[-empyre-] Fwd: Welcome to week 4 of February 2020 discussion: Politicizing space and time

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

> Begin forwarded message:
> 
> From: Murat Nemet-Nejat 
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to week 4 of February 2020 discussion: 
> Politicizing space and time
> Date: March 1, 2020 at 00:53:13 GMT+4
> To: Dale Hudson 
> 
> The term "blackness" or "Afro-American" is accepted today because the 
> Afro-American community in the United States in the sixties, seventies and 
> eighties insisted not to be called "negros" any more.From what I can see from 
> what is being discussed here, there is not a similar desire nor resistance to 
> the term "middle-east" or "middle eastern" in Iran or other countries in the 
> area. All we have is a group of outsider or a minority group of academicians 
> telling the people there what to do or how to speak. Is this not itselff a 
> kind of imperialism? I don't see any attempt to "convince."
> Ciao,
> Murat
> 
> On Sat, Feb 29, 2020 at 2:54 PM Dale Hudson  <mailto:dmh2...@nyu.edu>> wrote:
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Parisa, this is a great message to conclude the month’s discussion.
> 
> You make so many excellent points about the problems of self-defining and 
> being defined, which is especially complicated for communities who are not 
> recognized at the mythical ideal or model citizens for particular places. I’m 
> struck by your comments about the prosaic fears by Afro-Iranians of going 
> outside due to racism or colorism that remain unnamed. 
> 
> The marginalized presence of blackness in much of the art and film—as well as 
> scholarship on it—throughout North Africa, West Asia, and South Asia seems 
> only to contribute to the larger problem. Perhaps this near-erasure and 
> others are another reason that terms like Middle East need to be interrogated 
> rather than propagated. 
> 
> Thanks, everyone, for the insightful discussions over the past four weeks. 
> 
> Looking forward to subsequent ones!
> Dale
> 
> 
> 
>> On Feb 28, 2020, at 20:07, Parisa Vaziri > <mailto:pv...@cornell.edu>> wrote:
>> 
>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>> Yes, I wonder if inevitably, to work within an institutional space is 
>> necessarily to reproduce and perpetuate the very terms one seeks to disavow. 
>> 
>> I thought the initial prompt for this week was very interesting, and it's 
>> something I've been contemplating for some time now. The last piece of the 
>> prompt, with regard to how "minoritized and migrant groups navigate the 
>> intersections of race, gender, class, religion, and nation" really struck 
>> me. Part of my work grapples with the question of blackness in an Iranian 
>> context. Lately, some scholars, documentary filmmakers, and artists who have 
>> also become interested in this topic within the last decade have begun to 
>> employ the term "Afro-Iranian." On the one hand, this term seeks to situate 
>> black Iranians within the more global framework of a black diaspora. On the 
>> other, it relies upon a framework (also institutionalized) that does not 
>> exist or seem to make sense in the Iranian context. Though I have not been 
>> able to do ethnographic work in Iran (for various reasons), I have mediated 
>> contact with black communities in the South of Iran, and know that nobody 
>> employs the term "Afro-Iranian," nor its Persian equivalent, irani-i 
>> afriqa-tabar to describe him or herself. Nor is the term "black," or "siyah" 
>> (its Persian equivalent) accepted as a neutral way of describing oneself, or 
>> another person. In fact, there is *no* positive or neutral way to call 
>> oneself or to identify as black. 
>> 
>> This might not seem like a major problem from the outside, unless one takes 
>> into account the rampant anti-black racism black Iranians describe facing in 
>> their communities, however, without having the language to describe this 
>> either as racism, or as anti-blackness (cue the usual academic refrain: "We 
>> don't have race in the 'Middle East'"). Therefore, without having a 
>> discourse, or a community of others, with whom to communicate their 
>> experience. This has resulted in the complete erasure of black Iranians from 
>> public space, due not to the more abstract/obvious reasons (excision from 
>> the national narrative--which is of course also the case) but for the more 
>> prosaic fear of simply going outside. 
>> 
>> -Original Message-
>> From: empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au 
>> &l

Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to week 4 of February 2020 discussion: Politicizing space and time

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Parisa, this is a great message to conclude the month’s discussion.

You make so many excellent points about the problems of self-defining and being 
defined, which is especially complicated for communities who are not recognized 
at the mythical ideal or model citizens for particular places. I’m struck by 
your comments about the prosaic fears by Afro-Iranians of going outside due to 
racism or colorism that remain unnamed. 

The marginalized presence of blackness in much of the art and film—as well as 
scholarship on it—throughout North Africa, West Asia, and South Asia seems only 
to contribute to the larger problem. Perhaps this near-erasure and others are 
another reason that terms like Middle East need to be interrogated rather than 
propagated. 

Thanks, everyone, for the insightful discussions over the past four weeks. 

Looking forward to subsequent ones!
Dale



> On Feb 28, 2020, at 20:07, Parisa Vaziri  <mailto:pv...@cornell.edu>> wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Yes, I wonder if inevitably, to work within an institutional space is 
> necessarily to reproduce and perpetuate the very terms one seeks to disavow. 
> 
> I thought the initial prompt for this week was very interesting, and it's 
> something I've been contemplating for some time now. The last piece of the 
> prompt, with regard to how "minoritized and migrant groups navigate the 
> intersections of race, gender, class, religion, and nation" really struck me. 
> Part of my work grapples with the question of blackness in an Iranian 
> context. Lately, some scholars, documentary filmmakers, and artists who have 
> also become interested in this topic within the last decade have begun to 
> employ the term "Afro-Iranian." On the one hand, this term seeks to situate 
> black Iranians within the more global framework of a black diaspora. On the 
> other, it relies upon a framework (also institutionalized) that does not 
> exist or seem to make sense in the Iranian context. Though I have not been 
> able to do ethnographic work in Iran (for various reasons), I have mediated 
> contact with black communities in the South of Iran, and know that nobody 
> employs the term "Afro-Iranian," nor its Persian equivalent, irani-i 
> afriqa-tabar to describe him or herself. Nor is the term "black," or "siyah" 
> (its Persian equivalent) accepted as a neutral way of describing oneself, or 
> another person. In fact, there is *no* positive or neutral way to call 
> oneself or to identify as black. 
> 
> This might not seem like a major problem from the outside, unless one takes 
> into account the rampant anti-black racism black Iranians describe facing in 
> their communities, however, without having the language to describe this 
> either as racism, or as anti-blackness (cue the usual academic refrain: "We 
> don't have race in the 'Middle East'"). Therefore, without having a 
> discourse, or a community of others, with whom to communicate their 
> experience. This has resulted in the complete erasure of black Iranians from 
> public space, due not to the more abstract/obvious reasons (excision from the 
> national narrative--which is of course also the case) but for the more 
> prosaic fear of simply going outside. 
> 
> -Original Message-----
> From: empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au 
> <mailto:empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> 
>  <mailto:empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>> On Behalf Of Dale Hudson
> Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2020 4:13 AM
> To: empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au 
> <mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: [-empyre-] Welcome to week 4 of February 2020 discussion: 
> Politicizing space and time
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks, Afrah and 
> Sama, for nudging us to think about feminist interventions.
> 
> I’ve invited Joumana Al Jabri, Surabhi Shamra, and Parisa Vaziri to ways that 
> space and time can be politicized through arts practice and scholarship.
> 
> I’m seeing the week’s welcome prompt a little easier since I am in transit 
> today, but please feel free to respond to any of the previous weeks’ prompts.
> 
> Best from Beirut,
> Dale
> 
> 
> 4—Politicizing space and time
> 
> Whether physical or virtual, space is a location of where rights can be 
> enacted by communities when they are denied by states or social actors. 
> Occupying spaces can serve as a mode of representation that moves from visual 
> and auditory presence to political agency. Comparably, time has been a means 
> of marginalizing or discrediting communities as “backwards” or somehow 
> outsi

Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to week 4 of February 2020 discussion: Politicizing space and time

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Parisa, this is a great message to conclude the month’s discussion.

You make so many excellent points about the problems of self-defining and being 
defined, which is especially complicated for communities who are not recognized 
at the mythical ideal or model citizens for particular places. I’m struck by 
your comments about the prosaic fears by Afro-Iranians of going outside due to 
racism or colorism that remain unnamed. 

The marginalized presence of blackness in much of the art and film—as well as 
scholarship on it—throughout North Africa, West Asia, and South Asia seems only 
to contribute to the larger problem. Perhaps this near-erasure and others are 
another reason that terms like Middle East need to be interrogated rather than 
propagated. 

Thanks, everyone, for the insightful discussions over the past four weeks. 

Looking forward to subsequent ones!
Dale



> On Feb 28, 2020, at 20:07, Parisa Vaziri  wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Yes, I wonder if inevitably, to work within an institutional space is 
> necessarily to reproduce and perpetuate the very terms one seeks to disavow. 
> 
> I thought the initial prompt for this week was very interesting, and it's 
> something I've been contemplating for some time now. The last piece of the 
> prompt, with regard to how "minoritized and migrant groups navigate the 
> intersections of race, gender, class, religion, and nation" really struck me. 
> Part of my work grapples with the question of blackness in an Iranian 
> context. Lately, some scholars, documentary filmmakers, and artists who have 
> also become interested in this topic within the last decade have begun to 
> employ the term "Afro-Iranian." On the one hand, this term seeks to situate 
> black Iranians within the more global framework of a black diaspora. On the 
> other, it relies upon a framework (also institutionalized) that does not 
> exist or seem to make sense in the Iranian context. Though I have not been 
> able to do ethnographic work in Iran (for various reasons), I have mediated 
> contact with black communities in the South of Iran, and know that nobody 
> employs the term "Afro-Iranian," nor its Persian equivalent, irani-i 
> afriqa-tabar to describe him or herself. Nor is the term "black," or "siyah" 
> (its Persian equivalent) accepted as a neutral way of describing oneself, or 
> another person. In fact, there is *no* positive or neutral way to call 
> oneself or to identify as black. 
> 
> This might not seem like a major problem from the outside, unless one takes 
> into account the rampant anti-black racism black Iranians describe facing in 
> their communities, however, without having the language to describe this 
> either as racism, or as anti-blackness (cue the usual academic refrain: "We 
> don't have race in the 'Middle East'"). Therefore, without having a 
> discourse, or a community of others, with whom to communicate their 
> experience. This has resulted in the complete erasure of black Iranians from 
> public space, due not to the more abstract/obvious reasons (excision from the 
> national narrative--which is of course also the case) but for the more 
> prosaic fear of simply going outside. 
> 
> -Original Message-
> From: empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au 
> <mailto:empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> 
>  <mailto:empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>> On Behalf Of Dale Hudson
> Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2020 4:13 AM
> To: empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au 
> <mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: [-empyre-] Welcome to week 4 of February 2020 discussion: 
> Politicizing space and time
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks, Afrah and 
> Sama, for nudging us to think about feminist interventions.
> 
> I’ve invited Joumana Al Jabri, Surabhi Shamra, and Parisa Vaziri to ways that 
> space and time can be politicized through arts practice and scholarship.
> 
> I’m seeing the week’s welcome prompt a little easier since I am in transit 
> today, but please feel free to respond to any of the previous weeks’ prompts.
> 
> Best from Beirut,
> Dale
> 
> 
> 4—Politicizing space and time
> 
> Whether physical or virtual, space is a location of where rights can be 
> enacted by communities when they are denied by states or social actors. 
> Occupying spaces can serve as a mode of representation that moves from visual 
> and auditory presence to political agency. Comparably, time has been a means 
> of marginalizing or discrediting communities as “backwards” or somehow 
> outside modernities.
> 
> This wee

Re: [-empyre-] week 4

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks, Parisa, for these insights into your experience of these terms and 
where and when they are used. I’ve also noticed more use of West Asia in 
activism than in academia, likely for the same reasons. I believe Joumana will 
have insights in regard to Visualizing Palestine.

I was in Beirut for a weekend of meetings with colleagues to discuss such 
issues. As much as we wanted to move away from Middle East, we were pulled back 
by the institutionalized power of keyword searches, academic publishing, 
non-profit exhibitions, and commercial platforms. 

One of the issues that we faced is ways that Middle East might be more 
capacious at times than Arab World, not only for “including” Iranian and 
Turkish cultures, but also for inclined non-Arab cultures within Arab-majority 
states, as well as minoritized ethic or religious communities within Iran and 
Turkey. Same applies to South Asia, where Siddi are subjected to stigmas 
against blackness much like those faced by Afro-Iranians and Afro-Arabs. 
Slavery remains taboo.

Another related part of this discussion is the diaspora, so I wanted to 
congratulate Sama on being featured in the State of the Art 2020 exhibition at 
the Crystal Bridges  Museum of American Art: 
https://crystalbridges.org/exhibitions/state-of-the-art-2/ 




> On Feb 23, 2020, at 20:46, Parisa Vaziri  wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Thanks for the introduction, Dale. Before addressing this week’s prompt 
> directly, in this post I’d like to respond more generally to the question 
> formulated in the discussion proposal, regarding the ideological politics 
> underlying the term “Middle East.” I am currently situated at the crossroads 
> between two academic departments, Comparative Literature, and Near Eastern 
> Studies. As long as I’ve been working at the university, I’ve never once 
> heard the suggestion that we might consider changing our departmental name 
> from Near Eastern Studies to something else, nor that the term itself might 
> be problematic. This might simply be due to the conservativism of the 
> field—inextricably bound with the cold war politics that undergirded area 
> studies programs in the U.S. and that was the condition of possibility for 
> their development and expansion throughout the North American academy. I 
> bring this up only because it’s been striking to me that the place where I’ve 
> noticed actual movement and critique of the term “Middle East” is not in 
> academic settings, but in youth grassroots political activism. In Los 
> Angeles, where I lived as a graduate student before moving to central upstate 
> NY last Fall, I participated in a collective called SWANA (acronym for 
> Southwest Asia and North Afrika). As a group, SWANA’s mission is to advocate 
> for Southwest Asian and North Afrikan communities on both local and global 
> scales. They stage educational events, action-oriented campaigns and spaces 
> for healing.
>  
> One of the things I was involved in toward the end of my time in LA and 
> involvement with SWANA (and which dovetails with my past and current academic 
> research) was the presence of anti-blackness in SWANA communities. In my own 
> research I am interested in the forms of representations and of erasures of 
> blackness in Iranian cultural history. At the activist level in SWANA, I was 
> part of conversations about how to deal with forms of anti-blackness that 
> surface consistently—violently or invisibly-- in our own communities in 
> diaspora. 
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au 
> https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__empyre.library.cornell.edu=DwICAg=slrrB7dE8n7gBJbeO0g-IQ=qcTmJUObF8XYm8yI7VhbJrDrNIg8UQyscq1gBMIIbxk=7cZrikZGwsnTfx0UsNDlnE-UEyyPgygJHQ8AD73O3xs=lGOONabJ--upZgD5tPMZuZsKmVlJzvUkv8fU3VLlojY=
>  
> 
___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

[-empyre-] Welcome to week 4 of February 2020 discussion: Politicizing space and time

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thanks, Afrah and Sama, for nudging us to think about feminist interventions.

I’ve invited Joumana Al Jabri, Surabhi Shamra, and Parisa Vaziri to ways that 
space and time can be politicized through arts practice and scholarship.

I’m seeing the week’s welcome prompt a little easier since I am in transit 
today, but please feel free to respond to any of the previous weeks’ prompts.

Best from Beirut,
Dale


4—Politicizing space and time

Whether physical or virtual, space is a location of where rights can be enacted 
by communities when they are denied by states or social actors. Occupying 
spaces can serve as a mode of representation that moves from visual and 
auditory presence to political agency. Comparably, time has been a means of 
marginalizing or discrediting communities as “backwards” or somehow outside 
modernities.

This week considers communities that have been marginalized and otherwise 
disempowered by being erased or silenced in national or international 
representations of space and time. It asks questions about claiming visibility 
by stateless nations visible, claiming audibility by minoritized ethnicities, 
and claiming a place in histories.

Rather than discrediting such challenges to dominant powers as unruly. or 
uncivil, this week asks us to think about how minoritized and migrant groups 
navigate the intersections of race, gender, class, religion, and nation. It 
also asks which groups prefer to speak to outsiders and which prefer to keep 
conversations within the community.


GUEST BIOS

Joumana al Jabri’s work revolves around creative processes and outputs to 
address pressing social issues. She is a co-founder along with Ramzi Jaber and 
Ahmad Ghunaim of Visualizing Impact, winner of Prix Ars Electronica 2013, 
partnered with Polypod. Joumana co-curated TEDxRamallah 2011 with Ramzi, 
organized between Ramallah-Bethlehem, Beirut and Amman and livestreamed to over 
twenty cities globally. She is a co-founder along with Reem Charif and Mohamad 
Hafeda of Febrik a collaborative platform for participatory art and design 
research projects concerned with social practices in public spaces, with 
particular focus on Palestinian refugee camps.

