-ecologies-

Polytechnics year long programme ‘Ecologies’, discussing, adapting, transforming and modifying through; participation, performance, open, f{l}oss and collaborative methods; as live & dead aural, visual and data-led experimental interactions.

Artists, scientists and ecologists undertake investigations into the ecology of material in systems, as information economies, as face-to-face discussions and as the archive through the connected issues of our wider environmental context. ‘Ecologies’ engenders the fertilisation of information, technology, media and art through methods which reverse engineer and crack open new systems of information, old economies of ownership and revisit the aged and existent yet unseen materialist phenomena of our wireless world.

We got our hands dirty with ancient computing at the Chip Tracker Lab, making sweet pop music whilst re-distributing redundant computing paraphernalia to techno-junkies, curious newbies and eco-pragmatists at the Computer Jumble Sale. We performed the de- and re-coding of a biological soup alongside growing test-tube greens in the Bio Art Lab. We sat and chatted with Hans Steiner on the hacked transmutation of the other and the expected, continuing the thread at Datarama as the open and unexpected. The death of the author prompts the Open Music Archive to step into the otherside, slipping out of time into another time to re-surface at Ghost Trace Stellar with an archive of rich melodies for all-to-use and free-to-use. The Shredder modifies the literal death of the author to a caffeinated version resulting in an edible melangé of shitake, oyster and lions-mane fungi. The infinite cycle of energy now shifts its discourse to the wave particle duality in Spectral Ecologies where the courier avoids tragedy whilst the wave-length is receiving at full prominence.

Taking process, method and nature into account,‘Ecologies’ back-dates and downgrades ready to oscillate through a cycle of waste, death and re-invention in the parallel dimension of the present upgrade and update economy of the new and improved.