----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- Welcome to December, 2014 on –empyre soft-skinned space: We have listed guests below but there may be others added as the month progresses.
Social Media / Social Justice Moderated by Renate Ferro (US) and Tim Murray (US) with invited guests December 5th to the 8th: Week 1: Renate Ferro (US) , Tim Murray (US), Patricia Zimmermann (US) December 9th to the 15th: Week 2: Ricardo Dominguez (US), Rahul Mukherjee (IN, US) , Richard Grusin (US) December 16th to the 21st: Week 3: Patrick Lichty (US), Nicholas Knouf (US), Cherian George (HK), Omar Figueredo (US) For the month of December, -empyre- proposes a discussion of the relation of social media to efforts in acquiring social justice and social change. The complexities of this issue were foregrounded in the past weeks by a number of international events. The District Attorney in Ferguson, Missouri, lashed out at social media for questioning the grand jury’s case that failed to indict Darren Wilson -- the white policeman who shot down the unarmed black eighteen year-old, Michael Brown. Social media actions also protested the disappearance of 43 college students in Iguala, Mexico. Across the globe, a variety of social media actions contributed to the umbrella protests in Hong Kong. Throughout the past few years, moreover, members of –empyre- have had occasion to reflect on rough parallels between social media and social justice in other geopolitical cases, perhaps most tellingly in relation to the Arab Spring. Given the timeliness of this topic, we have decided to suspend the discussion planned for December in order to invite –empyreans- and leading thinkers in this area to share their thoughts before taking a holiday break toward the end of the month. Our hope is both to reflect on the particular issues raised by the Ferguson controversy in the U.S. and to discuss parallel examples on the international stage. Participants might be interested in discussing not only how the flow of information over social media might facilitate efforts toward social justice but also how new media software and interfaces might themselves make specific contributions to social struggle. Might we also reflect on appropriations of social media by authorities or reactionary communities opposed to social justice? Others may be interested in introducing the –empyre- community to their public or academic programs in the broad area of social media and social justice across the globe. Newer members of –empyre- may be interested in reviewing some past discussions that have touched indirectly on this topic, such as these discussions over the past three years: May 2013 May: Collaboration: Art Practice, Theory, Activism http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2013-May/thread.html June 2012 Queer Media Art and Theory http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2012-June/thread.html February 2011, New Media and the Middle East http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2011-February/thread.html Biographies: Moderators: Renate Ferro (US) is Managing Co-Moderator of –empyre- and a conceptual artist working in emerging technology and culture. Most recently her work has been featured at The Freud Museum (London), The Dorksy Gallery (NY), The Hemispheric Institute and FOMMA (Mexico), The Janus Pannonius Muzeum (Hungary), and The Free University Berlin (Germany). Her work has been published in such journals as Diacritics, Theatre Journal, and Epoch. Ferro is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at Cornell University teaching digital media and theory. She also directs the Tinker Factory, a creative research lab for Research Design, Creativity, and Interdisciplinary Research. Tim Murray (US) is Managing Co-Moderator of –empyre-, Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Director of the Society for the Humanities and Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Cornell University. He sits on the Executive Committee of the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) and is author of Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota 2008) and Zonas de Contacto: el arte en CD-ROM (Centro de la imagen, 1999). He is editing volumes on Jean-Luc Nancy and Xu Bing. With monthly guests: Week 1: Patricia Zimmermann (US)is professor of screen studies at Ithaca College. She also serves codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff), a multidisciplinary festival that embraces and interrogates sustainability across all of its forms-- economic, social, ecological, political, cultural, technological, aesthetic and sustainable development--through film, video, new media, installation, performance, literature, music, panels, and dialogues. She is the author of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Indiana)and States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies (Minnesota) as well as coeditor of Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (California). With coauthor Dale Hudson, her forthcoming book is Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places (Palgrave), to be published in Spring 2015, which examines over 130 new media and performance projects from across the globe. She was the Ida Beam Professor in Cinema and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa and the Shaw Foundation Professor of New Media in the School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She also serves as an envoy for documentary film and new media for the American Film Showcase of the US State Department. She has published over 200 scholarly essays and journalistic articles on documentary, media history, screen theory, and new media in Screen, Genders, Journal of Film and Video, Afterimage, Framework, Asian Communications Quarterly, Cinema Journal, Wide Angle, Cultural Studies, DOX, Film History, Socialist Review, Journal of Communications Inquiry, Afterimage, The Moving Image. The Independent, Gannett Newspapers, Afterimage. Website: http://faculty.ithaca.edu/patty/ Week 2: Ricardo Dominguez (US)is a co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), a group who developed virtual sit-in technologies in solidarity with the Zapatistas communities in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1998. His recent Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab project (http://bang.transreal.org/) with Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cardenas, Amy Sara Carroll, and Elle Mehrmand, the Transborder Immigrant Tool (a GPS cell phone safety net tool for crossing the Mexico/US border) was the winner of “Transnational Communities Award” (2008), an award funded by Cultural Contact, Endowment for Culture Mexico–US and handed out by the US Embassy in Mexico. It also was funded by CALIT2 and the UCSD Center for the Humanities. The Transborder Immigrant Tool has been exhibited at the 2010 California Biennial (OCMA), Toronto Free Gallery, Canada (2011), The Van Abbemuseum, Netherlands (2013), ZKM, Germany (2013), as well as a number of other national and international venues. The project was also under investigation by the US Congress in 2009-2010 and was reviewed by Glenn Beck in 2010 as a gesture that potentially “dissolved” the U.S. border with its poetry. Dominguez is an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, in the Visual Arts Department, a Hellman Fellow, and Principal/Principle Investigator at CALIT2 and the Performative Nano-Robotics Lab at SME, UCSD. He also is co-founder of *particle group*, with artists Diane Ludin, Nina Waisman, Amy Sara Carroll, whose art project about nano-toxicology entitled *Particles of Interest: Tales of the Matter Market* has been presented at the House of World Cultures, Berlin (2007), the San Diego Museum of Art (2008), Oi Futuro, Brazil (2008), CAL NanoSystems Institute, UCLA (2009), Medialab-Prado, Madrid (2009), E-Poetry Festival, Barcelona, Spain (2009), Nanosférica, NYU (2010), and SOMA, Mexico City, Mexico (2012, and the Cornell Biennial, “Intimate Cosmologies: The Aesthetics of Scale in an Age of Nanotechnology,” (2014). *particle group* Richard Grusin (US) is Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies and Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, a position he assumed in July 2010. He received his Ph.D. in 1983 from the University of California-Berkeley. He has published numerous chapters and articles and written four books. The first, Transcendentalist Hermeneutics: Institutional Authority and the Higher Criticism of the Bible (Duke, 1991), concerns the influence of European (primarily German) theories of biblical interpretation on the New England Transcendentalists. His more recent work concerns historical, cultural, and aesthetic aspects of technologies of visual representation. With Jay David Bolter he is the author of Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT, 1999), which sketches out a genealogy of new media, beginning with the contradictory visual logics underlying contemporary digital media; Remediation has become required reading for undergraduates and graduate students in the field of new media studies. Culture, Technology, and the Creation of America’s National Parks (Cambridge, 2004), focuses on the problematics of visual representation involved in the founding of America's national parks. His fourth book, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (Palgrave, 2010), argues that in an era of heightened securitization, socially networked US and global media work to pre-mediate collective affects of anticipation and connectivity, while also perpetuating low levels of apprehension or fear. As Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies he has organized three successful international conferences: The Nonhuman Turn in 21st Century Studies; Dark Side of the Digital; and Anthropocene Feminism. He is currently editing books based upon the plenary addresses for these conferences. Rahul Mukherjee (IN, US) is Assistant Professor of Television and New Media Studies in the Cinema Studies Program, Department of English at University of Pennsylvania. He is working towards conceptualizing the materiality of mediated technoscience publics based on case studies of environmental debates related to cell towers and nuclear energy. https://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/people/RahulMukherjee Week 3 Omar Figueredo (US)is current a PhD candidate in Hispanic Literature at Cornell University. His dissertation "Tender Struggles: Affect and Emotions in the Writings of Helena María Viramontes, H.G. Carrillo, and Manuel Muñoz" theorizes the ways in which these three contemporary Latina/o writers model and engage in a struggle with and for vulnerability through their writing. His writing engages with Latina/o studies, feminist theory, and cultural studies in order to theorize multiple modes of relation and knowing. In March 2013, Omar and his partner Nancy Morales were arrested by police in Brownsville, Texas after they engaged in an act of civil resistance against the U.S. Border Patrol at the local airport. Their action and arrest were broadcast via Livestream to witnesses across the country who immediately mobilized to call the airport and the local jail to demand their release. Cherian George (HK) is a journalism researcher, practitioner, educator and advocate who writes on media freedom issues, especially in Asia. Originally from Singapore, he now resides in Hong Kong, where is an associate professor at the Hong Kong Baptist University. His PhD research at Stanford University looked at the use of the internet to democratise journalism in Malaysia in Singapore. He is currently writing a book about religious offence/offendedness and censorship. He blogs at www.mediaasia.info and can also be found at www.cheriageorge.net. Nicholas Knouf (US) is an Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA. His research explores the interstitial spaces between information science, critical theory, digital art, and science and technology studies.Ongoing work includes the Journal of Journal Performance Studies, a series of three interrelated works on academic publishing; MAICgregator, a Firefox extension that aggregates information about the military-academic-industrial complex (MAIC); Fluid Nexus, a mobile phone messaging application designed for activists and relief workers that operates independent of a centralized network; robotic puppetry projects that engage with psycho-socio-political imaginaries; and sound works that encourage the expression of the unspeakable.Past and current work has been recognized by a number awards, including an Honorary Mention by Prix Ars Electronica in [the next idea] category (2005), the Leonardo Abstracts Service (LABS) for his master's thesis (2008), a memefest Award of Distinction (2008), and a special transmediale "Online Highlight" (2009). Additionally, his work has been discussed in print and online media, including ID Magazine, the Boston Globe, CNN, Slashdot, and Afterimage. Patrick LIchty (US) is a media “reality” artist, curator, and theorist of over two decades who explores how media and mediation affect our perception of reality. He is best known for his work as an Artistic Director of the virtual reality performance art group Second Front, and the animator of the activist group, The Yes Men. He is a CalArts/Herb Alpert Fellow and Whitney Biennial exhibitor as part of the collective RTMark. He has presented and exhibited internationally at numerous biennials and triennials (Yokohama, Venice, Performa, Maribor, Turin, Sundance), and conferences (ISEA, SIGGRAPH, Popular Culture Association, SLSA, SxSW). He is also Editor-in-Chief of Intelligent Agent Magazine, and a writer for the RealityAugmented blog. His recent book, “Variant Analyses: Interrogations of New Media Culture” was released by the Institute for Networked Culture, and is included in the Oxford Handbook of Virtuality. He is a Lecturer of Digital Studio Practice at the Peck School of the Arts in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office: 306 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: <rfe...@cornell.edu> URL: http://www.renateferro.net http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net Lab: http://www.tinkerfactory.net Managing Co-moderator of -empyre- soft skinned space http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/ _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