Surabhi Shamra has been an independent filmmaker making feature-length 
documentaries and short films since 2000. Her documentaries, fiction, and video 
installations engage with cities in transition using the lens of labor, music, 
and migration. Her films have been screened and awarded at international film 
festivals and include: Returning to the First Beat (2017); Bidesia in Bambai 
(2013); Jahaji Music: India in the Caribbean (2007); Above the Din of Sewing 
Machines (2004); Aamakaar, The Turtle People (2002); and Jari Mari: Of Cloth 
and Other Stories (2001). She is an assistant professor at New York University 
Abu Dhabi.

Parisa Vaziri received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from U.C. Irvine in 
2018. Her work engages legacies of Indian Ocean world slavery in the long durée 
through prisms of visual media. Her research overlaps interests in critical 
theory, black studies, Middle Eastern cultural production, postcolonial 
critiques of history, film theory, new media, philosophy, anthropology, and 
histories of displinary formation more generally. Her current project recovers 
articulations of blackness in Iranian visual culture, primarily through the 
media of experimental documentary and art cinema. She proposes film as a site 
of transmission that disrupts traditional periodization schemes and that 
elucidates problems of temporality and geography in orthdox narratives about 
the concept of race. Two of her forthcoming publications position the history 
of experimental ethnographic documentary as supplement and stimulant to the 
Iranian New Wave film movement, while exploring how filmic blackness 
allegorizes modernity's spatial and temporal disjunctions.
___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to week 3 of February 2020 discussion: Feminist interventions

[Dale Hudson]

 here 
> <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__digital.library.upenn.edu_women_sultana_dream_dream.html=DwMFaQ=slrrB7dE8n7gBJbeO0g-IQ=Hafd2vsMnrn24xKURxheOA=1Hh7QMEQ-lwOL6aChCtgn4ICBzeShlKVoMzbd_BPkmo=z0rNHJVFisB7EFWVSImPq9SzGxp8uODofDZ9pJ6hECA=>)
>  by a Bengali writer in 1905 called Begum Rokeya Sakhwat Hossien who was then 
> an Indian but is from what is now Bangladesh. And yet I was feeling the need 
> to define the work in a way that would allow a larger global audience to 
> situation it somewhere. I still feel unresolved about this and don't know 
> what the way to do this is without being inauthentic. 
> 
> Another place I was struggling with this idea of flattening was while I was 
> making itself. Since most of my material and research was drawing from an 
> archive and already existing documented history it is certain that there was 
> a heavy representation of an upper class and upper caste experience as those 
> stories are certainly more prominently represented in the archive. The lives 
> and histories of dalit or tribal women do not always fit into this narrative 
> and have their own trajectory. How to acknowledge this and make room for 
> multiplicity? For an artist who predominantly centres work around archives, 
> how does one draw from the archive and yet acknowledge the black holes within 
> it? I don't have certain answers to these questions but within the form of 
> this particular work one way in which I opened out the narrative to make it 
> less finite was to add an interactive feature where anyone can submit their 
> own story that then gets added on to the project as a note. 
> 
> One more thing I wanted to address was as Dale initiated, the idea of 
> legibility. As artists from who are you telling this story to/addressing when 
> you make your work? I always wonder about this when I see work by other 
> artists too. I remember this being said by Toni Morisson about her book the 
> bluest eye. When she read writing by many other black writers, she always 
> wondered why something basic that the community already knows was being 
> explained in the book. Who was this explanation for? When she went on to 
> write her first book she did no such thing and intentionally discredited the 
> white gaze. Not using what the outside world already knows about you as the 
> starting point to build on. Many parts of my work (jokes, puns, breaking into 
> Hinglish, particular references to local popular culture) will not make sense 
> to someone who is not familiar with the world it is set in. This is not 
> intentional but it is also not something that bothers me. To see a joke about 
> your own world, is rare and a juicy moment. When this happens to me in other 
> work, I love it. Wondering however if that also means that your work will 
> always be more relevant only to an audience that is closer culturally? 
> 
> On Mon, Feb 17, 2020 at 11:35 AM Dale Hudson  <mailto:dmh2...@nyu.edu>> wrote:
> >
> > --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> > Thanks, Kay and Nat, for nudging us to think differently.
> >
> > This week we continue by thinking about feminist interventions.
> >
> > I’ve invited Sama Alshaibi  and Afrah Shafiq to offer discuss how they 
> > engage in feminist arts practices in two different contexts, which I think 
> > can help us think comparatively and move beyond the essentializing 
> > categories that linger even as we collectively try to destabilize them
> >
> > Dale
> >
> >
> >
> > 3—Feminist interventions
> >
> > For the first week, the discussion focuses on feminist practices that might 
> > not always be legible outside North Africa, West Asia, and South Asia since 
> > they respond to different configurations of patriarchy in postcolonial and 
> > transnational contexts.
> >
> > Western feminisms often adopt categories of “Arab women,” “Indian women,” 
> > “Muslim women,” or “Oriental women,” who are imagined as repressed by 
> > clothing or religion. Lila Abu-Lughod’s famous “Do Muslim Women Need 
> > Saving?” outlined ways that A-list Hollywood female and male celebrities 
> > mobilized their power to forward U.S. military interests in Afghanistan. 
> > French president Emmanuel Macron’s speech at the opening of Le Louvre Abu 
> > Dhabi in the UAE evoked “universal” culture as a means of combatting 
> > terrorism, then sold warships in Saudi Arabia.
> >
> > How can feminists respond to these powerful foreign cultural institutions? 
> > How do artists navigate between claiming cultural heritage and tradition 
> > while also critiquing sexism, racism, casteism, and other forms of social 
> >

[-empyre-] Welcome to week 3 of February 2020 discussion: Feminist interventions

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thanks, Kay and Nat, for nudging us to think differently.

This week we continue by thinking about feminist interventions.

I’ve invited Sama Alshaibi  and Afrah Shafiq to offer discuss how they engage 
in feminist arts practices in two different contexts, which I think can help us 
think comparatively and move beyond the essentializing categories that linger 
even as we collectively try to destabilize them

Dale



3—Feminist interventions

For the first week, the discussion focuses on feminist practices that might not 
always be legible outside North Africa, West Asia, and South Asia since they 
respond to different configurations of patriarchy in postcolonial and 
transnational contexts.

Western feminisms often adopt categories of “Arab women,” “Indian women,” 
“Muslim women,” or “Oriental women,” who are imagined as repressed by clothing 
or religion. Lila Abu-Lughod’s famous “Do Muslim Women Need Saving?” outlined 
ways that A-list Hollywood female and male celebrities mobilized their power to 
forward U.S. military interests in Afghanistan. French president Emmanuel 
Macron’s speech at the opening of Le Louvre Abu Dhabi in the UAE evoked 
“universal” culture as a means of combatting terrorism, then sold warships in 
Saudi Arabia.

How can feminists respond to these powerful foreign cultural institutions? How 
do artists navigate between claiming cultural heritage and tradition while also 
critiquing sexism, racism, casteism, and other forms of social and political 
violence? How do artists, curators, and scholars activate feminist critique 
without being accused of betrayal or being undermined by white (“feminist”) 
saviors from Berlin, London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, or Tel Aviv? 

GUEAST BIOS

Sama Alshaibi’s practice examines the mechanisms displacement and fragmentation 
in the aftermath of war and exile. Her photographs, videos and immersive 
installations features the body, often her own, as either a gendered site or a 
geographic device resisting oppressive political and social conditions. 
Alshaibi’s monograph Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In (New York: Aperture, 2015) 
presents her Silsila series which probes the human dimensions of migration 
borders and environmental demise. Her work has been featured in several 
prominent biennials and exhibited in over 20 national and international solo 
exhibitions. Born in Basra to an Iraqi father and Palestinian mother, Alshaibi 
is based in the United States where she is Professor of Photography, Video and 
Imaging at the University of Arizona, Tucson. 

Afrah Shafiq is a multi/new media artist based between Goa and Bangalore. Her 
art practice moves across various platforms and mediums, seeking a way to 
retain the tactile within the digital and the poetry within technology.  Her 
work has been shown at the Lahore Biennial 2020, testsite Austin, Kochi Muziris 
Biennale 2018/19, The Guild Art Gallery in Alibaug, Be.Fantastic in Bengaluru, 
What About Art in Mumbai, Digital Graffiti Festival in Florida, The Fusebox 
Festival in Texas and the Computer Space festival in Bulgaria.  She has been 
invited on research and residency programs with Fluent Collaborative Austin, 
the Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, and the Institute of Advance 
Studies in Nantes, France. When she is not glued to her computer she also makes 
glass mosaic.
___
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Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to week 2 of February 2020 discussion: Thinking differently in scholarship and curation

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks, Kay, Sama, and Nat, for your thoughtful comments! 

And thanks also for the link to the articles Nat. I thought that I saw another 
one, so I will keep looking.

It is comforting in some ways that everyone is struggling with these terms. 
I’ve been trying to distill what I think:

Geopolitical regions (Middle East) have obvious problems, but everyone knows as 
much, so maybe it’s possible to ignore them.

Geographic units (West Asia or Southwest Asia) still have the problem of 
defining culture by territory, though they can reduce bias of geopolitics. 

Political states (Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, Morocco, Turkey, Yemen) tend too 
produce mythical ideal citizens and render everyone else as an ethnic, racial, 
or religious minority, though some are less problematic. Some states are 
nations; some nations are stateless. I also like Kay’s example of the 
pre-Palestinian films made in Iran as a potential to undo the imperialism of 
Middle East as a category.

Cultural groups (Arab) have different meanings in different spaces and at 
different times and in different contexts, not to mention related subdivisions 
like Mashriq and Maghreb. I prefer them in some ways, except in the context of 
the Gulf.

When I moved here ten years ago, I heard people use MENASA in contexts where 
South Asia and Iran were being acknowledged as part of the Gulf, so I adopted 
it for a class that I teach. I structure the weeks without using geopolitical, 
geographic, or national terms insofar as is possible. I try to focus on themes, 
which is perhaps a way to proceed when possible.

Curious what others think and have experienced. I was contemplating changing 
MENASA to NAWASA in the title to my course next semester.

Dale



> Begin forwarded message:
> 
> From: nat muller 
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to week 2 of February 2020 discussion: 
> Thinking differently in scholarship and curation
> Date: February 10, 2020 at 12:52:15 GMT+4
> To: Dale Hudson 
> 
> Hi all and thanks for the invite Dale,
> 
> The article you are referring to was this one: 
> http://m.startribune.com/minneapolis-art-exhibit-rejects-middle-east-in-favor-of-a-more-inclusive-community/566312062/
>  
> <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__m.startribune.com_minneapolis-2Dart-2Dexhibit-2Drejects-2Dmiddle-2Deast-2Din-2Dfavor-2Dof-2Da-2Dmore-2Dinclusive-2Dcommunity_566312062_=DwMFaQ=slrrB7dE8n7gBJbeO0g-IQ=Hafd2vsMnrn24xKURxheOA=0nPCagXI8BdV2ypCsFQufKLle-hjlOgzuXIQwpA8FsI=gPcklzHA9Sjc2KOH-NxbvIAyz5UNnifYF-8y3rKJqMs=>
> Here SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) is used as a decolonizing 
> corrective to the Middle East. The use of (South)West Asian has been taken up 
> for example by the critical and curatorial platform Mizna and has been a.o. 
> sanctioned by Hyperallergic editor-in-chief Hrag Vartanian and curator Reem 
> Fadda. See for Reem’s take: 
> http://www.radicate.eu/reem-fadda-associate-curator-for-the-middle-eastern-art/
>  
> <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.radicate.eu_reem-2Dfadda-2Dassociate-2Dcurator-2Dfor-2Dthe-2Dmiddle-2Deastern-2Dart_=DwMFaQ=slrrB7dE8n7gBJbeO0g-IQ=Hafd2vsMnrn24xKURxheOA=0nPCagXI8BdV2ypCsFQufKLle-hjlOgzuXIQwpA8FsI=OUxupdYu_vlOuyW8qLsaBxoUfYIPc8CcnWlnEsZc-uI=>.
>  It is real important to rethink the terms we use and how politically charged 
> or exclusive they are. I’d like to point to another aspect from a curatorial 
> perspective. One of the largest issues imho with Western institutions 
> curating regional shows - whether termed Middle East, Arab, MENA, MENSA, West 
> Asian, SWANA - is the tendency to on the one hand be didactic (i.e. it’s not 
> so much about the art really, but rather about teaching you something about a 
> region, usually involving an emphasis on violence and conflict) and on the 
> other hand clump together practices that have little in common (i.e. a hugely 
> diverse and heterogeneous region is reduced and flattened to a singular 
> place). And while there’s a damned if you do and damned if you don’t side to 
> this, I am still pretty amazed, curatorially-speaking, how reluctant Western 
> institutions are when it comes to dealing thematically and critically with 
> artists from the region. While I agree with Kay that using ‘Arab’ as a 
> grouping word opens possibilities, many artists are equally unhappy with 
> being categorized as such. The lens through which their work is seen becomes 
> limited. An early example is French curator Catharine David’s project 
> ‘Contemporary Arab Representations,’ that was shown in 2002 at Witte de With 
> in Rotterdam and the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona. While David 
> introduced artists from Lebanon, Egypt, and a few years later Iraq, to 
> European institutions/audiences, this project also became ‘representative’ 

[-empyre-] Welcome to week 2 of February 2020 discussion: Thinking differently in scholarship and curation

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thanks, Beth and Sean, for sharing some of your research on ways that artists 
in KSA and UAE are navigating the limitations of territory.

I realized that the numeral dates were aligning with the weekend for many 
subscribers, so I’m starting week 2 on Sunday evening my time, which hopefully 
will more closely align with the start of the week in Australia and start of 
the day in North America.


This week, I’ve invited Kay Dickinson and Nat Muller to extend the discussion 
into ways to think differently in our scholarship and curation. 

I’m pasting their bios below for a sense of the expertise that they bring to 
the discussion, particularly as it concerns art and media that are labelled as 
“Middle Eastern” or “in the Middle East.”

I’m curious how we as artists, scholars, curators, activists, theorists, 
students, and so forth can make ideas and perspectives visible and legible to 
broader publics without using terms that are reductive (like the ones Beth 
mentioned in her last post) or inaccurate (like Middle East) since the 
structures of publishing and curating are often based on 
keyword-search-friendly reproduction of these reductive and inaccurate 
categories.

There was an article published online in one of the arts/museums journals about 
an ongoing discussion about replacing Middle East with West Asia or Southwest 
Asia at a one of the museums in London, I believe. If I find the link, I will 
share. 

Dale



2—Thinking differently in scholarship and curation

Scholarship and curation often adopt the nation-state as a category of 
analysis. Much like art and film are promoted at commercial festivals and art 
market, our scholarship and curating often under-represent the significance of 
other aspects of identity and politics. Even museums and educational 
institutions continue to reduce artists to place of birth and residence.

This week considers ways of thinking differently, whether the transcontinental, 
pan-Arab, pan-African, and non-aligned movements of the mid-20th century or the 
more recent deterritorialized movements that emerge via internet and mobile 
networks, often using the idea of the nation-state as an oppositional strategy 
against corruption and nepotism.

How can we conceive more complicated ways to organize art practices? Are 
concessions to the logics of film festivals and art markets in our publishing, 
curating, and programming unavoidable?


Kay Dickinson is Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University, Montreal.  
She is the author of Off Key: When Film and Music Won’t Work Together (Oxford 
University Press, 2008), Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, 
Dubai and Beyond (bfi, 2016) and Arab Film and Video Manifestos: Forty-Five 
Years of the Moving Image Amid Revolution (Palgrave, 2018).

Nat Muller is an independent curator and writer based between Amsterdam and 
Birmingham. Her main interests are: image politics and contemporary art from 
the Middle East. Recent exhibitions include Spectral Imprints for the Abraaj 
Group Art Prize in Dubai (2012); Adel Abidin’s solo exhibition I love to love… 
at Forum Box in Helsinki (2013); This is the Time. This is the Record of the 
Time at Stedelijk Museum/American University of Beirut Gallery (2014/15); the 
A.M. Qattan 2016 Young Artist of the Year Award at Qalandiya International in 
Ramallah and The Mosaic Rooms in London; Neither on the Ground nor in the Sky 
at ifa Gallery Berlin (2019). In 2015 she was Associate Curator for the Delfina 
Foundation’s Politics of Food Program (London). She has curated film programs 
for Rotterdam’s International Film Festival, Norwegian Short Film Festival, 
International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, and Video D.U.M.B.O New York. Her 
writing has been widely published and she edited Sadik Kwaish Alfraji’s 
monograph (Schilt Publishing, 2015), Nancy Atakan’s monograph Passing On 
(Kehrer Verlag, 2016), Walid Siti’s monograph (Kehrer Verlag, forthcoming 
2020). Her AHRC-funded PhD project at Birmingham City University researches 
science fiction in contemporary visual practices from the Middle East. She 
curated the Danish Pavilion with Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour for the 
58th Venice Biennale in 2019. www.natmuller.com 
 
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Re: [-empyre-] (no subject)

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks, Beth. 

