ephemeropteræ 2015/04 – Ines Doujak & John Barker | Benjamin H. Bratton | Christoph Keller

Ines Doujak and John Barker stage a multimedia performance involving video, fabrics and text to tie knots between personal and global geographies, medical and spiritual and past and present. As a sort of "rehearsal" that resembles a theatre act, costumes, spoken, kinetic roles, they use the biblical figure of a “shape-shifting Devil” to convey their analysis of the contemporary global crisis. The first part of this ongoing project will deal with war, heroin, and crystal meth.

Drawing on his essay “On the Earth Layer: Governance of/with Computational Models of/for Comparative Planetary Computation", Benjamin H. Bratton investigates notions of “ecological cosmopolitics relying on the rhetorical criteria of consensus, whether as a lifeboat ethics—that we are all in this together—or the supposed self-evidence of Earth’s archive seen as a single space that can be made more communitarian". 

Christoph Keller considers the post-archeological situation, questioning the narratives that connect the fragmentary with the historical whole in his staged essay "Anarcheology Museum". Archeology is linked to the national mythologies and narrations of the 19th century. They constituted an identity based on the assumption of the existence of an historical timeline. The museums and later the exhibitions were the places, where isolated fragments or objects – were presented as carriers of extended meanings. Some objects in the museums e.g. stand in for an entire epoch of history. But without the framework and narration, the same object would just be an object.

Ines Doujak (born 1959) is an Austrian artist who researches, writes and teaches in the areas of visual culture and material aesthetics with a queer-feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonial focus. Doujak lives and works in London and Vienna, where she studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna (1988–93). She is key researcher in ´Utopian Pulse: Flares in the Darkroom´ located at the Secession in Vienna, which started in 2013. She is the project leader of “Loomshuttles / Warpaths”, a project shedding light on the highly complex and asymmetrical relationships between Europe and Latin America through the medium of Andean textiles. Textiles, as an ancient global product, is outset to unravel how multiple forms and consequences of colonialist policies reach into the present. With British novelist John Barker she regularly produces ideas and projects.

John Barker (born 1948) is a British novelist who has published extensively on political economy, labour process and the structure and misuses of language and metaphor. From the 1970s onwards he has published a number of texts of political economy, writers and writing, and on the capitalist psyche and ideological opportunism. These have appeared in Red Notes; Mute; Adbusters; Capital and Class; Telepolis; MELA; Science as Culture; Variant; and Scottish Left Review. He has written an essay dealing with the colonial political economy of cocaine, From Coca to Capital, for the Potosi Principle exhibition in Madrid, Berlin, and La Paz. He is a constant contributor for “Loomshuttles / Warpaths” of Ines Doujak. His role in this project has been a mixture of research, writing and editing.

Benjamin H. Bratton (born 1968) is an American theorist whose work spans philosophy, art and design. He is Associate Professor of Visual Arts and faculty coordinator of the MFA program; and Director of The Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego. He is also Professor at The European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Bratton's research is situated at the intersections of contemporary social and political theory, computational media & infrastructure, architectural & urban design problems, and the politics of synthetic ecologies and biology. Current work focuses on the political geography of cloud computing, highly-granular universal addressing systems, and alternate models of ecological governance. Bratton has published widely, from AD:Architectural Design and Volume to BlackBook and Theory, Culture & Society, and has been a visiting lecturer at Columbia, Princeton, Yale, the Architectural Association of London, Penn, USC, UCLA, Art Center College of Design, Michigan, Brown, and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, among others. His next book, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, is forthcoming. He was also co-chair of ambient:interface, the 54th (and final) International Aspen Design Conference. 

Christoph Keller (born 1967), German artists, curator, author, true interdisciplinarist, studied math, physics and hydrology in Freiburg, Berlin and Santiago de Chile, liberal arts at HdK Berlin and film and art at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. His projects feature discursive constellations (and archival strategies) of diverse disciplines, objects, subjects (impossibility of division of objective and subjective) and media just like in his "Æther, de la cosmologie à la conscience" at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (2011) where the barrier between the artist and curator is left consciously unclear, to mention one of many.