Re: [-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 3]

[Aviva Rahmani]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Just a quick comment on trees and hierarchies, vertical space doesn’t 
necessarily imply hierarchy. A tree’s canopy, for example is at least as 
important to its survival as its roots and all the interconnected mycellae of 
its underground networks. I would suggest a more realistic conceptualization of 
these spatial relationships would be to consider permaculture- in which each 
spatial layer is equally important and all are interconnected. Further more, it 
might be considered that any trees’ role is grounded in watershed dynamics, the 
atmosphere, soil, food webs, etc. Even a sentinel tree is only an artifact of 
these much larger relationships. Re: rehearsals for a network and other 
systems, it might be interesting to consider about the sentinel tree, that what 
is obvious may not be what’s important to pay attention to. The corollary in 
present politics is that the strong man may not be the real danger. It is the 
followers of the strong man and why they follow.

Aviva Rahmani, PhD
www.ghostn...@ghostnets.com
Watch ³Blued Trees²:  https://vimeo.com/135290635
www.gulftogulf.org



From:  on behalf of "Vanouse, Paul" 

Reply-To: soft_skinned_space 
Date: Tuesday, June 19, 2018 at 3:18 PM
To: soft_skinned_space 
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 3]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
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Re: [-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 3]

[Christiane Robbins]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Good Morning All -

Well….this thread is taking an unexpected twist.  Luxury may be in the mind of 
the beholder here relative to taking racial and cultural heritage.  

Melinda, I, too, was adopted - from Catholic Charities - a larger story here 
and there.  But the searching for answers - the promise that is inherent in 
offerings - the services -  of these corporate entities - are predicated (as 
are many commodities) upon our own fantastical projections.  Seems like a 
child’s common fantasy was coming from Royalty … in my case, the Kennedys :). 
Until I was in my twenties, I was told I was of a different ethnicity - and no 
one was the wiser as my physical appearance can lean in several regions 
depending on one’s perspective.  So was I placeless, perhaps, but somehow I did 
feel anchored - a feeling for which I cannot account.  Perhaps it was that I 
was raised in the same region that my families had been for centuries, as 
opposed to being totally displaced geographically as well.  The Lenape( the 
original people)  had been in the Americas for a millennia or more.

Nonetheless, I had found my birth mother through an Underground Railroad of 
sorts - a “mole" working in the Federal Gov with whom I had been put in touch 
with by one of my students who had been working on a documentary on adoption.  
This underground detective did this the hard way - looking through archival 
paper documents - this was the 90’s and the govt. was not yet fully digitized. 
My matriarchal line held the Lenape line along with the Coe lineage ( British.) 
among a few more.  

The oral tradition had not been handed down to me over a lifetime but through a 
few visits in my adulthood that with were abruptly halted with her untimely 
death.  It was she that told me of the Lenape.  Ironically, the Coe family 
refutes any Lenape lineage as offered thru their familial DNA analysis - which 
the family archivist is steadfastly tracking online and which is how I traced 
myself back to the Puritans.  BTW, I found the Coes on FB -  When my mother who 
told me of the Lenape and also made me promise ( honest to God ) to track down 
the church (land)  in Manhattan that had been “stolen” from her family - talk 
about a fantasy - not to mention a financial incentive :). The Lenape is now 
represented by a 6% in the proverbial pie chart of my DNA analysis.  I had 
previously understood that it was more prominent but then again I have only 
taken one DNA test.  Nonetheless, the matriarchal oral tradition is operative … 
although not verifiable by our evidentiary analytical mechanisms …. yet.  This 
is a chasm.

Actually, I took a DNA analysis to find out about my father - of whom no one 
would speak.  This also gave rise to many fantasies - not the least of which 
was the Sopranos - Italian, New Jersey - you may know what I am getting at.  
But as they say there has been no cheese down that hole and so my new fantasy 
is that I may have been an Immaculate Conception :). The DNA analysis has not 
been helpful in sorting this one out -

Need to run but once again, many thanks for such a unexpected and enriching 
conversation.

Chris




> On Jun 19, 2018, at 1:49 AM, Melinda Rackham  wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Hi all,
> great monthly topics.. and DNA talk compels me to respond..
> my take on DNA  is rather different as an Adopted person without knowledge of 
> my racial/cultural heritage
> 
> I did as a kid dream I was misplaced child of European royalty, but alas my 
> birth mum was just a young unmarried working class woman from the poorer 
> suburbs shamed and bullied by society and religion into letting nuns take her 
> child. she had another daughter she lost to adoption two years later. I have 
> never met my 1/2 sister.
> 
> so I am using DNA to locate my relatives - and I agree ist full of clichés 
> and stereotyping , especially when one runs ones results through different 
> companies (ancestry, 23andMe, my heritage etc) . their ancestral algorithms 
> are based on estimates and probabilities, not certainties,  and I come out 
> racially differently in each result.
> 
> My Scandanavian is overtaken by western European, I get to be more english 
> and less Irish/Scottish in others, my precious bit of Persian decreases, 
> while my Italian gains.  As well there are no DNA testing companies that have 
> reliable reference SNP data from Indigenous Australians -so bad luck if you 
> are looking.
> 
> For me it is flawed on so many levels , but serious as its the only linkage I 
> have to my paternal heritage, and to my adopted 1/2 sister. It also answers a 
> few questions for me, like why having grown up in outback Australia I feel so 
> at home safe and comfortable in European forests - why I feel very familiar 
> with Denmark and Danish. 
> 
> Those that have the luxury of connection to heritage, I don't think could 
> really unders

