February 2011 on -empyre- soft_skinned space
"New Media and the Middle East"
Moderated by Renate Ferro (US) and Tim Murray
(US) with Mirene Arsanios (Lebanon), Eliot Bates
(US), Isak Berbic (UAE), Tarek Elhaik (US),
Mayssa Fattouh (Qatar), Shuruq Harb (Palestine),
Horit Herman Peled (IS), Laura U. Marks (Cn),
Kevin and Jennifer McCoy (US/UAE), Nat Müller
(Netherlands), Larissa Sansour (UK).
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/
This month's geopolitical focus on new media and
the Middle East will provide a framework for
engaging in a wide-range of interdisciplinary
approaches to new media art and theory.
Featured guests will introduce their practices
across a range of media and cultural traditions,
from video, interactive, and relational media to
photography, sound, and gaming. Equally
important will be curatorial and social
initiatives. In so doing they will engage in a
discussion of how the cultural, political, and
theoretical specificities of the Middle East
contribute to and impact artistic practice? What
role does technology play in artistic and
curatorial practice, and how do Middle Eastern
histories, customs, and politics inform this
contribution? Is there a way that new
technologies and their artistic expression
enhance reflection on geopolitical considerations
important to the region and its reception? Or
might new technology itself exemplify the
paradoxes or tensions that in themselves have
informed the artistic and curatorial practices of
our guests. And, flowing from January's
discussion, how might the list's discussion of
the Netopticon dialogue with artistic and
curatorial practices in the Middle East? Are
there ways that flows between artistic and
geopolitical borders contribute to political and
conceptual thinking about the "Middle" as it
informs both "East" and "West"?
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Moderated by:
Renate Ferro (US) is a conceptual and new media
artist working in emerging technology,
participatory installation, and digital culture.
She is the Co-Managing Moderator of -empyre- and
the art/imaging editor of the journal diacritics
published by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
She teaches in the College of Architecture, Art,
and Planning at Cornell University. She has
recently staged participatory exhibitions and
installations in Berlin, Chiapas, Mexico, and
Pécs, Hungary. She directed an intervention in
October for -empyre- at the Making Sense
Colloquium at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and
teaches new media and conceptual art at Cornell
University.
Tim Murray (US) is the Curator of the Rose
Goldsen Archive of New Media Art at Cornell
University and Co-Managing Moderator of
-empyre-. He is Director of the Society for the
Humanities and Professor Comparative Literature
and English at Cornell. He sits on the Steering
Committee of HASTAC and is the author of numerous
books and articles on new media, film and video,
contemporary art, performance, and theory,
including Digital Baroque: New Media Art and
Cinematic Folds.
Featured Guests:
Mirene Arsanios (Lebanon) is curator, critic,
and co-founder of 98weeks Project Space and
artist organization in Beirut. She studied art
history in Rome and received her Masters in
Contemporary Art from Goldsmiths College, London.
She previously worked as a researcher at Ashkal
Alwan and as an Assistant Curator at MACRO,
Museum of Contemporary Art Rome. She now teaches
at the American University of Beirut.
Eliot Bates (US) is an ethnomusicologist
specializing in digital audio recording cultures
and the production of contemporary music in
Istanbul, Turkey. He is a Society for the
Humanities ACLS Fellow in Music at Cornell
University. He has published, Music in Turkey:
Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture (Oxford)
and co=founded the dancecult.net collaborative
bibliography project and the open source journal,
Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music
Culture.
Isak Berbic (UAE) is an artist, writer and
lecturer born in Bosnia and Herzegovina, at that
time called Yugoslavia. In 1992 as Yugoslavia
dissolved and Bosnia was under attack, he and his
family became refugees, moving from Croatia,
through the Czech Republic to a refugee camp in
Denmark, and lastly to the United States. In
2007 he moved to the Middle East; United Arab
Emirates, where he currently teaches media at the
College of Fine Arts and Design, University of
Sharjah. He is a continuing contributor to
numerous projects and publications on
contemporary art. His research deals with
histories, politics, tragedy, memory, humor,
exile, and the limits of representation.
Tarek Elhaik (US) is an anthropologist, film
curator, and Assistant Professor of Cinema
Studies at San Francisco State University. He situates his conceptual,
sensorial and ethnographic investigations of Modernity at the frontier
of anthropology, trans-cultural cinema, contemporary media arts and
curatorial work. He is particularly interested in the intersection between
the history of clinical concepts, political culture, curatorial
practice, and new media practices in both Latin America and the Middle
East.
