"The entanglement of ‘wilderness’ and car infrastructure on the Pasterze glacier" @ This Is Not A Glacier, AIL 26.1.2024

Friday next week I will be speaking about a research I have started together with Guus Diepenmaat, Victor Kössl and Sandra Sieczkowski this year (a short-film is in the making about this. The title of my presentation will be "The entanglement of ‘wilderness’ and car infrastructure on the Pasterze glacier" and will be part of a Panel with the wonderful title "Guilt-tripping on the loss of Wilderness". Below you can find the abstract of both my talk and the symposium in general as well as all the necessary info. 

National Parks as zones for consuming Nature? The entanglement of the car with our love for the high peaks examined through the lens of the Glocknerhochalpenstraße

The Glocknerhochalpenstraße is Austria’s perhaps most famous street, leading directly to the countries biggest glacier, the Pasterze. Right next to its melting glory, you can find a 5-story parking house and an exhibition of racing cars. If you drive a bit further up the road that leads through the core protection area of Central Europe’s biggest National Park, you can drink an overpriced coffee at the Porsche Café and chat with car enthusiasts of all countries, who came here for a day ride to enjoy nature. The tarmac of the entire street is full of tyre tracks from the frequent drift races.

 In this input presentation of an ongoing research, I want to look behind the apparent contradictions of such Nature Protection zones to look for their hidden entanglements. Rather then regarding the car as “bad for Nature”, I regard it as a machine that produces Nature for us as something to be consumed. By examining the history of the development of National Parks, their expropriation of indigenous tribes and their agenda of “protection of Nature”, I want to raise questions for an environmentalism of the future and a re-diversification of what it means to be human. The challenge for National Parks of the catastrophic future might turn out to again disentangle humans from their self-identification with cars.

This Is Not a Glacier

Thickening Description for Thinning Ice 

26 Jan 2024, 15:00 

Glaciers are often portrayed as icons of global warming because of their physical loss through melting and the loss of climate records stored in glacial ice. This is an attempt at a more multifaceted, heterogenous and thicker description of a glacier, beyond its current reductive stereotype. 

--> Web presence 

 

(The Photos are screenshots from the film-project mentioned above) 

Lecture & Panels at nacht:leben, Innsbruck - 26.1

I have been invited to "nacht:leben", a meeting and conference of club comissions in Innsbruck to talk about my 2018 book "Die Clubmaschine" (co-written with Jorinde Schulz) and how my relation to it and club culture in general changed in the last years of multiple crises and further precarisation of life-worlds. On the 26.1, I will be discussing this and other topics with the wonderful David Prieth and I can't wait for it!
 

--> https://www.pmk.or.at/events/nachtleben-club-kultur-konferenz 

The CARS WE LIKE - Thinking and Enacting Radical Change in Mobility - Symposium from 4th to 8th of March 2024 at AIL Vienna

As a follow-up to the 2022 conference exhaust(ed) entanglements at FU Berlin, I will be organizing a 5-day symposium & workshop titled "The CARS WE LIKE - Thinking and Enacting Radical Change in Mobility" from the 4th to the 8th of March 2024 at the AIL of the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In collaboration with the Futurama.Lab, we have invited an amazing array of speakers (Institut Momentum Paris (Agnes Sinai), Kilian Jörg, La Deroute des Routes (Enora Chopard), Marta Navaridas, Rainer Prohaska, Sand im Getriebe (Anna Raabe), Luc
Schuiten, Gretchen Sorin, Arthur Summereder, System Change not Climate Change (Mira Kapfinger), Verkehrswende Österreich, Markus Wissen, Conny Zenk) and will have an exciting 5-day building workshop for the CARS WE LIKE.

Mobility is one of the major challenges of global ecological transformation and yet our ideas for innovation seem to be very limited and one-sided – especially when it comes to automobility. In this transdisciplinary workshop and symposium, we will work towards overcoming this dead zone of imagination by prefiguring better worlds, beyond an auto-centered paradigm, for the many flourishing worlds of the future.

How can mobility become a source of inspiration in a devastated global society that mostly feels it has to or is obligated to move (to work, to the supermarket, etc.) and tends to forget the joys of doing so voluntarily and as a larger-than human practice?

The environment must no longer be adapted to the car, but the car to the environment is the leading motto of this 5-day-workshop led by the Futurama.Lab. It will focus on introducing plurality and fun to the gray monotony of mundane traffic jams. Participants will be able to build dada-esque, modular forms of radically ecological cars using recycled materials, found objects and bike waste.

