Re: [-empyre-] Week 1: Welcome Patrick Lichty to Flow, Impulse and Affect in Real Time

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi all,

In thinking about Patrick's theme for the month, "Flow, Impulse and Affect in 
Real Time," I hadn't contemplated thinking about RFTs, but more about the 
"flow" or "impulse" of 2021 media culture.  In my world of media theory, "flow" 
first takes me back to early television theory of the 80s when we thought of 
flow as the strategic wrapping into one seamless package of television 
sequences and internal advertising spots that systematically translate the 
viewers into the data of consumption. It may be that flow might work somewhat 
similarly today if we think of the succession of sequences on online media, say 
in Tik Tok, in correlation to the clicks of access that would similarly 
translate the user into consumption bits.  As Deleuze said in "Postscripts on 
Societies of Control," "individuals have become 'dividuals,' and masses, 
samples, data, markets or 'banks.'"  But I found myself very intrigued by 
Patrick's provocative linkage of flow to impulse and affect (in Real Time).  
Does impulse disturb flow, if only in providing flow with the texture of 
pulsation rather than the seamless of flow?  And what might be the correlation 
of impulse to affect?  This certainly "grabs back" (another term from tv 
theory) flow from the 'dividual,' no?, in enveloping it with impulse and affect.

Rather than RFTs, I find myself looking at various interactive installations 
where the impulsiveness of interactivity energizes links between pulse and 
affect.  Who better has experimented with this than Rafael Lozana-Hemmer whose 
large interactive installations initiate participants into the affect of 
impulse.  Take the installations in his 2019 Hirshhorn show, "Pulse," which 
literally translated the biometric and voice data of participants in the motion 
and flow of room size electronic installation.   Indeed, returning to Patrick's 
theme, the conjoining of affect and impulse happened in 'real time' as nothing 
that easily could be recorded and duplicated, if we understand the piece to 
consist of both interactor and visual interlocutor.  Here flow, (im)pulse, and 
affect merge together as colossal events beckoning users to acknowledge the 
impulsiveness of not only their spectatorial practices but also their 
inscription into larger affect-filled pools of other participants and 
incorporated bio-data.

Just a thought about how we might "claw back" the discussion in view of 
contemporary installation in "Real Time."

Happy spring,

Tim

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, Cornell Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 

On 5/12/21, 1:08 PM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of 
Renate Ferro"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Welcome to a short Week 1 on -empyre-.  To start things off Renate Ferro 
and Tim Murray will be joined by long-time -empyre- subscriber, participant and 
moderator, Patrick Lichty.  We are thankful to Patrick for innovating this 
topic and coming up with the conceptual parameters. Biographies are below.  We 
are hoping that this broad topic warrants an array of responses from our 
membership.  Just a few thoughts to get the conversation flowing. 

The “moment”, is that moment when the body encounters the impulse of the 
event, to which is has to assimilate and then emote.  But in real time, this 
moment does not allow for assimilation, it is the constant moment of the 
impulse, or impulsive. This can be likened to “flow”, or the quality of being 
“in the zone” of 2021’s media culture. If the rapidity of images, in the 
flowing, impulsive space is in the contemporary now of media culture, can it 
then allow for reverberation,  reflection, recitation?  How might we understand 
the artistic or critical payoff from the impulse of media culture?

Looking forward.  Renate Ferro

Welcome to May 2021 on –empyre- soft-skinned space:
Flow, Impulse and Affect in Real Time
Moderated by Patrick Lichty and Renate Ferro

Guests for 
May 10th:   Week 1: Patrick Lichty, Renate Ferro, Tim Murray

Biographies for Week 1: 
Renate Ferro is a conceptual media artist who toggles between the creative 
skins of old and new technologies. Her work mobilizes opportunities for 
creative interactivity that incorporate issues relating to feminist 
psychological and sociological conditions. Ferro’s work takes on create skins 
whose configurations include installation, interactive net-based projects, 
sculpture, digital time-based media, drawing, text, and performance-based work. 
These creative skins include participatory, collaborative, generative, and 
customizable characteristics impacting the network

[-empyre-] Laying the foundation for The Dawn of Aquarius: Art, Intuition and Technology

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks, Renate, for asking me to elaborate on Jean-François Lyotard’s concerns 
about the technological “pull of the future.”  Before we transition into the 
second week of our discussion, I might just clarify that Lyotard was concerned 
about how the weight of the emergent digital age (he was writing about this in 
the late 1980s and early 1990s) might impinge upon the plenitude of thinking 
and experiencing life in any aquarian “now.”

