Re: [-empyre-] - noise of contagion

[Simon]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Dear <>,

I am enjoying the dissonance between Sonata and Solidarnosc--Mozart and 
Jean-Michel Jarre, together at last.


Annie Mcclanahan wrote:
that solidarity requires that we see ourselves as intimately connected 
to lots of people we don’t know


On 29/04/20 5:09 pm, Patricia Zimmermann wrote:
We had one week to "migrate" our courses to "remote instruction."  
Words from administrators and not from faculty.  COVID meant 
shelter-in-place. No more F2F classes as they have come to be called.  
F2F, a phantom, a phantasmatic, a fantasy in this COVID world of 
invisible viruses, illness, death, and screens. Migration from the 
embodied sensorium of the classroom to the emphemerality of screens. 
From three dimensions to two. From a world of chiararscuro to flat.


The great migration as some have called it came with a great work 
speed up.  Many colleges, including my own, insisted on propagating 
ideas about "student centered," a neoliberal construct of consumerism 
and comfort displacing the messiness of ideas and debate.  A dangerous 
shift from the collective to the individual, from the abstract to 
feelings.


Of course there is recapitulation here.

I went back to Milan Kundera for his view on kitsch, about the cruelty 
sentimentality and mawkishness cover over, and recalled how Kundera 
listened to//Varèse and Xenakis, finding, especially in the latter, 
consolation. He asks himself why? Why, when he could be listening to 
Smetana? and recapitulating in its patriotism his nostalgia for homeland 
and for collective belonging.


He writes, equally brutally, perhaps, to the brutality he describes, and 
again, forgive me quoting at length:


"Despite Stravinsky's denial that music expresses feeling, the naive 
listener cannot see it any other way. That is music's curse, its 
mindless aspect. All it takes is a violinist playing the three long 
opening notes of a largo, and a sensitive listener will sigh, "Ah, how 
beautiful!" In those three notes that set off the emotional response, 
there is nothing, no invention, no creation, nothing at all: it's the 
most ridiculous "sentimentality hoax." But no one is proof against that 
perception of music, or against the foolish sigh it stirs.


"European music is founded on the artificial sound of a note and of a 
scale; in this it is the opposite of the /objective/ sound of the world. 
Since its beginnings, Western music is bound, by an insurmountable 
convention, to the need to express /subjectivity/. It stands against the 
harsh sound of the outside world just as the sensitive soul stands 
against the insensibility of the universe.


"But the moment could come (in the life of a man or of a civilization) 
when sentiment (previously considered a force that makes man more human 
and relieves the coldness of his reason) is abruptly revealed as the 
"superstructure of brutality," ever present in hatred, in vengeance, in 
the fervor of bloody victories. At that time I came to see music as the 
deafening noise of the emotions, whereas the world of noises in 
Xenakis's works became beauty; beauty washed clean of affective filth, 
stripped of sentimental barbarity."


...

As of Monday New Zealand has moved to what has been called for the 
simplification of collective imagining alert Level 3. This is nothing 
like the great migration to the digital Patricia Zimmerman names. But 
then, perhaps it is, since, on entering a cafe or going to a restaurant 
offering takeaway service (since entering Level 3 there has been a great 
rush to do so), although one is met by serving staff--at the appropriate 
distance--one cannot simply make a verbal request of them, point to and 
say, That piece of pie, or A latte, please. One must "click and collect."


The publicity for this programme speaks to its convenience--and it is 
not only applied to food and drink, but applies to hardware and clothing 
stores. Even in the absence of a delivery service, it is allegedly more 
convenient to text in a request--using the app--and to take oneself 
there, often with others, who might not be as observant of the rules as 
oneself, and make payment by a "swipe" or "paywave" (the latter 
encouraged, cash vehemently discouraged) of one's card.


Now this is getting to be an almost universal proposition, covering all 
transactions.


Of course it /can/ cover, with its convenience and ease well-attested 
to, the dropping of superfluous staff.


