Thursday, August 18, 2011
A still from the film The Ister
Compare Heidegger's quote with this one, which I keep returning to of late:
"Several species of cockatoo can be serious agricultural pests… controlled by shooting, poisoning or capture followed by gassing." (source)Read more...
Wheel of Progress-Capitalism (another false cycle)
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
I created this drawing today as a teacher and parent teaching aid. It's incredible how pervasive the dominant ideology is, and how the ad-men get into even the most conscientious of schools. Zeph's school is founded on non-harm Buddhist principles, however 'the winners' (the popular and influential) are still the kids who drink caffeinated energy drinks, know all the celebs, obsess over brands and labels, and are across junk food products like junkies in a chemist.
This is a reasonably new phenomenon in the school, so before it really takes hold a number of us are getting fairly active. Ad-men (and of course women) are setting the social agenda in the school through their new disciples – the whatevs. Those kids restricted in their access to pop culture consumption are made to feel inadequate, uncool. Peer-group pressure has hit middle years primary school in a big way, Target stores sell padded bra t-shirts to girls in this age group. Peer pressure was a thing that happened at high school when I was a kid. This is more of the aggregating hyper-mediated state I keep writing about...
Advertorial enterprise is a trillion-billion dollar industry engaged in strategic warfare against a bunch of disparate volunteer parents, teachers and carers. It's a David and Goliath scenario, and Goliath is romping it in.
So here's my catapult, my slingshot. Feel free to rip it and distribute widely (I can send you a high res copy if you want to make a poster of it). The idea of this drawing is to ask each child to imagine they're in the hub of the wheel (the mediated blob, or ambient blur), ask them to choose their favourite bought item, and then find out about it by researching all the possible energy inputs, social inputs, ecological inputs and pollution outputs that each item is likely to produce.
Click for bigger.
NB. Schools shred diversity by ordering students into year groups. This makes them easier targets for commerce pests to pinpoint specific generational desires, much like reduced biodiversity in environments encourage plagues and outbreaks – a weakened state. There are actual companies who profit by collating all forms of social data on all the various age and interest groups, and sell this information to businesses so as they can target consumers with deadly accuracy.
If our schools were generationally diverse the ad-man's power would be considerably reduced, especially if our elders abandoned the wheel of progress-capitalism too and began to behave again as elders. Currently schools are breeding grounds for self-interested bystander consumers. Addressing this issue may be part of addressing the strategic war on children by big business.
Greenwash #25 in Trouble - Locavore Intimacy
Monday, August 1, 2011
Click for bigger, then click again for better resolution.
Please note, my critique of agriculture in this piece is not an attack on farmers per se. We are agricultural consumers, farmers are agriculture providers. Urban-centric attacks on farmers for being ecological destroyers are misguided and simplistic. We grow the demand, desire and populations that necessitate ecological crisis. We're all participants, or as Gary Snyder puts it: "No one today can afford to be innocent, or indulge himself in ignorance of the nature of contemporary governments, politics and social orders." (Earth House Hold, 1957)
If only the following table read: "The Main Types of Damage Anthropocenes Inadvertently Cause to Wildlife," and unpacked all the different ways in which we dwell on Earth and the consequences for each. When white people began farming in Australia, Aborigines were rounded up and killed as 'cattle stealers'. I find the same continued hypocrisy in this table:
Click for bigger.
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Honey graft
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Grafting the commons (cont.)...
The antibacterial property of honey makes it a perfect skin cure for a graft. In this image a hawthorn rootstock has a quince scion grafted on to it.
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(More) grafting the commons
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Last year I wrote an article about grafting various fruits onto wild hawthorns and apples. I was keen to trial various fruits without doing any research, as this attitude can sometimes lead to the quite unexpected. However, not surprising to me now, all these grafts failed. So today, armed with a little more knowledge and an awesome grafting tool, I took a small jar of honey, some pear cuttings, a roll of grafting tape and walked into the bush.
I decided to use two cultivars of pears (Winter Nelis and Beurre Bosc) that cross pollinate with eachother. Apparently, hawthorn makes a good rootstock for any of the rose family – apples, medlars, pears, quince, etc. On a 'wild urban spaces' workshop taken by David Holmgren earlier this year we were shown a 10 year old medlar graft David had done onto wild hawthorn. It was doing really well with abundant fruit (though hard to see in this photo).
Brett Adamson and David Holmgren stand on either sides of the graft.
The grafts I did today were dipped in honey to mitigate disease before being wrapped in grafting tape. Each was then given a splint for strength and protection. I'd like to keep making rose family grafts onto hawthorn over the next two months, so hopefully I can report some significant success, even unexpected, next year.
If you have any grafting tips or anecdotes I'd love to hear them.
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Simulated poetics – beaming in from home
Saturday, July 23, 2011
I'm participating in a poetry event in NSW today from the low carbon comforts of my central Victorian home, courtesy of Skype.