Sounding the alarm over the degree of risk inherent in new digital 
technologies, Lyotard notes that the transformation of the perceptual event by 
the technical-industrial complex guarantees that the future won’t be what it 
used to be. “As is clearly shown by the development of the techno-scientific 
system, technology and the culture associated with it are under a necessity to 
pursue their rise . . . The human race is, so to speak, “pulled forward” by 
this process without possessing the slightest capacity for mastering it . . . 
In as much as a monad in thus saturating its memory is stocking the future, the 
present loses its privilege of being an ungraspable point from which, however, 
time should always distribute itself between the “not yet” of the future and 
the “no longer” of the past” (Lyotard, The Inhuman, 64-65). The pulling forward 
of futurity, as evidenced by the economy of planned technological obsolescence, 
thus depletes the magnetism of the present as the energetic and ungraspable 
hinge between past and future. It is in the drive of this informatic pull of 
the future that Bernard Stiegler, similarly, locates the highest degree of risk 
in the rise of global media. At stake for him is the dissolution of the 
plenitude of fiction and fantasy that might rewire the ontologies of 
military-industrial-digital capitalism. Stiegler ushers the dire warning that 
“the technical network of the production and diffusion of symbols produced for 
a planetary industry [the system of téléaction] can overwhelm the universal 
desire of fiction and at the same time condition the entire evolution of 
humanity at the risk of exhausting its desire for fables” (Stiegler, Technics 
and Time II, 30). In my forthcoming book, Technics Improvised, I wonder about 
the impact of such a deadening profusion of planetary symbols and power 
relations, contrary to the imaginary of any age of aquarius. When technology so 
morphs into its own teleology, as the advance of a thoroughly predetermined 
futurity of technology for technology’s sake, little space is left for fiction, 
little possibility for speculative imagination, little space for the joys of 
thinking the future otherwise.
Thanks for introducing what looks like a creative month on -empyre-.
Best to all as we welcome the arrival of warmer temperatures in Ithaca this 
week.
Tim


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

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


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[-empyre-] Laying the foundation for The Dawn of Aquarius: Art, Intuition and Technology

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Age of Aquarius!  Writing on this topic brings me back to the days of my life 
as a young hippie anti-war activist in the San Francisco Bay Area when I 
attended the uplifting and utopian San Francisco run of the new musical, 
“Hair,” whose medley “Aquarius: Let the Sunshine In” encouraged everyone on 
stage and most audience members to joyfully strip down in communal nude 
dancing.  Even in the midst of that age’s extensive social turmoil, with street 
movements for anti-war, black power, women’s rights, and the emergent rights of 
the earth, we were empowered by the promise of Aquarius and the hopeful belief 
that social struggle would deliver an almost immediate future of justice, 
social equality, and peace.

Decades down the line, I’ve had occasion more recently to cite in my academic 
writings on art and new media the legendary American baseball player of the 
1950s and early 1960s, Yogi Berra.  Yogi was infamous for his amusing 
aphorisms.  At the conclusion of my book, Digital Baroque: New Media Art and 
Cinematic Folds, and again in the book I’m just now sending into my publisher, 
Technics Improvised: Activating Touch in Global Media Art, I pun on one of my 
favorite Yogi quotes: “The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be.”

My point in remobilizing this aphorism is to reflect on how utopianism might 
have shifted in the digital age and in the age of the Anthropocene where 
technology often leads us into a future we might not otherwise have imagined 
(think of planned obsolescence, AI tracking of social and shopping behavior, 
genetic modification, and global warming). Aquarius certainly stands now for 
something much more nuanced, if not troubling, than it did during those 
celebratory days of San Francisco Flower Power.