But what is discovered by it is of course its inconvenience and the 
disease of the migration of some basic behaviours to the digital--in 
what might be called a series of /small migrations/. Further, what is 
entailed in the migration of the small is a disproportionate increase in 
the number of/personal data points/ one is handing over, freely, that 
one is both encouraged to as well as /has to/.


And this having to as well as being encouraged to and sometimes cajoled 
to, by ads calling for Unity, 

Re: [-empyre-] COVID 19 Movement III: Presto

[Sean Cubitt]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Dear Patti

this all rings so true - even now I'm at a wealthy institution in a country 
with better responses, generally, than much of the Engish-speaking world

my usual lecture slides are a montage of images and quotes: a set of prompts 
for improvisation, though based on the accumulated cultural capital. Now they 
are packed with explicit prose - the more so as many of our students have 
English as a second language. I record video and audio commentaries, and try 
not to wander too far from the script, allowing for hearing-impaired students 
(a challenge when dealing with sound). Assigned films and readings morph, and I 
spend significant time digitising. I' malso waiting for my books and DVDs to 
arrive from the UK so have had to resort to finding digital texts where I can, 
combing academic sites for sources of quotes. I'm teaching a Hollywood history 
course, starting in 2019 and working backwards - slightly easier to find 
copyright-clear clips and movies. The teaching and the learning change 
radically, as also in my digital media course, which had me digitising late 
into the night in small chunks so students in rural lockdown or in countries 
and in some cases quarantine camps with low bandwidth.

How they come out the far side is the big question: first assignments say 
they're coming good: reading, viewing and thnking hard, though many cope with 
caring responsibilities, shared housing and other demands. Not being able to 
see when they're baffled, so you can go back and explain better, when they're 
often too shy to ask in semi-public zoom tutorials, or even one-on-one emails - 
big pedagogical challenges that make it clear that face to face is so much 
richer and more complex than this

Colleagues in practice-based courses in film, journalism. sound, music and art 
have it even harder. Hardware and software and the peer assimilation and 
sharing of tips and shortcuts have gone. The shared learning is impossible to 
replace, and the random but intense corridor conversations with staff and other 
students. Were learning that learning is not personal or private -- in the same 
way the pandemic has proved there's no such thing as private medicine, only 
public health.

There will be psychological and economic fallout to struggle with, but the 
struggle to restore education as a public good that requires public spaces of 
interaction way beyond delivery of content will be as hard, if university 
management believe that we've done such a good job online that they can cut the 
expensive campus social world that we are discovering is so important.

I've been lurking and will lurk again: this period is even more intensely busy 
than most - but wanted to respond to your moving and wise post: many thanks
sean


Sean Cubitt
Professor of Screen Studies
School of Culture and Communication
W104 John Medley Building
University of Melbourne
Grattan Street
Victoria 3010
AUSTRALIA


scub...@unimelb.edu.au


New Book: Anecdotal Evidence

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anecdotal-evidence-9780190065720?lang=en=au#


From: empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au 
 on behalf of Patricia Zimmermann 

Sent: Wednesday, 29 April 2020 3:09 PM
To: empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au 
Subject: [-empyre-] COVID 19 Movement III: Presto

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

Re: [-empyre-] [empyre] COVID Sonata, Movement 1, Allegro

[Kathy High]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hello Tim,

Thank you for this response and for bringing Beatriz into this discussion. Her 
work was always prescient and also remains deeply moving still today.

Beatriz and I were close friends and we spoke about her pending death often. 
And I knew of this work you refer to well. Beatriz's film "Dying for the Other" 
was one created while she was living in NYC and studying with experimental 
filmmaker Grahame Weinbren. Beatriz and I talked about her research often as 
she went into this project. B said she had been influenced by an earlier 
project of mine from 2004-06 called Embracing Animal where I 
worked/collaborated/lived with transgenic rats who were used in 
pharmaceutical/medico research to develop drugs to treat autoimmune diseases. 
http://www.embracinganimal.com/ 
In Dying for the Other Beatriz tracked the ways that animal bodies (in this 
case a research mouse) was used against her own body that was also being 
subjected to cancer treatment and medical research. It is a beautiful and very 
personal project - one that is very special among B's body of artwork.