Of course digital culture is fully supported by industrial technics, so I'm not pretending this participation isn't without its pollutions and abuses. And I'm only guessing that my decline to be flown/driven up to participate in person constitutes a lower footprint, in comparison to using all this technology (including a plasma screen at the event end) to beam me up.
Here's the poster that was produced for this gig, in which the Bundanon Trust designer has taken an excerpt from a statement I wrote in 2004 and laid it over a photograph taken by Heidrun Lohr.
My Fellow panel participants are Yvette Holt, Chris Mansell and James Stuart. Read more...
Two forms of death: ecological and anthropocene made
Monday, July 18, 2011
Deborah Bird Rose (2011):
There are two big contexts of death. The first is the fact that death resides in life... Death, as a corollary to life, happens to all of us complex creatures. It may happen through old age, or illness; it may happen through hunting or killing; it may happen on larger scales through events such as cyclones, earthquakes, or volcanoes. In this context, living things are bound into ecological communities of life and death, and within these communities life is always making and unmaking itself in time and place.Read more...The second context differs from the first in being a uniquely human invention: man-made mass death. This form of death arises out of a will-to-destruction that seems to be confined to humans... The will-to-destruction can most vividly be thought of as death work. It involves imagining a future emptiness, and then working systematically to accomplish that emptiness... In ordinary life, death is the necessary completion of life. Man-made death is not necessary and does not complete life. Instead it is a massive interruption, a negation of the relationships between life and death.
Poetics and Future Scenarios: poems and poets in an age of energy descent and climate chaos
Sunday, July 3, 2011
I have put together a panel for a forthcoming poetry symposium to be held at Trades Hall in Melbourne. Here are the details, followed by a film trailer that features David Holmgren called Anima Mundi, due for release shortly.
The opening panel for the forthcoming national poetics symposium, “Poetry and the Contemporary” (Trades Hall July 7-9), is a panel of three poets joined by sustainability leader, David Holmgren, the co-originator of the permaculture movement.
The panel is titled:
“Poetics and Future Scenarios: poems and poets in an age of energy descent and climate chaos”, July 7, 2.30pm Meeting Room 1(downstairs), following the Welcome to Country, 2.20pm. (Entry by donation).
David Holmgren will open the panel outlining the four main scenarios he believes we face as a result of human engineered climate change and energy depletion. He will draw on his bestselling book “Future Scenarios”, and over thirty years of research that has made him one of the key ecological thinkers of our time and a national treasure.
Three poets, Sue Fitchett, Patrick Jones and Peter O’Mara will respond with critical papers, prose and poems. Each are ecological activists in their respective regions.
Read more...
We're all on 'work experience' thanks to Liam
Sunday, June 19, 2011
We have just completed a week of work experience thanks to Liam Scott, a student from the local high school. Liam undertook to hang with us and see what a typical week for Artist as Family entails, and what 'work' constitutes, according to us. One of the things we did during the week was to measure up and draw a first draft design for the proposed permanent Daylesford Community Food Garden. Here's a short vid that snapshots the adventure.
Walking Bare
Monday, June 13, 2011
A video poem written in response to a long shoeless walk, thinking further about technics and technical mediations, mediations such as shoes and the digital footage that preceded, inspired and ultimately simulated this poem.
Flesh of the forest
Saturday, June 11, 2011
A find of wood blewits (Lepista nuda) yesterday on a walk was last night cooked up with garlic and parsley as a protein bomb, and shared with friends.
More uncapitalised food from the commons.
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Even in death Monsanto follows
Monday, June 6, 2011
Today I walked through a graveyard and noticed the grass around the tombstones had been recently herbicided. It caused me to make the observation, that which is hidden is no less violent, in fact the hiding makes the act a double atrocity.
Herbicides even kill the good soil microbes where we finally lay. Is there no rest from the tireless ecocides of Monsanto and co? Can not our bodies be simply left to rejoin the dynamic microbial flux that is supposed to renew life?
Roundup ready? Rapture Ready!
Monsanto'd graves.
Critical Mass Daylesford (latest ride)
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Critical Mass hard liners brave the early winter and take over the street on sun down, last Friday in May. Local singer Anthony Petrucci, from Souls on Board, comes into view for an instant just as his voice comes into sound.
Greenwash #23 in Trouble - Goodly Spores
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
To read, click on image and then click again for better resolution.
A scientific justification of nonscientific 'slow text'
Monday, May 30, 2011
Just as I was finishing a slow text treatment of a Bernard Stiegler transcript (below), my friend Ian sent through a link to an article that states “The reason that the unusual fonts are effective is that it causes us to think more deeply about the material,” a co-author of the study, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton, wrote in an e-mail. “But we are capable of thinking deeply without being subjected to unusual fonts. Think of it this way, you can’t skim material in a hard to read font, so putting text in a hard-to-read font will force you to read more carefully.”
A Free-dragging manifesto - FREE
Saturday, May 28, 2011
We have just made Words and Things, and my A Free-dragging Manifesto from How to do Words with Things (with Peter O'Mara) available for free download. More info can be found down the right hand column of this blog. Otherwise just click away.