Re: [-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 2]

[margaretha haughwout]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Dear all,

I hope it's okay I'm writing to a week 2 thread I'm compelled by much
of this conversation and had a few thoughts to add, that have been very
much on my mind and related to a current project of mine called Trees of
Tomorrow. The project collapses hard boundaries between politics and
ecology, communication and exchange, considering the political networks of
trees in the neighborhood of Flushing, Queens.
http://www.treesoftomorrow.life/ We've begun to track how NYC Parks frames
these trees in terms of ecosystem services and quantifies their labor in
monetary terms.

I also just want to point out that the idea of nature as homeostatic is a
theory -- one which comes from cybernetics -- that has largely been
debunked. While it might be useful to think of our engagements with nature
in systems terms so that we can think creatively and sustainably about
inputs and outputs, ways to turn waste into nutrient for example, the ways
that nature is not a system is what might offer us the most answers to many
of the questions in this thread. Again, FRAUD's work with the reindeer
lichen is a concrete example of this. I recently interviewed a London Plane
Sycamore, one of Flushing's hardest workers when it comes to ecosystem
services:
http://www.treesoftomorrow.life/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/ToT_TabloidResizedFORPRINT-PAGES.pdf
It seems to suggest that adding companion species and keeping the
totalizing system on it's toes creates possibilities for sabotage and
retreat.

I also wanted to add one more possibility to John's suggestions for what
can be done, esp. extending the idea to "hack from the inside": eat. Can we
enlist multispecies kin to collaboratively EAT the system from the inside
and the outside?

PS I would love a reading list on the necropolitics of the network.


--
beforebefore.net
guerrillagrafters.org
coastalreadinggroup.com
--



On Sun, Jun 17, 2018 at 12:35 PM, FRAUD  wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>
> Hi all,
>
> Bleeding into week 3.
>
> @Christina: In brief, the installation is composed of a whaler wreck (used
> to be used to harpoon the whale from), a scale showing the 'value' of wood
> in carbon futures, and documentation of the process of collecting wreck
> wood. This is accompanied by scrolling text tracing a genealogy of carbon
> emission trading through whale oil, the whale oil myth, pitch, boat
> building, colonialism, slavery, witch burning and forestry. We hope to put
> it online soon (txt/doco).
>
> Also >>> Feral MBA <3
>
> Would happily contribute in explorations of feral bond trading and trusts!
>
> A&F
>
> On 15/06/2018 17:28, Christina McPhee wrote:
>
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>
>
>
> Dear Audrey and Francisco of FRAUD-
> How great to have the chance to bring this intervention on lichen, the
> incalculable /-financialization abstractions, and forest culture into the
> heart of London at Somerset House. Please could you describe the physical
> attributes of your installation (?) - how you are carrying these ideas into
> the space ?
> Thanks
>
> Christina
>
> On Sun, Jun 10, 2018 at 3:09 PM FRAUD  wrote:
>
>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>> Dear all,
>>
>> We are delighted to join the network discussion (and with such great
>> company!).
>> Some little bits to begin.
>>
>> *Networks:*
>> In our case, we are interested in the materiality and necropolitics of
>> the network and critical ecologies. Of late, we have been thinking through
>> the finantialisation of nature through emission trading systems and green
>> bonds. We are producing a genealogy of the conception of the forest as a
>> space of carbon flows which has carbon circulation, exchange and storage as
>> a nominal abstractions. Emission trading and green markets are popping up
>> globally (China just started its own), it is predicted to be the biggest
>> trading market by 2020. Carbon Futures is a speculative valuation system
>> that captures and extracts 'natural resources'. We are also inquiring into
>> how these markets are networked and we are investigating what is obfuscated
>> by this abstraction (cultural conflicts, subaltern knowledges and
>> environmental violence). Happy to expand, also we have a show opening
>> Tuesday in London on this topic :) [https://www.somersethouse.
>> org.uk/whats-on/complex-values].
>>
>> *The incomputable:*
>> During related research (in the Finnish forests) we were fascinated about
>> the reindeer lichen in East Fennoscandia, a disappearing species that
>> problematises the management of industrial forestry in Finland. Generally
>> lichen species are interesting because they constitute the majority of
>> diversity in the northern forests--there are only 5 tree species, whereas
>> there are thousands of lichens. Being a composite of a algae or
>> cyanobacteria and a fungi, their genetic make-up is more exposed to
>> m

