Welcome to the February edition of The Miaaw Monthly which tells you what to expect this month, and provides a few pointers to things you might like to explore. It also includes an advanced warning of a new and different kind of Miaaw event that will start in March.
Our podcasts are a way to have (hopefully) interesting conversations about the things we care about. Please spread the word as widely as you can, and encourage people to subscribe to The Miaaw Monthly.
If you have anything that you want to include in The Miaaw Monthly, or discuss in the podcasts, then please email us at monthly@miaaw.net and we will be happy to collaborate.
TODAY’S PODCAST
Today’s podcast, the final one for January, looks at the 20th anniversary of Pixelache in Helsinki: a digital art collective that has (among many other things) provided a home for Miaaw for the last three and a half years.
FEBRUARY’S PODCASTS
Every Friday a podcast appears at 12:34 UTC. Sometimes we get so eager that they appear an hour or two early to allow for any lag across the internet. Mostly they arrive on time. With that in mind, here are the podcasts that will drop in December.
Friday February 3: Meanwhile on an Abandoned Bookshelf | Episode 16
David Moscow managed Bernie Sanders media campaigns during the 2016 US election. He explains how he moved from that to writing From Scratch: Adventures in Harvesting, Hunting, Fishing and Foraging on a Fragile Planet, and what he learned from the journeys he went on. He discusses the relationship between tradition and community, and the importance of both.
Friday February 10: Genuine Inquiry | Episode 25
You may or may not have heard of Nick Bostrom, but he recently issued an sort-of-apology for something he wrote twenty years ago. His sort-of-apology did not receive the applause he may have expected.
Owen Kelly inquiries into the nature of apology in an age of instant opinion and social media. How can we tell a genuine apology from hollow PR, and why and when do we feel the need to insist on apologies?
Friday February 17: A Culture of Possibility | Episode 25
This month Arlene Goldbard and Francois Mattarasso talk with Beverly Naidus about her life and work. Beverly’s art projects focus on environmental crises that create problems for humans. Her works address social issues such as racism, consumerism, body image, nuclear threats, cultural identity. She has written several artist books including One Size Does Not Fit All (1993) and What Kinda Name is That? (1996) which has been discussed by academics in the field including Paul Von Blum, Lucy R. Lippard, and reviewed by contemporary journals.
Friday February 24: Common Practice | Episode 23
In this month’s Common Practice Sophie Hope returns and talks to Marc Herbst about cultural movements and their crossover with political movements, “post-migrant” studies, precarious research and cultural methods for working with possibly traumatized people.
Marc has recently carried out Always Coming Home: A precarious worker’s inquiry into “creative work” in refugee homes in Saxony, Germany that looks into the relationship between art workers and refugee children and the conditions of labouring together around German concepts for cultural integration. Marc works as an independent artist, curator and co-editor of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest.
LISTENING
All our podcasts are available from Anchor.fm, Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Overcast, RadioPublic, Soundcloud, Spotify, and Stitcher.
You can also listen to them at the miaaw.net website where you will find additional links, notes, and references accompanying each episode. You will also find a full archive of all the previous podcasts there.
ADVANCED WARNING
In the second half of March (by which we almost certainly mean March 21) we will launch the first of a Spring series of Miaaw Live!. This will take the form of a live video-on Zoom conversation that we will record and then place on our YouTube channel, where it will live on as an historical document.
Miaaw Live! will have a limited number of seats, since we want it to take the form of a conversation and not a lecture-with-audience. We will use Eventbrite for registration.
The first episode will form the international launch of Arlene Goldbard’s new book In The Camp of Angels of Freedom. Everyone who registers will get a discount code for the book.
Full details will arrive in the March edition of Miaaw Monthly!
OFF SITE
Browsing
From a distance it might look as though Elon Musk has begun to make deliberate efforts to shake off a large part of Twitter’s user base. This month he announced, with no notice whatsoever, that Twitter would no longer allow other applications to access their APIs. At a stroke this forced a number of well-loved and well-used applications, on mobile and desktop, to shut their doors, and in some cases close their companies.
