----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Thanks, Marianna and Dan.
"Walking Dead without zombies" is a great description for our times!
Thanks so much for creating this project. I remember finding it both haunting
and strangely reassuring when I explored it during the Brexit debates and vote.
Best,
Dale
> On Apr 26, 2018, at 14:06, Marianna & Daniel O'Reilly
> <theunstit...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Dear Dale,
>
> Inasmuch as the notion of 'social collapse as fantasy' is well established in
> the Hollywood paradigm at least, we tend to look at Neo London kind of like
> the walking dead, but without zombies. The contemporary world-weariness
> manifest in these visions of the 'end of society', seen another way,
> constitute a healthy social function by way of foreseeing precisely how to
> avoid such an end. Brexit is a good indicator of social hysteria, but rather
> than focus on political reality, we always tried to return to the individual
> experience, and how beauty continues to manifest there. Within these
> macrocosmic personal realities, economic forces erupt in the form of stories,
> memories, fragments of a wish to bring civilisation to its knees, realised in
> surreal, partially-conscious insights.
>
> Marianna and Dan
>
> On Mon, 23 Apr 2018 6:30 am Dale Hudson, <dmh2...@nyu.edu
> <mailto:dmh2...@nyu.edu>> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Thanks, Daniel, for these insights into NEO LONDON.
>
> For me, the project invites user to engage in a kind of archaeological
> excavation or foresnic investigation into a speculative version of what might
> be our own moment in history.
>
> The satire, comedy, and junk fiction of the documents also compel us to think
> about mundane news and social commentary during our own moment of social
> collapse.
>
> I’m curious to know what responses the project has received, especially since
> the Brexit vote. Maybe I projecting into it, but I couldn’t help but see
> parallels.
>
> Best,
> Dale
>
>
>> On Apr 22, 2018, at 11:28, Marianna & Daniel O'Reilly
>> <theunstit...@gmail.com <mailto:theunstit...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------Dear Dale and
>> empyre subscribers, thanks for hosting us this week.
>>
>> Location and experience form the fictional backbone of the psychogeographic
>> fantasies presented in Neo London, and the documentary format is used to
>> explore the language and tropes of mundane news and social commentary,
>> revealing a perverse excitement at the prospect of social collapse. The
>> documentation produced could thus be seen as a mapping of the grey areas
>> lurking at the cusp of experience, at the edge defining interior and
>> exterior worlds.
>>
>> The explorations undertaken in the project, to my mind, entertain the tropes
>> of the flâneur and the environmental notations of Benjamin, whilst drawing
>> on the English tradition of satire to draw a surreal, comedic, psychotic
>> urbanism into throwaway experience, junk fiction. In this effort, a poetry
>> of space emerges, although one which may only be revealed through
>> exploration of the maps.
>>
>> Daniel
>>
>> On Fri, 20 Apr 2018 8:59 pm Dale Hudson, <dmh2...@nyu.edu
>> <mailto:dmh2...@nyu.edu>> wrote:
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Thanks, Philip, for these insights in your two projects.
>>
>> The negotiations between a focus on particularities of a location or
>> relationships between various locations reproductive. Comparable ones are
>> present in many of the questions asked in environmental studies.
>>
>> I’m also curious to know what others think?
>>
>> The different sources of footage for _Slow Return_ seems as thought it would
>> invite us to think through these tensions. The story of the water from a
>> melting glacier becoming contaminated with pollution before flowing into the
>> sea seems as though it would remain “invisible” to many people despite the
>> satellite and webcams. The trope of “slow return” almost seems to evoke a
>> slow awareness of the return of human-activity that can caused the glacier
>> to be melting and the water to polluted.
>>
>> Best,
>> Dale
>>
>>> On Apr 16, 2018, at 20:05, Philip Cartelli <pcarte...@gmail.com
>>> <mailto:pcarte...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>> Thanks to Dale for the invitation. My contribution is a bit wide-ranging,
>>> since I’d like to take the opportunity to explore a new project as well, my
>>> first major work since ‘Promenade,’ included in Invisible Geographies.
