Ecotone 1 - Object Space Entanglements

an interdisciplinary workshop

Supported by Nottingham Trent University School of Art and Design Research fund          

Eco-tone

Eco-tone takes notions of entanglement as a prompt to action.

One such notion is the ecotone itself, a place where two ecosystems overlap and which supports a variety of species often richer than in the habitats it buffers. Another; right now, within environmental debate we find ourselves, like prisoners perhaps, waking up inside the ecological mesh of life forms to which there is no outside [see Timothy Morton, Outside, YH485 Press, 2010].

Following such notions Eco-tone brings into proximity creative and academic practice to juxtapose modes of awareness associated with specific activities so that they are experienced beyond usual boundaries. Participants are invited to respond to the relationship of environment, ecology and ecology of practice; to form spatial relations from within which we can expect to witness resonances that enhance how practice operates.  Through the relationship of environment and the ecologies of practice - the ecological thought, the eco-tone, the eco-spectacle - through interventions, responses and readings on the edges where practice overlaps, we aim to reveal critical and creative movement between cultural geography, philosophy, science, music, art history, architecture, still and moving image and sound; we aim to enhance understanding of our relationship with environment and ecology.

Eco-tone events are workshop, symposium, live exhibition;

art, performance, academic practice in creative proximity.

Object Space Entanglements

The ecotone is a place of transition, of shadings into ... and out of ...,

a place of troubled boundaries and unlikely associations where being

and becoming remain in constant tension. In the undulations and hollows

of the ecotone light and texture blend and pool. Unfamiliar topographies

and unexpected resonances disaggregate our methodologies, provoking

a response. Abandoning oneself to this web of undecided interrelations,

thinking beyond centrism (most pressingly beyond anthropocentrism),

constitutes both threat and opportunity: learning how to live and think

within the ecotone is to learn how to live and think eco-logically

rather than merely ecocentrically.

The challenge, then, is to develop an eco-logics that facilitates a reimagining

of our relation to the world, in both theory and practice. Not simply a world

that surrounds us (an environment or Umwelt) but a world in which and through

which one is already emplaced. With due care (cura) one might still allow thoughts

and perspectives to gather and coalesce in this decentered hollow, but the curation

of an ecotone remains a delicate and ontologically uneasy event. For the inaugural

workshop, this act of curation exposes space and objects to the ecotone, sensitive

to the ecologies that evolve.

It is perhaps unnecessary to observe that the provenance of space

and the status of the object remain contested. Whereas simple objects

have for many years appeared almost passé in philosophy and art,

recent developments in Speculative Realism (SR) and Object Orientated

Ontology (OOO) entreat us to rethink the object and its relations.

We are encouraged to reassess what an object is and what its relations

consist in, to the extent that even space and time, commonly held to

envelope objects, are now merely reducible to their relations. In the ecotone

object and space collide, the discrete and punctual materiality of things

encountering the smooth spreadliness of spaces across various habitats

of thought and practice. In this entanglement of space and object it is hoped

that edges will fray, topographies shift, relations form and new ecologies

of thought and practice emerge.

Participants

Jean Baird

Why objects?

How do we come to know what things are, what do we seek and

accomplish through our relations with materials and objects?  Still Life with Five Objects, considers the relation between the object, the photograph and the condition of being a picture, the photograph as a place where image and language coincide, a space to negotiate questions of expression and existence. Her photographic interests derive from the work of the British ‘object’ sculptors, who improvised a practice of sculpture through the use of light and photography to subdue the material difference between things and make the allusion between objects, images and words palpable.

Kathleen Coessens

Responsive Space.

We can enter, live and find our identity temporarily in spaces as long as these are responsive spaces. A responsive space is a space which can meet in a logical and balanced way expectations concerning affects, control and operations by its human inhabitants or travellers. This implies that, at the level of cognitive and sensorimotor interaction, we have impact in and on that world. By extending our bodies and minds and by incorporating the possibilities and constraints of that world, we can have access to and interact with that environment. By being able to interact satisfactorily at a sensorimotor level, we encounter that space bit by bit as a responsive space: we can engage ourselves in that space and commit ourselves in a sensorimotor and kinaesthetic way once we have the necessary bodily schemata and action patterns. 

We need to have another acquaintance with that world, an understanding and grasp of the environment on a rather psychological level, we need to engage with the space ‘as if the space belongs to us’. The relational space of Lefebvre, embodied accounts of space [Johnson], transitional objects and areas [Winnicot] model how the human being finds attractive or intriguing qualities in his or her environment, considering it at once as an objectively perceived space and as a subjective space. As long as the human being can continuously contextualise, i.e. make meaning of the environment, in an embodied and engaged way, relational space — real or virtual — becomes responsive space.