The accompanying symposium seeks to go beyond mere critique by combining theory and practice in a novel way. Evening lectures, panels and screenings will investigate radical utopias of car-free worlds, the need to devise new safe spaces beyond the car, the car as a crucial nexus in the consumer-capitalist system and how the arts can take part in this transformation. International experts and visionaries whose perspectives are almost unknown in the German-speaking sphere will be introduced to stimulate a dynamic discourse for the radical change we need.

You can sign up for the 5-day-workshop (and see some more infos) here.

More Info on the detailed program etc. will follow shortly!

 

Toxic Temple-Interview @ UND Heft

Anna Lerchbaumer and me were invited to give an Interview about the Toxic Temple in this beautiful magazine. The UND Heft asked us about our project mainly from the perspectives of how humor can be a strategy to deal with dire topics in the arts (and beyond) and what connections could be made between activism and the arts. The magazine is really beautifully designed and I highly recommend ordering it here. 

LANDEN - Open Lab

Next week, we'll have the second public opening of our your research cluster LANDEN. Please come by and share your experiences with this difficult topic with us!

Within Im_flieger’s artistic research project LANDEN, five artists from different fields are researching multifarious ways of (dis)orientation in relation to ecological politics and applications to the troubles of finding habitable futures. The artistic research process revolves around questions highlighted by the philosopher Bruno Latour in his 2017 book Où atterrir (Where to land?). Landing – tracing, walking, embodying, dancing and losing oneself in the problems and possibilities of exploring this complex concept of landing, a challenge and potential in equal measure.

The artists invite you to a LANDEN Open Lab to share, practice and reflect on their practical and theoretical exploration with the guests, to continue their research in the collective space.

“You want me to land on Earth? Why? – Because you’re hanging in midair, headed for a crash. – How is it down there? – Pretty tense. – A war zone? – Close: A Critical Zone, a few kilometers thick, where everything happens. – Is it habitable? – Depends on your chosen science. – Will I survive down there? – Depends on your politics.”
From “Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth” edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel

--> All the info <--

Dissident Practices: Posthumanist Approaches to a Critique of Political Economy (Symposium @ TU Wien & Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 4.12)

Monday next week I will be joining a symposium on "Posthumanist Approaches to a Critique of Political Economy" at TU Vienna and the Academy of Fine Arts. It is open to the public and I will speak about my critique of AI as a governmental technique - a thesis I develop in a chapter of my forthcoming book Ecological Reasonings (Bloomsbury 2024) and which will be re-published in updated form in the forth-coming volume of "Dissident Practices". Please feel free to join, as I hear it will be held in a quite experimental practice open for intervention and non-hierarchical ways of though-expression. 

Find all the info here.

"PASSIVELY WATCHING THE WORLD CRUMBLE OR ACTIVELY ENGAGING IN THE PROCESS?" & "THE CARS WE LIKE" - two Panels at Futurama.Lab @ Vienna Art Week

In the background, I have been building and collaborating with a new network of artists, thinkers and makers that try to take the ecological catastrophe seriously, called FUTURAMA.LAB (inaugurated by wonderful Rainer Prohaska, who has also been the artists and mind behind the MS Fusion project of last year). We try to build a transdisciplinary hub that seeks to overcome the dichotomies between form and content that so often creates weird moralistic hybrids in the art world. We want to work on ways how art can actively and radically engage in the radical transformation needed without green- or white-washing (and perhaps in dissolving the category of "art" in the process). We have many upcoming projects and I am happy to announce that we will present some of them for the first time to the public at the VIENNA ART WEEK on 11th&12th of November.

You can find the full program here.

I have organized two panels about topics particularly dear to me. One about "ecological art-making" and what that could mean and the second one about a new project you will hopefully soon hear more about. Find the descriptions below.

 
"PASSIVELY WATCHING THE WORLD CRUMBLE OR ACTIVELY ENGAGING IN THE PROCESS?"
 
Panel Discussion
Sabrina Rosina, Alexandra Graupner & Tomas Zierhofer-Kin. Modeartion: Kilian Jörg
 
Despite its omnipresence in public discourse, we would argue that there is surprisingly little art that is engaged with our ecological predicament in creative, radical and enabling ways that go beyond mere doom-kitsch, romantisization of Nature or moral exhibitionism. In this panel bringing together curators, artists and philosophers, we want to discuss examples and ideas that show us a way forward.
 
 

 

"THE CARS WE LIKE"
 
Dialogue
Kilian Jörg & Rainer Prohaska
 
Going beyond "mere" critique of the current automobile-centered system, Kilian Jörg and Rainer Prohaska try to hack the car-system from within by inventing serious and dada-esque vehicles that follow a simple paradigm: it is no longer the environment that has to adapt to our vehicles, but our vehicles that have to become as fluid as our environments. In an open dialogue they will discuss the broader horizon of changing mobility patters by means of artistic research.