Put otherwise how might we consider imagining the certainty of the future we 
would rather not want to live in?  If we have any certainty about this new Age 
of Aquarius, it would be about the world of, say, the inevitability of rising 
global waters due to the ecological warming of fossil fuels. Just as certain, 
it seems, is the masochistic refusal of global capital to acknowledge its risk 
to natural ecosystems, if not the neoliberal disinterest in precarity itself, 
whether the corporate enhancement of global food insecurity, the constant 
dumping of obsolescent technologies on the shores of Asia, the continual 
trafficking of human beings for the gain and profit of capitalist buccaneers, 
the continual oppression and murder of citizens of color by hegemonic networks 
of surveillance and policing, or even the capitalist disavowal of the viral 
extremity of our current global pandemic. And does not the doubled 
borderlessness of new patterns of immigration and old methods of slavery (still 
via child sex, domestic labor, and genomic doubling) mark the neoliberal 
precarity of our new digital world order?

It is in this context of Aquarius that I’ve shifted my thinking from the 
sunshine of the future to the imperatives of thinking futurity itself, whether 
that of the complexities of Afro-Futurism, the life reconfigurations of the 
futurity of the Anthropocene, or our continual work via -empyre- to continue 
raising the questioning of technology as it drives us forward, in the words of 
both Stiegler and Lyotard, as willing captives of future obsolescence and 
digital sovereignty.

So, ths is how I’m now thinking the Dawn of Aquarius.  Happy March everyone.

Tim




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

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


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Re: [-empyre-] Tactical Obfuscation: thinking bitcoin culturally

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
As we close out the first week of this discussion, I am prompted by Domenico to 
think about bitcoin, culture, and obfuscation.

I don't have that much to say, not being much involved in discussions around 
bitcoin but Dominico jogs my memory of incredible artistic interventions made 
about blockchain and bitcoin at the 2019 Asian Art Biennial, curated by Hsu 
Chia-Wei and Ho Tzu Nyen at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in 
Taichung. Making connections between rare earth mining and extensive power 
factories for blackchain mining, numerous artists in the exhibition drew 
historical connections between the metaphors of colonial mining and the 
contemporary analogies brought to bear by digital culture and blockchain 
economies across rural Asia and Southeast Asia.  Key to many multimedia 
installations was how the dazzle and seduction of contemporary mining 
obfuscates the multilayered cultures again being laid to siege.  While we began 
the week with thinking about 
Ben's fascinating concept of "tactical obfuscation," I'm now recalling how so 
many of these artists called forth the memories and specters of traditional 
ethnic cultures and performances to engage in a tactical obfuscation of the 
seductions of anything approximating the political euphorias around blockchain 
as described by Domenico.  Just thought it might be provocative to end this 
week by thinking about this paradox.

Cheers,

Tim

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, Cornell Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 


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Re: [-empyre-] Tactical Obfuscation: remembering net.art

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thanks so much for your fascinating posts, Ben, and Geert for your post 
in-between (it's been such a very long time).  I'm fascinated by Ben's strategy 
of "tactical obfuscation."  I'm in the midst of putting last touches on a book 
for Minnesota, "Technics Improvised: Activating Touch in Global Media Art," 
which touches on a lot of first generation tactical net.art, especially as 
Arthur and Marilouise Kroker and I curated it for CTHEORY Multimedia at the 
turn of the millennium. Ironically, this was still a rather celebratory period 
during which we imagined that we might alter, even a little bit, the 
digital-military-corporate complex by bombarding it with provocative but 
obscure art and theoretically provocative curatorial writing.  The imaginary 
wasn't that the browsers themselves would be disrupted but rather they we could 
complexify digital discourse through multimedia assemblages that combined 
emergent form with compelling political content and theoretical manifestos (we 
published issues on the promise and perils of the human genome project, digital 
terror & ethnic paranoia post 9/11, and NetNoise: 
http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu).  

The politically oriented issues we put together contained some 12-14 nert.art 
pieces per volume for which "tactical obfuscation" might have been partially 
the point as they solicited users to experiment with unfamiliar interfaces, 
rollovers, and densely organized data. I remember fondly the arguments I had 
with the original designer we hired in the Cornell Library for the project.  
Coming from the corporate environment of digital designwith packaged softwares 
(à la Adobe)  for clear organization and obvious presentation, he resisted our 
wish to design the journal's platform as an artwork itself that would situate 
the net.art pieces and curatorial statements around enigmatic interfaces, 
bleeding sounds, confounding rollovers, and quirky graphics.  He insisted quite 
emphatically that this would lead to the obfuscation of his design, the 
journal, and the Cornell Library's brand in the expanding blending worlds of 
university and corporation.  