Her project The Anti-Cancer Survival Kit was another amazing research project 
looking into the herbs, foods and plants that were useful as immune boosters - 
a project very much on people's minds now as supplies of elderberry are 
dwindling! This project was very much about life and living and a will to live! 
Which does sit side by side death and dying. I was lucky enough to be the 
recipient of one of B's beautiful Anti-Cancer Survival Kits. Lovingly assembled 
by Robert Nideffer and Maria Michails after B's death, the receipt of this kit 
took my breath away. Massive amounts of herbal research had been conducted in 
the accompanying reference guide. Growing kits included seeds for cooking such 
as rosemary, titan parsley, Greek oregano, winter thyme, lexton leeks, and 
drion fennel. Cooking utensils with the anti-cancer logo burned into the sides. 
All  these items to encourage positive and healthy consumption to nurture and 
support our bodies - now ingested in her memory. 

Thank you for binging all that into this conversation, Tim! 

My death tool kit is more about collecting recipes to help us now in this 
strange pandemic moment to talk about and think about coronavirus deaths. How 
to comfort each other and mourn together. How to hold the weight of the unfair 
deaths occurring now to populations who have been historically underserved? How 
 to understand these deaths as we come to terms with the other impacts of the 
virus - economic, environmental, racist.

Or as Patty Zimmermann wrote in another recent empyre post "We are all in 
mourning for losses we can not yet name." 

More soon, and many thanks to all the contributors.
xK

On 4/28/20, 12:44 PM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of 
Timothy Conway Murray"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi Kathy,

Your proposal to create a "death tool kit" brings so clearly to mind the 
final projects on which Beatriz da Costa labored at the end of her iife (many 
of our participants might not realize that Beatriz -- a pioneering bio and 
tactical artist -- died in 2012 at the age of 38 after battling cancer 
throughout her adult life).  Her projects in one of her last (maybe her final?) 
exhibitions, "The Cost of Life," included a video tryptich, "Dying for the 
Other," which screened documentation of her struggles in the months following 
brain surgery alongside footage of experimental laboratory mice..  She also 
produced "The Anti-Cancer Survival Kit," which includes a database of research, 
guidelines for anti-cancer approaches, interactive smart games, guides to 
therapeutic gardens.  Isn't it uncanny how all of Beatriz's survival strategies 
would serve the needs of this COVID stricken moment?

I might mention that thanks to the labors and thoughtfulness of your RPI 
colleague, Robert Nideffer, Beatriz's archive, including "The Anti-Cancer 
Survival Kit" will be deposited in Cornell's Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media 
Art probably this summer (depending on how much COVID slows down our 
collaboration).  Then next fall, we will be excited to announce and launch a 
competitive research grant in Beatriz da Costa's name for travel to Cornell to 
study her archive and related materials in the Rose Goldsen Archive.   Stay 
tuned for that, which I'm not sure I've mentioned to you or -empyre- previously.

Stay well.

Tim


Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, Cornell Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English

B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853



On 4/28/20, 9:57 AM, 

Re: [-empyre-] - noise of contagion

[Annie Mcclanahan]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--I don’t think you did get it wrong--I’m also not sure what I mean myself, at 
least not yet! :) The thing about stopping some movements referred to the 
idea—present in Bernes’ writing about logistics (I think I didn’t link properly 
before—it’s here 
https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/3/en/jasper-bernes-logistics-counterlogistics-and-the-communist-prospect)
 and also articulated by Joshua Clover in Riot Strike Riot—that the labor 
movement of the future will be about “circulation struggles” (Clover) or 
“counter-logistics” (Bernes). Bernes and Clover use those terms to describe 
things like building occupations, general strikes, port shutdowns, and highway, 
pipeline, or railway blockages. What’s interesting to me is that today's 
“lockdown” is a kind of dystopian inverse of those circulation 
blockades—perhaps one that could be seized upon: what if we put our fascist 
immigration system, or our oil pipelines, or the entire Amazon logistics 
network on “lockdown”?