Tapbot, a two-person company in North Texas, have published a dryly amusing web page about the death of their app Tweetbot, which they launched in April 2011. You can find it here. They have also announced that they will soon launch a similar app for Mastodon called Ivory.
The delusion of disruption has apparently now promoted Elon Musk to become Mastodon’s new recruiting officer.
Education
Alexander Verbeek publishes a weekly newsletter called The Planet which you can subscribe too in free or paid versions. In the latest issue he discusses the Doomsday Clock, “a symbolic representation of the likelihood of a global catastrophe, [that] has been moved closer to “midnight” by atomic scientists. The clock, created in 1947 to convey threats to humanity and the planet, is now set at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been”.
He notes that the “Doomsday Clock has been adjusted 18 times since its creation in 1947, with the closest it has ever been to “midnight” being two minutes in 1953, following the testing of the hydrogen bomb by the United States. The clock was furthest from doomsday in 1991, when it was 17 minutes to midnight. The last time it was adjusted was in 2020, when it was moved to 100 seconds to midnight”.
Exploring
January 26 saw the release of SFPC_Malware_Anthology.zip, a collection of work created during An Artist’s History of Computer Viruses and Malware, an online class at School For Poetic Computation taught by Todd Anderson and Herdimas Anggara. The zip file anthology contains a mix of desktop software and browser extensions that creatively explore malware aesthetics including a little worm that eats files on your desktop, a browser extension that lets you explore the web on foot, a poetic email spambot, and more!
From Franklin & Marshall College in New York City:
“If you are planning to be in NYC this February, I hope you will consider attending the session we are doing at the College Art Association about CETA.
Titled Art History in Search of a Historian it will aim to attract art historians to study the program and its impact on contemporary art. Our open-access, digital archive has grown tremendously in the last year, providing a great starting point for scholars”.
If you cannot attend this session, please pass the word along to your colleagues. And, if you haven’t been to the website in awhile, please visit the CETA Arts Legacy Project.
John Hopkins, pioneering digital, environmental and sound artist, sent us this image from Western Colorado, where he currently works remotely for the Colorado Geological Society. He took it on January 23 while he “was snow-shoeing around for some exercise away from the desk & monitors!”
You can follow John’s adventures at Neoscenes
Participating
From Rhizome: Yao Collaborative has announced an open call for Digital Diasporas 联网离散. If you self-identify as Chinese and/or Sino diaspora & are interested in experimental, digital, and/or research-based practices, consider applying to this remote, six-week long online residency by February 15.
Meanwhile in Sheffield, England, Access Space have launched Noises & Projections “an open platform for artists to present, play, screen or perform work that can be experimental, improvised, abstract, material, concrete, acoustic, amplified, analogue, digital, mechanical, chemical, video, film, expanded, blurred, flicker, music, projections or noise”.
Noises & Projections launched in January but you can contribute on Feb 14th or March 7th by contacting Jake at Access Space – or you can just turn up, in which case you should bring a bottle and expect an informal atmosphere.
Reading
This month PM Press have published The Mohawk Warrior Society: A Handbook on Sovereignty and Survival. They say that “this anthology by members of the Mohawk Warrior Society uncovers a hidden history and paints a bold portrait of the spectacular experience of Kanien’kehá:ka survival and self-defense. Providing extensive documentation, context, and analysis, the book features foundational writings by prolific visual artist and polemicist Louis Karoniaktajeh Hall (1918–1993)—such as his landmark 1979 pamphlet The Warrior’s Handbook, as well as selections of his pioneering artwork. This book contains new oral history by key figures of the Rotisken’rhakéhte’s revival in the 1970s and tells the story of the Warriors’ famous flag, their armed occupation of Ganienkeh in 1974, and the role of their constitution, the Great Peace, in guiding their commitment to freedom and independence”.
You can find out more about the book, and order a copy from PM Press. You can buy it as a paperback for $27.95 or an ebook for $8.95.
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