These insights from your research are fascinating. 

I’m looking forward to reading more when the research is published, especially 
about the use of online platforms to produce a community for discussions that 
might not translate, especially into western commercial art world where those 
adjectives are linked to the entire catalogue of orientalist tropes and 
rationales for military interventions. 

We’ll return to the related category of feminist arts practice in week 3, so we 
can considered the power asymmetries between colonial feminism, corporate 
feminism, white feminism in contrast with postcolonial feminisms, transnational 
feminisms, Muslim feminisms, and so forth.

Dale

> On Feb 7, 2020, at 23:17, Derderian, Elizabeth  
> wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Hello all
> In response to one of Dale's earlier Qs: the artists I have worked with in 
> the UAE have used the internet to make work about exile/belonging/citizenship 
> (or lack thereof), compulsions across boundaries or taboos (physical, 
> emotional, social, etc), hymen rejuvenation schemes that prey on Khaleeji 
> women, to name a few. I think the first two artists, their work is relatable 
> quite broadly. The third artist, her work was meant to spark a conversation 
> amongst local women, which it did; it speaks to global feminist art practices 
> secondarily. Most artists I worked with felt some kind of obligation to speak 
> to a local community they identified with (whether city, nation, ethnicity, 
> religion or region), but struggled to do so in ways that didn't feel a) trite 
> or b) silo them as a [qualifying adjective]* artist - they reported often 
> trying to speak broadly about the human condition from their particular 
> vantage, and being frustrated as writers in the media defined their 
> contributions as valuable solely because of their positionality. 
> 
> *ie Arab, female Muslim, Emirati, etc. See also: Olu Oguibe, The Culture Game 
> (2004) 
> 
> -Beth 
> ___
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>  
> 
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Re: [-empyre-] Response to Dale Post

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks, Sean, for the link to your book — and your new article, which I haven’t 
yer read and now see that I must! 

I really appreciate ways that Saudi artists work within certain constraints yet 
also work around others. I’ve also been fascinated by how some of the work 
translates to foreigners whereas other work translates less widely. 

In my class, I’ve asked students to think about different Telfaz11 videos, such 
as "No Woman, No Drive” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZMbTFNp4wI), and 
“Screw Infidels” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgbJGn4cH-M=43s). It’s 
remarkable how much more accessible and comprehensible the former is.

Curious what others think?

Best,
Dale

> On Feb 5, 2020, at 19:44, Sean Foley  wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Dale:
>  
> Thank you for your response! Those are all good but complicated questions – 
> ones that I deal with in a recent book 
> https://www.rienner.com/title/Changing_Saudi_Arabia_Art_Culture_and_Society_in_the_Kingdom
>  
> 
> and my late 2019 article in ROMES – https://doi.org/10.1017/rms.2019.43 
> .
>  
> Gharem and his colleagues have been successful in part because they use two 
> key mechanisms. First, they understand that visual images (and even film, 
> etc) provide one with opportunities to speak to multiple audiences and speak 
> on a variety of topics at once. “Visually,” Gharem once observed, “you can 
> say it because no one can accuse you with an image.” By contrast, “if you are 
> going to write or text or say something, it’s easy to accuse you.”  Second, 
> Gharem and others also use collage, humor, and other forms of communication 
> that voice multiple – even contradictory messages – at once. Images allow the 
> audience to, in the words of a Saudi art critic, to read into art “work what 
> they want…, to have their own take, so to speak.”  Media companies like 
> Telfaz11 have in particular utilized humor—a context that often involves 
> multiple viewpoints and which is not supposed to be taken seriously by 
> definition (“that’s just a joke, right?”) – to discuss some of the most 
> sensitive topics in the Kingdom. This is an example: 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgbJGn4cH-M 
> 
>  of a work that deals with a serious topic which has been interpreted in 
> vastly different ways.
>  
> Best,
>  
> Sean 
> ___
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>  

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Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to February 2020 discussion: Why Are We Still Talking about the Middle East?

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks, Ana, for sharing your intellectual journey.

It reveals both how much miseducation and disinformation circulate in the 
centers of empire — and how much work we need to do to undo it!

Another great volume to add to this list is _Is There a Middle East?: The 
Evolution of a Geopolitical Concept”, eds. Michael E. Bonnie, Abbas Amanat, and 
Michael Ezekiel Gasper (Stanford UP, 2012), which examines the intellectual and 
military use of the term over the centuries.

What other books have other read to add to this list?

Best,
Dale

> On Feb 4, 2020, at 18:40, Ana Valdés  wrote:
> 
> Thank you Dale for your kind words! I remember I was appalled when I read 
> about how England and France shared the crumbles of the Ottoman Empire and 
> built colonial empires upon it. Gertrude Bell traced the borders and created 
> Iran Irak and Saudi Arabia. Lawrence became their protector. Allenby was the 
> maker of today’s Palestine. Many streets in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv carry his 
> name.
> I am a scholar on the Crusades topic and liked very much Amin Malouf book The 
> Crusades from the Arabic eyes.
> He quotes there sources unknown for us in the West and writes about things as 
> the Crusades being cannibals eating small Arabian children.
> I reacted against this narrative and rejected it as biased and false.
> But my curiosity was awake and I read again the tales or documentary written 
> by that times writers, William of Tyres and many French writers.
> Nobody of them wrote something about the cannibalism.
> But I travelled to Paris and checked the 1800-century of the same books, 
> published by la Pleiade as facsímil editions.
> And it was there!
> “We didn’t have enough food to feed our enormous army and the locals were 
> hostile. There was not enough meat for us. We used then raid the small Muslim 
> villages and take the small children. We cooked or broiled or grilled them 
> and has them as salty proviants. They were not baptised and they were as 
> animals to us.”
> I read them Edward Saids book “Orientalism” how the Western created a 
> fictional Orient as contrast and opposite to us.
> I still think our obsession with the Middle East is about narrative how we 
> define the “Other”.
> Ana 
> 
> El El mar, 4 de feb. de 2020 a la(s) 11:14, Dale Hudson  <mailto:dmh2...@nyu.edu>> escribió:
> Thanks, Ana, for sharing the link to your work with Cecilia Parsberg.
> 
> I’m wondering whether you might say something about it in relation to the 
> month’s theme (basically, why do we still us the Middle East as a term) or 
> the week’s theme on circumventing territorial limitations, which opens to 
> very sidderent questions in Palestine than in the Gulf states that Sean and 
> Beth are discussing.
> 
> 
>> On Feb 2, 2020, at 11:28, Ana Valdés > <mailto:agora...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> Dear Dale and -empire. I am very happy and grateful for the choice of topic. 
>> Middle East is a symbolic loaded place and a no place, using Marc Auges 
>> definition. 
>> I look forward to this month discussion. 
>> As an intellectual and activist deep envolver with the struggles of the 
>> Palestinian I wish this discussion could enlighten us...
>> For many of you my work within Palestine is known not for others. I link 
>> here to my and my colleague the Swedish  visual artist Cecilia Parsberg 
>> work, www.ceciliaparsberg.se/jenin 
>> <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.ceciliaparsberg.se_jenin=DwMFaQ=slrrB7dE8n7gBJbeO0g-IQ=Hafd2vsMnrn24xKURxheOA=WPXSpufZ6h0pwIEh1Oik6OXDXCLV61nkmf72hYJZjx8=KzAXNf4EQhzHR7QANaPk4lk0phW8quW7AlhlMJT4vUs=>
>>  and Cecilia’s films on Vimeo To Rachel and I see the House.
>> We were in Gaza at the same time when Rachel Corrie was killed and Cecilia 
>> did a very moving film about her.
>> Ana 
>> 
>> El El dom, 2 de feb. de 2020 a la(s) 04:17, Dale Hudson > <mailto:dmh2...@nyu.edu>> escribió:
>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>> Hi all.
>> 
>> Thanks, Renate for the generous introduction! Despite the different time 
>> zones, Ithaca seems nearby due to some many connections with amazing 
>> scholars and artists there.
>> 
>> Thanks, also to the Joumana al Jabri, Sama Alshaibi, Beth Derderian, Kay 
>> Dickinson, Sean Foley, Nat Muller, Afrah Shafiq, Surabhi Shamra, and Parisa 
>> Vaziri for joining me in leading this discussion. I’ve pasted their bios 
>> below.
>> ,
>> I’m hoping that this month’s theme will generate an insightful discussion, 
>> particularly in thew wake of the “peace” plan recently proposed by the 
>> United States. 
>

[-empyre-] Welcome to week 1 of February 2020 discussion: Circumventing Territorial Limitations

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks, Beth, for sharing with us some of your research on ways that Emirati 
artists circumvent some of the limitations on site by going partly online. 

Could you share with us some of the themes or types of themes that their work 
addresses? I’m curious whether they fall into what might be considered 
typically Middle Eastern, Arab, or Gulf themes or ones that move partly around 
these conventional labels.

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi empyre – thanks for reading, and to Dale for the invitation to engage with 
these important questions.



Many of the artists I work with are based in the UAE, which restricts 
expression – particularly criticism of the state, royal families, and Islam. 
Artists have used the [ostensibly] deterritorialized site of the internet to 
skirt some of these restrictions – engaging in limited-circuit digital 
performances, online exhibitions, or withholding information about the target 
of the work’s critique or exhibition’s location in order to protect the artist 
from potential retribution. The resulting work is simultaneously of the UAE, 
and yet not.  Paradoxically then, the internet as deterritorialized platform 
reveals the very contours of the political in a particular place.

-Beth
--empyre- soft-skinned space--
I am thrilled that Elizabeth (Beth) Derderian and Sean Foley have agreed to 
help me launch month's discussion on Why Are We Still Talking about the Middle 
East?

They both have done extensive research into ways that artists work around 
territorial limitations whilst still remaining grounded in particular cultural 
contexts of Saudi Arabia, UAE, and elsewhere. I’ve included their bios below 
the theme.

I’ve learned so much from their work, so I am excited to learn more from them 
and for others through comments on their posts or sharing their own research or 
practice.



WEEK’S TOPIC: Circumventing Territorial Limitations

While some states in North Africa, West Asia, and South Asia are savvy in 
shutting down the internet to subdue protests, notably Egypt and India, others 
have been unable to keep pace with how citizens and non-citizens mobilize 
digital spaces make statements that are riskier to make in physical space.

While official state censorship garners headlines, unofficial forms 
self-censorship often pass unnoticed to the outside world. Various other 
pressures come into play such a social stigma and family status.

Social media platforms that operate online and on mobiles provide a structure 
for networking across territorial boundaries. Despite the built-in risk of 
surveillance by transnational corporations, people often use Facebook or 
WhatsApp to communicate across distances and divisions.

This week focuses on how to artists circumnavigate censorship, often based on 
laws or rules concerning broadcast and on-site performance or exhibition, by 
mobilizing virtual space, considering which artists feel empowered to speak 
directly and which artists prefer to speak indirectly or not at all.


GUEST BIOS

Beth Derderian is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Council on Middle East 
Studies at Yale University. She has a PhD in anthropology from Northwestern 
University, and a Master’s in Museum and Near Eastern Studies from NYU. Her 
research focuses on the politics of art and cultural production in the Gulf. 
She was awarded a Fulbright IIE and a doctoral research grant from the Al 
Qasimi Foundation to conduct her field research. She also makes podcasts for 
AnthroPod, and co-edits the Middle East Section News on Anthropology News.

Sean Foley is a Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State University, who 
has published extensively on Middle East and Islamic history. He is the author 
of Changing Saudi Arabia: Art, Culture, and Society in the Kingdom (2019) and 
The Arab Gulf States: Beyond Oil and Islam (2010)—both of which were published 
by Lynne Rienner Publishers. He has also done extensive research in Saudi 
Arabia and has held Fulbright grants in Syria, Turkey, and Malaysia. For more 
on his work, see his website, 
https://nam05.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=www.seanfoley.orgdata=02%7C01%7Celizabeth.derderian%40yale.edu%7C3d7e7816370f40fecf6608d7a7b0c225%7Cdd8cbebb21394df8b4114e3e87abeb5c%7C0%7C0%7C637162249926510932sdata=h5GfSJqUn3dRib%2BLTMGPnajEXUt%2FISUDP5Yq7lmHCmA%3Dreserved=0.
 

 Follow him on twitter @foleyse.
_

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Re: [-empyre-] Art and Saudi Arabia

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks, Sean, for this post. For anyone unfamiliar with Gharam’s practice, his 
website is https://abdulnassergharem.com .

Sean, could you tell us more about how artists like Gharam navigate various 
state and social restrictions to play a role in defining and redefining Saudi 
Arabia? I was struck by the use of stamps and concrete blocks.

Is the work received as Saudi, Arab, or Middle Eastern?

It would also be great to hear about telfaz11, which uses YouTube to circumvent 
restrictions placed on television.



> On Feb 3, 2020, at 19:55, Sean Foley  > wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>> Over the last two decades, Saudi Arabia has witnessed a cultural renaissance 
>> in film, literature, online media, stand-up comedy, and the visual arts. On 
>> multiple occasions, Abdulnasser Gharem, one of the country’s foremost 
>> artists, has argued that he and his colleagues fill a critical social role, 
>> telling the New York Times in 2016: “That is your role as an artist, to 
>> bring out the option that the politician can’t say and that the religious 
>> man can’t say… You bring out the solutions that people can’t say.” Three 
>> years later in an interview with Spain’s El Pais, he stressed that art is “a 
>> form of soft power” through which you “can change people’s behavior.” 
>> “People,” he added “need to listen to the artist.” Is Gharem right? What 
>> role could he and other artists like him play in a country in which an 
>> absolute monarchy and clerics have long wielded enormous power? What could 
>> Gharem and artists tell us about the Kingdom in 2020? 
> ___
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Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to February 2020 discussion: Why Are We Still Talking about the Middle East?

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks, Ana, for sharing the link to your work with Cecilia Parsberg.

I’m wondering whether you might say something about it in relation to the 
month’s theme (basically, why do we still us the Middle East as a term) or the 
week’s theme on circumventing territorial limitations, which opens to very 
sidderent questions in Palestine than in the Gulf states that Sean and Beth are 
discussing.


> On Feb 2, 2020, at 11:28, Ana Valdés  wrote:
> 
> Dear Dale and -empire. I am very happy and grateful for the choice of topic. 
> Middle East is a symbolic loaded place and a no place, using Marc Auges 
> definition. 
> I look forward to this month discussion. 
> As an intellectual and activist deep envolver with the struggles of the 
> Palestinian I wish this discussion could enlighten us...
> For many of you my work within Palestine is known not for others. I link here 
> to my and my colleague the Swedish  visual artist Cecilia Parsberg work, 
> www.ceciliaparsberg.se/jenin 
> <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.ceciliaparsberg.se_jenin=DwMFaQ=slrrB7dE8n7gBJbeO0g-IQ=Hafd2vsMnrn24xKURxheOA=WPXSpufZ6h0pwIEh1Oik6OXDXCLV61nkmf72hYJZjx8=KzAXNf4EQhzHR7QANaPk4lk0phW8quW7AlhlMJT4vUs=>
>  and Cecilia’s films on Vimeo To Rachel and I see the House.
> We were in Gaza at the same time when Rachel Corrie was killed and Cecilia 
> did a very moving film about her.
> Ana 
> 
> El El dom, 2 de feb. de 2020 a la(s) 04:17, Dale Hudson  <mailto:dmh2...@nyu.edu>> escribió:
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Hi all.
> 
> Thanks, Renate for the generous introduction! Despite the different time 
> zones, Ithaca seems nearby due to some many connections with amazing scholars 
> and artists there.
> 
> Thanks, also to the Joumana al Jabri, Sama Alshaibi, Beth Derderian, Kay 
> Dickinson, Sean Foley, Nat Muller, Afrah Shafiq, Surabhi Shamra, and Parisa 
> Vaziri for joining me in leading this discussion. I’ve pasted their bios 
> below.
> ,
> I’m hoping that this month’s theme will generate an insightful discussion, 
> particularly in thew wake of the “peace” plan recently proposed by the United 
> States. 
> 
> Looking forward to hearing your perspectives!
> Dale
> 
> Dale Hudson | دايل هدسون
> New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD)
> Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF)
> 
> 
> 
> MONTH’S THEME: Why Are We Still Talking about the Middle East?
> 
> This month’s theme confronts the legacies of European colonialism and U.S. 
> imperialism in the divisive segregation of cultures into geopolitical 
> regions. We invite artists, curators, and scholars to consider whether the 
> term remains useful, either as a term of convenience or as a term of 
> contention. 
> 
> The invention of a so-called Middle East mobilizes orientalist tropes that 
> essentialize diverse cultures and histories while simultaneously categorizing 
> them as too diverse to function as a unified civilization. The terms and its 
> antecedents and counterparts (Orient, Libya, Near East) facilitate political, 
> economic, and cultural domination and inhibit social and psychological 
> decolonization after independence.
> 
> Britain partitioned India in 1947 and Palestine in 1948. The United States 
> subsequently mobilized the term Middle East to undermine Arab nationalism and 
> legitimize military interventions. Destructive myths of “Jews versus Arabs” 
> and “Sunnis versus Shias” continue to circulate. From the War on Terror into 
> the Arab Spring, U.S. assumptions about a Middle East (which includes Muslim 
> South Asia) have prioritized unruly violence.
> 
> The term Middle East has been uncritically adopted within the region, often 
> by neocolonial and neoliberal power holders. It has been tolerated by 
> critical area studies at universities around the world. It has been diffused 
> as an ME in less obviously problematic terms such as MENA (ME + North 
> Africa), MENASA (ME + NA + South Asia), and MENASASEA (ME + NA + SA + 
> Southeast Asia). Still, it might be timely to think in other terms and 
> rethink the consequences of continuing to imagine a Middle East exists.
> 
> Are we complicit with violence when we use terms like the Middle East to 
> designate cultures across North Africa, West Asia, and South Asia that have 
> diverse and distinct cultures and histories yet also share common experiences 
> and perspectives? They were connected historically by pilgrimages, caravan 
> routes, and maritime trade, but they are linguistically and culturally 
> diverse. Can arts practice, curation, and scholarship help to recognize 
> difference without amplifying division?
> 
> Are academic disci

[-empyre-] Welcome to week 1 of February 2020 discussion: Circumventing Territorial Limitations

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
I am thrilled that Elizabeth (Beth) Derderian and Sean Foley have agreed to 
help me launch month's discussion on Why Are We Still Talking about the Middle 
East?

