Dr Jaimey Hamilton Faris
IICSEEHawaii2017 Keynote Speaker
University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA
Dr Jaimey Hamilton Faris, Keynote Speaker for The IAFOR International Conference on Sustainability, Energy & the Environment – Hawaii 2017 (IICSEEHawaii2017), will introduce Liquid Archives, an attempt to make visible the important geological, cultural and historical markers hidden in our oceans, atmospheres, icecaps, aquifers and oil veins. They also seek ways to visualise the information flowing through government agencies, global business and bundles of fibre-optic cable on the bottom of the sea-floor as accumulating markers of the recent history of techno-capitalism. Her full abstract is available to read below.
Jaimey Hamilton Faris is based in Honolulu, where she is Associate Professor of Art History and Critical Theory at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. At UHM, she directed Intersections, the Visiting Artist and Scholar Program, from 2008 to 2014, a residency that brings in globally recognised artists to share their artistic processes with the community. She is currently working on establishing a digital archive for oral histories of Hawaii’s artists. Since 2008 she has been interviewing Hawaii’s artists and is now working with her students to record the conversations and studio practices of the islands’ artists. The histories reflect the uniqueness of artistic processes on the islands and relate how Hawaii’s history as a colony, plantation, military outpost and tourist paradise has impacted its visual culture.
Her academic writing focuses on issues of global trade networks and systems, environmentalism, and sustainability in contemporary art, especially in the Asia-Pacific context. Her book, Uncommon Goods (Intellect, 2013), explores the use of everyday goods and situations in contemporary art practice in response to neoliberal trade expansion in the nineties. In 2015 she guest edited a special volume of Art Margins on Capitalist Realism. She has published other articles on contemporary art in October, Art Journal, InVisible Culture, Art Pulse and more. Her current focus is on a collection of essays called Liquid Archives.
Keynote Presentation | Liquid Archives
Even as big data can be used to visualize our moment-by-moment shipping activities, it is difficult to capture how these activities affect sea levels and ice caps in a single image. How to come to terms with this contradiction? Perhaps one way is to be more attentive to oil and water as quickly accumulating repositories that challenge our very systems of conceptualization, innovation, and analysis. If we follow this path, we will need to think of them as archives, as media, as heterogeneous witnesses of the past, present and future – and not merely as assets and resources to be used in the now. This talk will introduce this notion of “liquid archives” and a selection of artists (often in conjunction with writers, scientists, geographers and others) who have established new visual and interpretive strategies to make this archive known and felt. They attempt to make visible the important geological, cultural and historical markers hidden in our oceans, atmospheres, icecaps, aquifers and oil veins. They also seek ways to visualize the information flowing through government agencies, global business and bundles of fiber-optic cable on the bottom of the sea-floor as accumulating markers of the recent history of techno-capitalism. These various efforts to establish the liquid archives all necessitate radical adjustments in our perception of the moment when global flows meet climate change.
See the full list of speakers for this event.
