Re: [-empyre-] Post #3 After critique and the politics of capta

[Stephanie Strickland]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--I am grateful for the fullness, and what seems to me the accuracy, of
Johanna's account.


On the basis of it, it seems to me that the challenge of visualization
cannot be “met,” but can perhaps be to some degree temporarily outfoxed by
insisting on a minimum of three alternative visualizations for any
situation in which visualization is used.


Either by attempting a cross-fix of these three or more forms, or by
learning from their contrastive elements how to see and thus avoid the most
habitual or unwanted or deviously dangerous elements of each, we might take
a next step, now, involving action and once again the generation of
multiple displays.

Stephanie

Stephanie Strickland

1175 York Avenue 16B
New York NY 10065
212-759-5175
http://stephaniestrickland.com
..  ..  ..  ..
Hours of the Night
http://hoursofthenight.com
House of Trust
http://www.house-of-trust.org/
*Dragon Logic, *Ahsahta Press
*Vniverse *iPad app


On Thu, Jul 21, 2016 at 3:47 PM, Christina McPhee  wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Dissembling, passing-as, representing-as-if…….. Johanna Drucker puts so
> well the condition we are blind to and yet complicit in
>
> "The politics of capta, therefore, are the cultural politics of all
> semiosis, in which the fundamental processes of sense-making and sign
> systems come into being so that they pass themselves off as "what is"
> rather than "what has been represented to appear to be what is". Such a
> politics is always freighted with the baggage of any and every hegemony at
> work, and the "nothing is ever/never natural" assertion has to be taken
> literally here as a way to undo the easy habit of familiar thought. For
> though we "know" that data is constructed, we do not always know how that
> knowing encodes the blindness that keeps unfamiliarity at bay, keeps the
> "otherness" of the world at a distance in all of its true profundity.”
>
> To ‘undo the easy habit of familiar thought’— such is the enormous task of
> this conversation and the work of the scholars and artists coming together
> here.  We’re asking, what’s feminist about this visualization?  Drucker
> charges us
> with understanding that ‘display itself is conceived to embody qualitative
> expressions, and that the information is graphically constituted’ (Drucker,
> Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production, Harvard, 2014).
>
> This gets at the deepest crisis of our time and moment!  How many levels
> of ‘undo’ are there… infinitely or indefinately— and this is the horror
> from which we recoil— when like little children touching a burning piece of
> hot asphalt with our toes and screaming with fascination and the sharp
> allure of pain— is there ANY ethical position possible if we realize each
> level of blindness is acceded to another level?  The horror, the horror, as
> Joseph Conrad foretold.
>
> Drucker goes on, nevertheless: "Our "of course" we know statements are
> almost all framed within the terms of our social world, an acknowledgement
> of the instrumental and operationalized terms on which structuring occurs.
> We turn nature into a fantastic term, "otherness" into a political category
> through which to guide apparently ethical actions, but we have few ways to
> undo the ways that knowing has already been produced to create knowledge
> according to terms programmed in advance. My argument does not resolve into
> a set of discursive metaphors in which geographies of "beyondness" or
> "limits" can be invoked. The unfamiliar is in the normative, the immediate,
> and the habitual, not what lies "outside" these realms. What is most
> "known" is what is most "unknown" because we do not think about the ways in
> which we know. Hard to see ontological blindness.”
>
> In the heady days of cybernetics in the post-war, post-Bauhaus, Gyorgy
> Kepes promoted the notion that visual literacy could rest on the empirical
> objectives of identifying patterning in ‘nature’ — a necessity of all
> taxonomies in the natural sciences, surely.— but Kepes and others hoped for
> such within an understanding of the ‘nature of culture’.  As evidently this
> cannot be, not now at least, we have to ask how to ‘capta-mine’  , to mine
> what we can see in the dark, even as we know our own blindness exceeds what
> we can see .
>
> "The challenge for visualization is to simultaneously intensify the
> representationalism of its methods--call them to attention in a graphical,
> critical, way while undoing the belief system that representationalism
> supports--that a world can be known in some stable way.” — Drucker’s
> challenge causes me to ask what element in this semiosis is ‘stable’.  I
> think, perhaps that she is onto something when she asks, in another post
> about enunciation and voicing.
>
>
>
> Christina
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Christina McPhee
>
> http://christinamcphee.net
>
>
>
>
>
> Christina McPhee
> naxsm...@mac.com
>
> ht

