[mf2012] July 5th Moving Forest Workshop - Coda

[Matthew Fuller]

Dear All,
Please find below the current version of the Moving Forest Workshop event, 
arranged as a Coda to the performance on the 4th July.
If you have any questions about it, do let me know.
Best,
Matthew


Moving Forest Workshop - Coda
Chelsea School of Art
July 5th, 2012
Triangle Gallery

This workshop follows on from the Moving Forest event on July 4 as a coda, 
giving a time for reflection and for developing the argument and experience 
of the work along other lines.  It involves participants, organisers and 
guests, and people from CCW, CCS, RADA and activists, artists and others 
from across the sprawl.

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.

Format
Each speaker will be asked to present an idea or argument in around 10-15 
minutes.  Presentations may result in a Q&A, but should be aimed at 
stirring up answers and discussion in other participants, so the discussion 
may move entirely to the 'floor' following the presentations.




Schedule

12.00 doors open – Triange Gallery

12.40pm Opening
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.co.uk
Eleni Ikoniadou, Kingston University
John Jordan, labofii.org
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, bravenewwhat.org
Brian Ashton, Liverpool
Nick Thoburn, Manchester University


Closing stroll along Millbank
Robin Bale