Talk Plan!

Part 1
1.Irene and Jara introduce DONE and the program / 5 mins?

2.C+H Intro to The Anti Mengarie Project 
multispecies conf, stories, other workshops, website 7-10 mins
Began out of a response to the curators in sweden of the multispecies storytelling confernece - we met in the bar after the conference - state of the discourse and how people were responding to it - and when the call came we decided to do a response to it. 
-Covid hit, and we were confronted with penguins isolated at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, nature is healing, all these things became exceptionally present in this isolated reality, different response in relation to animals and saw there wasn't a critical understanding - the penguin thinking perhaps this is my prison, perhaps this is my jail? Even though they were being brought into the stark contrast of the realities they were they were illuminating
-Not just wanting to reproduce something, the politics of solidarity and trying to understand the particular lineages of resistance and how this requires a particular form of storytelling.. for entertainment a form of storytelling that can hold ourselves and others accountable.

Accomplices Not Allies -- “Academics, & Intellectuals”
Although sometimes directly from communities in struggle, intellectuals and academics also fit neatly in all of these categories. Their role in struggle can be extremely patronizing. In many cases the academic maintains institutional power above the knowledge and skill base of the community/ies in struggle. Intellectuals are most often fixated on un-learning oppression. These lot generally don’t have their feet on the ground, but are quick to be critical of those who do.
Should we desire to merely “unlearn” oppression, or to smash it to fucking pieces, and have it’s very existence gone?
An accomplice as academic would seek ways to leverage resources and material support and/or betray their institution to further liberation struggles. An intellectual accomplice would strategize with, not for and not be afraid to pick up a hammer.

3.Website - making a space for shared practices, as an active and living archive in collaboration with colleagues, comrades, and students -- inviting Elaine and Sophie, training with Alexis Pauline Gumbs  - website description! 
(The Anti-Menagerie is a space that aggregrates conversations, collaborations, and research stemming from investigations into trans-species solidarity, resistance, and practice, facilitated by Helen Pritchard and Cassandra Troyan.

This site was created as a way to continue the work “Multispecies Methods for Solidarity Stories — Using Multispecies Storytelling for Sustainable Change by Engaging with Decolonial and Anti-Racist Strategies”, which seeks to use interdisciplinary methods as part of a digital lab, to allow writers, scholars, artists, designers, and theorists to engage and collectively build practices and ways of rethinking how we imagine our role as humans in connection with other species.

This platform was developed in collaboration with Cristina Cochior, a researcher and designer working in the Netherlands. Rather than existing only as a static and hierarchical archive, it is purposely swampy and layered. All the notes, drawings, images, and writings that came out of these workshops, lectures and seminars were collectively made in collaboration with our colleagues and students in the Department of Design at Linnaeus University, and at i-DAT at the University of Plymouth. The Anti-Menagerie figures as a space for the proliferation of new projects with the possibility for continual expansion and re-ordering. When navigating the site, all the floating images and pdfs can be dragged across the page. For a more stable view, click on the middle left button. The site is build using the free software distribusi and the typeface is FluxischElse.)

