T. Rudzinskaitė Memorial Amateur Lichenologists Society
for the love of lichen
The Photosynth Social Club’s ‘Summer Beat Camp’ has just wrapped up in Helsinki (full report forthcoming) and to celebrate we are taking part in a semi-public Outdoor Sauna Reading broadcast event of lichen summer camp-related material drawn from the spectacular home library of our hosts Kitchen Lab Tarvo, today JUNE 11, 18:00-20:00 EEST. And there will be sauna of course!
More info at Kitchen Lab & you can tune in directly via {Open Radio} here
‘Photosynth Social Club: Summer Beat Camp & Sound Bathhouse (Helsinki)’
Pixelache Festival ‘Glitchez’
Day One: Thursday 8 June, 13:00 – 16:00 | Puristamo, Kaapelitehdas/Cable Factory
Day Two (Tarvo Island expedition): Friday 9 June, 13:00 – 16:00 | Kitchen Lab Tarvo *drop ins welcome!
Sound Bathhouse: Saturday 10 June, 18:00 | Puristamo, Kaapelitehdas/Cable Factory
The T. Rudzinskaitė Memorial Amateur Lichenologists Society returns to the Octo-Biozone in 2091 for a rejuvenating Summer Beat Camp & Sound Bathhouse on the site of the former Kaapelitehdas (with special expedition to Tarvo island!). This year our Photosynth Social Club offers an exploration of the area’s unique post-industrial-techno-nature-cultural surrounds, inviting local lichen-kin into a program of convivial sonic and somatic experimentation. Participants will snap symbio-selfies to process or synthesise into samples, discovering together how to play these using free/libre open-source software while seeking interesting correspondences, patterns and rhythms.
The camp culminates in a breakbeat science sound bathhouse ‘soak session’, where campers will perform the results on a nice sound system and video projector, hopefully in a geodesic dome.
More info on Pixelache here
* Participants are requested to register (email welikelichen@protonmail.com) as spaces are limited. Camping is not permitted on site, please contact us for an alternative option.
This project is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW
We are generously hosted on Tarvo island by Kitchen Lab Tarvo – kiitos paljon!
The Society released a new mobi-video last month, as part of fellow Society for Social Studies of Science annual conference 4S 2089 ‘Good Relations’. Spotlighting for the first time our Space-Time Fab Lab, an experimental research department within the Metta Verse Mutual Aid Space Program, it’s called ‘Fabricating Frequencies: Sounding Out Cosmic LiKIn with Space-Time Morphologies‘ and works as a kind of operatic instructional guide to prepare lichen lovers for participating in an upcoming Special Transmission. More details on that will be announced, in time, via the usual portals. Meanwhile you can all watch and sing along to the video here.
While the publication of the much awaited re-issue of Love Letters to Lichen has been postponed due to unforeseen delays, the Society is delighted to be launching its very own satellite, Hello World!, as part of the now flourishing Metta Verse Mutual Aid Space Program. Its inaugural transmission will take place during the 43rd ASLEC-ANZ symposium Strange/Letters.
If you are unable to attend via spektra-link you can listen to the transmission on {openradio}.
Going live on February 4, 23.15 CET / February 5, 09:15 AEDST.
UPDATE: If you missed the live transmission a recording is below.
Lichen lovers, it’s been a while between drinks!
UPDATE: As the live broadcast has now passed, you can actually tune in from the comfort of your own home anytime on this link. Enjoy!
‘It’s not the age of reason … it’s the era of flummery, and the day of the devious approach’ – Trouble with Lichen (1960).
We’ve recently spent some time lying low in the Old Paljakka Forest of the Area D BioZone.. and you’re all invited to join us there now, by which we mean THIS SATURDAY 8/8/88 at 14:00 EEST. Meet us in the airwaves for a remote-viewing live broadcast from the ‘2088 Lichen Fest Revival’, an incredible event brought to you by our good friends at the Mustarinda inter-pagan intentional community as part of their Forest Seminar program, which may include a suprise low-key edition of edition of our flagship Annual Field Trip & Picnic. Like us, Lichen Fest is celebrating its platinum anniversary this year, and everyone is photo-synthesising like crazy.
The T. Rudzinskaitė Memorial Amateur Lichenologists Society held its Annual Convention 27-29 January this year at Linnaeus University in snowy Växjö, Sweden. Society co-convenors Tessa Zettel and Dr. Sumugan Sivanesan delivered the official Opening Address on Day One, with Dr. Sivanesan beaming in via spectra-link from the Convention’s Satellite program in the former west.
Highlights of the 2087 Convention: ‘Speculative Flummery and Cosmic Co-becomings’ included a keynote from the President of the Therolinguistics Association about the group’s recent trek to Pike’s Peak to decipher lichen lyrics on its rockface, a report from participants in our Forever Together vocational study program at Nefertiti Health and Beauty Salons (right here in Växjö), and a hands-on dia-sporing workshop run by some of our inter-pagan members.
