Ambient Thought: Recent Episodes
firefly frequencies
As part of the Digital Undercommons, Ambient Thought re-situates the recorded words of philosophers, writers, thinkers, artists and activists in minutely layered soundscapes that aim to provide a counterpoint and extension to their thinking as well as a new way for it to resonate in the listener's mind and body...
In this talk, drawing on examples ranging from pig farming practices in Denmark to Henry Ford's doomed Brazilian rubber plantation venture, Fordlandia, anthropologist Anna Tsing - author of "The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins" - argues for a need to apply a range of feminist approaches to recount and address the planetary disaster of what has become known as the "Anthropocene". Such approaches are necessary, she says, to get beneath the oversimplifying universalist pretensions of this recently established discursive field regarding the effects of "mankind" on earth. They can also show how these claims to universalism arise from a predominantly white male property-owning class, and how they both mask and are at the root of a still-ongoing history of human violence and environmental destruction, marked by the predations of plantation, industrial and finance capitalism on entangled multispecies lifeworlds.
Editing and mix: Graeme Thomson
In this slightly abridged version of a lecture given at the European Graduate School, philosopher Giorgio Agamben takes up and expands upon Deleuze's formulation of the work of art as "an act of resistance", relating it to his own theories of potentiality, disactivation and the inoperant. Returning once again to his singular reading of Aristotle and referring to the work and worklessness of Titian, Glenn Gould, Franz Kafka and Kazimir Malevich, Agamben considers exactly what type of 'resistance' is at stake in any artistic endeavour worthy of the name.
Editing and mix: Graeme Thomson
The first episode of Ambient Thought features an extract from a lecture given by artist and filmmaker Trin T. Minh-ha, “Between Dog and Wolf”. Through this "colour", entre chien et loup, she evokes the migrant self, boundaries and multiplicities, as well as the complex passage between feelings of identity and alterity experienced by those who struggle under the labels of exile, migrant or refugee. A reimagining of what it means to say, to stay and to move between here, there and elsewhere, in a new unfolding of the poetics of journeys...
Editing and mix - Graeme Thomson