On the basis of the concept of 'responsive space', I would like to offer some examples on the interaction between artists and environment where space was looked at as 'responsive space'

Mary Conlan

Six Memos Calvino project, and Smog, Knowledge as Dust-cloud and the unfinished lecture on Consistency; Eco-tone ‘curator in action’

Alfredo Cramerotti

The Essence of Things

What are the roles of contemporary artists and curators when confronted with the emergence of problematic environmental situations?  What are the cultural, political and social contexts that form the interdisciplinary research under which their activities and observations take place?  Socio-political? Meta-projects instigated by data flows, results of scientific research? Aesthetic factors? Radical imaginary situations or attitudes? New forms of journalism?  What forms of international, accessible and open platforms of dissemination can be made available to such practice in order to best facilitate its impact   on social,legal, scientific, cultural and geopolitical activity?

Rhodri Davies [Harp]

Elaine Radigue

Occam I    For solo harp

Created in collaboration with Rhodri Davies in Paris.

Completed on the occasion of the composer's 79th birthday.

Jean-Luc Guionnet

harp as filter: on the other hand – part 1

First of all: the harpist faces the audience, centre stage. On her/his right: a table that the player can reach with her/his right hand. On her/his left: a table that the player can reach with her/his left hand. On one of the tables: a bunch of objects. The objects should be passed through the strings. There are 5 different signals:

     1. “that was an easy pass”              

     2. “that pass wasn’t as easy to complete”

     3. “I couldn’t do that one”

     4. “I totally give up: that’s the end”

     5. “that was a difficult pass”

Nothing is funny, nothing is sad in this situation.

Rhodri Davies [harp, electric harp, live-electronics. wind, water and fire harp installations] is a performer and researcher of improvised and contemporary composed music.  In 2008 he collaborated with the visual artist Gustav Metzger on ‘Self-cancellation’, a large-scale audio-visual collaboration in London and Glasgow.. New pieces for harp have been composed for him by: Christian Wolff, Ben Patterson, Alison Knowles, Michael Pisaro, Carole Finer, Mieko Shiomi, Radu Malfatti and Yasunao Tone.

Paul J. Ennis

Melancholic Coexistence amongst Objects.

Timothy Morton, in his recent article ‘Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology,’ has set in motion a discussion of the implications for humans once the object-oriented perspective is taken into account. Against the ‘aesthetics of dejection,’ to borrow a phrase from Dominic Fox, the melancholia in question is to be differentiated from the humbling of the human one finds in other strands of speculative realism. This melancholia arises precisely because one gains a glimpse of a reality that churns below – this being the reality described in the metaphysics of Graham Harman. In this paper my intention is to demonstrate how the melancholia exhibited in object-oriented ontology, and this melancholia remains always in tension with the object-oriented celebration of objects, is better suited to addressing ecological crisis than the standpoint of dejection offered to us by the other strands of speculative realism.

Chrissie Harrington

The Spaces Between: Body, Performance, Technology

Robert Jackson

The Agency of Waste: Purification and Procedure.

In the publication 'History of Shit',  the late French psychoanalyst Dominique Laporte offered a historical, poetic and political account of modern civilisation's preoccupation with waste management and procedure. Through a French decree in 1539, Laporte traces the first attempt of imposing specific waste protocols and procedures onto human output in the guise of modernity, by 'purifying' human waste and conferring onto it order and beauty. Although Laporte's thesis is strictly dialectical, we also find a reply in Latour's 'We Have Never Been Modern' (1993), whereby modernity is similarly characterised by the 'Work of Purification' and hybridisation. Why is modernity characterised by these two cleansed realms; Nature out there, and Culture in here? And furthermore, who initiated the purifying?

The paper will proceed to examine waste from these two viewpoints and the real impact that our concept of waste has on ecological issues. Waste is not a hybridisation of 'cultural' output on one side and the 'natural' conclusion of input on the other - rather - waste is comprised of individual units that are contingent on and contingent to heterogeneous procedures. To examine an objects waste is an excellent way of examining an objects procedure.

Dr Kevin Love

Dispositions: ecologies of philosophy.

Negotiating difference in and between spaces and objects, in and around Heidegger, Harman and Derrida, Dispositions considers the ecology of object-space philosophy and offers reflections on philosophy as eco-logy.

Dr David Reid

Eco-tone: notes

Jonathan P Watts

England and the Octopus

SPUR Project

The SPUR project is an undergraduate research project at Nottingham Trent University.  Photography undergraduates Oliver Seamarks and Ben Gore are researching the relationship of photography to ecological thinking under the direction of David Reid.  Oliver’s visual loop In Wildness is the Preservation of the World will be shown during Object Space Entanglements, and Ben’s online resource archive of ecological photographic practice will be available for the forthcoming academic year.

                                   

                                                                                                                                     drder/drkl  250611