They both have done extensive research into ways that artists work around 
territorial limitations whilst still remaining grounded in particular cultural 
contexts of Saudi Arabia, UAE, and elsewhere. I’ve included their bios below 
the theme.

I’ve learned so much from their work, so I am excited to learn more from them 
and for others through comments on their posts or sharing their own research or 
practice.



WEEK’S TOPIC: Circumventing Territorial Limitations

While some states in North Africa, West Asia, and South Asia are savvy in 
shutting down the internet to subdue protests, notably Egypt and India, others 
have been unable to keep pace with how citizens and non-citizens mobilize 
digital spaces make statements that are riskier to make in physical space. 

While official state censorship garners headlines, unofficial forms 
self-censorship often pass unnoticed to the outside world. Various other 
pressures come into play such a social stigma and family status.

Social media platforms that operate online and on mobiles provide a structure 
for networking across territorial boundaries. Despite the built-in risk of 
surveillance by transnational corporations, people often use Facebook or 
WhatsApp to communicate across distances and divisions.

This week focuses on how to artists circumnavigate censorship, often based on 
laws or rules concerning broadcast and on-site performance or exhibition, by 
mobilizing virtual space, considering which artists feel empowered to speak 
directly and which artists prefer to speak indirectly or not at all.


GUEST BIOS

Beth Derderian is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Council on Middle East 
Studies at Yale University. She has a PhD in anthropology from Northwestern 
University, and a Master’s in Museum and Near Eastern Studies from NYU. Her 
research focuses on the politics of art and cultural production in the Gulf. 
She was awarded a Fulbright IIE and a doctoral research grant from the Al 
Qasimi Foundation to conduct her field research. She also makes podcasts for 
AnthroPod, and co-edits the Middle East Section News on Anthropology News.

Sean Foley is a Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State University, who 
has published extensively on Middle East and Islamic history. He is the author 
of Changing Saudi Arabia: Art, Culture, and Society in the Kingdom (2019) and 
The Arab Gulf States: Beyond Oil and Islam (2010)—both of which were published 
by Lynne Rienner Publishers. He has also done extensive research in Saudi 
Arabia and has held Fulbright grants in Syria, Turkey, and Malaysia. For more 
on his work, see his website, www.seanfoley.org. Follow him on twitter @foleyse.
___
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[-empyre-] Welcome to February 2020 discussion: Why Are We Still Talking about the Middle East?

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi all.

Thanks, Renate for the generous introduction! Despite the different time zones, 
Ithaca seems nearby due to some many connections with amazing scholars and 
artists there.

Thanks, also to the Joumana al Jabri, Sama Alshaibi, Beth Derderian, Kay 
Dickinson, Sean Foley, Nat Muller, Afrah Shafiq, Surabhi Shamra, and Parisa 
Vaziri for joining me in leading this discussion. I’ve pasted their bios below.
,
I’m hoping that this month’s theme will generate an insightful discussion, 
particularly in thew wake of the “peace” plan recently proposed by the United 
States. 

Looking forward to hearing your perspectives!
Dale

Dale Hudson | دايل هدسون
New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD)
Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF)



MONTH’S THEME: Why Are We Still Talking about the Middle East?

This month’s theme confronts the legacies of European colonialism and U.S. 
imperialism in the divisive segregation of cultures into geopolitical regions. 
We invite artists, curators, and scholars to consider whether the term remains 
useful, either as a term of convenience or as a term of contention. 

The invention of a so-called Middle East mobilizes orientalist tropes that 
essentialize diverse cultures and histories while simultaneously categorizing 
them as too diverse to function as a unified civilization. The terms and its 
antecedents and counterparts (Orient, Libya, Near East) facilitate political, 
economic, and cultural domination and inhibit social and psychological 
decolonization after independence.

Britain partitioned India in 1947 and Palestine in 1948. The United States 
subsequently mobilized the term Middle East to undermine Arab nationalism and 
legitimize military interventions. Destructive myths of “Jews versus Arabs” and 
“Sunnis versus Shias” continue to circulate. From the War on Terror into the 
Arab Spring, U.S. assumptions about a Middle East (which includes Muslim South 
Asia) have prioritized unruly violence.

The term Middle East has been uncritically adopted within the region, often by 
neocolonial and neoliberal power holders. It has been tolerated by critical 
area studies at universities around the world. It has been diffused as an ME in 
less obviously problematic terms such as MENA (ME + North Africa), MENASA (ME + 
NA + South Asia), and MENASASEA (ME + NA + SA + Southeast Asia). Still, it 
might be timely to think in other terms and rethink the consequences of 
continuing to imagine a Middle East exists.

Are we complicit with violence when we use terms like the Middle East to 
designate cultures across North Africa, West Asia, and South Asia that have 
diverse and distinct cultures and histories yet also share common experiences 
and perspectives? They were connected historically by pilgrimages, caravan 
routes, and maritime trade, but they are linguistically and culturally diverse. 
Can arts practice, curation, and scholarship help to recognize difference 
without amplifying division?

Are academic disciplines like art history, film and media studies, digital and 
visual arts complicit in extending the politically exclusionary and 
intellectually limiting frameworks of nations and regions that often 
marginalize and minoritize different perspectives? Can we work towards more 
equitable and just ways of framing our interventions?


MONTH’S GUESTS

Joumana al Jabri’s work revolves around creative processes and outputs to 
address pressing social issues. She is a co-founder along with Ramzi Jaber and 
Ahmad Ghunaim of Visualizing Impact, winner of Prix Ars Electronica 2013, 
partnered with Polypod. Joumana co-curated TEDxRamallah 2011 with Ramzi, 
organized between Ramallah-Bethlehem, Beirut and Amman and livestreamed to over 
twenty cities globally. She is a co-founder along with Reem Charif and Mohamad 
Hafeda of Febrik a collaborative platform for participatory art and design 
research projects concerned with social practices in public spaces, with 
particular focus on Palestinian refugee camps.

Sama Alshaibi’s practice examines the mechanisms displacement and fragmentation 
in the aftermath of war and exile. Her photographs, videos and immersive 
installations features the body, often her own, as either a gendered site or a 
geographic device resisting oppressive political and social conditions. 
Alshaibi’s monograph Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In (New York: Aperture, 2015) 
presents her Silsila series which probes the human dimensions of migration 
borders and environmental demise. Her work has been featured in several 
prominent biennials and exhibited in over 20 national and international solo 
exhibitions. Born in Basra to an Iraqi father and Palestinian mother, Alshaibi 
is based in the United States where she is Professor of Photography, Video and 
Imaging at the University of Arizona, Tucson. 

Beth Derderian is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Council on Middle East 
Studies at Yale University. She has

Re: [-empyre-] Thanks to Dale. Open -empyre- for the month of May

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thanks, Renate — and thanks to everyone who participated in the April 
discussion!

There may be a few additional posts and replies since those of us on the US 
academic calendar are in the midst of final exams and thesis defenses. 

Best,
Dale 

> On May 3, 2018, at 04:46, Renate Terese Ferro <rfe...@cornell.edu> wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Thanks to Dale Hudson and his guests who guided us through the month of April 
> on new media documentary practice. Thanks to so many old friends like Craig 
> Saper and Patty Zimmermann for joining Dale as well as so many new –empyre- 
> subscribers.  We hope you will stay on for the next month! 
> 
> We have an OPEN DISCUSSION on –empyre- this month.  Looking forward to having 
> an uncurated time for all of our subscribers to write about issues they want 
> to share, interesting readings, prescient topics, and more.  
> 
> Renate Ferro
> Visiting Associate Professor
> Director of Undergraduate Studies
> Department of Art
> Tjaden Hall 306
> rfe...@cornell.edu
> 
> 
> 
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

___
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Re: [-empyre-] The Shore Line

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks, Liz — and congratulations on this wonderful project!

I think that reading the “storybook” as a collaborative story of resilience and 
innovation towards climate justice is a wonderful example of adapting 
documentary’s concerns for local experiences and stories in the context of 
broader concerns that affect so many of us. If I am remembering 55% of us 
(world population) lives on or near the coasts. 

I wanted to share with you that I was invited to speak at a youth media event 
in Jeddah last year and spoke about The Shore Line. People loved it, especially 
since they could access it on their mobiles.

Best,
Dale

PS  Apologies for the delayed reply. We had thesis defenses all week, so 
just emerging.



> On Apr 29, 2018, at 06:10, Elizabeth Miller  
> wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Invisible Geographies has been on my mind now for some time and I was so 
> thrilled to be a part of this program to rethink visible and invisible, 
> constructed versus natural, and all the other ways we imagine geography.  My 
> goal in making The Shore Line was to create a collaborative story of 
> resilience and climate justice. I was drawn to the coast as a subject, as a 
> metaphor and even a method - as a way to challenge narratives in addressing 
> climate-disasters. The coast, where the land meets the sea and where runaway 
> development meets rising waters, where disaster meets resilience.  The surge 
> of coastal tourism, the increased dumping of industrial waste, and the 
> unsustainable growth of fossil fuels are threatening the very ecosystems that 
> protect us from storms and sea level rise. But rather than dwell on disaster, 
> I was inspired by Anna Tsing’s notion of collaborative survival and her 
> provocative invitation to observe what survives in the midst of disaster.  
> 
> Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Miller
> Visiting Knight Chair, University of Miami
> Spring, 2018, School of Communication
> Cell: 786-406-9352
> 
> Professor in Communication Studies Concordia University, Montreal
> 
> Director: theshorelineproject.org 
> Co-Author: Going Public: The Art of Participatory Practice 
>  (UBC Press, 2017)
> http://goingpublicproject.org/ 
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

___
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Re: [-empyre-] Week 3 of the April 2018 discussion: New Media Documentary Practice

[Dale Hudson]

--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> 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 simul

Re: [-empyre-] Some further words on my work and Aquarius the Waterman

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi Steve.  

Great definition of art as never terminating inquiry. I think this aspect is 
close to what I am thinking about in relation to documentary, which, as others 
have mentioned this month, is derived from docere (to teach). Patty and I wrote 
about digital media as shifting focus from documentary’s conventional 
preoccupation with “what was” into new preoccupations with “what might be.” The 
inquiry continues beyond the presentation of evidence.

I’m wondering what others think of time-based digital media as training us (or 
maybe inviting us) to ask more questions about what we are seeing and hearing. 
I was struck by your use of found footage from YouTube in _Aquarius the 
Waterman_, as well as the accented German in the audio. 

Best,
Dale


> On Apr 19, 2018, at 03:27, Stephen M Wetzel  wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Some further words on my work and Aquarius the Waterman:
> 
> Though there are no rules, the one rule for art making is that the art object 
> (and for me, in this context, the art object is a time-based work steeped in 
> documentary forms or non-fiction strategies) never terminates inquiry, that 
> it constantly unfolds in new ways, remains a puzzle, or is puzzling, building 
> in its puzzlement over time, something like that. Documentary can be art and 
> not just artful but it must satisfy the badly formed criteria mentioned above 
> otherwise we’re just talking about the delivery of information, problems and 
> solutions, cause and effect, and so on (this is a tired distinction I 
> suppose, but I still find it relevant). My preferred mode is the linear edit, 
> the ultimate in artifice as it is the form most unlike consciousness.
>  
> The work I submitted to FLEFF, Aquarius the Waterman, contains an 
> extraordinary legend wherein a water creature offers the folk of 
> central-western Austria—after having just been set free upon granting them 
> their wish of iron ore forevermore—the gift of puzzlement: “You forgot to ask 
> me the best thing of all! The carbuncle and the meaning of the cross in the 
> nut.” My aim is to manifest such a gift in the form of a documentary-like 
> object, documentary because of its power in “bearing witness to the actual” 
> (MacDougall?), a gift because it’s for others. For me the gift is always art; 
> I am only interested in art.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Steve WetzeL
> Associate Professor
> Director of Graduate Program in Film
>  department of Film, Video, Animation & New Genres 
> Peck School of the Arts
> University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
> www4.uwm.edu/psoa/film/ 
> 
> ___
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> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au 
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu 
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Re: [-empyre-] Week 3 of the April 2018 discussion: New Media Documentary Practice

[Dale Hudson]

--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> 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.
> 
> I

Re: [-empyre-] Week 2 of the April 2018 discussion: New Media Documentary Practice

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks, Murat.

Excellent point — and great “image” of the two-sided mirror to make this point, 
which raises other important questions.

What is the place of politically engaged documentary (or media) available on 
web or mobile platforms when users are vulnerable to being tracked? Does this 
condition differ from the inherent dangers of analogue media?

We’ve included projects in past FLEFF exhibitions that attempt to disrupt this 
surveillance by flooding with bogus data. 

The makers are very aware that each user's relationship to power (enacted by 
states, corporations, etc.) determines their engagement. Ones in locations 
where political speech is monitored or censored feel less willing to engage, 
whereas ones in locations where political speech is not widely monitored or 
censored, feel rebellious in acts of hacktivism.

I’m curious to know your thoughts in this regard.

Best,
Dale



> On Apr 17, 2018, at 00:15, Murat Nemet-Nejat <mura...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Hi Dale,
> 
> " I didn’t understand Garrett to say that code is neutral. I understood him 
> to be saying that code does not constitute a document in the way that 
> documentary studies typically does.
> 
> I definitely agree that code is not neutral but a mode of power, which is why 
> I wanted to see what other thought about shifting ways that we think about 
> documentary from documents to operations."
> 
> In the digital world, the word "document, implying a physical entity," is 
> replaced by the more "universal" word "data." What is new about data and 
> differentiates it from document is that, unlike in the case of document, data 
> is (to use an image) a two sided mirror. While accessing data, one is also 
> being accessed, the accessor becoming a document/data herself/himself -- 
> becoming a commodity, capable to be manipulated. Of course, the whole 
> controversy about Facebook as a "business model" hinges on this difference.
> 
> Ciao,
> Murat 
> 
> On Mon, Apr 16, 2018 at 3:00 PM, Dale Hudson <dmh2...@nyu.edu 
> <mailto:dmh2...@nyu.edu>> wrote:
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Hi Murat.
> 
> I didn’t understand Garrett to say that code is neutral. I understood him to 
> be saying that code does not constitute a document in the way that 
> documentary studies typically does.
> 
> I definitely agree that code is not neutral but a mode of power, which is why 
> I wanted to see what other thought about shifting ways that we think about 
> documentary from documents to operations.
> 
> Best,
> Dale
> 
> 
>> On Apr 16, 2018, at 22:00, Murat Nemet-Nejat <mura...@gmail.com 
>> <mailto:mura...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>> Hi Garrett,
>> 
>> "... Document in new media is simply an agreed dumbed down term for the 
>> benefit of communicating - similar to desktop as I mentioned and one of my 
>> own best loved/most hated, 'virtual'..."
>> 
>> Your description has the kind of naivety that often plagued the thinking 
>> around digital technology. A code is not a neutral term denoting merely 
>> convenience ("simply... a dumbed down term for the benefit of 
>> communicating..." ) but a structure of knowledge (and potentially of power) 
>> with epistemological, social, political consequences. "Convenience" has 
>> often turned out to be a bait, a Trojan horse.
>> 
>> Ciao,
>> Murat
>> 
>> On Mon, Apr 16, 2018 at 11:12 AM, Dale Hudson <dmh2...@nyu.edu 
>> <mailto:dmh2...@nyu.edu>> wrote:
>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>> Excellent point, Garrett. 
>> 
>> I’m interested in this shift from analogue to digital when document no 
>> longer become as significant as code. I’m wondering whether it help move 
>> discussion on documentary away from representation towards operation. 
>> 
>> 
>>> On Apr 16, 2018, at 13:07, Garrett Lynch <garr...@asquare.org 
>>> <mailto:garr...@asquare.org>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>>> For us, code is not a document.  Document suggests a singular 'thing' or at 
>>> least a group of things in proximity and closely held together.  The nature 
>>> of code is that it can't be thought of as a document, physical or 'real' 
>>> analogies don't work well.  Even the simplest type of code, say for example 
>>> HTML (which is technically 

Re: [-empyre-] Week 2 of the April 2018 discussion: New Media Documentary Practice

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Excellent point, Garrett. 

