Issue 9 | June 2023
ISSUE 09 | JUNE 2023
Welcome to the JUNE edition of The Miaaw Monthly which tells you what to expect this month, and provides a few pointers to things you might like to explore.
Our podcasts are a way to have (hopefully) interesting conversations about the things we care about. Please spread the word as widely as you can, and encourage people to subscribe to The Miaaw Monthly.
If you have anything that you want to include in The Miaaw Monthly, or discuss in the podcasts, then please email us at monthly@miaaw.net and we will be happy to collaborate.
TODAY'S PODCAST
The final podcast for May arrives today and continues our special series inspired by things we saw and heard at the ICAF festival in Rotterdam in the Spring.
In this episode Charlie Fox talks about the Marseilles River Project and some of what he has learned working in partnership with Chloé Mazzani, les Collectif des Gammares, and an ancient, non-human, self-healing entity.
JUNE'S PODCASTS
Every Friday a podcast appears at 12:34 UTC. Sometimes we get so eager that they appear an hour or two early to allow for any lag across the internet. Mostly they arrive on time. With that in mind, here are the podcasts that will drop in June.
Friday June 2: Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse | Episode 62
In the first of two interlinked events, Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope discuss Owen’s new book Cultural Democracy Now: what it means and why we need it, which sneaked out of the back door of Routledge Towers earlier this year.
Friday June 9: A Genuine Inquiry | Episode 28
Andrew Gryf Paterson joins Owen Kelly to discuss the Wikimedians in Residence program that Pixelache hosted, the results of which have just been published, and to talk about the history of Pixelache as an example of the need for a considered archival perspective among small, decentralised cultural projects.
Friday June 16: A Culture of Possibility | Episode 29
Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso talk to Anastacia Ackers, Natasha Borton, and Naomi Chiffi, focusing on A Proper Ordinary Miracle and other TEAM projects from National Theatre Wales.
Friday June 23: Miaaw at ICAF | Episode 06
Sophie Hope talks to Hui Ling from Drama Box from Singapore about the nature and purpose of their work.
Friday June 30: Friday Number 5 | Episode 9
Once again we dive deep into the Miaaw archives and pull up something interesting that we haven’t heard for a while, and you may never have heard at all.
LISTENING
All our podcasts are available from Anchor.fm, Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Overcast, RadioPublic, Soundcloud, Spotify, and Stitcher.
You can also listen to them at the miaaw.net website where you will find additional links, notes, and references accompanying each episode. You will also find a full archive of all the previous podcasts there.
MIAAW LIVE!
Miaaw Live! Zoom Event No 2: video and audio!
Exactly three months after our inaugural edition, the second episode of Miaaw Live! arrives. On Wednesday, June 21, Arlene Goldbard hosts a public conversation with Owen Kelly about his new book Cultural Democracy Now: what it means and why we need it.
Join us for a live conversation featuring Arlene, Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and you!
In the book, Cultural Democracy Now, Owen Kelly attempts (according to the blurb) to untangle the various historical meanings of the term "cultural democracy" and explores the various ways in which it has been co-opted, suggesting that it has a strength that we should open up to examination with a view to reinvigorating it.
He situates cultural democracy within the wider framework of progressive political and social movements, and of the impact of new digital information and communication technologies, while relating it to concepts such as digital cultural politics, participatory democracy, and digital citizenship.
In this edition of Miaaw Live! Arlene Goldbard will ask Owen to explain the purpose behind the book; challenge him to outline some of the main arguments; and then open up a discussion on some of these ideas and the examples he uses to illustrate them.
If that sounds like your idea of fun then you can register here! Early next month a discount code will appear on the Miaaw Live! Eventbrite page, so that you can, should you so wish, read some or all of the book before joining the discussion.
OFF SITE
Defining
What does “open” mean? Version 2.1 of The Open Definition makes precise the meaning of “open” with respect to knowledge, promoting a robust commons in which anyone may participate, and interoperability is maximized.
You can find the full definition here.
Pointless pedantry or necessary precision? You decide.
Eating
Jake Harries and Monika Dutt have launched Meso meals as part of their A Little Piece of Land project.
Satirising the marketing and branding of commodified food, we created the food brand MesoMeals during a research and development residency utilising a vacant retail unit in Sheffield city centre. We wanted to bring the idea of wild food into an urban arena and devised a series of radical urban interventions, subvertising and performative actions which complemented a sculptural and light installation Spring Uprising. We launched the brand with fly posters covering existing advertising left around the exterior of vacant units, a supermarket intervention in which we placed fake food packets in the chilled and frozen food sections, and a shop window performance, Wild Weed Kitchen. MesoMeals references the Mesolithic period when people repopulated Britain after the Ice Age, and focuses on food readily available during the era, parodying the Californian trend of Paleo food, referring to the old Stone Age, where proponents seem to believe that our ancestors were able to jet around the world at will as they incorporate lychees, sweet potato and raspberries into one meal.
Not just satire, though. The website contains some genuinely delicious recipes.
available at one or two good bookshops now
Exploring
When the system normalizes injustice, the glitch can be a momentary interruption of the normality. The error can dismantle the norm by resisting to accomplish its function or definition. The error and disruption moved by a desire for re-appropriating and subverting the codes. A festival as a situation for experimenting with technologies that can be used to contaminate, mutate or mediate diverse languages and life situations. The public program consists of audiovisual performances, workshops, and an exhibition with local and international artists, researchers, and activists.
Pixelache’s 19th Festival Glitchz will run from June 8 to 17 in venues across Helsinki, and will explore the idea of glitch as a possible tactic for resisting oppressive social systems.
“How can we disrupt the code?”, the festival curators ask. The festival will examine this question using artistic strategies and tools; creating through open source, copying, pasting, sharing, distributing, remixing, and sampling.
Some of the festival will manifest itself online, so even if you can’t get to Helsinki you can still participate. For more details go to the Pixelache website at pixelache.ac where more and more information will appear over the next week or so.
Hearing
Hannah Kemp-Walsh emailed us about Dawn Chorus day, which we mentioned last month. She said that “I'm involved in a project that brings together people standing in fields around the world with microphones to create a relay broadcast of the dawn chorus as we follow the sun rise across the globe for 24 hours.
You might like to listen in... here”.
We did, and we liked what we heard.
Reading
You may have wondered to yourself, “How is Bihar rapidly losing the libraries that it was once famous for?” You can find the answers you seek in a recent essay in The Hindu.
For us, the point here revolves around the question of whether ideas of cultural democracy can be dismissed as a “first world problem”, or whether they have a wider applicability. Reading between the lines of this essay suggests that comparable issues of access and availability occur across the globe, albeit in differing, localised guises.
If you subscribe to The Miaaw Monthly you will get a short, sharp newsletter in your email in-box at breakfast time on the last Friday of every month. You can then find out what’s in the podcasts for the following month, as well as some of what is available in the wider world.
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