about
Jamie Allen (he/him🇨🇦) is an artist, researcher and organiser occupied with the resonances between metabolisms, ecologies, technologies, infrastructures, and institutions. Almost always in collaboration, he creates writing and media, artworks and events, gatherings and workshops, containers and experiments, discussions and platforms for publishing and public-making.
I am always interested in and looking for cooperative projects, situations, people and activities that would like to acknowledge love, friendship and reciprocity as part of creative knowledge practices in art, media and research. If you have or are forming an experimental, empathetic and generous collaborative constellation, and I am absolutely up for chatting and probably up for hanging out.
Artist, researcher, designer, media-maker, organiser, teacher, learner, writer. From the southernmost, industrial part of 'Canada' (the part that doesn’t look like most people think Canada does). Born (white, male, settler-colonial) during an oil crisis. Early appreciation of eroding infrastructure, modes of solidarity, erosive trade agreements, civic pride, ecological tradeoffs, metabolic privilege and environmental injustice through play, media, music, art, collaboration and friendship. Fascination for material movement, planetary resource dynamics, migration and movement, institutional critique and infrastructural globalism.
Media art, engineering, music, performance, community radio, poetry, compositional scores, diy spaces, interactive art, interaction design, museum design, artistic research, the right to research, extradisciplinary practice, infrastructure studies, experimental publishing, political ecology, planetary intimacy, media methods, media materialism and archaeology, psychic and cultural-techniques, metabolic media, convivial tools, oceanic storytelling and affective infrastructures.
Extended Biography
Jamie Allen works across artistic research, experimental media and the organisation of collective life. His projects follow the movement of materials, energy and knowledge through bodies, technologies and institutions. They take shape as peer-reviewed journal articles and books, films, installations, experimental publications, workshops and gatherings, bringing technical and historical inquiry into contact with everyday practices: cooking, listening, walking, building and sharing. He likes to make things with his head and hands, and with people who value friendship, care and reciprocity.
Helping to initiate and build media labs has been a big part of Jamie's trajectory: creating shared spaces for artistic research, experimentation and public-making. He contributed to Eyebeam during its burgeoning years in New York and helped build Culture Lab Newcastle. He helped develop the CIID Research group in Copenhagen and was an initiator of Critical Media Lab Basel. He continues this work with metaLab Basel.Berlin.Harvard. He is a founding member of the Anthropocene Commons, a global network for experimental learning, collaborative research and collective action in response to planetary crisis.
Recent collaborations include SUNK COSTS, which follows the material and narrative afterlives of shipping and the Felicity Ace; Milk Matters, tracing dairy through bodies, cultures and ecologies; and Islands of Conviviality, a travelling research programme on conviviality, tools and autonomy. The film We Are All Hummingbirds Now brings sweetness, energy, sensing and care into the same frame.
Jamie was born in Canada and lives in Europe. His training spans chemical and electrical engineering, music composition, media arts and philosophies of communications and technology, with degrees from Canada, Scotland, New York and Switzerland. He has worked as a polymer chemist, an electronics engineer and a museum designer. Earlier academic appointments include Senior Researcher at Critical Media Lab Basel, Canada Research Chair in Infrastructure, Media and Communications at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD), Head of Research at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID), and Assistant Director of Culture Lab in the UK.
Early art and technology projects developed through Eyebeam and exhibitions such as Electric Lab at Exit Art. In 2005 he initiated and organised Wood Metal Water at the RedHead arts space of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Throughout the 2000s he contributed to open-source technologies including the Firmata protocol. He has also helped initiate community spaces and publishing platforms, including Science Friction and continent..
His PhD (summa cum laude, 2015), supervised by Siegfried Zielinski and Avital Ronell, developed a materialist philosophy and techno-aesthetics of natural and technical infrastructures. Research fellowships have included Trent University’s Traill College and the Nam June Paik Art Centre.
Exhibitions and collaborations include Emergent Strategies from the Deep at Savvy Contemporary (2021), (Un)mutable Channels for The Shape of a Practice at the House of World Cultures (2020), The Lie Machine in Invisible Threads: Technology and its Discontents in Abu Dhabi (2016), Echoes of Eco at documenta14 in Athens (2017), and #rocks for the Neue Nationalgalerie Festival of Future Nows (2014). Commissions and performances have also taken place with the Walk&Talk Festival in the Azores (2018), Nikolaj Kunsthal in Copenhagen (2016), and transmediale in Berlin, including Critical Infrastructure (2014).
Current and forthcoming publications include Geognostics: A Planetary Manual, Didn’t You Get the Memo?, Apocryphal Technologies, Belongings—How We Make Home, Nomadic Research at the Fringes and the developing Milk Matters collection.
Jamie teaches and hosts workshops in cultural and academic settings. He has taught with NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications and Museum Studies programmes, the Pratt Institute’s Department of Digital Arts, New Media Music at Hanyang University in Seoul, the Parsons School of Design and the Royal College of Art in London. His “workshop as artwork” practice has developed with institutions including Tate Liverpool, STEIM and the Art Meets Radical Openness Festival. His published research examines truth verification technologies, the organisation of environments through media and logistics, and the racialised histories of ecology.
Projects and research have been supported by the AHRC in the UK, SSHRC in Canada and the Swiss National Science Foundation, as well as arts and cultural organisations including the Canada Council of the Arts, the Danish Arts Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Most of what Jamie does are "metabolic creative practices": situations in which energy, technology, labour, ecologies and care become ways of thinking and making together. They bring art practice, engineering sensibilities and critical scholarship into contact with everyday techniques of sustenance and survival, asking how institutions and infrastructures might support more generous and beautiful forms of collective life.
Philosophies of Infrastructure and Metabolic Media are continuing, perhaps lifelong, research and writing projects on how media and infrastructures shape perception, social life and ecological relations. Monograph books are taking shape within this wider inquiry.