And yes, you’re also getting at exactly what I had in mind re: solidarity. My 
idea there—one I was trying to work out more clearly in my reply to you—is that 
solidarity requires that we see ourselves as intimately connected to lots of 
people we don’t know—it requires that we think not just outside the narrow 
orbit of the family or the household but also outside of the elective 
affinities that (neo)liberalism cherishes. Solidarity means understanding 
connections that aren’t by choice, that aren’t immediately visible, that aren’t 
bounded by affective affinity per se but require broader forms of imagination. 
Here again, the virus is a kind of horror-movie image of that solidarity—yet if 
we don’t think in terms of that broader, wider, more complicated solidarity 
(the solidarity of transmission, say), we will too easily accept the risk 
“trade off” where those of us with privilege and security allow others 
(“essential” workers, i.e. exposed workers) to take on the risk for “us."


Annie J. McClanahan
Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies
University of California, Irvine
annie@uci.edu
Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and 21st Century Culture 
 (Stanford UP, 2016)
Pronouns: she/her









On Apr 28, 2020, at 12:40 PM, Johannes Birringer 
mailto:johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk>> wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
thank you , Annie, for your response,
I can see now I got your earlier sentence wrong, when you wrote about stopping 
some movements, and not others.
(We could refuse to see our personal safety as our zero-sum due and instead see 
that inevitable, unintentional connection—transmission, even—is another name 
for solidarity..) - that last sentence confused me, as it seemed to imply 
transmissions, the inevitable ones, are an expression of solidarity.  I tried 
to link it to the idea of blackness as unrepair, and unreconciled solidarity. I 
see now there is so much more to ask ("about what it becomes possible to ask 
for or demand in these times") and to hand over.

Junting, can you tell us more about the "noise" you have worked on, and how 
noise aesthetic and political discourse on “noise” intersects or converges 
between media, writing, performance (did you see "Formosa" by Lin Hwai-min?) 
and autobiography?  and what so many here, in this provocative debate, have 
talked about, or written/painted, as the personal as political?

Writing, I feel, now, having looked at the language blur image and Alan's 
brilliantly evocative " Confusion entanglement: etymological impulse, poetics 
rooted in
roots",  is also an ethical choice for dialogue (not the "new normal" which as 
Annie correctly assume will be the old normal) and the way one listens to the 
vibrations.

regards
Johannes Birringer



[Junting Huang schreibt]



Thank you, Luca. A quick note on your last point, Eric Hayot’s The Hypothetical 
Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain traced that whole tradition to 
the Enlightenment period, when European philosophers often used the Chinese in 
their thought experiments on ethics. At its core, it asks us again and again 
what we should do about the suffering from afar.

I also tried to follow the debates originated from Agamben, and I do feel the 
remarks he has made are a bit out of touch with reality, even though he may 
have some valid points in China’s context—considering civil liberties in the 
state of exception 
(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/09/the-new-normal-chinas-excessive-coronavirus-public-monitoring-could-be-here-to-stay),
 etc. However, his deliveries read more like an ideological commitment than a 
theoretical guidance.

Junting

Junting Huang
Department of Comparative Literature
240 Goldwin Smith Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853

_

Re: [-empyre-] COVID 19 Movement III: Presto

[Christina McPhee]

--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Patty—you  inspire a presto search for that sonata
Writing about this grief and torment is far from easy - thank you for three
powerful  movements and moments 
A grateful reader,
C