Re: [-empyre-] 'On Racial Violence, Love and Information, Brexit and Dramaturgy of Data’

[christ...@christinamcphee.net]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Aviva, et al, 

If Johanna Drucker is accurate in her insistence on grasping the concept of 
‘data' as ‘capta,’ (see 
http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2016-July/009208.html 
)

 then, ‘the danger of built in biases’ is just so, built or baked in, or to put 
it in the reverse, there is no such entity as unbiased data.  Logically, then, 
‘capta’ itself embodies a social world.  

To that point, Rebecca Prichard has called forth, in the original post on this 
thread (see link below) the example of works by three artists, Caryl Churchill, 
Evelyn Wau, and John Edmonds. Thinking about these, I”m most familiar 
personally with Caryl Churchill’s plays, one of which I actually saw played in 
London, ‘Far Away’ at the Young Vic (2014). It was a hallucinatory experience 
of entering into a complicit texture of image and voice with no ‘outside’. 

The scary totalizing of capta-as-social world is on full display at the moment, 
too, with the spectacle, or spectre (ghosting), of hate rhetoric in the 
American media.  The total work of art, gesamtwerk…

So I wonder, as if to say, yes the violence of information visualization is 
implicit and structural in its very inception, is the beginning of feminist 
consciousness. 

Its growth, form, texture, and proliferation is another matter.  We will learn 
about Aviva Rahmani’s project in this regard next week. For now, I want to just 
copy and paste a quote from Rebecca Prichard’s comment that begins this
thread.  She describes how such growth and generation works in Churchill’s play 
“Love and Information” :


"In some ways,  thinking about Caryl Churchill's 'Love and Information’ is 
useful, since it is a play which explores the social role of data in the 
'Information Age', or more broadly put, how human relationships and our 
relationship to the world are constituted/qualified/quantified by the 
circulation of data in the ‘anthropocene'. The play's scope is as voraciously 
wide as this would suggest. One of the most vivid images of violence in the 
play is of a chick whose head is snipped off by a scientist after s/he has 
measured the neurological effect of the chick's cognisance of a particular 
event. The structure of the play (a series of apparently random brief 
exchanges, each involving a dynamic around the reduction of living systems to 
information) suggests that these processes of reduction and their violence is 
culturally prevalent, even a cultural necessity. In Churchill's play the urge 
to kill in order to measure drives a much broader cultural obsession with 
secrets and with exposure - the act of knowing is part of the act of consuming, 
which in turn is the only mode of relating; human relationships are constituted 
as data at the same time that data drives the constitution of human 
relationships. “   - Rebecca Prichard  
http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2016-July/009186.html 





Christina 





Christina McPhee

http://christinamcphee.net






> On Jul 17, 2016, at 10:22 PM, AAR  wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> I have been scrambling to catch up with all the thoughtful, interesting and 
> erudite posts. It seems we are all addressing WHAT is made transparent with 
> the data, and HOW it is made evident, with the danger of built in biases in 
> methodologies. I am reminded of a very simple but powerful mapping from the 
> activist black artist, Paul Rucker, which simply overlaid the distribution of 
> plantation slave holdings and contemporary prison systems in the Mississippi 
> Water Basin. This is now the same region being mercilessly exploited by 
> frackers, at the expense of the richest farmland on the US continent. I think 
> it’s worth comparing examples across the gender and racial spectrum, to 
> possibly narrow down what we uniquely have to contribute as Feminists, altho, 
> honestly, I am a bit stumped about what conclusions might be drawn. I would 
> be very glad if someone could put their fingers on some bullet points that 
> might distinguish the results of a Feminist point of view on data from the 
> observations or effects of other interest groups..
> 
> 
> “What the world needs is a good housekeeper.”
> Aviva Rahmani, PhD
> Affiliate INSTAAR, University of CO. at Boulder
> https://www.nyfa.org/ArtistDirectory/ShowProject/1446ef3a-0a9d-4449-96be-74023eb9c376
>  
> 
> Watch “Blued Trees”:  https://vimeo.com/135290635 
> 
> www.ghostnets.com 
> www.gulftogulf.org
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