Mayssa Fattouh (Qatar) is an independent curator
and cultural practitioner born in Beirut and
currently based in Doha Qatar. Fattouh has been
developing her practice between Beirut, Dubai and
Bahrain where she worked as Curatorial and
Program Manager at Al Riwaq Gallery. Her latest
ongoing project
<http://receptiveground.blogspot.com/>Receptive
Ground, is a web based archive platform
addressing subjects of art and culture in the
Middle East and the Arab Gulf. Fattouh is
currently pursuing her Master's of Arts in
Communication at The European Graduate School in
Saas-Fee, Switzerland.
Shuruq Harb (Palestine) is an artist based in
Ramallah, Palestine. Working with text and
photography, her artistic practice deals with
issues around writing, language and image. Harb
has worked on several online projects such Across
Borders in 2005/2006, and is currently developing
online photography courses for Birzeit
University 's Virtual Gallery. She is the
co-founder of ArtTerritories, an online platform
for critical exchange on matters of art and
visual culture in the Middle East and the Arab
World.
Horit Herman Peled (Israel) is an artist, peace
activist, and theorist. She resides in Tel Aviv
and teaches new media and theory at the Art
Institute, Oranim College, Israel.
Horit Herman Peled is an artist, peace activist
and theorist. Resides in Tel Aviv and teaches new
media and theory at the Art Institute, Oranim
College, Israel. Most recent publication: "Post
Post Zionism: Confronting the Demise of the
Two-State Solution," New Left Review, 67,
January-February 2011 (co-authored with Yoav
Peled).
Laura U. Marks (Canada) is the Dena Wosk
University Professor of Art and Culture Studies
at Simon Fraser University. A scholar, theorist,
and curator of independent and experimental media
arts, she is the author of The Skin of the Film:
Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses
(Duke University Press, 2000),Touch: Sensuous
Theory and Multisensory Media (Minnesota
University Press, 2002). Several years of
research in Islamic art history and philosophy
gave rise to her new book Enfoldment and
Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art
(MIT Press, 2010). She has curated programs of
experimental media for venues around the world.
Her current research interests are the media arts
of the Arab and Muslim world, intercultural
perspectives on new media art, and philosophical
approaches to materiality and information culture.
Kevin and Jennifer McCoy (US/UAE) are a Brooklyn,
New York couple who make art together, and are
now located in Abu Dhabi while Kevin launches the
art program at the Persian Gulf campus of New
York University. Their current exhibition at
Postmasters in New York, "Abu Dhabi is Love
Forever" explores their experiences in the media
rich environment of the UAE. They work with
interactive media, film, performance and
installation to explore personal experience in
relation to new technology, the mass media, and
global commerce. They often re-examine classic
genres and works of cinema, science fiction or
television narrative, creating sculptural
objects, net art, robotic movies or live
performance.
Nat Müller (Netherlands) is an independent
curator and critic based in Rotterdam. She has
held positions as staff curator at V2_, Institute
for Unstable Media (Rotterdam) and De Balie,
Centre for Culture and Politics (Amsterdam). Her
main interests include: the intersections of
aesthetics, media and politics; (new) media and
art in the Middle East. She has published
articles in off- and online media. Her projects
include Xeno_Sonic: a series of experimental
sound performances from the Middle East
(Amsterdam, 2005), the workshop 'Between a Rock
and a Hard Place? Negotiating Artistic Practice,
Audiences, Representation and Collaboration
within Local and International Frameworks'
(Amman, 2007). She was the first
curator-in-residence at the Townhouse Gallery in
Cairo (2008-2009), and serves as an advisor on
Euro-Med collaboration to the ECF and the
European Commission.
Larissa Sansour (UK) was born in Jerusalem and
lives in London after studying Fine Art in
Copenhagen, London, and New York. Her work is
immersed in the current political dialogue and
utilizes video art, photography, experimental
documentary, the book form and the internet. By
approximating the nature, reality, and complexity
of life in Palestine and the Middle East to
visual forms normally associated with television
and televised pastime, her schemes clash with the
gravity expected from works commenting on the
region. She has participated in the Busan
Biennial in Korea, the Third Guangzhou Triennia,
Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, PhotoCairo4,
Dubai International Film Festival, Istanbul
Biennial and Loverpool Biennial.
--
Renate Ferro and Tim Murray
Managing Co-Moderators, -empyre- a soft-skinned-space
Department of Art/ Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
Cornell University
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