Ten months later
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
I was in Sydney earlier this month, so I checked in on the Food Forest and did a little work there with some local residents. When I got back, a family friend, Rory, who works for ABC radio, sent me the audio file of the interview I had with Deborah Cameron on 702 in September last year. This little archive vid brings all these things together.
Public is public
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Pic. Adam Trafford
A number of us turned out to protest the sale of a community park in Daylesford last week. Read more at the Daylesford Community Food Gardener's blog Just Free Food.
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Revisiting older writing while thinking about form and ecological poetries
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
From How To Do Words With Things: A Free-dragging Manifesto (2008), this text first published as Lalgambook: the Djadjawurrung and Coca-Cola Amatil, in D!SSENT magazine, Spring 2008.
Energy, primitivism and slow text
Monday, May 9, 2011
Primitivism, as a purely intellectual thing, is indeed problematic terrain. However, once the primitive, by which I mean activity that transcends history (such as foraging), cohabits everyday practice, it ceases to be utopian and becomes instead pragmatic, or something not of wishfulness or fantasy. This is especially the case if we are to consider global energy powerdown, where primitive forms will again have currency due to a fall in affluence.
So often ecological thought rides exclusively between humanism and ecology and skips energy altogether. "The energetic is nearly always left out of the equation" (David Holmgren, 2010), which seems strange especially when the aestheticisation or mediatisation of nature – our very predicament, or crisis – is precisely linked to high energy inputs – our affluence. Three hundred years of high fossil fuel productions has necessitated that art leads the disembodiment or 'hyper-separation' (Val Plumwood, 2002) process as populations swell into cities and radicals, peasants and indigenous folk no longer have anywhere to practice unclocked forms.
William Blake, printer and poet, with a love of being naked and in the garden, is one such marker of the end of European art as a low energy, unclocked, minimal noise activity. At the time of writing The Garden of Love (1794) coal furnaces were being build and beginning to change his beloved Albion for ever. Today, the screeching, oil dripping 'blob' of Thomas De Zengotita's Mediated (2005) culture, or the all-tech 'ambient blur' that Timothy Morton describes in Ecology without Nature (2007), are both – blob and blur – necessarily immersed in cheap crude oil, and they must necessarily find primitivist forms abhorrent or at best just another choice in a smorgasboard of options. Whereas, when you consider a powering down, even as a 'long descent' (Greer, 2010), the options to pollute, to be allopoetical, or to drive aesthetics globally, necessarily reduce. This reduction is very scary if you imagine energy powerdown (post global aggregated capitalism) as a return to agricultural toil, direct animal cruelty (as opposed to the indirect global cruelty we exhibit today; passivism is an option as long as others are doing the dirty work), and authoritarian sexual repression. But not so if one considers the possibility of an eroding private property (intellectual and physical) culture and the reestablishment of a foraging commons courtesy of collapsing globalised economies wholly reliant on cheap fossil fuels.
Rather than some vague Rousseauian pigmented or pixalated image of primitivism, which is of course just groundless fantasy, we now have real, of the soil, applied ecological breakthroughs that are current practiced modes of primitivism. These can be evidenced in Masanobu Fukuoka's 'do nothing farming', Permaculture's 'food forestry', and in a growing culture of urban foraging witnessed across the blogosphere (such as here and here).
For me, at least, primitivism is not a conjuring of the old world for old world's sake, but rather an attempt to concieve of a present and future with low energy inputs; today, for reasons to do with social and ecological justice, and tomorrow, for issues of species resilience. We are at the tailend of an era of cheap oil and many thinkers haven't factored this within their intellectual framework. It's like there's an abiding belief there will always be an abundance of energy, making what we do today always possible. Conceiving energy powerdown is to concieve of redistributed (reruralised) populations, which, among many other things, will attend to the homogenisation of global ascent capitalism – the so-called global village. Any socialism – from Marxism to Fascism – persevering with industrialisation is thinking fairly short-term, unless of course there is a conjuring of fantasy world resources on some distant planet.
I'm not advocating here a pure primitivism or necessarily a whole primitivism. It's way too simplistic to think along these lines, or perhaps just too early. However, in attending to technofetishisation and the spectacle and 'false cycles' (Guy Debord) of clock-time, I am advocating a rethinking of the primitive per-se at a time of peaking fossils, phosphates, fish, water and just about every other essential element that drives industrial culture on and on.
As a kind of 'doing-saying' (Joan Retallack) evidence of this rethinking, I repost my video-poem-recipe, A Place of Simple Feeding, after re-recording the spoken words today and adding a brief visual clip of the poem as a slow text 'mesostic' (John Cage) for the page. Or, at least a seconds worth of detail of it. The aesthetics aren't pure, instead they're mutable responses to the less than bodily in art today. The slow text (super and subscripted vowels) shows the physical relationship between letters, words, chance, foraging and berries. A move away from Cartesian letters lining up in monological rows (like this text), or ambient representations requiring large energy inputs – styrofoam art, international careerism et al.
Decapitalised art, decapitalised food.
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