| Stella Aster via nettime-l on Tue, 6 Jan 2026 13:22:08 +0100 (CET) |
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| Re: <nettime> Furtherfield legacy Research |
Thanks for sharing Marc 😊I like you latest post "The Relentless Suffocation of our Community Spirit and Radical Selves". What I have identified is missing in my own practice and life and community is attention to global Indigenous cultures. They are very close to green union and red struggle, and green struggle, and I feel for myself at least, I am in a process of unlearning some things taught to me by empire, and relearning other things from nature and global ancestors.
In that spirit I share with you and the list a draft statement of practice for a decolonising/decolonised/reindigenising/reindigenised Lancashire. These are still mostly my words, but I am pleased to say it has been amended by others, and we have begun the practice that the statement intends.
We live on the outputs of many, deep, extractive flows of material from all over the world. Every cup of tea is a reminder of colony and empire, and the certainty of its continued widespread availability in our British culture shows that materially, little has changed. We are not "post-colonial", we've just been given the false impression that empire is something we all now willingly participate in, through our free choices in a free market, our freedoms protected by freely elected democratic governments.
Despite living in the imperial core, and being forced to live in a material culture of extraction, exploitation, and domination, we find _ourselves_ being exploited for our labour, and marginalised along lines of identity and embodiment to best serve that exploitation. Perhaps it is not despite of but _because of_ what empire is and does, because empire is fractal, and lives in and through the beliefs and behaviours of many people, groups, organisations, communities, cultures, and countries.
We seek total liberation, total decolonisation, an end to all exploitation and marginalisation, and the death of all empires. Prefigurative anarchists and artists have demonstrated that imagining our ideal world and bringing it into being as directly as possible is a powerful and practical praxis. But will we be drinking tea after the revolution?
We need to dismantle empire, decolonise empire, decolonise Lancashire and the British Isles and the World. We need to decolonise ourselves. And in that process of unlearning, of stripping away all the layers that empire has grafted onto us, through family and school and culture and work and trauma, we start to yearn for something, for a new culture, for a new set of things to be in relation with which meet our needs, physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, and beyond.
We believe that decolonising empire requires a thread of something we don't have a word for yet, but something like 'reindigenising'. How do we re/build a material culture for the decolonised future, and the decolonising now, one that repairs the schisms that empire has made in ourselves and itself? In Lancashire we have our dialects, our hills, our weaving, our food. Where do these things come from materially? Where does their cultural significance come from? And how can we decolonise these things, rather than reverting to ethnonationalism, or discarding them?
We aim to answer these questions in community, and we do so by turning to Indigenous peoples around the world. We seek to re/learn our practices and those of other peoples. We seek an open Indigenous Lancashire, a land with many peoples and no citizens or borders, where we are in material relation with our land and in solidarity with Indigenous communities and the Earth.
This is a draft statement of practice. It is necessarily and always a draft, because it is a representation of a living part of our culture. It is to be revised by us. It is to be something for us to convene around in spirit, and something we seek to realise materially.
Stella ✨ On 05/01/2026 11:39, marc.garrett via nettime-l wrote:
Sorry for any cross posting. Hi all, All ready for 2026, is -- diwologue.co.uk: Furtherfield legacy Research. https://diwologue.co.uk/ My professional and research journey is deeply intertwined with Furtherfield, the non-profit digital arts organisation I co-founded with Ruth Catlow in 1996. For 30 years, we have pioneered international engagement with critical digital arts, with our core activities supported by the Arts Council of England since 2004. My commitment to understanding and articulating this field culminated in a PhD from Birkbeck College, University of London (2021), for which my dissertation provided the first critical examination of Furtherfield’s dynamic history across its online and physical venues. I hope to start a fellowship later this year (fingers crossed) that would enable me to build directly on this foundational work, transforming my doctoral research into a primary public-facing output that secures this necessary legacy work. 1. The Digital Archive: A Living Research Tool. We are launching a comprehensive online archive that makes a wealth of historical material publicly accessible for the first time. More than a static repository, it will be a dynamic research engine, consisting of: A digital archive of primary sources. Together, these will form the foundation for a future program of international exhibitions. This initiative is designed to secure Furtherfield’s legacy as a cornerstone of digital art history. 2. The Book: Contextualising a Movement Building on the research from my PhD, I will prepare a new book for publication. This volume will offer a critical reflection on the core themes that have defined Furtherfield’s journey. Expert Editorial Guidance: The manuscript will be refined under the co-editorship of renowned scholars Regine Debatty (We Make Money Not Art) and Dr Martin Zeilinger, Reader in Computational Arts & Technology, Abertay University, Dundee, Scotland. Legacy in Print: It will serve as the definitive narrative companion to the archive, contextualising landmark projects and spotlighting the creative intersections that have shaped the field. We have already begun working with respondents to various chapters. This approach uses the DIWO principle, in which the community is part of the ethnographic context and experience, building a mutualist art venture beyond top-down defaults. 3. Future Exhibitions: Activating the Legacy The archive and book will directly fuel the next stage of public engagement: a program of groundbreaking exhibitions celebrating thirty years of critical digital art. These exhibitions will weave Furtherfield’s historical shows and commissions with the work of contemporary artists. I will be supported in this by an exceptional curatorial team, including: Ruth Catlow (Furtherfield Co-Founder), Pita Arreola-Bates (Victoria & Albert Museum), Alex Estorick (Editor-in-Chief, Right Click Save; Contributing Editor, Flash Art). Together, we will develop an exhilarating exhibition proposal for a major institution like the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), ensuring this legacy continues to inspire and challenge audiences. 4. A Supported Research Journey Furtherfield’s legacy honours its artists, community, and dynamic history. It will recognise the organisation’s ever-evolving cultural footprint both in the UK and internationally, at a time that marks a significant chapter in the history of art, in which technology has been explored not only critically but also as a collaborative and social innovation. Furtherfield – Arts, Technology, and Eco-social change https://www.furtherfield.org/ Featured image by Andy Deck. Glyphiti, 2006. https://artcontext.org/en/ Wishing you well. Marc Feral Class, by Marc Garrett. Available at Minor Compositions. https://www.minorcompositions.info/ Currently editing '30 years of Furtherfield: Art. Technology and Eco-Social Change. Eds, Marc Garrett, Regine DeBatty and Martin Zeilinger. 2026. Furtherfield legacy Research https://diwologue.co.uk/ Furtherfield - https://www.furtherfield.org/ Feral Class - https://marcgarrett.org/cv/ Sent with [Proton Mail](https://proton.me/mail/home) secure email.
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