CO-EDITORS: DISNOVATION.ORG & Alessandro Ludovico INTERVIEW WITH: Špela Petrič, Tega Brain, Joyce Hinterding, Kat Austen, Melle Smets, Thomas Thwaites COMMISSIONED BY: NEURAL.IT EXTRA:This Neural #64 includes an intervention by artists DISNOVATION.ORG. Their ‘Post-Growth Toolkit’ is made of an embroidered patch, sampling a graph of world energy consumption (1800-2017) continued by a post-growth scenario, plus a text introducing their wider project.
EDITORIAL: When Neural invited us to co-edit the present issue, they instantly got us onboard. At Disnovation.org we’ve been critically investigating the cult of technological innovation and the ideology of growth, as well as their long term consequences on society, with a strong interest in the popularization of alternative, non techno-solutionist, or non growth-oriented voices, promoting situated practices, and stimulating imaginaries of post-growth societal transitions.
If we take some of the current crises: climate breakdown, ecosystem collapse, peak oil, and their multiple geo-political and social consequences; it can be observed that public sensibilities around these topics are noticeably shifting, along with increasing anxiety and concern, across different age groups, disciplines, regions, and political orientations.
This disquiet is exacerbated by the formidable complexity and variety of specialized knowledge involved in comprehending these threatening circumstances. Popular opinion tends to focus on the myriad of consequences rather than the root causes, dynamics, and societal values that may have fostered these crises. The major media platforms are themselves party to a growth-imperative orthodoxy which over-determine the prospects and proposals they proffer. The result is a general sense of overwhelming dread, bewilderment and impotence.
This Neural issue is part of a larger set of efforts to confront this situation and cultivate better understandings of the deep causes of these challenges in the context of an accelerated transformation of the sociosphere and the biosphere.
This Post-growth issue compiles a set of critical and radical art projects, principles and narratives aimed at reconnecting our modes of perception of the growth crisis with political, social and physical proposals, in order to ground the debate, to nuance the narratives, to widen the perspectives and to cultivate strategies for socio-political transition.
It presents artistic methods towards a deeper experience and understanding of the current ecosystemic, economic, and energetic crises, as well as tools to stimulate the imagination of scenarios for desirable transitions towards a livable future no longer organized under the prime imperative of economic or energy growth.
POST GROWTH, embroidered patch. Intervention by artists DISNOVATION.ORG in NEURAL.IT issue 64.
POST GROWTH TOOLKIT, Statement. Intervention by artists DISNOVATION.ORG in NEURAL.IT issue 64.
[Picture above] Paul Prudence wrote an essay on ecocritical listening for this edition of Neural Magazine titled The Sound of Disappearance & The Sonic Sublime. He made a mix to accompany the essay. You can listen here:
