Please join us at Cineworks on 17 May for the next edition of the Text To Speech reading salon series. We will be reading and discussing the chapter Indigenizing the Anthropocene by Zoe Todd, from Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, (Eds. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin).

Taking as its premise that the proposed epoch of the Anthropocene is necessarily an aesthetic event, Art in the Anthropocene is a publication of essays and interviews exploring the relationship between contemporary art and knowledge production in an era of ecological crisis. Métis academic Zoe Todd’s contribution to this collection argues that the increasing prominence of the Anthropocene is tantamount to a colonizing move, as a space marked by white supremacy that serves to erase other ways of being and other kinds of knowledge. Todd proposes that to tackle the intertwined and complex environmental crises in which the world finds itself, informed responses to in situ challenges around the globe cannot be constructed using one philosophical, epistemological, or ontological lens. Rather than engage with the Anthropocene as a teleological fact implicating all humans as equally culpable for the current socio-economic, ecological, and political state of the world, Todd insists that openness to multiple Indigenous perspectives on “ecological imagination” is vital.

Text To Speech is a joint initiative of Western Front, Cineworks and VIVO Media Arts. Focused on writing about media, media art and the surrounding concepts and frameworks of the mediated world, Text to Speech gatherings aim to build stronger community ties and knowledge in our field. In this reading group, participants will be provided with copies of the reading, and we will facilitate a group reading, discussion, and analysis of this text. Prior knowledge of the work is encouraged but not required, as the session will involve some form of introduction, and some portion of close reading (out loud).

READING 11: Zoe Todd, Indigenizing the Anthropocene (Art and the Anthropocene; Eds. Davies and Turpin; Open Humanities Press; 2015; p241-254)

DOWNLOAD: http://v.ht/Gtrf

‍PREVIOUS READINGS:

• 10 - Benjamin Bratton: The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty "The City Layer"
• 9 - Wendy Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fibre Optics
• 8 - Cornelia Vismann, Cultural Techniques and Sovereignty
• 7 - Seth Price, Dispersion
• 6 - Bernard Stiegler, Automatic Society 1: The Future of Work – Introduction
• 5 - Ute Holl – Trance Techniques, Cinema, and Cybernetics
• 4 - Artie Vierkant, The Image Object Post-Internet
• 3 - Kaja Silverman, Introduction to The Miracle Of Analogy
• 2 - Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Or the End of the Intellectual Postwar Era in German Media Theory
• 1 - Sadie Plant, Zeroes and Ones, Digital Women + the New Technoculture