Sha Xin Wei, Chris Fynsk
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2-4 October 2020
zoom videoconference |
15:00 - 16:30 CET (09:00 - 10:30 EST)
19:00 - 20:30 CET (13:00 - 14:30 EST) |
The Alter-Eco seminars propose that to rethink our economies reciprocally demands engaging with our ecosystems in an equally radical way. Following on the symposium and seminar on alternative economies and ecologies in Malta in 2019, this seminar concerns the problem of measure and value.
Setting aside the anthropocene conceit that humans are the most significant beings in the world, and considering what makes life possible, we ask, can technology be more-than-human and yet humane? Considering what makes life worth living, we ask, can there be art not made by humans and for humans alone?
Such questions inevitably lead to questions of value.
Under the regime of quantification it seems that deciding value devolves to a matter of data: if only we had the right data about a person or a situation, and enough of it, then we could assess or even predict that person's or situation's value. Data, however, are not plucked from a tree but constructed by measurement. And since measurement rests on a decision about what is measurable, determining what is made legible versus what is made indiscernible, we realize that "ground truth" data are neither absolute ground nor absolute truth.
Most fundamentally, the very openness of the ever-evolving, ontogenetic world implies that it will exceed every pre-given measure or category. So what can we do in the face of indeterminacy?
In this seminar, we propose a different perspective: turning from things and their predicates to processes and relations, from ontology to ontogeny, from metrics to practices of sense-making, navigating, articulating dynamical experience. Learning from vegetal life, metabolic experience, and the arts of improvisatory performance, we turn from attempting to ground value in metrics to intercalating, calibrating, layering, refracting, and chorusing processes valuing events as they constitute those events.
Setting aside the anthropocene conceit that humans are the most significant beings in the world, and considering what makes life possible, we ask, can technology be more-than-human and yet humane? Considering what makes life worth living, we ask, can there be art not made by humans and for humans alone?
Such questions inevitably lead to questions of value.
Under the regime of quantification it seems that deciding value devolves to a matter of data: if only we had the right data about a person or a situation, and enough of it, then we could assess or even predict that person's or situation's value. Data, however, are not plucked from a tree but constructed by measurement. And since measurement rests on a decision about what is measurable, determining what is made legible versus what is made indiscernible, we realize that "ground truth" data are neither absolute ground nor absolute truth.
Most fundamentally, the very openness of the ever-evolving, ontogenetic world implies that it will exceed every pre-given measure or category. So what can we do in the face of indeterminacy?
In this seminar, we propose a different perspective: turning from things and their predicates to processes and relations, from ontology to ontogeny, from metrics to practices of sense-making, navigating, articulating dynamical experience. Learning from vegetal life, metabolic experience, and the arts of improvisatory performance, we turn from attempting to ground value in metrics to intercalating, calibrating, layering, refracting, and chorusing processes valuing events as they constitute those events.
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