Radical Intimacies, book launch talk series!

We are delighted to announce the Melbourne launch of our new book Radical Intimacies, Designing Non-Extractive Relationalities (Intellect). The book will be launched in a special series of talks and conversations in collaboration with the Melbourne Free University in November and December. Read more about the talks and find out the dates below.

See more about the book here: http://www.memefest.org/publishing/radical-Intimacies/

The book Radical Intimacies, Designing Non-Extractive Relationalities (edited, written and curated by Oliver Vodeb) investigates key aspects of capitalist domination and resistance to it through design: dialogue, power, land, interventions, and radical praxis; The book presents the concept of “Radical intimacies”, which implies a relational way of designing enabling an alternative and opposition to the extractive relationalities imposed by capitalism. This special series of talks presents several contributing authors discussing key ideas of the book. Final talk presents activists unpacking book insights for radical action.

The four talks will investigate how we can think of emancipatory design:

1. An overview of the concept of Radical Intimacies, and how to relate it to knowledge, addiction, and pleasure
2. Activist resistance to commercial advertising
3. How to think about dialogue in a anti-dialogic capitalist society
4. Empowering mental health consumers and psychiatric system survivors


Join us always on Thursday at 6.30 pm at the Alderman, East Brunswick, Melbourne.

16.11. Oliver Vodeb: Radical Intimacies, Designing Non-Extractive Relationalities
23.11. Kyle Magee and Oliver Vodeb: How to Participate in the Public Sphere
7.12. Oliver Vodeb: Dialogue in Praxis
14.12. Morgan Cataldo & Daryl Taylor: Redefining Mental Illness: From Extractive Exploitation to Contributive Co-Liberation

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Talk 1#: 16.11. Oliver Vodeb: Radical Intimacies, Designing Non-Extractive Relationalities

This talk will argue that design is largely operating through the colonisation of knowledge and of the public sphere by the formation of extractive relations that serve capitalist domination. Furthermore, this process can be considered as the destruction of publicness and the public sphere directly related to the destruction of knowledge. Oliver Vodeb will speak about the potential of design to operate in non-extractive ways through what he calls radical intimacies. Radical intimacies imply relational way of designing that creates closeness to the world, which works towards the decolonization of knowledge and of the public sphere. Radical Intimacies constitute and enable an alternative and opposition to the extractive relationalities imposed by capitalism. The talk will provide an overview of the concept of Radical Intimacies including designs relation to knowledge and the potentials of extradisciplinary investigations, designs relation to addiction and pleasure, as well as onto-epistemic politics of participatory design.

Oliver Vodeb is the principal curator of Memefest and Lipstick+ Bread, an academic in the School of Design at RMIT and a founding member of Academics for Public Universities and Public Universities Australia.


Talk 2#: 23.11. Kyle Magee and Oliver Vodeb: How to Participate in the Public Sphere

Advertising is the one of the most powerful forces in our society – and it has a clear agenda: to promote a radical consumer culture. It is normalized, weaponized, is based on surveillance and it is colonizing the public sphere. While it is perceived as normal that advertising is everywhere, direct action against advertising is illegal under the pretense of “freedom of speech” and the protection of private property. What looks like a social consensus is strictly enforced and critique is penalized. The conversation between anti- advertising activist Kyle Magee and Oliver Vodeb will examine how we as citizens can participate in the public sphere and show concrete examples of direct actions by Kyle Magee and Memefest.

Kyle Magee has been painting over billboards in Melbourne for over a decade, since dropping out of a science/engineering degree. He calls for the abolition of the for-profit media advertising farce, and its replacement with a broad public media system that makes democracy possible. His protests have seen him jailed numerous times. He keeps a blog of his protest at: democraticmediaplease.net.

Oliver Vodeb is the principal curator of Memefest and Lipstick+ Bread, an academic in the School of Design at RMIT and a founding member of Academics for Public Universities and Public Universities Australia.



Talk 3#: 7.12. Oliver Vodeb: Dialogue in Praxis

Dialogue is the most intensive and highly intimate form of communication. It demands the highest attention. What counts in a dialogue is not who says what, but what is created in the commons. But what if dialogue is not working?

Capitalist societies are anti-dialogic. Most of the communication in the public realm is based on marketing principles. Technologies such as social media create self-referential bubbles, attention – a key faculty for dialogue— gets destroyed and with it also care.

What is dialogue, how can we think about it and how can we practice it, if the forces of the market are stacked against it?

Oliver Vodeb is the principal curator of Memefest and Lipstick+ Bread, an academic in the School of Design at RMIT and a founding member of Academics for Public Universities and Public Universities Australia.



Talk 4#: 14.12 Morgan Cataldo & Daryl Taylor: Redefining Mental Illness: Extractive Exploitation to Contributive Co-Liberation

Radical (non-extractive) Intimacies have shaped the shared imaginaries of generations of mental health consumers and psychiatric system survivors (some of societies’ most disposable and dispensable, marginalised and brutalised ‘othered’ others).

Peer-with-peer relational counter-paradigms, counter-patterns and counter-practices continue to emerge and inform the ongoing generation of ‘outsider’ social movement safe spaces, systemic innovations, structural interventions and epistemic disruptions.

Consumer-survivors-peers are leading a shift from engagement with neoliberal corporate-professional service delivery and the relentless tracking of billable hours and unit costing data to engaging systemically with mulitiplicities of contextualities and relationalities and identities through Warm Data*; and from the individualisation of pathology and treatment to mutual learning (symmathesy*) and mutual healing (coliberation); and from the entrapment of depreciative diagnoses (diminishing otherings) oriented towards shame and paralysis to the coalescence of invisible intra-actions (aphanipoiesis) oriented towards celebration and vitality. (*after Nora Bateson)


Morgan Cataldo and Daryl Taylor are members of the Applying ‘The Community Development Continuum’ to Emotional Distress and Mental Illness consumer-survivor-peer collective. Morgan and Daryl hope to one day co-host a MemeFest on post-colonial, post-carceral and post-corporate, commons-oriented co-liberatory (and co-abolishionist) approaches to, and interventions in, human and living systems vitality and flourishing.