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Andrea, the Human River Flow 1 has simply terrific choreography and camerawork.
The dancers embodying the river flow are amazing – even as moving through,
navigating and inhabiting the Lagos market is marked by contingencies and
improvisations, there seemed to be a lot of attention and coordination. Thanks
for sharing this – I watched it a number of times and then watched another of
your choreographed river flows through Occupy. On the Lagos one, I could not
help but think of how you do not just trouble the boundaries of bodies in/and
spaces, but also create an alternative infrastructure of water: the artists
seem to be, and be in, water. Also liked the sound mix, some parts of the
ambient diegetic sounds also made me attend to the rhythm of the dancing
artists and to the market atmospherics.
I have been working on a paper about how three kinds of informal economies
interweave – one related to memory card/media use in cellphones, another
dealing with e-waste recycling, and still another about extending electricity
connections. Other than in India, I have found examples in Cuba, Tanzania,
Ghana, and Bangladesh, and it was helpful to hear Robert Neuwirth’s talk for
some practices in Nigeria.
Tim: I am definitely looking forward to check out the WIRED RUINS CTheory issue
and “Machine Organs” piece. I shall keep thinking about these sentences you
cited from there: “With its trajectory across races, species and places,
information crosses out differences. Excising excess as it goes. We are
learning to know the body as if outside culture and history. And we are being
habituated to understand corporeality only in the narrowest of biological
discourses.”
- rahul
________________________________
From: empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
<empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of Timothy Conway Murray
<t...@cornell.edu>
Sent: Sunday, November 26, 2017 11:44:44 AM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Kathirveechu Kathihal (Radiation Stories)
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Thanks, Rahul and Andrea, for describing such compelling medial reflections on
contaminations. I posted earlier on the “Wired Ruins” issue of CTHEORY
Multimedia that Arthur & Marilouise Kroker and I edited on ethnic paranoia.
Your postings also bring to mind a prior issue we did on “Tech Flesh: The
Promise and Perils of the Human Genome Project.” The net.art pieces in that
issue commented on the confusing infections of capital into body by the rising
genome industry. One of the pieces, “Machine Organs,” by Norie Neumark and
Maria Maranda (Norie was active in last month’s –empyre- discussion) went a
step further to figure the contamination of the body by “information” itself.
While speaking of ‘machine organs’ metaphorically, Rahul’s work transforms the
metaphorical into the symbolic as the rare earth materials sustaining digital
culture contaminate the body as well as the machine. Neumark and Miranda also
maintain, in their writing on “Machine Organs” that information, as the
symbolic, has the added effect of contaminating cultural representation by
effacing difference: “Information culture's promise of pure exchangabilty masks
its paradigm of sameness. This degradation of information theory is a cultural
move parallel to the way psychoanalysis was reduced to ego psychology, thus
eliminating the frightening, messy, noisy unconscious. With its trajectory
across races, species and places, information crosses out differences. Excising
excess as it goes. We are learning to know the body as if outside culture and
history. And we are being habituated to understand corporeality only in the
narrowest of biological discourses. Now there is (only) DNA to inform you of
who you are and then to re/form you.” Whether in performance, documentary, or
net.art, medial interventions can give rise to the very messiness at the core
of the projects featured by Neumark & Miranda, Andrea and Rahul. Best, Tim
Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu <http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/>
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
114 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
2017-18 International Sea-Sky Scholar, School of Architecture and Fine Art,
Dalian University of Technology, China
On 11/26/17, 9:36 AM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of
Rahul Mukherjee" <empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of
rm...@cornell.edu> wrote:
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