31/10/2020

aftermath * the nth of letting go / P * training in the everday (new modes of living together) by: oracle(s)

Helen Pritchard

Helen Pritchard is an artist and designer whose work brings together the fields of Computational Aesthetics, more-than-human geographies, and queer theory to consider the impact of computational practices on environmental and social justice. Helen is an Associate Professor of Queer Feminist Technoscience at i-DAT, Plymouth University and a research fellow at Goldsmiths University of London. They are the co-editor of “Data Browser 06: Executing Practices”, published by Open Humanities Press (2018)http://www.helenpritchard.info/ 

Eric Snodgrass

Eric Snodgrass is senior lecturer at the Department of Design+Change at Linnaeus University. They are currently involved with a postdoc project at Linköping University’s Technology and Social Change program, looking at infrastructures that work to imagine, materialise and sustain forms of change. Recent work includes the co-edited volume Executing Practices (Open Humanities Press).https://liu.se/en/employee/erisn36

Romi Morrison

Romi Morrison is an artist working across critical data studies, black feminist praxis, and geography. Focusing on boundaries, social infrastructure, and community technology, they engage informal practices of knowing and representing space beyond modes of enclosure that capture land into property, people into subjects, and knowledge into data. They are currently a PhD candidate in the School of Cinematic Arts at USC. https://elegantcollisions.com/

Loren Briton

Loren Briton is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher based in Berlin. Focusing on: radical pedagogy, play and unthinking oppression they make objects that re-position and collaborations that unlearn. Britton is responsible to matters of anti-racism, trans*feministTechnoScience, and making accessibilities (considering class and dis/ability). Britton is an artistic researcher within Gender/Diversity in Informatics Systems Department at the University of Kassel, DE and is an Associate Lecturer at i-DAT, Plymouth University, UK. https://lorenbritton.com/.

With gratitude to the participants of the workshop Future(s) Otherwise: Dreaming with Oracle Practices, and in dialogue with the Black Feminist Poet(h)ical writers that have formed this project, we share this writing practice of skeletal architectural text sketching. Developed through a series of instructions, in this practice we collectively build off of individual poems written in response to the oracle(s) workshops. This practice is similar to our oracle(s) practice of finding connecting, emergent points of reflection and interpretation.(.notes) soulmates sharing organs.
  • https://www.yourworldoftext.com/~snoddy/oracles

The poem aftermath * the nth of letting go / P * training in the everday (new modes of living together) was generated by a workshop engaging methods from Black Feminist Poet(h)ics, and asking questions about our computational environments that took place in the context of the New Alphabet School edition #Caring in June 2020. Through a guided process of welcoming, writing, choosing, reading and intuiting, the participants posed questions to an oracle that allowed for thinking the world otherwise. The oracle functioned as a source to work with, not to extract from. In the workshop the oracle was the text: M Archive: After the End of the World, the 2018 book of poetry from Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Rethinking what ethics for computational practices are, the authors propose oracle(s) as a critical-technical practice for opening up possibilities and imaginations for accountability that arise within automation and digitalisation. Oracle(s) demands that we think the world differently and practices what it might mean for all of us to be free.