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-empyre- STRIKES BACK, January 2017 Moderated by Renate Ferro (US) and Timothy Murray (US)
Rather than feature weekly guests throughout the month of January, we urge all 2,000 members of -empyre- to crank up the noise of the net by submitting your New Year's resolutions against oppression, fascism, neoliberalism, and conservatism. While we cannot forestall the US inauguration of Donald Trump and its international celebration by opponents of network neutrality and human dignity, we can contribute to filling the network with critical discourse, the soul of -empyre-. January 2017 promises to be a memorable year of cataclysmic proportions, marked by rising international tides of conservatism, nationalism, and fascism that rides the waves of xenophobia, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. Challenged by state-sponsored hacking, on one end, and corporate interference of net-neutrality, on the other end, the once utopian celebration of the world wide web might now seem but a bad dream. January 2017 marks the month of the shocking inauguration of Donald Trump in the US, the onset of BREXIT in the UK, international attacks on queer and racial rights, the ongoing umbrella movement in Hong Kong, and the neoliberal choke hold of global commerce, and depressingly, on and on.. 2017 also marks the fifteenth anniversary of -empyre- soft-skinned space, founded by Melinda Rackham (AU) in 2002 to facilitate online discussion that encourages critical perspectives on contemporary cross-disciplinary issues, practices and events in networked media. We want to launch this anniversary year (also the tenth year of our collaborative moderating of -empyre-) by providing the -empyre- community with a platform to strike back against the global reactionary environment that threatens -empyre-'s critical values. We invite you all to post your political, social, and cultural New Year's Resolutions, short or long, as they pertain to your geopolitical conditions. Posts can be made to: soft_skinned_space <empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> Happy New Year from Tim and Renate Timothy Murray Professor of Comparative Literature and English Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/ Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu A D White House Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853
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