I’m interested in this shift from analogue to digital when document no longer 
become as significant as code. I’m wondering whether it help move discussion on 
documentary away from representation towards operation. 


> On Apr 16, 2018, at 13:07, Garrett Lynch <garr...@asquare.org> wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> For us, code is not a document.  Document suggests a singular 'thing' or at 
> least a group of things in proximity and closely held together.  The nature 
> of code is that it can't be thought of as a document, physical or 'real' 
> analogies don't work well.  Even the simplest type of code, say for example 
> HTML (which is technically not code but has some of the same qualities) 
> incorporates whole other 'documents' (e.g. images), parts of other documents 
> (e.g. classes and functions) and those can be distributed anywhere when you 
> factor in a network.  Document in new media is simply an agreed dumbed down 
> term for the benefit of communicating - similar to desktop as I mentioned and 
> one of my own best loved/most hated, 'virtual'.
> 
> 
> On Sun, Apr 15, 2018 at 6:34 PM, Dale Hudson <dmh2...@nyu.edu 
> <mailto:dmh2...@nyu.edu>> wrote:
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Thanks, Luke and Garrett, for this discussion.
> 
> I agree about the shortcomings in reducing operational to optical. If 
> anything, the foregrounding of the operation of coding and transcoding should 
> heighten our awareness of the mechanical and chemical operations to capture 
> and render analogue images.
> 
> I’ve been interested in new media (for lack of a better term) documentaries 
> (also for lack of a better term) that instruct users in how data is tagged, 
> sorted, and rendered into information, as well as the structural limitations 
> to the kinds of information that can be rendered.
> 
> I’ve also been interested in documentaries that emerge in different 
> iterations, conforming to the limitations of a particular venue but then 
> morphing for other venues. This variation also seems important as a mode of 
> instruction that teaches critical practices of “interacting” with digital 
> media. 
> 
> In terms of documentary’s relationship with the visual, I have colleagues who 
> work in documentary poetry and theater. For them written or audio testimony 
> is a document. 
> 
> I am interested to know what people think (or whether people think) of code 
> as a “document.” 
> 
> Best,
> Dale
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> regards
> Garrett
> _
> garr...@asquare.org <mailto:garr...@asquare.org>
> http://www.asquare.org/ <http://www.asquare.org/>
> 
> Current events and soon:
> 
> Real Virtuality The Networked Art of Garrett Lynch:
> http://realvirtuality.peripheralforms.com/ 
> <http://realvirtuality.peripheralforms.com/>
> 
> A network of people who attended an exhibition and contributed to the 
> creation of this work
> http://asquare.org/work/peoplenetwork/ 
> <http://asquare.org/work/peoplenetwork/>
> 
> Pick up a postcard and participate at any of the following galleries: Aksioma 
> Institute for Contemporary Art (Ljubljana, Slovenia), Bannister Gallery 
> (Rhode Island, USA), Centro ADM (Mexico City, Mexico), Centro de Cultura 
> Digital (Mexico City, Mexico), Gallery XY (Olomouc, Czech Republic), Gedok 
> (Stuttgart, Germany), Guest Room (North Carolina, USA), Human Ecosystems 
> (Rome, Italy), Kunst Museum (Stuttgart, Germany), Laboratorio Arte Alameda 
> (Mexico City, Mexico), Le Wonder (Bagnolet, France), MUTE (Lisbon, Portugal), 
> NYU Art Gallery (Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates), Open Signal (Portland, 
> USA), Plymouth Arts Centre (Plymouth, England), The Gallery at Plymouth 
> College of Art (Plymouth, England), Transfer Gallery (New York, USA), Upfor 
> Gallery (Portland, USA), Watermans (London, England), Wilhelmspalais 
> (Stuttgart, Germany), WOWA (Riccione, Italy), ZKM | Center for Art and Media 
> (Karlsruhe, Germany)
> 
> Best of Luck with the Wall (variant) @ European Media Art Festival, Report - 
> notes from reality (Osnabrueck, Germany) 18/04 - 21/05/2018
> https://www.emaf.de/en/index.html 
> <https://www.emaf.de/en/index.html>___
> 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/>
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Re: [-empyre-] Week 2 of the April 2018 discussion: New Media Documentary Practice

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks, Luke and Garrett, for this discussion.

I agree about the shortcomings in reducing operational to optical. If anything, 
the foregrounding of the operation of coding and transcoding should heighten 
our awareness of the mechanical and chemical operations to capture and render 
analogue images.

I’ve been interested in new media (for lack of a better term) documentaries 
(also for lack of a better term) that instruct users in how data is tagged, 
sorted, and rendered into information, as well as the structural limitations to 
the kinds of information that can be rendered.

I’ve also been interested in documentaries that emerge in different iterations, 
conforming to the limitations of a particular venue but then morphing for other 
venues. This variation also seems important as a mode of instruction that 
teaches critical practices of “interacting” with digital media. 

In terms of documentary’s relationship with the visual, I have colleagues who 
work in documentary poetry and theater. For them written or audio testimony is 
a document. 

I am interested to know what people think (or whether people think) of code as 
a “document.” 

Best,
Dale



> On Apr 14, 2018, at 18:19, Garrett Lynch  wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> >my point about timecodes was less about the micro-constraints setup by a 
> >platform, 
> >and more about the way limited timecodes gesture towards broader 
> >understandings 
> >of what documentary is, what form it takes, what its purpose is, and so on. 
> 
> Yes so we are saying similar things - these are the assumptions we 
> (Frédérique and myself) mentioned on the part of programmers building the web 
> players.  Couldn't agree more that we build atop what we have, web players 
> being re-skinned, their code being reused is exactly that.  We have submitted 
> to film festivals and as you mentioned limited understand that takes the form 
> of fixed formats, no longer than ten minutes etc., have eliminated us from 
> submitting to many but we knew making the film/video that those platforms 
> wouldn't necessarily be for us.  Our main issue was not so much length but 
> first and foremost the format of it being shown in a cinema style setting.  
> Best of Luck needs the possibility of dipping in and out, watching as much or 
> as little as you need as Dale mentioned.  We were however pleasantly 
> surprised that there were more opportunities to submit to than in previous 
> years - so all in all understanding of expanded film/video formats does seem 
> to be opening up a little.  Neither of us are by any means deeply involved in 
> documentary so whether this is true for documentary film festivals we can't 
> say.
> 
> 
> >I would also venture that the requirement to 'educate' you mentioned is also 
> >one based 
> >on this genealogy. ;-)
> 
> True but we think there needs to be some absolute baseline for defining 
> documentary whether it's 'traditional', new media etc. and this is where we 
> agree with your initial comments about its role.
> 
> 
> >documentary is embedded in a lineage of optical media
> 
> Is documentary embedded in the optical?  Again, we are by no means 
> specialised in documentary new media is our area of expertise, but it seems 
> to us stating that documentary is visual is a little like stating new media 
> is interactive.  Yes a lot is, perhaps the majority, but there is non-visual 
> documentary and non-interactive new media (e.g. generative).  Somebody on the 
> list who is an expert in documentary needs to chime in here because we 
> certainly can't give examples of non-visual documentary but do seem to have 
> come accross examples of what we would have said was documentary - 
> particularly in sonic compositions/work.
> 
> 
> >'new media' (hate that term) might instead focus on the operational. As 
> >mentioned, 
> >life today increasingly seems structured by the operational logics of 
> >technologies, 
> >operations which are complex, ubiquitous and largely unseen. What would it 
> >mean 
> >to document such operations, and how might these documents elude the 
> >constraints 
> >of the visible? 
> 
> The best of a bad lot of terms as at least it focuses on qualities that were 
> not present in established media but are in new media.  Most others terms 
> focus on format/platform etc. which is even more problematic.  Documenting 
> the operational logic of technologies seems like a really interesting idea 
> for a documentary in itself.  Several artists have worked with this.  Perhaps 
> some sort of an Adam Curtis, neoliberal, dystopian look at McLuhanism gone 
> very wrong :)
> 
> 
> >Atlantic's recent article on stock photo depictions of Bitcoin, "because 
> >there's 
> >nothing better than images of collectible coins, stage props, miniatures, 
> >and 
> >professional models to convey the intricacies of a distributed, 
> 

Re: [-empyre-] Week 2 of the April 2018 discussion: New Media Documentary Practice

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks, Garrett, Fédérique, Toby, and Dorit, for these insights into the 
conception of your projects for FLEFF.

One aspect of all three projects, and also Luke’s, that intrigues me is that 
they allow audiences to experience them in multiple ways rather than one single 
way. 

What I mean is that Jerusalem, We Are Here invites users to follow one of three 
guides through the city, selecting to read text, view videos, or look at images 
along them way. Exploring the project becomes a kind or archeology. It demands 
users to make comparisons and develop arguments about what they find. They 
can’t just wait for information to be interpreted for them.

Null Island requires users to move through a virtual space, orienting and 
reorienting their experience of hearing and seeing within a somewhat fluid 
space. The experience is particularly disorienting at times since the virtual 
space is rendered as a map with longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates that 
typically suggest stability.

With Best of Luck with the Wall (variant), users do not necessarily need to 
watch for 34 hours without interruption, so that can watch segments over days 
or weeks — or they can dip into the video at various points, moving backward 
and forward. This very act calls attention to the ways that surveillance 
footage can be monitored by humans.

When screened online, The Toby Tatum Guide to Grottoes and Groves also allows 
the option of access images out of sequence without undermining the integrity 
of the immersion within the environment, thus allowing users to spend more time 
in particular grottoes or groves, that is, produce their own mental spaces in 
the curation of their interaction with the film.

For me, all of them moves around conventional assumptions for documentary, 
documenting, and documentation. 

Curious to know your thoughts — and please correct anything that I may have 
misunderstood.

Best,
Dale




> On Apr 11, 2018, at 22:46, Toby Tatum  wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Thanks Garrett,
> 
> Ok, for my part:
> 
> I'm trying to create landscapes of the imagination - the geography of mental 
> space. Although there is a profound engagement specific places when I'm out 
> shooting material but during the editing process the filmed material becomes 
> reformed into something reflective of my own inner geography. 
> 
> 
> Toby Tatum
> 
> http://www.tobytatum.com/   
> 
> 
> Toby Tatum's films are distributed by Collectif Jeune Cinéma 
>   
> 
> 
> Recent interviews online here 
> 
>  & here 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Wednesday, 11 April 2018, 18:34:43 GMT+1, Garrett Lynch 
> > wrote:
> 
> 
> Yes gazing through technology is certainly an aspect of some of my works this 
> probably creeps in from my reading around the New Aesthetic but the goals 
> aren't the same.  There is a simpler level/theme (even 'site') that links the 
> works however, networks.  Both Best of Luck with the Wall (variant) and 
> Sculptures for Distant Places both use networks to see spaces in impossible 
> ways.  The former work shifts me more firmly into film because it's a 
> collaborative work and Frédérique's main medium is film.
> 
> We've both (Frédérique and myself) being talking about 
> deterritorialisation/reterritorialisation (sticking more closely with 
> Deleuze's spelling with an s) since it's been mentioned a few times now - 
> trying to unpack a little more how we feel Best of Luck with the Wall 
> (variant) deterritorialises a space.  For us I guess this occurs on two 
> levels; political, how politics is turing the US/Mexico border into a sort of 
> no-mans land, and technological, how the use of technology/seeing through 
> technology transforms the territory/space into something other than 
> geography.  We are not sure what that 'other' is precisely but its scale 
> (rapidly approaching actual scale) makes us think of Alfred Korzybski's 
> map-territory relation and Borges short story On Exactitude in Science.
> 
> There seem to be aspects of deterritorialisation/reterritorialisation in all 
> the works by the artist's this week (to greater and lesser degrees) - would 
> be useful if you could all unpack this for the list.
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, Apr 10, 2018 at 6:15 PM, Toby Tatum  > wrote:
> Yes, of course! That is why your name was familiar. I can see now how Best of 
> Luck with the Wall (variant) ties in with your installation at Stuttgarter 
> Filmwinter. I can see now that the 

[-empyre-] Week 2 of the April 2018 discussion: New Media Documentary Practice

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thanks, Patty and Helen, for participating in last week’s discussion.

This week’s guests include Dorit Naaman (CA), Luke Munn, (AU/NZ), Garrett Lynch 
and Frédérique Santune (IE/FR), and Toby Tatum (UK).

All have participated in the “Invisible Geographies” exhibition for the 
twentieth edition of FLEFF. For this discussion, I would like to consider them 
for their intersections with and interventions to assumptions about documentary 
and digital media, as well as nearby categories, such as experimental. Each of 
these projects engages with representations and performances of spaces that are 
both physical and psychical, contoured by the sensory and rational.

Dorit Naaman’s project _Jerusalem, We Are Here_, an ongoing project to remap of 
the international city of Jerusalem (Al-Quds in Arabic). The project takes the 
form of a platform that allows users to move through neighborhoods, past and 
present. Users explore the geographies of a city whose many ethnicities, 
religions, and cultures have been partly erased and severely diminished — none 
more than the indigenous Palestinians.

Luke Munn’s _Null Island_ explores how movement through our world is 
increasingly dependent on environments that exist partly as computer code — and 
what happens when connections between virtual and physical worlds break down. 
The project focuses attention on invisible manifestations of power by rendering 
their effects visible in an absurdist yet disquieting manner by highlighting a 
tiny island that exists only in GPS systems.

Garrett Lynch and Frédérique Santune’s _Best of Luck with the Wall (variant)_ 
allows users to move along the geopolitical border between México and the 
United States at a speed equivalent to driving in an automobile, thus gaining a 
sense of the scale of the border and counterproductive enterprise of dedicating 
public monies to policing and militarizing it.

The result of “a year-long vision quest into the twisted labyrinths of the 
forest,” The Toby Tatum Guide to Grottoes and Groves presents psychological and 
emotional geographies in particular and peculiar environments near the coastal 
town of Hastings (United Kingdom). _Toby Tatum’s The Toby Tatum Guide to 
Grottoes and Groves_ looks at the wooded world in coastal towns in the United 
Kingdom.

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:

Dorit Naaman (CA) is a documentarist and film theorist, born and raised in 
Jerusalem, who teaches film and media at Queen’s University (Ontario). She 
developed a format of short personal documentaries, which she calls 
DiaDocuMEntaRy. She has published on Israeli and to a lesser extent Palestinian 
cinema, focusing on gender, nationalism and militarism. She initiated 
_Jerusalem, We Are Here_ as a collaborative platform that can map and tell the 
stories of a Jerusalem that is no longer visible. To learn more about her work, 
visit her website: http://www.diadocumentary.com/.

Luke Munn (AU/NZ) uses the body and code, objects and performances to activate 
relationships and responses. His projects have been featured in the Kunsten 
Museum of Modern Art (DK), the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona 
(ES), the Fold Gallery London (UK), Causey Contemporary Brooklyn (US), and the 
Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum (TR), with commissions from Aotearoa Digital 
Arts, and TERMINAL. He is a Studio Supervisor at Whitecliffe College of Art and 
Design and a current Ph.D. candidate at Western Sydney University (AU).

Garrett Lynch (IE) is an artist, lecturer, and theorist. His arts practice, 
teaching, and research addresses networks (in their most open sense) within an 
artistic context; that is, the spaces between artist, artworks and audience as 
a means, site, and context for artistic initiation, creation, and discourse. 
His project with Frédérique Santune, _Best of Luck with the Wall (variant)_, is 
featured in the European Media Arts Festival (EMAF)’s “Report – Notes from 
Reality” exhibition, which opens in Osnabrück  (DE) on 18 April 2018 
(https://www.emaf.de/en/index.html).
 