4.Done Research commission, - screen share the website discuss the process 5-7 mins
-During Covid there becomes a massive influx of robots/robotics of performing services, militiarized context of covid, Spot from a military animal, straight into the domestic sphere and the political economy of companies who want to invest in these services -- delivery, self-distancing, brought in by police and governments to control poor Black populations 
-Bringing in the visual -- the project is engaging with the ways that different image based practices --- abolition of particular image-making practices as well. 
In the mouth of a polar bear: The undead feeling of the world
In this artistic research project Helen Pritchard and Cassandra Troyan engage with the production of transpecies animacy in the domains of edu-tainment, policing, and the military industrial complex. They interrogate the capacities of “legged robots designed to be used by the military, industrial, mining, energy, public safety and last-mile delivery” by Ghost Robotics, to animatronic spy animals made to look believable in natural history BBC programming, “Spy in the Wild”. All violent scenes dependent on visualizing technologies of feeling the world through aggressive sensing, scanning and surveillance.
Posing as either helpful or harmless machines, such as the Boston Dynamics dogs that can pick up your laundry, to more-than-animate soldier combatants dancing to tracks such a “Do You Love Me”. These robots are often posed as feeling the world, although not through embodiment, but with undead visual practices. In their physicality, they are a spy, spirit, or wraith –– witness to the world they sense and scan, yet beyond and removed from the consequences of its material realities. A viewer is constantly left with the place where a face should be looking back at you, or to look into the eyes of an animal expecting recognition only to see a camera lens or computational sensor returning your gaze.
Through the para-fictional scenarios explored in these viral video poems they investigate how transpecies storytelling and visual sensing technologies if not countered otherwise can be imploded as a mode for structuring the racist western imaginary of militaristic carceral imperialist fantasy. Using the visual and sonic principals of clickbait trauma-porn against itself, they reject a negative world-building project by instead approaching these techniques from a perspective of queer decolonial solidarity –– seeking to ultimately abolish the category of the species, along with the injurious technologies that could name, sense, and scan it as well.
Commissioned by DONE 5: The More-than-Human Mascarade and Foto Colectania.

5.Screening and Readings / approx. 15 mins:
    
(*Warning about flashing images/lights!*) 
Show In the mouth of a polar bear
Read In the mouth of a polar bear
Show Cluster Fuck
Read Cluster Fuck Text 
Show Spots Worlds Frames
Read Hang In There, Smash the Cam
Show Hang In There, Smash the Cam
Break (and reshare website)

Part 2
Discussion with curators and audience

Areas of/for conversation (draft):

- about the spectacular techniques, infrastructures and architectures of the menagerie and the mascarade, their instrinsic representational and operative violences, and how they are ongoingly active in the computational and ecocidal presents.
- (related to the previous) about your method to work with text and (audio)visuals, but refusing to instrumentalize by means of explanation, linearity, consistency(?)  etc.
- about the tactics of boicott, sabotage, virality, para-fictionality, disruption, erasure, escape, 
- (related to the previous) can you comment on the use of poetry and poethics (?), somehow in tension with that of narrative or storytelling?
- about the regime of frames (optic, operative, control) + and regimes of capture/sensing/acquisition/scanning/...
[as a counter-side of the industrial continuum...]
- about the abolition of species (and of prisons, zoos, cloud computing, ...).
- can you comment on the continuities and discontinuities you found between the notions of animality, animacy and animation along this specific project of yours? and in your praxis, more broadly?
- an extended comment on the multispecies storytelling as a proto-disciplinar corpus, their approach and how does your critique apply to it?




- maybe Cristina wants to take the word and say something about how site's design and decissions are entangled with these sensitivities?



========================================================================================================


Planning for the event meeting 16/9
Will let audience know about the online event - not so clear if people will connect 
Maybe to share it among followers
english may be an issue
like that the events can be quite participatory 
chat tool as a way to participate - to share ideas or suggestions - don't need to wait until the end
*(can we update bios for the website?) -very short bios??
-send 2 or 3 more images to possibly use for the newsletter 

can register for the zoom event from the newsletter, with the streaming link
typical zoom meeting, people can participate
cristina - invite ?
*(how long will the talk and Q&A, full event be?)

---
-reading experience of the work
-accumulative experience of moving from one mediated violence to another
 

Starting with an intro to the work - how it relates to the wider project, contextualize the work, how it developed, our backgrounds, etc.
-sharing some of the text and videos
-give some objectives in developing the project
-intro aspect to be 20 minutes or less
-viewing video & reading/ can also fold these into the introduction with how we contextualize the work
-move to open conversation 

Networks to connect
-abolition
-people involved in the multispecies project/storytelling
-robotics
-environmental humanities network
-technopolitics groups in barcelona --- and elsewhere?
- done community
- 


27/9
40 minutes 
break
40 minutes