Fabienne Liptay - Böcker

An edited collection of contributions to conversations about the climate crisis and its role in critical discourse.The climate change crisis has become part of aesthetic discourse and critical research in culture and the arts. Future-oriented, ecologically conceived possibilities for action are being explored by artists, curators, and scholars alike. eco-operations addresses these emerging aesthetic ecologies and new technologies of cooperation that both challenge and shape a sustainable future, foregrounding interruptions, ruptures, disconnections, dissonances, exclusions, and allochronism. Moving beyond the concepts of “flow” and “network” as a single, coherent (ecological or technological) system, eco-operations instead emphasizes the frictions within asynchronously running systems. The infrastructures and formats of artistic production and exhibition play a central role here, as they themselves constitute ecosystems that invite and regulate processes of sharing and exchange. Artists and activists are embedded in these ecosystems, in which they simultaneously intervene when searching for alternative ways of creating collaborative practice. Bringing together scholars, artists, writers, and curators, and working across a range of disciplines, eco-operations explores this field of tension between global and local ecologies and aims to speculate on where dissonances imply both creative potential and political challenges.eco-operations features contributions by Dalida María Benfield, Ursula Biemann, Lisa Blackmore, Mateo Chacón Pino, Lucrezia Cippitelli, T. J. Demos, Sandra Frimmel, Laura Flórez, Lorena Cely, Alexandra Gelis, Liliana Gómez, Fabienne Liptay, Uriel Orlow, and Dorota Sajewska.

The book’s title — Taking Measures — has a double meaning: as a reference to the practices of measurement and to the political potential of power and resistance. Throughout their history to today, film and video have served as measuring devices for scientific, economic, political, and other purposes, and have been employed in a variety of fields beyond art. In acknowledging these uses also lies the opportunity for art to test its own effectiveness in public space and to uncover potential for resistance in artistic action.This book — which has evolved from a series of dialogues between artists and researchers as part of the research project Exhibiting Film: Challenges of Format at the University of Zurich — addresses issues of measures and formats in both content and design. In which practices of measurement, of the production of knowledge and evidence in the interest of useful research, are film and video involved? In what way can artistic practice not only make these involvements visible but challenge and test them? How can technologies of measurement in art be used politically and be made operative for the public sector? How can formats themselves, as the measures of art, be exhibited? How can they be put in relation to exhibition spaces and their economies of valorisation, and how can this relationship be assessed? These questions are explored in illuminating and richly illustrated essays.