_

Re: [-empyre-] Post #3 After critique and the politics of capta

[Christina McPhee]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Dissembling, passing-as, representing-as-if…….. Johanna Drucker puts so well 
the condition we are blind to and yet complicit in

"The politics of capta, therefore, are the cultural politics of all semiosis, 
in which the fundamental processes of sense-making and sign systems come into 
being so that they pass themselves off as "what is" rather than "what has been 
represented to appear to be what is". Such a politics is always freighted with 
the baggage of any and every hegemony at work, and the "nothing is ever/never 
natural" assertion has to be taken literally here as a way to undo the easy 
habit of familiar thought. For though we "know" that data is constructed, we do 
not always know how that knowing encodes the blindness that keeps unfamiliarity 
at bay, keeps the "otherness" of the world at a distance in all of its true 
profundity.”

To ‘undo the easy habit of familiar thought’— such is the enormous task of this 
conversation and the work of the scholars and artists coming together here.  
We’re asking, what’s feminist about this visualization?  Drucker charges us 
with understanding that ‘display itself is conceived to embody qualitative 
expressions, and that the information is graphically constituted’ (Drucker, 
Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production, Harvard, 2014). 

This gets at the deepest crisis of our time and moment!  How many levels of 
‘undo’ are there… infinitely or indefinately— and this is the horror from which 
we recoil— when like little children touching a burning piece of hot asphalt 
with our toes and screaming with fascination and the sharp allure of pain— is 
there ANY ethical position possible if we realize each level of blindness is 
acceded to another level?  The horror, the horror, as Joseph Conrad foretold. 

Drucker goes on, nevertheless: "Our "of course" we know statements are almost 
all framed within the terms of our social world, an acknowledgement of the 
instrumental and operationalized terms on which structuring occurs. We turn 
nature into a fantastic term, "otherness" into a political category through 
which to guide apparently ethical actions, but we have few ways to undo the 
ways that knowing has already been produced to create knowledge according to 
terms programmed in advance. My argument does not resolve into a set of 
discursive metaphors in which geographies of "beyondness" or "limits" can be 
invoked. The unfamiliar is in the normative, the immediate, and the habitual, 
not what lies "outside" these realms. What is most "known" is what is most 
"unknown" because we do not think about the ways in which we know. Hard to see 
ontological blindness.”

In the heady days of cybernetics in the post-war, post-Bauhaus, Gyorgy Kepes 
promoted the notion that visual literacy could rest on the empirical objectives 
of identifying patterning in ‘nature’ — a necessity of all taxonomies in the 
natural sciences, surely.— but Kepes and others hoped for such within an 
understanding of the ‘nature of culture’.  As evidently this cannot be, not now 
at least, we have to ask how to ‘capta-mine’  , to mine what we can see in the 
dark, even as we know our own blindness exceeds what we can see .  

"The challenge for visualization is to simultaneously intensify the 
representationalism of its methods--call them to attention in a graphical, 
critical, way while undoing the belief system that representationalism 
supports--that a world can be known in some stable way.” — Drucker’s challenge 
causes me to ask what element in this semiosis is ‘stable’.  I think, perhaps 
that she is onto something when she asks, in another post about enunciation and 
voicing.  



