Talk and Round Table Discussion with T.J. Demos
Discussants: Liliana Gómez and Fabienne Liptay
eco-operations
The climate change crisis has become part of both aesthetic discourses and critical research perspectives in culture and the arts. Until recently, the focus has mainly been on the representation of the prevalent ecological relationships and cycles or on the impacts on the environment and contemporary society. Increasingly, however, future-oriented, ecologically conceived possibilities for action are being explored by emergent artists, curators, and critical scholars. In addition to the need for global and local (co)operations, new technologies present both challenges and opportunities for shaping a sustainable future. We will thus explore "eco-operations" and "e-cooperations" that address both the ecologies and technologies of cooperation (artistic, activist, curatorial, etc.). The concepts of “flow” and “network” that are central in globalization studies are relevant for our perspective and, as the hyphen suggests, for the discussion of interruptions, ruptures, disconnections, dissonances, exclusions, and allochronism. The project critically distances itself from notions of a single, coherent (eco- or techno-) system and emphasizes instead frictions within asynchronously running systems.