>>>
>>> In this new project, ‘Slow Return,’ I use my own original footage as well
>>> as satellite and webcam imagery to depict and connect the source of the
>>> Rhone River in the Swiss Alps and its estuary in southern France. The Rhone
>>> Glacier’s situation is particularly urgent as it’s in an advanced stage of
>>> melting and will likely have completely disappeared by the end of the
>>> current century. At its other extremity, the Rhone flows past southern
>>> Europe’s largest petrochemical port, a major source of pollution, on its
>>> way out to the Mediterranean Sea.
>>>
>>> One of the challenges that I face in this project is creating connections
>>> or cause/effect links beyond the natural resource that links these two
>>> regions, which is where the alternative footage comes in, allowing me to
>>> make such links evident through the human-made surveillance technologies
>>> that are in many ways products of the same industrial production and
>>> environmental control that led to the Rhone Glacier’s current condition.
>>> But when I tend towards these macro perspectives, I’m aware of neglecting
>>> the specificity of each location. This has led me reflect how I faced a
>>> similar conundrum in ‘Promenade.’
>>>
>>> In 'Promenade,' I attempted to reconcile the two by a taking a more
>>> formalistic, distant approach from my subjects, which I blended with
>>> repetition and duration in a narrative sense to emphasize the simultaneous
>>> structural and experiential aspects of changing modes of use in a
>>> redeveloped public space. In following the conversation so far this month,
>>> I’ve seen similar questions posed by others with regard to projects they’ve
>>> either made or viewed. So, I’d ask: how does the imperative of
>>> ‘documentary’ structure our negotiations (whether as documentarians,
>>> filmmakers, artists, critics, theorists) of questions of specificity v.
>>> larger mechanisms/themes/connections? Is something lost when we hew too
>>> closely to one or the other?
>>>
>>> On Mon, Apr 16, 2018 at 11:15 AM, Dale Hudson <dmh2...@nyu.edu
>>> <mailto:dmh2...@nyu.edu>> wrote:
>>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>> Thanks, Garrett, Fédérique, Dorit, Luke, and Toby, for participating in
>>> last week’s discussion, which I hope will continue and intersect with this
>>> week’s discussion.
>>>
>>> This week’s guests include Steve WetzeL (US), Mariana and Daniel O’Reilly
>>> (UK), Max Schleser (AU), Philip Cartelli (US/FR), Adam Fish (UK), and
>>> Rachel Johnson (US) .
>>>
>>> All have participated in the “Invisible Geographies” exhibition for the
>>> twentieth edition of FLEFF.
>>>
>>> Steve Wetzel’s _Aquarius the Waterman_ makes visible the geographies that
>>> humans negotiate through economic shifts in commodity markets for iron-ore
>>> within the environmental devastation of the Erzberg open-pit mine in
>>> Austria.
>>>
>>> With _NEO-LONDON_, The Unstitute (Marianna and Daniel O’Reilly) speculates
>>> on a possible future in which the city of London in the United Kingdom has
>>> collapsed. The project allows users to navigate an archive that maps
>>> according to psychological coordinates rather than physical ones, in order
>>> to locate causes for an increasingly probable future.
>>>
>>> Max Schleser’s _Viewfinders_ (with Gerda Cammaer and Phillip Rubery) is a
>>> platform that offers users the opportunity to compare their own views of
>>> the world with those of others by uploading a short tracking shot to a
>>> database where it will be edited together with tracking shots by others.
>>>
>>> In Philip Cartelli details in _Promenade_, the Mediterranean port of
>>> Marseille is being transformed from a racially/ethnically, religiously, and
>>> nationally diverse center of trade into a whitewashed tourist attraction.
>>> Nonetheless, traces of the past emerge.
>>>
>>> Adam Fish's _Points of Presence_ (with Bradley Garrett and Oliver Case)
>>> documents the invisible geographies of submarine and subterranean internet
>>> cables and the human labor that makes wireless function.
>>>
>>> In _Escaped Exotics Vol. 1_ Rachel Johnson investigates the Jequirity
>>> (Rosary Pea) as more than a mere invasive species from South Asia to south
>>> Florida in the United States. The plant’s poisonous seeds have been
>>> appropriated into the cultures of tropical areas around the globe.
>>>
>>> I look forward to hearing more about these projects from their makers, as
>>> well as their conceptions of an arts practice that moves between
>>> conventional categories, including documentary.