Christina















Christina McPhee

http://christinamcphee.net





Christina McPhee
naxsm...@mac.com 

http://christinamcphee.net 






___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

Re: [-empyre-] The Latin American body and landscape

[Christina McPhee]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi Cristina and Carolyn and all,

One of the terrific achievements of contemporary art practice and critical 
spatial practice, for that matter, is how it’s formed by feminist strategies, 
even subliminally.
One of the signal features of feminism in the context of cultural production is 
its obsession and critique of embodiment— embodiment in all its paradox and 
complexity. 
In cyber-feminism, if we think of such as a generative engine of feminist 
values in our times of extreme displacement,  and auto-perpetuation of 
violences at every register—
embodiment goes beyond questions of ‘such a thing as’ classification of 
peoples, or a focus on etymologies of ‘universal’ terms such as ‘landscape', or 
taxonomies of cultural 
identities. Instead, contemporary art practice, for example, here,  Castaño’s, 
is a ferocious means by which to take, and propagate an ethical position, 
against and at the same time, from within the
pervasive rot of post-modernity, as Rosi Braidotti calls it—  ‘putrefaction of 
the industrial space, marking the death of the modernist dream of urban civil 
society.’ 


Christina 





Christina McPhee
naxsm...@mac.com 

http://christinamcphee.net 






> On Jul 21, 2016, at 8:53 AM, cristina miranda  
> wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Dear Everyone, 
> In relation to the message by Carolyn Castaño, it raised many questions to me:
> If we wish to oppose the official story and representation let's start by 
> asking if there is such a thing as a Latin American women, given the fact 
> that in Latin America there are all kinds of peoples, from Indigenous, to 
> Africans, to North and South European, Arabic and Japanese emigrants. Do you 
> think all these origins are not present and do not determine bodies? How do 
> you understand a Latin American body emerging out of these origins that are 
> not 'latina'? For me it is impossible to see Women in Latin America as Latin 
> American Women understood as 'latina'.  what do we mean by body and by 
> 'landscape'; why do you connect body and landscape in the case of 'latin 
> american women'. Is that only valid for Latin American Women (in the way you 
> define), why not to relate body and landscape to other women in the world? Is 
> this a valid approach? I consider that relating women's body and landscape is 
> not a feminist approach. In fact the origin of 'landscape' is related to 
> 'control' and domination of nature. So, from this approach inscribing the 
> woman body in relation to the 'landscape' can be  similar to relating it to a 
> controlled and objectifie nature. 
> How can we relate body and landscape in a feminist way?
> Thank you for raising these questions in my mind,
> Best,
> Cristina
> 
> On 19 July 2016 at 16:38, carolyn castano  > wrote:
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Hello Everyone! 
> It's been wonderful to follow along and read everyone's posts. I'm interested 
> in how Feminist Data Visualization can offer an opposing picture of the 
> "official  story" or resist  what Catherine D'Ignazio calls the "final 
> representation", specifically, when it comes to women and minority bodies and 
> narratives. I'd like to share some of the work that I have been doing that 
> attempts to provide alternate histories of Latin American women, the body and 
> landscape.  
> 
> A little bit about my work: 
> As a visual artist, my practice has focused on painting, drawing, and video. 
> My most recent bodies of work are all encounters with themes and images 
> originating in our hemisphere’s narco-­‐trafficking milieu and armed 
> conflicts, with a particular emphasis on how gender and ecological concerns 
> play out therein. These drawings and paintings mix materiality with content 
> in pieces that consider how the Latin American body and the Latin American 
> landscape remain inextricably linked, even as their surrounding media and 
> political contexts are increasingly digitized and globalized. I’m drawn to 
> these questions not just as a Colombian-­‐American and a woman, but as a 
> painter who believes painting, drawing and mark making continue to offer 
> rich, materials-­‐based avenues for understanding the world around us. 
>  I have several works that I'll share with you through my website (apologies, 
> it is being rebuilt, so the presentation is a bit wonky) and through my Vimeo 
> page.  The first piece is titled The Female Report/ El Reporte Femenil.  
>  The Female Report/ El Reporte Femenil explores the role of Latin American 
> women in history and the media. In The Female Report/El Reporte Femenil, a 
> single channel video which addresses perceptions of Latin American women in 
> news and ‘infotainment’ culture through a simulated newscast exploring 
> feminism and popular notions of Latina womanhood. 