Frédérique Santune (IE/FR) is a versatile artist/designer with fifteen years of 
experience in cultural and educational fields. She is interested in both paper 
and screen-based media, so long as it involves user journeys through words. Her 
project with Garrett Lynch, _Best of Luck with the Wall (variant)_, is featured 
in the European Media Arts Festival (EMAF)’s “Report – Notes from Reality” 
exhibition, which opens in Osnabrück  (DE) on 18 April 2018 
(https://www.emaf.de/en/index.html).
 
Toby Tatum (UK) has exhibited at film festivals and arts events, including the 
Rotterdam International Film Festival (NL), the Berwick Upon Tweed Film and 
Media Arts Festival (UK), the Swedenborg Film Festival 

Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to the April 2018 discussion: New Media Documentary Practice

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks for this question, C. Saper, and apologies for the delayed reply. (I was 
away for a weekend seminar with my students and returned to a 13-hour day of 
classes and meetings.)

For the FLEFF exhibition, we think of environments as constructed by multiple 
species. Liz Miller’s project "The Shore Line" is a great example of one in 
which some humans think about their role in living with nonhuman species, such 
as mangroves, in order to combat the damage to the planet by humans activities. 
She will be a guest later in the month, so we can ask her to think about the 
project in these terms then.

Patty and I discussed one project that might be considered a 
human-nonhuman-machine collaboration in our book _Thinking through Digital 
Media_ called "Farm Animal Drawing Generator” 
(http://www.gebseng.com/09_farm_animal_drawing_generator/), which involves cows 
and donkeys wearing GPS loggers to track their stochastic movements. I don’t 
think that this particular project occupies space in the way that Patty and 
Helen identify in their new book since the animals are imprisoned by humans. 
They do discuss projects that engage such environmentalist concerns.

Best,
Dale

> On Apr 5, 2018, at 19:48, C. Saper <csa...@umbc.edu> wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Thank you Patricia Zimmerman and Dale Hudson. I wonder if you might elaborate 
> more on groups or projects working specifically on what we used to call 
> nature documentaries — and if this might also involve animal-studies (with 
> the non-human persons as collaborators). Is this parallel to the nature 
> documentary or occupying that space?
> 
> Thanks again.
> 
> On April 5, 2018 at 11:36:16 AM, Patricia Zimmermann (pa...@ithaca.edu 
> <mailto:pa...@ithaca.edu>) wrote:
> 
>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>> 
>> 
>> Our concept of Open Space New Media Documentary explores the productive 
>> interstices between documentary and the digital turn.
>> New technologies, realigned social relations, and emerging 
>> contestatory political challenges call for a reexamination of documentary’s 
>> forms, functions, and roles. 
>> No longer a fixed object, documentary is taking on iterative, 
>> shape-shifting contours and migrating across multiple interfaces. 
>> Collaborative models of production, distribution, and exhibition reject 
>> enclosure and hierarchies. Open space new media documentary projects gesture 
>> towards a nexus of collaborations, community, convenings, histories, and 
>> technologies.
>> Documentary studies has focused on analog forms. 
>> 
>> However, new media documentary presents a more place-based 
>> practice of co-creation, collaboration, and community. Avoiding vertical 
>> hierarchies of production, the participatory documentary uses a horizontal 
>> system. No longer auteurs, documentary directors transform into community 
>> designers who convene people around contradictory, suppressed, and 
>> unresolved issues. In open space documentary, technologies meet places and 
>> people. 
>> 
>>  The documentary triangle of subject, filmmaker, and audience is 
>> a central metaphor informing documentary studies. In contrast, the open 
>> space documentary paradigm is circular, with media makers becoming 
>> place-based designers and audiences becoming engaged participants in 
>> collaborative encounters. These collaborative documentary practices move 
>> across the analog, digital, and embodied.
>> 
>> Open space new media practices emerge from long histories of collaborative, 
>> collective, and participatory media movements which critiqued auteurism and 
>> focused on communities and broader unresolved social and political issues. 
>> In the early 20th century, Dziga Vertov and the Kinoks (USSR) and the 
>> Workers Film and Photo League (US) refuted auteurism for collective work. In 
>> the 1960s, Challenge for Change (Canada) and the Newsreel Collective (US) 
>> addressed political issues from the perspectives of communities. In the 
>> 1970s and 1980s, Appalshop (US), Paper Tiger Television (US), and the Black 
>> Audio Collective (UK) advocated for collaborative processes to probe 
>> marginalized ideas and communities. In the 21st century, digital 
>> storytelling movements and global indigenous media production processes 
>> proliferate.
>> These aggregated storytelling micro-documentaries build mosaics 
>> that are localized, multi-voiced, and reciprocal. They experiment with how 
>> to design dialogic appro

[-empyre-] Welcome to the April 2018 discussion: New Media Documentary Practice

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Welcome to the April 2018 discussion: new media documentary practice, moderated 
by Dale Hudson (AE/US).

I hope that the discussion opens expectations about documentary to modes that 
use digital technologies to help us reengage the complexities our world. Some 
recover repressed or overlooked histories; others speculate on possible 
futures. Some analyze the everyday mediated images of the world that shape our 
perceptions of global connections; others locate themselves in particular 
locations to reveal subtle and often subjective details that might otherwise 
escape notice.

The last three weeks will focus on artists, scholars, and others participating 
in the “Invisible Geographies” exhibition for the twentieth edition of the 
Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, which reimagines how we think about 
documentary across vectors that are visible and invisible, material and 
immaterial, audible and inaudible.

Confirmed guests include: Philip Cartelli (US/FR), Dawn Dawson-House (US), 
Helen De Michiel (US), Adam Fish (UK), Garrett Lynch and Frédérique Santune 
(IE/FR), Erin McElroy (US), Liz Miller (US/CA), Max Schleser (AU), Naz Shahrokh 
(IR/AE), Sarah Shamash (BR/CA), Toby Tatum (UK), Steve WetzeL (USA), and 
Patricia R. Zimmermann (US).

For the first week, the discussion will focus on Patricia R. Zimmermann and 
Helen De Michiel’s new book _Open Space New Media Documentary: A Toolkit for 
Theory and Practice_ (Routledge, 2017), which reimagines how we think about and 
teach documentary practice.

They highlight community-based practices that are sustainable, scalable, and 
relatively inexpensive. They also select and analyze documentary projects made 
between 2000 and 2017 by artists and scholars in Argentina, Canada, China, 
Ghana, Indonesia, Peru, Syria, Ukraine, United States, and elsewhere, including 
the in-between spaces of diaspora and exile.

Their book also bridges what is often conceived as a divide between theory and 
practice by offering a “toolkit” for putting theory into practice, but also one 
for opening theory to considering a range of practices that have emerged with 
new technologies and even been ignored or marginalized by past generations.

With this message, I invite the –empyre subscriber list to discuss these issues 
in our soft-skinned space with our distinguished group of weekly guests. 

Best,
Dale

Guest bios:

Patricia R. Zimmermann (US) is professor of screen studies at Ithaca College in 
the United States. Her books include _The Flaherty: Decades in the Cause of 
Independent Cinema_ (2017); _Open Space: Openings, Closings, and Thresholds of 
Independent Public Media_ (2016); _Thinking Through Digital Media: 
Transnational Environments and Locative Places_ (2015), and many others.

Helen De Michiel (US) is a filmmaker, writer, and community designer based in 
Berkeley in the United States. Her documentary projects include the 
work-in-progress _Knocking on Doors_, _Lunch Love Community_ (2015), _The 
Gender Chip Project_ (2004), _Turn Here Sweet Corn_ (1990), the dramatic 
feature _Tarantella_ (1994), and many other shorts and media installations.


Moderator bio: 

Dale Hudson (AE/US) teaches in the Film and New Media Program at New York 
University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) in the United Arab Emirates. He is a digital 
curator for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) and 
coordinator of Films from the Gulf at the Middle East Studies Association 
(MESA) FilmFest. He is author of _Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods_ 
(2017) and co-author of _Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational 
Environments and Locative Places_ (2015). 

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[-empyre-] Welcome to the April 2018 discussion: New Media Documentary Practice

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Welcome to the April 2018 discussion: new media documentary practice, moderated 
by Dale Hudson (AE/US).

I hope that the discussion opens expectations about documentary to modes that 
use digital technologies to help us reengage the complexities our world. Some 
recover repressed or overlooked histories; others speculate on possible 
futures. Some analyze the everyday mediated images of the world that shape our 
perceptions of global connections; others locate themselves in particular 
locations to reveal subtle and often subjective details that might otherwise 
escape notice.

The last three weeks will focus on artists, scholars, and others participating 
in the “Invisible Geographies” exhibition for the twentieth edition of the 
Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, which reimagines how we think about 
documentary across vectors that are visible and invisible, material and 
immaterial, audible and inaudible.

Confirmed guests include: Philip Cartelli (US/FR), Dawn Dawson-House (US), 
Helen De Michiel (US), Adam Fish (UK), Garrett Lynch and Frédérique Santune 
(IE/FR), Erin McElroy (US), Liz Miller (US/CA), Max Schleser (AU), Naz Shahrokh 
(IR/AE), Sarah Shamash (BR/CA), Toby Tatum (UK), Steve WetzeL (USA), and 
Patricia R. Zimmermann (US).

For the first week, the discussion will focus on Patricia R. Zimmermann and 
Helen De Michiel’s new book _Open Space New Media Documentary: A Toolkit for 
Theory and Practice_ (Routledge, 2017), which reimagines how we think about and 
teach documentary practice.

They highlight community-based practices that are sustainable, scalable, and 
relatively inexpensive. They also select and analyze documentary projects made 
between 2000 and 2017 by artists and scholars in Argentina, Canada, China, 
Ghana, Indonesia, Peru, Syria, Ukraine, United States, and elsewhere, including 
the in-between spaces of diaspora and exile.

Their book also bridges what is often conceived as a divide between theory and 
practice by offering a “toolkit” for putting theory into practice, but also one 
for opening theory to considering a range of practices that have emerged with 
new technologies and even been ignored or marginalized by past generations.
 
With this message, I invite the –empyre subscriber list to discuss these issues 
in our soft-skinned space with our distinguished group of weekly guests. 

Best,
Dale

Guest bios:

Patricia R. Zimmermann (US) is professor of screen studies at Ithaca College in 
the United States. Her books include _The Flaherty: Decades in the Cause of 
Independent Cinema_ (2017); _Open Space: Openings, Closings, and Thresholds of 
Independent Public Media_ (2016); _Thinking Through Digital Media: 
Transnational Environments and Locative Places_ (2015), and many others.
 
Helen De Michiel (US) is a filmmaker, writer, and community designer based in 
Berkeley in the United States. Her documentary projects include the 
work-in-progress _Knocking on Doors_, _Lunch Love Community_ (2015), _The 
Gender Chip Project_ (2004), _Turn Here Sweet Corn_ (1990), the dramatic 
feature _Tarantella_ (1994), and many other shorts and media installations.


Moderator bio: 

Dale Hudson (AE/US) teaches in the Film and New Media Program at New York 
University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) in the United Arab Emirates. He is a digital 
curator for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) and 
coordinator of Films from the Gulf at the Middle East Studies Association 
(MESA) FilmFest. He is author of _Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods_ 
(2017) and co-author of _Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational 
Environments and Locative Places_ (2015). 
 
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Re: [-empyre-] closing down the November discussion on -empyre

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks, Renate — and thanks to everyone for sharing your ideas and work with us!

Patty and I have really appreciated the opportunity to learn more about the 
projects that we discussed in our book, which we sometimes describe as a 
“celebration of collaboration.” Our framework emerged within the process of 
curating. We saw our work as making connections between the projects that 
artists, activists, advocate, intellectuals, and students were making around 
the world in different contexts.

I want to acknowledge the intellectual work of Patty and ,her co-director of 
the FLEFF, Tom Shevory, for devising FLEFF’s innovative themes that guide the 
calls for submissions for the online exhibitions, as well as Tanya Saunders, 
Assistant Provost of International Programs and Extended Studies, who makes 
FLEFF possible in so many ways. And, of course, a huge thank you to you 
(Renate) and Tim for keeping this platform alive and also for inaugurating the 
very first online exhibition at FLEFF nearly a decade ago.

Finally, I want to share with everyone the link to the latest FLEFF exhibit, 
Iterations as Habitats (http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff/iterations/), which 
includes brilliant projects by Francois Knoetza (South Africa), Chiara Passa 
(Italy), Kuesti Fraun (Germany), Ben Grosser (USA), Shazia Javed 
(India/Canada), Leah Shafer (USA), Banu Colak (Turkey/UAE), and Mario Ceolin 
(Italy).

Best,
Dale


On Dec 1, 2015, at 9:04, Renate Terese Ferro <rfe...@cornell.edu> wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> On behalf of -empyre we would like to thank Dale Hudson and Patty
> Zimmermann and their monthly guests for participating in the month's
> discussion highlighting global issues in new media practices.  It has been
> especially appreciated amongst the backdrop of campus uprisings and global
> violence and unrest.  These issues percolated throughout the discussions
> all month and are sure to remain throughout our discussions.  Locative
> media, political and ecological impacts, migration and global movements
> are some of the highlights from this month¹s large group of guests.  We
> appreciate all of your contributions and hope you will remain active in
> our global community. Thank you again to all of you.
> 
> Renate
> 
> 
> Renate Ferro
> Visiting Associate Professor of Art
> 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 Moderator of -empyre- soft skinned space
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

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Re: [-empyre-] week four | engagement with place/from Helen

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks, Helen, Babak, and Chris for sharing these thoughts.

Helen, your description of the projects that we’ve been discussing this month 
as "hacks into the system” and “creative and radical bursts” is wonderful. I 
think that for Patty and I (as well as our collaborators at FLEFF, especially 
Tom Shevory, Sharon Lin Tay, and Claudia Pederson) have been inspired by ways 
that people have come together to refocus our attention within all of the 
distraction of competing voices and perspectives. Your Love Lunch Community is 
amazing in this regard, particularly for the ways that its engages very 
particular spaces rather than flattens particularity into an oppressive 
universalism, which was another of Patty’s and my concerns in the book.

Babak, Dérive.app (along with Leila and Cary’s IH+) is brilliant for its 
locative practices via mobile networks. The customized deck — both for hiking 
in IH+ and for specific locations in Dérive.app — offer an opportunity to 
notice what we forgot to notice in the daily routines of our lives. I still 
remember the workshop for creating the Dérive.app deck for Abu Dhabi. Following 
the task cards, I got “lost” in my own neighborhood and engaged with it in a 
completely different way. 

Chris, your Exit Six series are fascinating. In our book, Patty and I tired to 
contextualize ways that artists think through digital media, and your paintings 
are a wonderful illustration of what we mean (and I wish that we’d included 
them!) for your use of an aesthetics of digital glitches and digital 
broadcasting as a way to reconceptualize painting — and explore the 
ever-shifting terrain of human relations with technologies. Same with Flag 
Bombs, which moves into subjects that have become increasingly taboo in the 
United States in a moment of what appears (at least from the outside) as one of 
de-democratization.

Thanks again to all of you for sharing your thoughts and projects with us. 
Truly inspirational!

Best,
Dale


On Nov 30, 2015, at 21:44, Kienke, Christopher  wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi Everyone,
> 
> 
> I began my career as an abstract painter and Tarek as a photographer.
> Tarek and I
> collaborated on the War Room a decade ago. The effort started as two
> completely
> independent efforts.  We were both in our own apartments unsure how to
> react to the impending invasion and subsequent war and so we started
> photographing our television screens. I began to do this as a
> way of bearing witness, Tarek can speak to his motivations. I continued to
> photograph until President Bush stood on the back of an aircraft carrier
> and
> declared ³mission accomplished². I shut the tv off in disgust.
> 
> A couple of months later Tarek set a photo down in front of me. It was a
> picture of the tv
> screen. Tarek is known for practical jokes so I thought he had somehow
> stolen my pictures as a joke. He assured he had not. He then showed my
> over 600+ photos he had taken with his camera. I was in shock, I went home
> and returned with my laptop to show him the 600+ photographs of the
> television I had taken
> as well. There is coincidence and then there is fate, we started to
> collaborate that day and both
> of us started to photograph the television again. Our archive documents
> the death of a Pope, the beginning of the colonization of Mars with our
> robots, the death of world leaders and the continuation of a war.
> We were fortunate enough to have the work commissioned by Jack Persekian
> for the Sharjah Biennial in 2005. An image of this work is in Patricia and
> Dale¹s book.
> 
> 
> Since then I have been continuing to use digital media in my work as a
> tool, often incorporating traditional painting and drawing along with
> digital imagery. I have included some writing about two recent projects
> below to help the conservation. You can see images of the new work at:
> www.kienke.com
> 
> 
> Thanks for reading,
> Chris Kienke
> 
> 
> Exit Six
> For the past five years I have been working on a series of paintings
> titled Exit Six. In Exit Six, I am painting on photographs taken from the
> television screen when the electronic signal is interrupted.  When the DVD
> gets stuck or the network is jammed, the image on screen freezes and
> becomes pixelated. Exit Six observes through this glitch. Using this
> ³post-analog² approach to painting, I have been able to abstract each
> image to
> interrupt the viewing experience in order to reflect on notions of reality
> and ³virtuality². I am interested in how the visual language of film and
> television informs the creation of an individual¹s beliefs and sense of
> identity. My ³tele-visual² images integrate technology and painting, as
> both subject and process, which
> further challenges traditional notions of painting. Moreover, my
> examination of digital images now situates my work within the 

Re: [-empyre-] week three | locative scraping and counter-surveillance

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks, Robert and Michael — and apologies for the delayed reply.