>>>
>>> Best,
>>> Dale
>>>
>>> Bios:
>>>
>>> Steve WetzeL (US) is an artist, video maker, and assistant professor in the
>>> film department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Over the past
>>> decade, Wetzel has produced many works of experimental non-fiction and
>>> anthromentary (a form that combines anthropology and documentary) video,
>>> which have been exhibited nationally and internationally. His arts practice
>>> emerges within the intersection of experimental film/video, observational
>>> documentary, and social constructions of reality. These themes can also be
>>> found in two small volumes of writings, _Occasional Performances and
>>> Wayward Writings_ (2010), and _[PAUSE]_ (2014), described as “an urgent and
>>> generous exegesis” and “a contemporary mix of aesthetic, personal, and
>>> moral imminence.”
>>>
>>> The Unstitute (UK) is Marianna and Daniel O’Reilly. Built in 2010 to
>>> challenge establishment values and explore the domain of art in the
>>> twenty-first century, The Unstitute not only presents projects produced
>>> in-house, but hosts virtual residencies, virtual curated exhibitions and
>>> monthly online screenings. The architecture of the website itself is a
>>> prime feature of the project, incorporating labyrinths amid derelict online
>>> spaces.
>>>
>>> Max Schleser is a filmmaker, who explores smartphones and mobile media for
>>> creative transformation and media production. His portfolio
>>> (http://www.schleser.nz/ <http://www.schleser.nz/>) includes various
>>> mobile, smartphone and pocket camera films, which have been screened at
>>> festivals, galleries, and museums internationally. He publishes on mobile
>>> and smartphone filmmaking, creative innovation, and collaborative
>>> filmmaking. He is also cofounder of the Mobile Innovation Network
>>> Australasia (MINA) and curates the annual International Mobile Innovation
>>> Screening.
>>>
>>> Philip Cartelli (US/FR) has made films and video works exhibited at the
>>> Locarno Festival (CH), the Edinburgh International Film Festival (UK),
>>> FID-Marseille (FR,) and the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s non-fiction
>>> showcase Art of the Real (US), among others. He holds a Ph.D. in Media
>>> Anthropology with a secondary emphasis in Critical Media Practice from
>>> Harvard University, where he was a member of the Sensory Ethnography Lab.
>>> He also holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the Ecole des hautes études en
>>> sciences sociales. He currently teaches filmmaking at Wagner College in New
>>> York City, where he is also co-director of the Film and Media Studies
>>> program.
>>>
>>> Adam Fish (UK) is cultural anthropologist, video producer, and senior
>>> lecturer in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University. He employs
>>> ethnographic and creative methods to investigate how media technology and
>>> political power interconnect. Using theories from political economy and new
>>> materialism, he examines digital industries and digital activists. His book
>>> Technoliberalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) describes his ethnographic
>>> research on the politics of internet video in Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
>>> His co-authored book After the Internet (Polity, 2017) reimagines the
>>> internet from the perspective of grassroots activists and citizens on the
>>> margins of political and economic power. He is currently working on a book
>>> about hacktivist prosecution called Hacker States and a book and
>>> experimental video called System Earth Cable about “elemental media” —
>>> atmospheric and undersea information infrastructures in the United Kingdom,
>>> Denmark, Iceland, and Indonesia.
>>>
>>> Rachel Johnson (US) is a North American artist working regionally along the
>>> East Coast. Her media-specific videos and performances unveil the temporal
>>> nature of the human within the frameworks of biological desire that guide
>>> the evolution of our virtual/material landscapes and poetics. She traces
>>> her own origins to the humid subtropics of North Carolina and has no
>>> reaction to poison ivy, pollen, or mosquito bites.
>>>
>>>
>>> TO MAKE A POST TO THE SUBSCRIPTION LIST USE:
>>> <empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>>> <mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>>
>>>
>>> TO ACCESS ARCHIVES USE THIS URL:
>>> http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/
>>> <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/>
>>>
>>> TO ACCESS THE WEBSITE FROM THE CORNELL SERVER TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT EMPYRE
>>> GO TO:
>>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu <http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> empyre forum
>>> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>>> <mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
>>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu <http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> empyre forum
>>> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>>> <mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
>>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu <http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>> <mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>> <http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/>_______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>> <mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu <http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
> <http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/>_______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