A fortuitous overlap in university scheduling meant our attendees also had the opportunity to enjoy the tail end of another conference, ‘Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices’, and a seventy-hour-long more-than-non-human dance marathon to celebrate the 70th anniversary of leading intergalactic research group Dance for Plants.
Speculative flummery was specially prepared each day by final year students from the University’s School of Post-lithoculinary Arts. A full report on convention proceedings will be published in book form later this year.
The T. Rudzinskaite Memorial Amateur Lichenologists Society is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.
We’re looking forward to catching up with our members at the upcoming 69th Annual Society Convention gathering around the theme of ‘Speculative Flummery and Cosmic Co-becomings’, January 27-29, 2087*
This year we’re delighted to be hosted by Linnaeus University, in Växjö, Sweden. The University is renown for the groundbreaking research that’s been conducted for many decades at its Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies, in partnership with the Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology. This is a great opportunity to bring the lichen love to our Scandinavian neighbours, and hopefully catch a glimpse of the extremely rare Bitter wart lichen (Pertusaria amara) that we’ve all heard so much about lately.
The full program is now online. Registrations have officially closed, but please get in touch if you’d like to attend.
* Note: conference dates overlap with another symposium organised by our colleagues at Linnaeus University, ‘Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practice’ (Jan 25-27). Special two-for-one registration packages are available.
Meeting point at Nida carpark
After many weeks traipsing through the dunes, forest and beach of the Curonian Spit, collecting spruce shoots, nettles, raspberry leaves and mosquito bites, talking to local biologists and foragers, concocting jellies and pancakes and fermented sodas, we finally hosted this year’s annual field trip & picnic on 22 June 2086!
Thanks to everyone who came along – amateur lichenologists, artists, interpagans and everything in between. For those of you unfortunate enough to have missed out on this special bumper edition (back on Lithuanian soil for the first time in decades!), here’s a taste of what the Society got up to.
Follow the fish!
Toasting the locally extinct arctic raspberry, and the miraculously alive-and-well wild strawberry, with wild strawberry kvass (fermented soda).
UFO landing site: space lichen, astrobiology and Cold War luxuries.
Blinis with un-caviar. Each amateur lichenologist dollops a spoonful of un-caviar onto a neighbour’s blini while saying ‘kosmičeskije sso-sstanivlenija‘ (‘in cosmic co-becomings’).
Flummery! Made with agar and blueberries from the old forest. With a side of Permian mass extinction and microplastic futures.
The Great Tuning Fork
A full report from the Society will be published in the forthcoming Nida Art Colony Log: On Rites and Terrabytes, due for release later this year.
Big cheers to Sepideh Ardalani for helping with food wizardry, Diana Pusko for foraging advice, the interpagan intentional community for their extraordinary un-caviar, and Nida Art Colony for letting us crash their symposium! See you somewhere else next year!
‘It’s not the age of reason … it’s the era of flummery, and the day of the devious approach’ –Trouble with Lichen (1960).
The T. Rudzinskaitė Memorial Amateur Lichenologists Society cordially invites you to its Annual Field Trip & Picnic to be held in 2086 on Nida. This year we are fortunate to gather on the UNESCO World heritage-listed biocultural landscape of the Curonian Spit, Eighth designated Eco-Zone and home to countless rare communities of lichen, as well as the wonderfully prehistoric (and once-extinct!) Baltic Sturgeon.
We will meet promptly in the carpark of Nida Art Colony on Friday June 22, 2086, at 14.30 for immediate departure. Enthusiasts are advised to bring a carrier bag and water, and to wear a hat, sunscreen and comfortable shoes for walking through forest and sandy terrain. Be prepared for mosquitos! Speculative flummery will be provided.
Numbers are limited, please RSVP by emailing. Hope to see you there!
This year the Amateur Lichenologists Society was invited to have a presence in Vilnius, with the opportunity to show some work alongside Žilvinas Landzbergas in the Vilnius Academy of Arts Glass Pavilion, as part of the exhibition Teleport to Nida.
That’s our life-size baltic sturgeon on the glass (long ago extinct in the wild), the exact length of the last one caught in the Baltic Sea. Here also is the text that went along with the display:
“Did you know that the iconic Baltic Sturgeon is considered a ‘living fossil’ that was for a short time extinct here in Lithuania? The Sturgeon’s ancestors survived ‘the Great Dying’ (the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event) some 200 million years ago, in which 96% of marine life disappeared. In 1996 the last wild specimen of this prehistoric fish to be found in the Baltic Sea was hauled out at a remote island in Estonia, 2.9 metres long and weighing 136 kg. In 2057, after decades of a committed reintroduction program, healthy adults born in captivity and released into the Neman River were once again observed at the Curonian Spit, leaping from the water in what some believe is a kind of communion with their oddly kindred space lichen.”