Robert, Interesting observation that our inboxes seem like streams of data 
rather than collections of documents. Your code visualizes a way of seeing this 
data as potentially meaningful information that seems a contestation of ways 
that our data is used for surveillance. 

Michael, "Insurance.AE256" and “PRISM” are fascinating exploration of 
comparable questions of how data is transformed into information that is 
potentially useful or harmful. The quote by Snowden is a chilling illustration. 

The various projects by both of you are continually being refreshed in their 
relevance and urgency. The recent panic and paranoia that I’ve been seeing in 
the news in France and even far away in the United States seems like a replay 
of the panic and paranoia around 9/11 and 7/7 that was instrumentalized in some 
devastating ways. 

All of the recent fears over Daesh come shortly after the criticisms of the 
Digital India project that Modi’s government is promoting (overseas in 
California and England) as a nonpolitical improvement in infrastructure. The 
violence against voices of dissent have been very disturbing, as have the 
overly racist statements by U.S. politicians. 

Thanks to both of you for helping us to see through the ways that we are 
collectively coaxed into complicity through practices in journalism and 
security.

Best,
Dale


On Dec 1, 2015, at 3:45, Michael Takeo Magruder <m...@takeo.org> wrote:


> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Hello Dale,
> 
> My more recent explorations regarding "the fabrication of truth in news" in
> many ways reflect upon the changing nature of journalism in today's data
> disclosure/social media culture. Two projects come to mind:
> "Insurance.AES256" and "PRISM".
> 
> "Insurance.AES256" was produced in 2011 during the height of the
> WikiLeaks/Julian Assange controversy for the exhibition "All That Fits: The
> Aesthetics of Journalism" (QUAD, UK). The project sought to consider not
> only this particular story, but more importantly, to question how
> organisations like WikiLeaks and personalities like Assange now have the
> ability to shift/subvert journalistic practice in ways that can be either
> beneficial or problematic for society. 
> 
> The second work, "PRISM" was commissioned in 2014 by the UK theatre company
> Headlong to coincide with their (now internationally acclaimed) production
> of George Orwell's "1984". The artwork sought to draw comparisons between
> Edward Snowden and Orwell's fictional protagonist Winston Smith - as both
> could be considered 'everymen' of their generation. The installation's
> central component was created from algorithmically remixed interview footage
> of Snowden combined with flickering snapshots of his disclosed data. This
> endless video montage provided a narrative for the work, while the
> surrounding elements of the installation incorporated shifting streams of
> live personal data that had been scraped from the social media sites which
> were being targeted by the NSA's mass surveillance programmes.  However, the
> point of the work was not just to reflect on the present concerns over
> privacy and surveillance, but also to consider how the "truth" surrounding
> any individual can now be fabricated. To quote Snowden: "...it's getting to
> the point where you don't have to have done anything wrong. You simply have
> to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody - even by a wrong call. And
> then they can [] go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever
> made, every friend you've ever discussed something with. And attack you on
> that basis to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint
> anyone in the context of a wrongdoer..."
> 
> Insurance.AES256
> http://www.takeo.org/nspace/2011-insurance_aes256/ 
> 
> All That Fits: The Aesthetics of Journalism
> http://www.derbyquad.co.uk/exhibition/all-fits-aesthetics-journalism 
> 
> PRISM
> http://www.takeo.org/nspace/2014-prism/ 
> 
> Headlong - Digital Double 
> http://headlong.co.uk/
> http://www.digital-double.com/digital-double/ 
> 
> -------
> Michael Takeo Magruder
> www.takeo.org
> ---
> 
> -Original Message-
> From: empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> [mailto:empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Dale Hudson
> Sent: 24 November 2015 20:09
> To: soft_skinned_space
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] week three | locative scraping and
> counter-surveillance
> 
> --empyre

[-empyre-] week four | engagement with place

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Welcome to our final week of Transnational Environments and Locative places.

This week we continue our overlapping discussions with a focus on engaging 
place, suggesting ways that we might engage micro-politics to locate and claim 
places within the larger spaces defined by dominant forms of knowledge, power, 
and control.

Helen De Michiel’s Love Lunch Community is a series of short videos and website 
that move from classrooms to social media in an effort to increase awareness 
about nutrition in public schools. The project is a grassroots intervention to 
undo the damages of policies derived under U.S.-style democracy that fail to 
protect children’s health to ensure learning as school lunch programs are 
increasingly privatized through deals with transnational corporations, such as 
Coca-cola and MacDonald’s. 

Enrico Aditjondro worked to develop EngageMedia as a portal for video 
file-sharing around a diverse set of urgent issues regarding environmental and 
social justice, particularly in the Asia Pacific region, particularly Southeast 
Asia, but also in parts of South Asia and Southwest Asia (Middle East). The 
platform aims as participation by designing media to circulate via social media 
to open discussion across specific contexts. Migrant Worker Stories, for 
example, emerges in collaboration with advocacy organizations and include 
capacity-building workshops. 

Tarek Al-Ghoussein and Chris Kleine’s collaborative The War Room creates a 
place for critical reflection on the transnational environments of war and 
trade that are created around us in 24/7 broadcasts by state and corporate news 
channels, such as Al Jazeera, BBC, and CNN. In the case of this project, 
Al-Ghoussein and Kleine analyzed and recomposed the tele-visuals of the second 
U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. Reassembling still images from 
these broadcasts into a “war room,” the project allows us to enter into the 
militant mindset of the United States.

Patty and I invite our guests to post more about these and other projects.



WEEK 4—ENGAGEMENT OF PLACE


Helen De Michiel (Love Lunch Community), United States
Helen De Michiel is a writer/director, producer, and author whose work includes 
film, television, media installation and new media. Her films in circulation 
include “Turn Here Sweet Corn,” “Tarantella,” “The Gender Chip Project” and 
“Lunch Love Community.” At Twin Cities Public Television she produced 
innovative arts series, “Alive From Off Center,” and “The Independents.” She 
has designed several participatory media projects for museums and 
organizations. She writes about issues in public media and the arts, including 
the co-authored essay with Patricia Zimmermann, “Open Space Documentary,” in 
The Documentary Film Book (2013). From 1996 to 2010 Helen served as the 
National, and then Co-Director for NAMAC. From 2002-2007 she served on the 
Board of Directors for The George F. Peabody Awards for Electronic Media. From 
2011-13, she designed and taught a blended online course in participatory media 
at the University of Oregon. In 2016, she joins University of Colorado’s 
Department of Critical Media Practices. Her most recently completed project, 
“Lunch Love Community” (2015) is a transmedia documentary in twelve episodes 
exploring how Berkeley advocates and educators tackle food reform and food 
justice in the schools and in the neighborhoods. She is currently writing a 
book exploring core creative values that the media arts offer for participatory 
digital culture.

Enrico Aditjondro (EngageMedia), Indonesia
Enrico Aditjondro has lived in Indonesia, West Papua, United States, Australia, 
and Timor-Leste. He started his journalism career in 1998 when he joined The 
Maritime Workers’ Journal in Sydney. He moved to Jakarta in 2000 and joined the 
Southeast Asia Press Alliance, while also traveling and working in Timor-Leste 
with UNESCO and the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor 
(UNTAET). In 2005 he co-founded and was managing editor for Paras Indonesia, 
which became one of the country’s leading bilingual social-political websites. 
He has worked for the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 
The International News Safety Institute, Transparency International-Indonesia, 
and EngageMedia. He is currently working in West Papua as a producer for Big 
Stories Small Towns, an evolving multiplatform documentary about love, humour, 
family and belonging.

Tarek Al-Ghoussein (The War Room), United Arab Emirates/Kuwait/Palestine
Tarek Al-Ghoussein is an artist and Professor of Visual Art at New York 
University Abu Dhabi. A primary focus of Al-Ghousseins's studio teaching is 
developing a strong formal awareness among students and facilitating the 
ability to manifest ideas in visual form. As a Kuwaiti of Palestinian origin, 
much of Al-Ghoussein's professional work deals with how his identity is shaped 

Re: [-empyre-] week three | locative scraping and counter-surveillance

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thanks, Robert.

Can you say more about the databases that some of the Crufts projects scrape? 

Are they all publicly available? I’m thinking of images from CCTV cameras and 
other private and public surveillance systems.

Have people been rallying for increased surveillance in the United States since 
the Paris (and Beirut and Bamoko) attacks?

Best,
Dale



On Nov 20, 2015, at 5:44, Robert Spahr <r...@robertspahr.com> wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> On Wed, 18 Nov 2015 23:40:07 +0400
> Dale Hudson <dale.hud...@nyu.edu> wrote:
> 
>> One of our favorites, is Distress Cruft (my fellow americans), which
>> scrapes the security photographs for tourists to the Empire State
>> Building in New York — the very photos that tourist can purchase as
>> souvenirs. The program composites the image with a U.S. flag hung to
>> signal distress, thus visualizing the content state of distress in
>> post-9/11 NYC. It asks us to question the erosion of privacy in the
>> name of security.
> 
> 
> Thanks to both Dale and Patty for moderating this month. 
> 
> I want to build upon Dale's comments about my work called Distress
> Cruft (my fellow americans).  This work represents one of the major
> themes in my creative practice regarding the ways that the network and
> software in general can be used as tools of freedom and control. For
> example, the use of free software such as GNU+Linux allows one
> the freedom to understand how the software works, rather than being
> controlled by proprietary softwares hidden algorithms. Free software
> respects the users freedoms.
> 
> After the recent terrorist attacks in Paris last week, the discussion
> in the main stream media seems to be pointing to the _possible_ use of
> encryption, and if encryption is allowed to continue, it will prevent
> law enforcement from keeping us safe from future attacks.  An
> alternative argument would be that encryption keeps our data and
> privacy safe from those who would cause harm.
> 
> We are in distress, hence the signal of the upside down flag in my
> artwork, and with each terrorist attack we continue to lose control of
> our data, privacy, and the network. 
> 
> Distress Cruft (my fellow americans) was created in reaction to living
> in Manhattan after 9/11, when the number of CCTV cameras increased, and
> our bags were beginning to be searched when one traveled by subway.
> Unfortunately, these most recent attacks show the power grab for our
> privacy has only gotten worse, as we continue to give up more freedoms,
> for the illusion of more security. 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Robert Spahr
> http://www.robertspahr.com
> 
> 
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

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Re: [-empyre-] week three | locative scraping and counter-surveillance

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thanks, Michael, for this information and the link to the article.

Are you working on any new projects that explore the fabrication of truth in 
news?

I’ve been struck by the ways that French news this past week reminds me of U.S. 
news after 9/11. 

France 24/7 was 24/7 on the attacks with little space for the news elsewhere 
apart from French military strikes. 

Best,
Dale


On Nov 20, 2015, at 22:36, Michael Takeo Magruder <m...@takeo.org> wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Many thanks to Dale and Patty for inviting me to be a part of this week's
> conversation.
> 
> The artworks of mine that Dale referenced in his introduction are still
> online and working (even though they were created around a decade ago). They
> can be accessed here:
> 
> "[ FALLUJAH . IRAQ . 31/03/2004 ]", 2004
> http://www.takeo.org/nspace/ns011/
> 
> "{transcription}", 2006
> http://www.takeo.org/nspace/ns017/
> 
> Both projects are aligned to my longstanding exploration of global news
> media. This thread of my practice certainly relates to examining the
> contextualization/decontextualization of information flows, and how history
> is formed - or even fabricated - in the present data-driven age. Within this
> context, I am particularly interested in how the notion of 'truth' is
> derived and then propagated or subverted by systems of "freedom and control"
> (linking into Robert's thoughts from his last post).  
> 
> A few years ago Jo-Anne Green (co-director of Turbulence.org) authored a
> very insightful essay - entitled "Parsing Truths" - about this area of my
> work. In it she writes:
> 
> "Frequently, Takeo arrests this often instantaneous, sometimes contextless
> 'reportage' and re-mediates it within a 'contemplative space' in which
> deeper truths stand a better chance of being revealed and understood. He
> captures headlines and articles about worldwide, often catastrophic, events
> from the 24/7 'space of flows' (Manuel Castells), demanding that we see,
> read and listen. He juxtaposes/opposes multiple media streams - image, text,
> sound - within single works, bombarding our senses until we are able (if we
> are able) to separate the 'signal' from the 'noise': 'narratives are like
> temporal filters whose function is to transform the emotive charge linked to
> the event into . units of information capable of giving rise to something
> like meaning.' (Lyotard) While Takeo rescues some of these events from
> potential obscurity, he does not pretend to present them factually. He does,
> however, want us to experience them authentically."
> 
> The full essay is available in my 2012 monograph "(re)mediation_s" -  a free
> PDF version of the book is available to download here:
> 
> http://www.takeo.org/projects/remediations/
> 
> ---
> Michael Takeo Magruder
> www.takeo.org
> ---
> 
> -Original Message-
> From: empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> [mailto:empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Dale Hudson
> Sent: 18 November 2015 19:40
> To: soft_skinned_space
> Subject: [-empyre-] week three | locative scraping and counter-surveillance
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> 
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

___
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empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
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Re: [-empyre-] week two | transnational collaboration research/practice

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks, Leila and Cary, for this overview of IH+. I’m looking forward to your 
forthcoming article in Leonardo!

I think that IH+’s challenge to the “default mode” is precisely what Patty and 
I found so productive about the various projects that we discuss in the book. 

In particular, we were impressed by ways that IH+ not only tries to dislodge 
default assumptions about mobile devices but also our default assumptions about 
our participation in a broader environment that includes human and nonhuman 
animals — and animals and nonanimals, including pants and trees along with less 
visible living and vibrant matter.

I would love to know more about ways that IH+ helps to dislodge default 
assumptions about “wilderness.” Can you offer an example?

