Thinking in the Deep: Celebrating the scholarly lives of Bridget Crone

Sam NightingaleEvents, News

On the 1st of June 2023, hosted by the Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, we celebrated the multiple and unique scholarly endeavours of Bridget Crone. Thanks to filmmaker Marlon Tavaresa, and to Susan Schuppli, a film of the event was made, which is now online. 

This important evening, honouring Bridget’s life, combined an incredible keynote (FEELed Work, or Ecologies of Feeling” by Professor Astrida Neimanis, with heartfelt words from Bridget’s colleagues and students, as well as a series of readings from many of the contributors to Fieldwork for Future Ecologies, a book published by Bridget, Polly Stanton and myself, at the start of this year.

Thanks to the Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths for making this video available.

Attuning to the Politics and Poetics of Seaweed in the Hebrides

Sam NightingaleNews

Published in the University of California research journal, The Foundry, ‘Attuning to the Politics and Poetics of Seaweed in the Hebrides’ describes some of my ongoing research into seaweed and kelpping in Scotland.

The ocean around the Scottish Hebrides is home to vast kelp forests and many other species of seaweed. This plenitude once fuelled the island’s kelp industry, filling the pockets of the estate owners who benefited from this valuable trade. The brutal weather that the island experiences first makes landfall on the west of the island, coming directly off the Atlantic. It is here that I am staying, not far from the foundations of the old seaweed factory in Middleton. My abode is a traditional crofters’ cottage; I feel grateful for the thick stonewalls, small windows, and the traditional thatched roof that protect me from the elements. In the 18th century, it was in structures like these that not only the permanent inhabitants of Tiree lived, but also many of the seasonal workers who came to harvest seaweed.

Read the full essay here.

‘Attuning to the Politics and Poetics of Seaweed in the Hebrides’ is published as part of “Holding Sway: Seaweeds and the Politics of Form” a series of photo essays that channels a visual curiosity about seaweeds with considerations of militarization, gender, Indigenous sovereignty, extractive regimes, and climate change. Foundry guest editors Melody Jue and Maya Weeks invited participants to create or curate images that literally and figuratively “hold sway” in two senses: capturing the attention of an audience, or conveying a relationship of being in touch with seaweeds by holding their swaying botanical forms.

Book: Fieldwork for Future Ecologies

Sam NightingaleNews, Publishing

Fieldwork for Future Ecologies: Radical practice for art and art-based research is published by Onomatopee. I have been working on this edited volume with my co-editors Bridget Crone and Polly Stanton for the last few years.

Bringing together contributions by artists, writers and theorists, Fieldwork for Future Ecologies addresses the role that art practice and art-based research plays in expanding notions of fieldwork. At once a handbook for research and practice and philosophical speculation, the book offers the unique opportunity to explore ways of working within vastly diverse climates and terrains using image, sound, movement and other sensing technologies. It also offers more creative and speculative interventions into the idea and location of the ‘field’ itself.

Focusing on a range of projects from across different geographic locations and situations, the book highlights the crucial contribution that art can make to environmental and climate studies offering a valuable intervention into current discussions of artistic practice and research. ‘Fieldwork for Future Ecologies’ presents a series of propositions and speculations … radical practices for radical times.

Contributing authors: Angus Carlyle, Alliance of the Southern Triangle/AST (D Bauer, F Grodin, P M Hernandez, E Kedan), Bianca Hester, Bridget Crone, David Burns, Henriette Gunkel and Eline McGeorge, Imani Jacqueline Brown, Julie Gough, Kate Pickering, Kreider + O’Leary, Kristen Sharp, Melody Jue, Nicholas Mangan, Philip Samartzis, Polly Stanton, Ruth Maclennan, Sam Nightingale, Saskia Beudel, Simon O’Sullivan, Susan Schuppli, Therese Keogh.

PoA workshop

Sam NightingaleEvents, News

Upcoming workshops

As a co-founder and member of the research/ practice collective, Practices of Attunement (PoA) I would like to announce we are facilitating a series of online workshops as part of HKW’s New Alphabet School #instituting public programme in June 2021. 

The workshop acts as a proposition that takes “instituting” as a nonfinite verb, a call to collective action: a never-ending form of speculation, adopting attentiveness, receptivity and movement as its constituent elements. PoA seeks to extend Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s notion of “study”: an encounter “where you allow yourself to be possessed by others,” instituting a mode of counter-maintenance, generating and maintaining felicitous conditions for encounters.  Over the past nine months, we have been meeting bi-weekly to undertake an ongoing process of study(ing) together. For New Alphabet School #Instituting, we invite you to join us in extended sessions that focus on maintaining, triggering or establishing the conditions for study via remote(ly) collective practices of attunement occurring (a)synchronously across multiple sites. In the unfolding space of study – being together and apart – PoA propose to encounter and attempt to attune to different, overlapping, inconsistent, unevenly distributed, (in)tangible and (un)bounded ecospheric entanglements.
The workshop will take place across a two-week period, where participants meet online twice in preliminary sessions prior to the event on June 25. The purpose of part 1 is to think through conditions and practices for attunement. Based on the participants’ experiences, part 2 will discuss possibilities to institute counter-institutional modes of study.

Participants need to be able to commit to all three gatherings. 

Part 1 – Field-Studies
Preliminary online workshops: Friday, June 11 and June 18, 11am–1pm CEST (Berlin) // 12noon – 2pm EEST (Athens) 

Part 2 – Practices for Deep-Hanging Out
Online workshop: Friday, June 25, 2:30pm–6pm CEST (Berlin) / 3:30–7pm EEST (Athens). For this session, participation on-site in Athens (Eight Collective, Politechneiou 8, Athina 104 33, 5–8pm EEST) is also possible. 

Information about registering for this and other #Instituting workshops is here. Details about HKW’s #Instituting programme can be seen below and the full schedule of events is found here. 

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The workshop is part of HKW’s #Instituting: Public Programme – June 24-26 2021
with Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, ruangrupa and others. 

What could processes of self-organizing and collective making look like in the current landscape? In what ways might they affect public processes of social improvisation? How might such forms of “instituting” give rise to other forms of institutions? Inviting theoretical as well as practical approaches, this edition of the New Alphabet School studies “instituting” as an incomplete, fugitive and thus continuous process that constantly seeks out ways to interact with evolving strictures of the here and now. In their book Now (2017) the Invisible Committee argues that “in reality what we need are not institutions but forms… Everything that lives is only forms and interactions of forms”. How to begin to study this process, this evolving mutation and redefinition of forms as social improvisation, inseparable from emergent imaginings and imaginaries of a livable life?

The full schedule of events is found here. 

Practices of Attunement

Sam NightingaleOther

PoA Press is a series of thoughts set in motion by the study group “Practices of Attunement.” The Press is released bi-monthly, in attunement with the rhythm of the study group’s meetings. It includes patches from our collective practices, of thinking and being in the world together. Conceived as an archive and resource, you can read short reflections on previous meetings, listen to and watch music, films, and documentaries we shared across various time zones; in future editions, you can access our shared map, learn how to make crystals, go on asynchronous walks with us, and develop your own practices of attunement. The PoA Press is itself an infinite form of speculation: we invite you to explore and enjoy its messiness and non-locality.

See the first edition of PoA Press

Read What is PoA?

Watch this space or subscribe to PoA Press for news on workshops and events we will be hosting.