On Wed, Apr 29, 2020 at 8:17 AM Patricia Zimmermann 
wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> *COVID 19 Movement III: Presto*
>
> Only the recent books on documentary history and analysis could be found
> as e-books, according to our librarians at Ithaca College.  The theoretical
> books in critical ethnography, critical historiography, theory were
> confined to hard copy.  Our librarians ordered every e-book on documentary
> they could find, squeezing out budget from small cracks so my students in
> my History and Theory of Documentary class could have some readings.
> Plenty of books on new media theory had been published as ebooks, so that
> covered part of my class, but not the abstract part, the meta.
>
> The college had shutdown. We had one week to "migrate" our courses to
> "remote instruction."  Words from administrators and not from faculty.
> COVID meant shelter-in-place. No more F2F classes as they have come to be
> called.  F2F, a phantom, a phantasmatic, a fantasy in this COVID world of
> invisible viruses, illness, death, and screens.  Migration from the
> embodied sensorium of the classroom to the emphemerality of screens. From
> three dimensions to two. From a world of chiararscuro to flat.
>
> The great migration as some have called it came with a great work speed
> up.  Many colleges, including my own, insisted on propagating ideas about
> "student centered," a neoliberal construct of consumerism and comfort
> displacing the messiness of ideas and debate.  A dangerous shift from the
> collective to the individual, from the abstract to feelings.  To be student
> centered, we should be synchronous, stay in touch with our students, send
> emails, be available on Zoom open office hours, understand. These
> ideologies ignored what faculty had to do:  redesign and restructure and
> reconceptualize courses in a new interface, a new format, under almost
> impossible conditions. And all of us, whether at elite schools, public
> universities, or third rate four year private colleges had to do it fast.
>
> Presto, I thought.  Very fast.  Tumultuous.  A forward driving rhythm with
> contrapuntal tension.  Presto.
>
> I scrambled to cut films and new media projects out of my syllabus, not to
> make the course easier, but to respect the labor of our librarian who
> digitized titles for Sakai. He was swamped by requests from across campus.
> He was digitizing ten hours plus a day to get it all done.
>
> When the Governor instituted PAUSE which shut down everything, this
> librarian brought in back packs and shopping bags to pack up all the DVD
> titles faculty needed, and many external drives.  He would digitize from
> home.  I cut and pruned and honed, trimming down titles.  I convinced
> myself that instead of my carefully curated sequencing of films and new
> media to use juxtapositions to jolt students into ideas through shock or
> through pleasure, I needed a new plan.  The curatorial plan would not work
> online.
>
>  So I brainwashed myself into thinking this could now be a "slow read,"  a
> deep dive into close readings of the texts.  In fact, Tim Murray, our
> comrade here on Empyre, even offered an argument that all undergraduates
> need to learn to read films and new media carefully on a formal level of
> textual analysis, so this was in fact, not defeat, but a good thing, a
> cleansing in a way, a paring down to what matters.
>
> I started to play Mozart's Sonata in A Minor during this scramble to
> transition my courses to online.  Written in 1778, it commemorated his
> mother's death, a mix of pounding repetitive chords and flying lines of
> fast notes, then a gorgeous sweeet andante movement, and the third
> movement, presto.  Tumultous, surging dynamics.  Juxtapositions of loud and
> soft, rage and sweetness.  The sonata sits as only one of two Mozart sonata
> in a minor key. I realized this so-called mass migration to remote learning
> catapulted me and other colleagues into presto.  Not the kind identified
> with magic shows, but presto, fast, furious, contrapuntal.
>
> But, as we say in critical historiographic theory,  there is the straight
> story and then there is the crooked story.  The straight story seemed to
> emanate from administrators emphasizing access to media technologies,
> teaching synchronously, simply transposing what we do in classrooms in a
> large media school to an online environment.  It meant an uncritical
> technofetishism of workshops, tutorials, webinars on various gadgets and
> interfaces that disguised the anxieties, work speed ups, and conceptual
> work.
>
> All to keep it ALL THE SAME, as though nothing had happened and as though
> the Zoom screen did not flatten our affect and 

[-empyre-] COVID 19 Movement III: Presto

[Patricia Zimmermann]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--COVID 19 Movement III: Presto

Only the recent books on documentary history and analysis could be found as 
e-books, according to our librarians at Ithaca College.  The theoretical books 
in critical ethnography, critical historiography, theory were confined to hard 
copy.  Our librarians ordered every e-book on documentary they could find, 
squeezing out budget from small cracks so my students in my History and Theory 
of Documentary class could have some readings.  Plenty of books on new media 
theory had been published as ebooks, so that covered part of my class, but not 
the abstract part, the meta.

