ISEA2012 Albuquerque: Machine Wilderness (2012)

Published to coincide with the Eighteenth International Symposium on Electronic Art, ISEA 2012, subtitled “Re-envisioning Art, Technology and Nature”. The catalog features images and stills of the works from the exhibition as well as essays by the curators and developers of the symposium.

Publisher Radius Books, with 516 Arts, Albuquerque Museum of Art, University of New Mexico, and Fund at the Albuquerque Community Foundation, Santa Fe, NM, 2012
ISBN 9781934435571, 1934435570
171 pages
via ISEA Archives

Symposium website, (2)
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF, PDF (5 MB)
See also Conference proceedings (5 MB, PDF).

Tim Ingold: Materials Against Materiality (2007)

“This article seeks to reverse the emphasis, in current studies of material culture, on the materiality of objects as against the properties of materials. Drawing on James Gibson’s tripartite division of the inhabited environment into medium, substances and surfaces, it is argued that the forms of things are not imposed from without upon an inert substrate of matter, but are continually generated and dissolved within the fluxes of materials across the interface between substances and the medium that surrounds them. Thus things are active not because they are imbued with agency but because of ways in which they are caught up in these currents of the lifeworld. The properties of materials, then, are not fixed attributes of matter but are processual and relational. To describe these properties means telling their stories.”

With responses by Christopher Tilley, Carl Knappett, Daniel Miller, Björn Nilsson, and Tim Ingold.

Archaeological Dialogues 14(1), Discussion Article section
Publisher Cambridge University Press, 2007
ISSN 1380-2038
38 pages

Publisher

PDF

Cultural Anthropology: Lexicon for an Anthropocene Yet Unseen (2016–2017)

“The idea of an Anthropocene has spread with astonishing speed, dislodging familiar terms like nature and environment from their customary preeminence as signs of the world beyond ourselves. These developments pose a peculiar challenge for those of us in anthropology. To be sure, everyone suddenly seems to share our concern for that singular creature, anthropos. Yet, the Anthropocene is a gift armed with teeth, with a hau of demands and reciprocal tethers that have left many anthropologists rightly cautious about embracing its tale of an overwhelming human agency. What would it take, we wonder, to see this time and its configurations, agencies, and effects otherwise? With this lexicon we hope to develop a resource that is helpful for this task.

This Theorizing the Contemporary series is meant to confront the challenge of vision and sensibility, of finding new ways of conceiving, engaging, and expressing the felt impasses of the present. It first sprung to life as a “pop-up” panel at the 2015 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, with contributions emerging on the fly amid the tumult of an annual academic carnival.”

Terms: Address, Carbon, Care, Cloud, Cosmos, Distribution, Dream, Earths, Ecopolitics, Environing, Expenditure, Flatulence, Generation, Gluten, Heat, Hyposubjects, Leviathans, Melt, Models, Nature, Nemesis, Petroleum, Photosynthesis, Plastic, Power, Predation, Preparedness, Probiotic, Relationships, Ruin, Shit, Species, Stability, Steps, Sustainability, Timely, Vulnerability, Wildness, Zoonosis. (list updated on 2016-10-6)

Edited by Cymene Howe and Anand Pandian
Publisher Society for Cultural Anthropology, 2016
Theorizing the Contemporary series
ISSN 1548-1360

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Book edition (2020, added on 2020-12-1)