Re: [-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 3]

[bl...@x-i.net]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--it is hard not to noticed that the week 3 of network rehearsal are all 
female protagonists if the curatorial suggestion here is that the 
the post-net network imaginary depends on female traits, let me throw in 
another angle from the realm of 'mother' culture.


paraphrasing Marx, the new will appear in the womb of the old.🐡 🐡 
🐡 🐡 (thank you for this Liz)


two points here. one with regards to Kombucha culture and the resistance 
presented by their mother/ daughter dyad to cultural appropriation into 
the growing health drink industry or what some even have called the 
kombucha war in USA between kombucha breweries and federal regulation 
agencies. as some might know, the kombucha drink bottled and sold in 
health food shops is always already impregnated and a live. the smallest 
environmental change, be it a temperature or oxygen levels will 
reactivate the fermentation process, daughters growth and rise the 
alcohol levels, subsequently requiring this slavery to be regulated 
under the law as an alcoholic beverage, with costs that entails.


the other point . like the recent rise of 'heartless psychopaths' 
there are also a rise of what some could call 'heartfelt psychopaths' or 
what they themselves prefer to call the crazy mother movement who are 
standing up for the acknowledgment of matrixial and the rights of the 
voiceless infant child. Borrowing Brecha Ettinger articulation of 
matrixial space as one pregnant with potentials, possibilities and 
surprises, a radical and anarchic space where 'co-emergence' takes 
place, but only if undisturbed by the logic of separation, the noise of 
cultural hegemony and techno excitement, they beginning to contest and 
refuse what Bernard Shaw once called the "witchcraft, in modern form of 
patent medicines and prophylactic inoculations".


these standpoints represent rejection of the separations that are 
currently imposed on all subjects and reinforce the notions of 
inter-connectivity, inter-subjectivity and **a cooperative relationship 
'mother' culture represent. It still to be seen what the network of 
angry mothers can bring to the life in capitalism ruins


in such context, the DNA discussions are also already shifted from 
frameworks of identity to those of epigenetics and inter-dependencies.





On 19/06/2018 07:20, Shu Lea Cheang wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--


Hi all

Let me just pick up a few threads here to follow through

From Kate Rich - "i'm particularly interested in non-model businesses 
- experiments in business which do not scale or replicate but can 
travel, cross-breed and transmit -  & also in martin parker's idea of 
insurgent entrepreneurship as a set of potentially transformative 
practices in reorienting economy, for communities as well as individuals."


From Ilze Black - the human networks that transport kombucha, the 
t-shroom, ultimately "to put forward the notion of symbiosis for the 
post-net network imagination! Mycelium networks offer us organic 
metaphors to re-evaluate ourselvesThey give us a chance to move 
away from human=machine rhetoric, from cyborg like visions of future 
transhumans, and possibly change the course of current industrial 
enterprise. This, however, requires for every supporter to become a 
symbiosis partner, to be considered as a cell in a social mycelium. "


From Liz, risking getting into the discourse on 'immersive species",  
we would certainly be interested  in the tracks of UBERMORGEN's 
network projects that "undermine the current networks of the heartless 
psychopaths".


I offer here also a quote from Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, /The mushroom at 
the end of the world -on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins/
"We are stuck with the problem of living despite economic and 
ecological ruination….. Neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us 
how to think about collaborative survival. It is time to pay attention 
to mushroom picking. Not that this will save us— but it might open our 
imaginations. "


There is new relationships to be established, some disconnection to be 
made..


any takers?

sl


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empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu


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http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

Re: [-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 3]

[Melinda Rackham]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi all,
 great monthly topics.. and DNA talk compels me to respond..
my take on DNA  is rather different as an Adopted person without knowledge of 
my racial/cultural heritage

I did as a kid dream I was misplaced child of European royalty, but alas my 
birth mum was just a young unmarried working class woman from the poorer 
suburbs shamed and bullied by society and religion into letting nuns take her 
child. she had another daughter she lost to adoption two years later. I have 
never met my 1/2 sister.

so I am using DNA to locate my relatives - and I agree ist full of clichés and 
stereotyping , especially when one runs ones results through different 
companies (ancestry, 23andMe, my heritage etc) . their ancestral algorithms are 
based on estimates and probabilities, not certainties,  and I come out racially 
differently in each result.

My Scandanavian is overtaken by western European, I get to be more english and 
less Irish/Scottish in others, my precious bit of Persian decreases, while my 
Italian gains.  As well there are no DNA testing companies that have reliable 
reference SNP data from Indigenous Australians -so bad luck if you are looking.