Best,
Dale

On Nov 18, 2015, at 4:20, Leila Christine Nadir  wrote:

> Hello everyone:
> 
>  
> It's a pleasure to be working with all of you to build upon the discussion 
> initiated by Dale and Patty's Thinking through Digital Media book.
> 
>  
> First, I'd like to provide this URL so that readers might be able to see some 
> imagery and get a feel for Indeterminate Hikes+ if they like: 
> http://www.ecoarttech.net/project/indeterminate-hike/. I'd also like to say 
> that we have a in-depth essay forthcomin
> 
> ​g in Leonardo about Indeterminate Hikes+ project, part of a special 
> issue on mobile media art, edited by Mimi Sheller and Hana Iverson.​
> 
>  
> Our Indeterminate Hikes+ mobile media app project originated in our desire to 
> rethink the way mobile media devices are used, and to test some of the 
> criticisms leveraged against mobile computing devices by media theorists and 
> environmental thinkers--and to also adapt psychogeography, happenings, and 
> maybe even a little Buddhist meditation and mindfulness for the smartphone 
> era. We are environmental artists, so we are involved in a lot of ecocritical 
> scenes, where it was quite common a few years ago to hear that smartphones 
> will destroy the planet because all those screens are directing attention 
> away from the world around us.
> 
>  
> In that context, Indeterminate Hikes+ was a sort of test, a social hack, a 
> way to break down the instrumentality of GoogleMaps, and to work against what 
> Jason Farman calls the "default mode" of mobile media use. We use this quote 
> a lot, so if you've ever seen one of our talks, you've probably already heard 
> it: "While our devices can and do pull us away from a deep engagement with 
> people and spaces, this doesn’t have to be the default mode for the ways we 
> use our mobile media… if used in a dynamic way that addresses the medium’s 
> strengths, mobile media can actually get us to engage with each other and 
> with the spaces we move through in deep, meaningful, and context-rich ways." 
> At the same time, we were adapting the discourse of wilderness--most famously 
> deconstructed by historian William Cronon--for urban settings. Misusing 
> "wilderness" and turning it into a poetic concept rather than a geographical 
> or ecological label.
> 
>  
> Here's how the app works:
> 
>  
> After downloading the app, IH+ users input their starting points (usually 
> their current locations) and their destinations. The app, rather than 
> providing the quickest route from one location to the other, mis-uses 
> GoogleMaps to create an indirect, meandering path that makes no sense in 
> terms of efficiency. As their phones direct them along these spontaneous 
> trails, participants are stopped at Scenic Vistas. In traditional wilderness 
> discourse, a ‘scenic vista’ signifies sublime nature that is supposed to awe 
> and inspire: views atop mountains where one can see for miles, a canyon where 
> one pulls off the road for a closer look, a majestic waterfall where one sets 
> down her backpack. Indeterminate Hikes+, however, does not work this way. The 
> app’s Scenic Vistas have a decidedly different character than the special 
> markers we are accustomed to. Rather than landmarks designated on a static 
> map, predetermined by either cultural values or an authoritative human guide, 
> IH+ provides Scenic Vistas entirely at random, so you might end up at a rain 
> gutter, alleyway, or abandoned house. To put this in terms of media and 
> mapping: IH+ does not use mobile media technology to communicate 
> pre-established environmental data, simply linking hikers with pre-approved 
> places understood easily as beautiful nature or sublime wilderness. This 
> would repeat, in effect, the privileging of wilderness that Cronon 
> criticizes. And such an approach would not take advantage of the unique 
> qualities of mobile media; it would entail simply uploading the age-old, 
> hierarchical experience of print cartography onto our smartphones. Instead, 
> IH+ reworks navigational technologies in order to create Scenic Vistas that 
> are always changing, using mobile 

Re: [-empyre-] week two | transnational collaboration research/practice

[Dale Hudson]

ision of 
> labor on the assembly line. In its just-in-time production model, workers got 
> to meet the actual customers ordering the jeans as this took place through a 
> webcam. They could also see the fruits of their labor as the customers would 
> often show the workers the final finished jeans by holding them up in front 
> of the webcam.
> 
> Although the jeans were a smashing hit at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, 
> Jeff and I were lousy virtual entrepreneurs and were losing money on the 
> business. So we came up with a new product that was less costly and could 
> also leverage a more robust crowdsourcing platform that was gaining 
> popularity called Mechanical Turk (mTurk) and created by Amazon.com. 
> “Laborers of Love (LOL),” created in various stages from 2010-2012 (and is 
> still online so try it) is an adult entertainment website that outsources 
> your intimate fantasies. Through an online form and a Paypal account you can 
> create a fantasy that gets outsourced to an anonymous group of mTurk workers. 
> The higher the price, meaning the more you are willing to pay, the faster you 
> get it because your HITS (mturk job tasks) are worth more money. What the 
> project ultimately does is map out the distributed production of your fantasy 
> in real time through our web interface. You can watch it get made through a 
> real time global map – see workers taking the mTurk HITS and where they are 
> geographically located via their IP addresses.
> 
> When you enter your fantasy it gets broken down into 3 parts so the workers 
> only get a fragment. And since they are working via mTurk, they are not 
> specifically sex workers. These aspects of the project leave a very 
> interesting space for thinking about how interpretation can happen through 
> anonymous collaboration and how in this project it mediates desire.
> 
> Cheers, Stephanie
> 
>  
> 
> On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 5:15 PM, Dale Hudson <dale.hud...@nyu.edu> wrote:
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> 10–16 November 2015: 
> TRANSNATIONAL COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH/PRACTICE
> 
> We continue the discussion of potentials and limitations of thinking through 
> digital media into the area of transnational collaboration in 
> research/practice with a few examples of projects that we discuss in our 
> book. 
> 
> These projects foreground collaboration — not in the sense of “interaction” 
> or “participation” that are promoted by corporations and increasingly by 
> states, all of which have well-publicized links to data collection and 
> surveillance — but collaboration in ways that foregrounds ethical and 
> political considerations.CAMP’s From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf is a collaborative 
> project that Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukaran developed in collaboration with 
> migrant sailers who transport goods between India and Pakistan, Iran and the 
> Arabian Gulf, and East Africa. The film is compiled from videos that the 
> sailers make and exchange with one another, mostly set to music that evokes 
> their experience of months at sea away from family and friends. The videos 
> are not made with us in mind as an audience. With the increased attention to 
> the history of the Indian Ocean World, FGtGtG helps us visualize the 
> continuum of cultural and economic exchanges that predate the violent 
> interruption of European colonialism that carved the region into strategic 
> areas of study/control that have encouraged sectarian violence. Unlike 
> conventional documentary, FGtGtG foregrounds emotion and unknowability over 
> facts and evidence; it does not pretend to interpret the lives of the sailers 
> for us. 
> 
> Two projects by Stephanie Rothenberg and Jeff Crouse facilitate opportunities 
> for us to think about the ways that we might be (and most likely are) 
> complicit with the exploitation of labor. They do as much, however, with a 
> sense of humor, which is often necessary to get us to drop our defenses and 
> pretenses. Invisible Threads is a locative media project that makes the 
> invisible power structures of just-in-time production visible and wearable. 
> It moves from the virtual world of social networking and role-playing in 
> Second Life to the physical world in live performance. Comparably, Laborers 
> of Love (LOL) prompts us to think about the outsourcing to (relatively) 
> anonymous workers through Amazon’s MTurk as well as the fetishization of 
> glitch art. The project’s online platform allows us to commission adult video 
> with settings for customized content and glitches, as a means to reflect upon 
> the immodest ways that neoliberalism’s flexible systems are promoted 
> (sometimes even erotically) as simulating economic growth. 
> 
> Leila Nadir and Cary Peppe

Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 131, Issue 7

[Dale Hudson]

phy that generates an archive as it 
> also maps space differently.  The other part of your post describes the 
> student uprisings in South Africa at the moment, a movement that has been 
> virtually erased from news coverage in the US and Europe.  I only learned of 
> it through a Facebook link and then through the  powerful talk on radical 
> historiographic temporalities of Premesh Lalu at a recent closing lecture at 
> the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University (mounted by Tim Murray 
> of Empyre).
> 
> You post is so powerful.
> 
> I wondered if you might share with our list what kinds of mapping, mobile, 
> and organizing interfaces are being deployed in this new movement?  How do 
> they intersect with the issues you outlined?  How do they move between the 
> digital and the embodied?  And what kinds of mobilizations in both digital 
> and embodied, on the ground demonstrations, are evolving? It strikes me that 
> the current student movement in South Africa perhaps opens up our discussion 
> of mobile apps and environmental performances towards a move transnational 
> consideration.
> 
> Patty
> 
> Patricia R. Zimmermann, Ph.D.
> Professor of Screen Studies
> Roy H. Park School of Communication
> Codirector, Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival
> 
> Ithaca College
> 953 Danby Road
> Ithaca, New York 14850 USA
> 
> http://faculty.ithaca.edu:83/patty/
> http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff
> 
> 
> 
> From: empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au 
> <empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of Dale Hudson 
> <dale.hud...@nyu.edu>
> Sent: Friday, November 6, 2015 8:41 AM
> To: soft_skinned_space
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] week one | mobile apps and environmental performance
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Thanks, Jeff.
> 
> Patty and I really loved the way that the PlantBots initiate discussions 
> without the same potentially threatening affect of more direct approaches to 
> documenting the health and environmental hazards of GMOs, which we imagined 
> as a corollary of sorts to ways that corporations exercise intellectual 
> property to discourage innovation with digital technologies and media content.
> 
> Could you tell us more about what you?re been doing int relation to 
> pollinator decline? I would also be interested to know whether you and Wendy 
> have been thinking of any of these issues in relation to indigenous rights?
> 
> Best,
> Dale
> 
> 
> On Nov 5, 2015, at 17:00, Jeff Schmuki <jschm...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> > Hello Dale and All,
> >
> > PlantBot Genetics began as a street-based project where we would release 
> > PlantBots into public spaces.  These humorous PlantBot Invasions would 
> > easily draw attention, and once someone stops for a moment, they will ask a 
> > question. Humor is a vital ingredient as it creates a safe place for the 
> > discussion to occur.  Those visiting hopefully come away empowered through 
> > links, published information, and guidelines for better food and 
> > environmental practices at home. Today we often use an 18? off-grid, 
> > trailer (ArtLab) converted into a mobile platform containing a library of 
> > information and hands-on activities. Most are surprised at the 
> > proliferation of GM products in the market and being unlabeled, we all are 
> > consuming them. Is it better to have a choice? When the project began in 
> > 2009, most were unaware of GMOs and wanted to learn more. Today many do 
> > know and while some just want to play with the PlantBots, complex 
> > discussions on supporting transparency in food labeling, suppor
>  ting local farming, composting, pollinator decline and native plants, always 
> transpire. Everyone seems to have a good time and PlantBot fun transcends 
> language wherever we are. GM research is being done worldwide today, and is a 
> complex issue yet, "what will it all become" is an interesting question. 
> PlantBot Genetics believes conversations from these events is powerful and 
> provides the opportunities for change, whether it be at the individual level 
> or through community-wide discourse. Most recently we have been focusing on 
> pollinator decline in the US and abroad.
> > ___
> > 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
> 
> 
> --
> 
> ___
> empyre mailing list
> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
> 
> 
> End of empyre Digest, Vol 131, Issue 7
> **
> 
> ___
> 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

[-empyre-] week two | transnational collaboration research/practice

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--10–16 November 2015: 
TRANSNATIONAL COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH/PRACTICE

We continue the discussion of potentials and limitations of thinking through 
digital media into the area of transnational collaboration in research/practice 
with a few examples of projects that we discuss in our book. 

These projects foreground collaboration — not in the sense of “interaction” or 
“participation” that are promoted by corporations and increasingly by states, 
all of which have well-publicized links to data collection and surveillance — 
but collaboration in ways that foregrounds ethical and political 
considerations.CAMP’s From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf is a collaborative project that 
Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukaran developed in collaboration with migrant sailers 
who transport goods between India and Pakistan, Iran and the Arabian Gulf, and 
East Africa. The film is compiled from videos that the sailers make and 
exchange with one another, mostly set to music that evokes their experience of 
months at sea away from family and friends. The videos are not made with us in 
mind as an audience. With the increased attention to the history of the Indian 
Ocean World, FGtGtG helps us visualize the continuum of cultural and economic 
exchanges that predate the violent interruption of European colonialism that 
carved the region into strategic areas of study/control that have encouraged 
sectarian violence. Unlike conventional documentary, FGtGtG foregrounds emotion 
and unknowability over facts and evidence; it does not pretend to interpret the 
lives of the sailers for us. 

Two projects by Stephanie Rothenberg and Jeff Crouse facilitate opportunities 
for us to think about the ways that we might be (and most likely are) complicit 
with the exploitation of labor. They do as much, however, with a sense of 
humor, which is often necessary to get us to drop our defenses and pretenses. 
Invisible Threads is a locative media project that makes the invisible power 
structures of just-in-time production visible and wearable. It moves from the 
virtual world of social networking and role-playing in Second Life to the 
physical world in live performance. Comparably, Laborers of Love (LOL) prompts 
us to think about the outsourcing to (relatively) anonymous workers through 
Amazon’s MTurk as well as the fetishization of glitch art. The project’s online 
platform allows us to commission adult video with settings for customized 
content and glitches, as a means to reflect upon the immodest ways that 
neoliberalism’s flexible systems are promoted (sometimes even erotically) as 
simulating economic growth. 

Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermint’s Intermediate Hikes (IH+) is a mobile-phone 
app that creates occasions for planned and unplanned collaboration between 
human participants and the nonhuman world. The project is an application of 
critical theory into media practice that prompts us to think about a number of 
interrelated issues concerning urbanism, environmentalism, eco-tourism, and 
anthropocentrism. Some of the task cards ask us to move outside our comfort 
zones in order to approximate, if not inhabit, the perspectives of others. The 
project thus facilitates a variety of self-conscious experiences (and maybe 
some unconscious ones) that open interactions not only with other participants 
but also with the nonhuman world as vital and agentive rather than as 
“wilderness." The project gets us to engage in a critical mode rather than 
lapsing into a touristic mode when confronting difference as well as uses of 
land. IH+ allows us to engage in research through practice. 

We invite our guests to write more about these projects as well as their 
current and other previous ones. 

Best, 
Dale and Patty 



Guest biographies 

Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukaran, CAMP (From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf), India 
CAMP (http://studio.camp/)is a collaborative studio founded in 2007. It 
combines film, video, installation, software, open-access archives with broad 
interests in technology, film and theory. From their home base in Chuim 
village, CAMP are co-initiators of the online footage archive (http://pad.ma/), 
the new cinema archive (http://indiancine.ma/), and a new project on cultural 
histories of Bombay. CAMP's work has shown extensively including at the MoMA 
and New Museum, the BFI London Film Festival, the Viennale, at dOCUMENTA 13, 
Sharjah Biennial, Shanghai Biennial, Kochi-Muziris Biennial, and museums and 
film festivals around the world. In 2015, they presented a major survey of 
their works across five solo exhibitions titled As If I- V in Kolkata, Delhi 
and Mumbai. 

Stephanie Rothenberg (Invisible Threads, Laborers of Love LOL), United States 
Stephanie Rothenberg is an interdisciplinary artist using performance, 
installation and networked media to create provocative public interactions. 
Mixing real and virtual spaces, her work explores the power dynamics between 
contemporary 

Re: [-empyre-] week one | mobile apps and environmental performance

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks, Babak, Jeff+Wendy, and Ismail, for sharing with us — and please feel 
free to continue these discussion threads throughout the month. We really 
appreciate everyone juggling so many different commitments in order to 
participate this past week.

Best,
Dale and Patty


On Nov 8, 2015, at 19:45, Patricia Zimmermann <pa...@ithaca.edu> wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Ismail, 
> 
> I am struck by the history implied in your post.  It's now ten years since 
> your project SOWETO UPRISINGS, a radical reimagining of the multiple 
> narrative routes of protest, a historiography that generates an archive as it 
> also maps space differently.  The other part of your post describes the 
> student uprisings in South Africa at the moment, a movement that has been 
> virtually erased from news coverage in the US and Europe.  I only learned of 
> it through a Facebook link and then through the  powerful talk on radical 
> historiographic temporalities of Premesh Lalu at a recent closing lecture at 
> the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University (mounted by Tim Murray 
> of Empyre).  
> 
> You post is so powerful.
> 
> I wondered if you might share with our list what kinds of mapping, mobile, 
> and organizing interfaces are being deployed in this new movement?  How do 
> they intersect with the issues you outlined?  How do they move between the 
> digital and the embodied?  And what kinds of mobilizations in both digital 
> and embodied, on the ground demonstrations, are evolving? It strikes me that 
> the current student movement in South Africa perhaps opens up our discussion 
> of mobile apps and environmental performances towards a move transnational 
> consideration.
> 
> Patty
> 
> Patricia R. Zimmermann, Ph.D.
> Professor of Screen Studies
> Roy H. Park School of Communication
> Codirector, Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival
> 
> Ithaca College
> 953 Danby Road
> Ithaca, New York 14850 USA
> 
> http://faculty.ithaca.edu:83/patty/
> http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff
> 
> 
> ____
> From: empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au 
> <empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of Dale Hudson 
> <dale.hud...@nyu.edu>
> Sent: Friday, November 6, 2015 8:41 AM
> To: soft_skinned_space
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] week one | mobile apps and environmental performance
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Thanks, Jeff.
> 
> Patty and I really loved the way that the PlantBots initiate discussions 
> without the same potentially threatening affect of more direct approaches to 
> documenting the health and environmental hazards of GMOs, which we imagined 
> as a corollary of sorts to ways that corporations exercise intellectual 
> property to discourage innovation with digital technologies and media content.
> 
> Could you tell us more about what you’re been doing int relation to 
> pollinator decline? I would also be interested to know whether you and Wendy 
> have been thinking of any of these issues in relation to indigenous rights?
> 
> Best,
> Dale
> 
> 
> On Nov 5, 2015, at 17:00, Jeff Schmuki <jschm...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>> Hello Dale and All,
>> 
>> PlantBot Genetics began as a street-based project where we would release 
>> PlantBots into public spaces.  These humorous PlantBot Invasions would 
>> easily draw attention, and once someone stops for a moment, they will ask a 
>> question. Humor is a vital ingredient as it creates a safe place for the 
>> discussion to occur.  Those visiting hopefully come away empowered through 
>> links, published information, and guidelines for better food and 
>> environmental practices at home. Today we often use an 18’ off-grid, trailer 
>> (ArtLab) converted into a mobile platform containing a library of 
>> information and hands-on activities. Most are surprised at the proliferation 
>> of GM products in the market and being unlabeled, we all are consuming them. 
>> Is it better to have a choice? When the project began in 2009, most were 
>> unaware of GMOs and wanted to learn more. Today many do know and while some 
>> just want to play with the PlantBots, complex discussions on supporting 
>> transparency in food labeling, supporting local farming, composting, 
>> pollinator decline and native plants, always transpire. Everyone seems to 
>> have a good time and PlantBot fun transcends language wherever we are. GM 
>> research is being done worldwide today, and is a complex issue y