I am conducting this research thanks to the receipt of the Leverhulme Magna Carta Doctoral Studentship: Creating Popular Narratives of Security by Royal Holloway, University of London. I am situated between the Media Arts Department and Information Security Group.
Project Summary
My practice-based PhD project considers what affirmationist conceptions of security and vulnerability may look like.
Methodology
I combine artistic research with cultural analysis. I conduct close-readings of LARP zones as temporary autonomous zones (TAZ) and study the methods of creating these zones. I investigate how LARP can be a site where political becomings are forged. My studio practice takes form in interdisciplinary performance, including lo-fi pop digital media expressions, creative writing, sound (using modular synthesizer and field recordings), movement, and fashion.
Guiding questions are: what are the fields/architectures of care relations, what are the assets, what is the lineage of asset handling, what is the logic of the system, what are the conditions of interoperativity within the system, what are the relations of power and their (information access) structure, what is the relation to the outward boundaries of the security territory? These questions are framed in scenes and narratives of contemporary intimate relations.
I work with movement, material, and novel forms of documentation of LARP zones in order to study embodied, autonomous social collective units and the action of their ethics. I focus on non-invasive forms of recording the “imprints” of the social constitutions collaboratively created during the LARP; the ongoing and nuanced negotiation methods of game play; and flexible calibration tools.
Ideas
🝏 I propose re-conceiving the concept of social reproduction by way of Italian political theorist Silvia Federici, through the examination of modalities of exchange and thus economics, as proposed by Japanese theorist Kojin Karatani in his book "The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange" (2014) - what I argue must be a feminist economics. I investigate applications of commons-based ideology and social relations in organizations such as P2P Foundation, Enspiral, Loomio, unMonestary; projects responding to mutations in social exchange, such as Re.Union Network and MANY; and consider how prototypes may be played out and challenged through LARP play and methodology. The intersection of these objects and concepts ingnite new conceptions of the civic, and connections with stewardship and care theory.
🝏 I consider different relations between machine and human intelligence in terms of territory- making. What information may be better unknown by humans and rather managed through AI and algorithmic governance for planetary infrastructural fluidity. For example, without knowing geo- locations of the communities in my PhD's creative narrative, territory- making and commercial extortion of people and lands may be avoided. This could permit communication exchanges to be about learning and not acquisition, construction of terror, or propaganda.
🝏 In taking globalisation as the paradigm and phenomena of the capital-nation-state system, I consider the planetary's phenomenas. Focal points are the urban and architecture designs of commons, co-determinations, and co-operations, through which may expose comprehensions of the civic in the planetary paradigm. What are cosmopolises if not global cities, subjectivities of legal units if not citizen-subjects of nation-states, households if not the nuclear family? I make inquiries into legal unit(s), house, polis, through artistic investigations of moving in and out of the TAZ. I question the relevance of traditional law in such formulations.
Applied Investigations
🝏 Currently, my research helps shape new social contracts of care and forms of social units in my participation in Re.Union Network. The project proposes circumventing the ever shifting legal-institutional framework and explores ways in which new technologies, particularly decentralised platforms, can facilitate social organisation of care relations.
🝏 To speculate the cultural identity of the planetary as paradigm following globalization and its implications for cosmo[s]polises- and citizen(ships)- conglomerations, I co-created a public reading group series (2019). We assume a post-state scenario and discuss themes of alliances, kinship architectures, lineages, rituals, legal entities, group conflict, and economic mandates for planetary-stewardship, with invited guest participants. Guests have included Victoria Ivanova, Emily Jones, Jack Self, and Jaya Klara Brekke. https://genevievecostello.net/portfolio/reading-group🝏