The college had shutdown. We had one week to "migrate" our courses to "remote 
instruction."  Words from administrators and not from faculty.  COVID meant 
shelter-in-place. No more F2F classes as they have come to be called.  F2F, a 
phantom, a phantasmatic, a fantasy in this COVID world of invisible viruses, 
illness, death, and screens.  Migration from the embodied sensorium of the 
classroom to the emphemerality of screens. From three dimensions to two. From a 
world of chiararscuro to flat.

The great migration as some have called it came with a great work speed up.  
Many colleges, including my own, insisted on propagating ideas about "student 
centered," a neoliberal construct of consumerism and comfort displacing the 
messiness of ideas and debate.  A dangerous shift from the collective to the 
individual, from the abstract to feelings.  To be student centered, we should 
be synchronous, stay in touch with our students, send emails, be available on 
Zoom open office hours, understand. These ideologies ignored what faculty had 
to do:  redesign and restructure and reconceptualize courses in a new 
interface, a new format, under almost impossible conditions. And all of us, 
whether at elite schools, public universities, or third rate four year private 
colleges had to do it fast.

Presto, I thought.  Very fast.  Tumultuous.  A forward driving rhythm with 
contrapuntal tension.  Presto.

I scrambled to cut films and new media projects out of my syllabus, not to make 
the course easier, but to respect the labor of our librarian who digitized 
titles for Sakai. He was swamped by requests from across campus. He was 
digitizing ten hours plus a day to get it all done.

When the Governor instituted PAUSE which shut down everything, this librarian 
brought in back packs and shopping bags to pack up all the DVD titles faculty 
needed, and many external drives.  He would digitize from home.  I cut and 
pruned and honed, trimming down titles.  I convinced myself that instead of my 
carefully curated sequencing of films and new media to use juxtapositions to 
jolt students into ideas through shock or through pleasure, I needed a new 
plan.  The curatorial plan would not work online.

 So I brainwashed myself into thinking this could now be a "slow read,"  a deep 
dive into close readings of the texts.  In fact, Tim Murray, our comrade here 
on Empyre, even offered an argument that all undergraduates need to learn to 
read films and new media carefully on a formal level of textual analysis, so 
this was in fact, not defeat, but a good thing, a cleansing in a way, a paring 
down to what matters.

I started to play Mozart's Sonata in A Minor during this scramble to transition 
my courses to online.  Written in 1778, it commemorated his mother's death, a 
mix of pounding repetitive chords and flying lines of fast notes, then a 
gorgeous sweeet andante movement, and the third movement, presto.  Tumultous, 
surging dynamics.  Juxtapositions of loud and soft, rage and sweetness.  The 
sonata sits as only one of two Mozart sonata in a minor key. I realized this 
so-called mass migration to remote learning catapulted me and other colleagues 
into presto.  Not the kind identified with magic shows, but presto, fast, 
furious, contrapuntal.

But, as we say in critical historiographic theory,  there is the straight story 
and then there is the crooked story.  The straight story seemed to emanate from 
administrators emphasizing access to media technologies, teaching 
synchronously, simply transposing what we do in classrooms in a large media 
school to an online environment.  It meant an uncritical technofetishism of 
workshops, tutorials, webinars on various gadgets and interfaces that disguised 
the anxieties, work speed ups, and conceptual work.

All to keep it ALL THE SAME, as though nothing had happened and as though the 
Zoom screen did not flatten our affect and transform our images into postage 
stamps.

The straight story meant asserting without critique that students needed high 
end gear to make their films and videos, and that it needed to get to them at 
all costs.  The engineers called me, worried about how to decontaminate cameras 
with all their nooks and crannies.  They called various equipment places in New 
York where friends of theirs worked.