For me it is flawed on so many levels , but serious as its the only linkage I 
have to my paternal heritage, and to my adopted 1/2 sister. It also answers a 
few questions for me, like why having grown up in outback Australia I feel so 
at home safe and comfortable in European forests - why I feel very familiar 
with Denmark and Danish. 

Those that have the luxury of connection to heritage, I don't think could 
really understand what its like to not see anyone u look like, and that 
mirroring is a vital component of development, and have no threads to  
cultures, society, or land.  Its a little like being a refugee from birth .. 
grateful for food and shelter but stricken with grief and loss - cant go back 
uncertain about going fwd, a placeless person.

DNA promises a lot, but it doesn't deliver - almost like gambling- get a lead 
follow it, then people don't respond, etc.. .MyHeritage has a pro bono 
initiative DNA Quest which is supposed to  help adoptees and their birth 
families reunite through DNA testing- sending out 15,000  DNA kits for free.  
But u still need the dedication to do the work to find and follow links and 
build thier network and info.  My favourite line in their blurb:
" We hope to make this project a shining light for corporate philanthropy and 
an example to be followed by other commercial companies in their own lines of 
expertise, to help make our world a better place."

And in all of this heart-felt searching, most companies ask if they can retain 
our DNA records for medical research .. building a Biodata Empire, and most 
people, thinking they are helping their fellows, say yes.

happy testing 

Kerri Anne Burgess
as I was on my birth certificate before I was legally transformed into Melinda 
Rackham


> On 19 Jun 2018, at 10:03 am, Christiane Robbins  
> wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Brett,
> 
> I couldn’t agree more in that DNA kits are ripe for parody … the clichés the 
> stereotyping, the narrow bandwidth of race is utterly sophomoric and 
> misleading.  That said, I take issue with the focus of your position below - 
> the “will toward cultural appropriation”, identity theft and the rush to 
> judgement of an the exploitive branding as an identity prop for purposes of 
> cultural appropriation…. or if, as you may be implying, for financial gain.
> 
> I, too, state this as a citizen of the USA.  My own ancestor was Robert Coe - 
> an original puritan ( colonizer) displaced from the UK and arriving in MA - 
> and a rather prolific one at that!.  My blood lines ( as it were ) speak to 
> the amalgam of immigration patterns in the east coast of USA since 1635 .
> These include the Lenape Tribe ( the original peoples,)  the British, the 
> Irish, the German, the Italian, the Spanish, the Finnish and the Lebanese - 
> and all of these speak to their own migratory patterns throughout the 
> millennia that in themselves have been racialized and nationalized.  
> 
> I am simply an exemplary example of 4 centuries of migratory co-mingling in 
> what is now called the USA.   All are verifiable in my DNA analysis as well 
> as the patriarchal names ( Coe, Maier, Cassidy, Allaway, etc.) And most 
> significantly via an oral history that has been handed down to me through my 
> matriarchal line - my mother.  This oral history is most incredible but now 
> pales in responding to the evidentiary demands of verifiable data analysis of 
> the 21st c the DNA analysis which has now taken center stage .  This is 
> simply an apt metaphor for our moment in history.
> 
> FYI, throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th century in the USA the Lenape tribes 
> ( comprising 3 clans in NY, NJ, PA CT,and MD) my own ancestors, were 
> decimated first by 

Re: [-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 3]

[Shu Lea Cheang]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi all

Let me just pick up a few threads here to follow through

From Kate Rich - "i'm particularly interested in non-model businesses - 
experiments in business which do not scale or replicate but can travel, 
cross-breed and transmit -  & also in martin parker's idea of insurgent 
entrepreneurship as a set of potentially transformative practices in 
reorienting economy, for communities as well as individuals."


From Ilze Black - the human networks that transport kombucha, the 
t-shroom, ultimately "to put forward the notion of symbiosis for the 
post-net network imagination! Mycelium networks offer us organic 
metaphors to re-evaluate ourselvesThey give us a chance to move away 
from human=machine rhetoric, from cyborg like visions of future 
transhumans, and possibly change the course of current industrial 
enterprise. This, however, requires for every supporter to become a 
symbiosis partner, to be considered as a cell in a social mycelium. "


From Liz, risking getting into the discourse on 'immersive species",  
we would certainly be interested  in the tracks of UBERMORGEN's network 
projects that "undermine the current networks of the heartless 
psychopaths".


I offer here also a quote from Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, /The mushroom at 
the end of the world -on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins/
"We are stuck with the problem of living despite economic and ecological 
ruination….. Neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think 
about collaborative survival. It is time to pay attention to mushroom 
picking. Not that this will save us— but it might open our imaginations. "


There is new relationships to be established, some disconnection to be 
made..


any takers?

sl
___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu