency becoming a New Reactive Earth (NRE). Earth´s agency became more tangible and direct, acting like a social global organism, a cyborg gaia. The assumed purpose with this was to distribute life resources in a way that keep the colony (earth) alive. Balancing the withdraws between different agents in the ecosystem.
In practice this meant something analogous to a new natural law. Redefining the basic conditions of life everywhere on earth.
Everything on the planet has been linked into an interconnected consciousness. This consciousness distributes the life-space in its system to create balance. It restricts all resource use so that each organism has a specific allocated amount of resource / energy to use, there is a direct / local feedback to each withdrawal.
L-CA [ˈɛlsə] one of many names for the New Reactive Earth. This name is mostly used among advocates of the cyborg-gaia theory, that suggests that the earthsystem has updated itself with a code, enabeling it to redistribute its energy in realtime, in order to ensure its survival.
Feeling observed and judged by future generations in my storyworld, I felt the urge to email "all" at SKH calling to climate strike. (instead of sneaking away on my strike in privacy as usual).
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all the responses I had, made visible new connections between me and everyone around me
..a sense of cyborg-gaia threads growing
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Being subjected to Life Cycle Asessment, becoming aware of more and more ways in which my footprint effect things, makes me less and less prone to act, make, use things without very careful considerations first.
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INBETWEENING
A term from the animation practice describing the creation of the missing frames between two key images, key poses or extremes, in an action. In this column I try to figure out what is going on in this feedback loop & gradual merging between my worldbuilding and my worldings.
November 12 2020
While introducing the BA students to Life Cycle Asessment, I realized (maybe again?) that it was a way of unleashing something equivalent to Cyborg Gaia in my workplace.I started calling the Cyborg Gaia L-CA/ Elsa/ [ˈɛlsə]
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scaling up manifestations of Earth/nature as legal person
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processing new experience of indigenous practices.
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Testing ways to stage/manifest earth as having rights and agency, and how powerrelationships can shift through legal inventions.
Absorbing responses.
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Expanding the idea of a New Reactive Earth.
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creating a forum on an online community for atypical sexual intests in order to formulate how the process of embodying the sense of an earth with agency in total control over me affected feelings and desires.
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Formulating the fiction in order to be able to appropriate possible future events/ enabeling it to come true.
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2019
Creating surveillance functions in my life as paralells to cyborg-gaia helps me embody the logics of the storyworld.
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Using the infrastructure that make up my current reality, planting my storyworld inside it in order to transform them (both)
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December 2019
planting my storyworld in different "reality creating" contexts, like scientific research.
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feeding back the speculations the scientists created (when filtering their expertice through my storyworld's premises).
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pandemic covid outbreak
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observing many typs of interruptions of business as usual played out in socitey
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creating situations of cancelled access to energy/resources, as a way to explore the other side of cyborg gaia.
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embodying the consequences of being submitted to cyborg-gaia
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the sense of an earth with agency in total control over me, affects my values in my practice, what I want or don't want to do.
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scaling up cancellation of resources. Scaling up the gaia-cyborg function from individual to organisation level. Becoming a organisation-organism, connecting us all for a moment by disconnecting us from power.
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October 7 2020
writing an email from within the storyworld helped me realize what email to write in order to achieve the same result.
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Planning and organizing the shutdown put me in touch with all kinds of different part of the university and the people there that I would have never gotten to know in this way otherwise. a whole new way for me to be part of it.
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2011
Understanding Ron’s time machine theory helped me grasp and concretizise something I was longing for. Something that could turn injustices around if it became real. I started to expand on that imagination.
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Staging this with Ron made it real in a new way.
I could believe that the machine was now running, because I acted it out with its maker. Now it was possible for me to imagine a continuation of the narrative.
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watching the balancing principle of a New Reactive Earth play out in my organisation. To experience it in action made it possible to describe more concrete.
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Contributing to a conference with "a shutdown as form of knowledge"
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invitation to present at tekniska museet
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proposing a film for their mining exhibition in return for a electricity shutdown.
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EXTREME II
A term from animation practice describing a key pose in an animated sequence, where the motion is at its other extreme.
WORLDING
A term from material feminist thought about making "cuts" in the world, enacting interventions that produce the world I inhabit. Worlding is acknowledging the relations, how I am entangled in the world, while acting. This column consists of examples on worldings in my practice. The concept of worldings resonate with my artistic practice a lot, my main intrests are in systems and “wholes”, the full range of things, from material to structural to epistemological and ontological. I prefer to make interactions on all levels simultaneously in order to trace their effects, how they are connected, how they interact and affect each other. I see life and the world as a collective process, an ongoing narration. I tap into these ongoing narratives, make small contributions, deviate things a bit in order to shift the meanings. I use inner fantasy worlds to push my perspective on what actions are possible. Sometimes I refer to it as fanfiction.