Re: [-empyre-] The Latin American body and landscape

[cristina miranda]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Dear Everyone,
In relation to the message by Carolyn Castaño, it raised many questions to
me:
If we wish to oppose the official story and representation let's start by
asking if there is such a thing as a Latin American women, given the fact
that in Latin America there are all kinds of peoples, from Indigenous, to
Africans, to North and South European, Arabic and Japanese emigrants. Do
you think all these origins are not present and do not determine bodies?
How do you understand a Latin American body emerging out of these origins
that are not 'latina'? For me it is impossible to see Women in Latin
America as Latin American Women understood as 'latina'.  what do we mean by
body and by 'landscape'; why do you connect body and landscape in the case
of 'latin american women'. Is that only valid for Latin American Women (in
the way you define), why not to relate body and landscape to other women in
the world? Is this a valid approach? I consider that relating women's body
and landscape is not a feminist approach. In fact the origin of 'landscape'
is related to 'control' and domination of nature. So, from this approach
inscribing the woman body in relation to the 'landscape' can be  similar to
relating it to a controlled and objectifie nature.
How can we relate body and landscape in a feminist way?
Thank you for raising these questions in my mind,
Best,
Cristina

On 19 July 2016 at 16:38, carolyn castano  wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>
> Hello Everyone!
>
> It's been wonderful to follow along and read everyone's posts. I'm
> interested in how Feminist Data Visualization can offer an opposing
> picture of the "official  story" or resist  what Catherine D'Ignazio
>  calls the "final representation", specifically, when it comes to women
> and minority bodies and narratives. I'd like to share some of the work
> that I have been doing that attempts to provide alternate histories of
> Latin American women, the body and landscape.
>
>
> A little bit about my work:
>
> As a visual artist, my practice has focused on painting, drawing, and
> video. My most recent bodies of work are all encounters with themes and
> images originating in our hemisphere’s narco-­‐trafficking milieu and
> armed conflicts, with a particular emphasis on how gender and ecological
> concerns play out therein. These drawings and paintings mix materiality
> with content in pieces that consider how the Latin American body and the
> Latin American landscape remain inextricably linked, even as their
> surrounding media and political contexts are increasingly digitized and
> globalized. I’m drawn to these questions not just as a Colombian-­‐American
> and a woman, but as a painter who believes painting, drawing and mark
> making continue to offer rich, materials-­‐based avenues for understanding
> the world around us.
>
>  I have several works that I'll share with you through my website
> (apologies, it is being rebuilt, so the presentation is a bit wonky) and
> through my Vimeo page.  The first piece is titled The Female Report/ El
> Reporte Femenil.
>
>  The Female Report/ El Reporte Femenil explores the role of Latin
> American women in history and the media. In The Female Report/El Reporte
> Femenil, a single channel video which addresses perceptions of Latin
> American women in news and ‘infotainment’ culture through a simulated
> newscast exploring feminism and popular notions of Latina womanhood.
> Modeled after popular, female-anchored Spanish-language television news
> programs on Telemundo and Univision, El Reporte Femenil features a
> fictional newscaster, Silviana Godoy, “reporting” on the past and current
> status of women in Latin America. Godoy alternates between English and
> Spanish over the course of an extended, free-wheeling monologue, alighting
> on the accomplishments and downfalls of Latin American women. The Female
> Report/ El Reporte Femenil travels between English and Spanish and
> employs a tongue in cheek or comedic delivery that "reports" on the news or
> alternate history. The reporter Silvia Godoy interprets her own newscast 
> switching
> from English to Spanish in an act that Brasilian writer Oswald De Andrade
> calls Antropofagia,  she simultaneously consumes or eats her own words.
>
> The Female Report/ El Reporte Femenil challenges or relocates the
> official feminist history ( one that is usually centered on the history
> makers from Europe and the US) by offering the names of key women in Latin
> American revolutions, art, and literature.
>
> The Female Report/El Reporte Femenil https://vimeo.com/41060029
>
>
>
> In *Physiognomy of Tropical Vegetation in South America: After Humboldt &
> Berg* immerses itself in a visual tradition at the root of many of these
> conversations: the maps, painted travelogues and scientific illustrations
> that were critical tools of colonialism, botany and pharmacology. This work
> is in