We won, we obfuscated, and we provided our artist's a creative platform 
compatible with the form and aim of the work. Most all, we joined our artists 
in thinking that interactivity itself could be thoughtful, creative, 
compelling, and often open-ended.   Our collaborative artistic and curatorial 
obfuscation was tactical.   As I recently read over our co-authored curatorial 
statements, I still like to believe that we were onto something as we 
celebrated potential just as we critiqued the corporate expansion of biotech, 
virtual life, and the digital divide. For us, something like conceptual 
obfuscation opened doors to thought, critique, and critical imagination.

Of course, the corporate world won out.  The growing search engines pretty much 
left us and our artists out, still living but at the bottom of the search 
engine hierarchy. And, most recently, just a month ago, Adobe abandoned Flash 
now almost completely obfuscating CTHEORY Multimedia.  I suppose that one 
response would be to enact Geert's "culture of refusal," perhaps walk away from 
Adobe. and the often dumbly standardized platforms it celebrates.  But another 
option is to ban creatively together with colleagues, such as those at Rhizome 
and ELO, to create open source alternatives that might reenliven these early 
works, as many of us also have done to reactivate artistic CD-Roms that were 
stranded by Apple's move to Intel in 2005 [and now Apple's going to move to its 
own chip again endangering 15 more years of digital art created on that 
system].   Could it be at all possible that we could be at another pivotal 
moment of DYI creativity and responsiveness, thus enacting another breakout of 
"tactical obfuscation," in which hackers and programmers, artists and 
theoreticians, could again come together to think inside the box, but 
differently, always with Ben's sharp tactical edge? Hopeful, I know, but 
there's still tactical noise on the edge.

Thanks, Ben and Geert. You got me thinking and times past and future.

Cheers,

Tim

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, Cornell Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 

On 2/1/21, 6:41 PM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of 
Ben Grosser"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

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Re: [-empyre-] Renate Ferro: What's on your Bookshelf 2021

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Happy 2021 empyreans.  It's been quite a ride through the past year, no?.  I 
join Renate in hoping that our sharing of reading lists will empower us through 
the months to come.

Here are some titles that have gotten me through the challenging year and that 
I'm looking forward to bringing into dialogue with each other as I pursue 
various writing projects in 2021:

Ian Baucom, History 4degrees Celcius: Search for a Method in the Age of the 
Anthropocene (Duke)
Amy Sue Carroll, REMEX: Toward An Art History of the NAFTA Era (Texas)
Bishnupriya Ghosh and Bhaskar Sarkar, eds., The Routledge Companion to Media 
and Risk (Routledge)
Anna Watkins Fisher, The Play in the System: The Art of Parasitical Resistance 
(Duke)
Erin Graff-Zivin, Anarchaeologies: Reading as Misreading (Fordham)
Katherine Groo, Bad Film Histories: Ethnography and the Early Archive 
(Minnesota)
Fred Moten, Black and Blur: Consent Not To Be a Single Being (Duke)
Rahul Mukherjee, Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of 
Uncertainty (Duke)
Andrea Righi, The Other Side of the Digital: The Sacrificial Economy of New 
Media (Minnesota)
Samantha N. Sheppard, Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle 
Memory on Screen (California)
James Steintrager and Rey Chow, eds., Sound Objects (Duke)
Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of 
Listening (NYU)
Antoine Traisnel, Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal 
Condition (Minnesota)
Patricia R. Zimmermann and Helen De Michel, Open Space New Media Documentary: A 
Toolkit for Theory and Practice (Routledge)

Hope you have an opportunity to be touched by their thought.

Cheers,

Tim


Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, Cornell Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 

On 1/15/21, 7:14 PM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of 
Renate Ferro"  wrote:

Audiovisual

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

[Timothy Conway Murray]

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

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

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

Stay well.

Tim


Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, Cornell Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 

On 4/28/20, 9:57 AM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of 
Kathy High"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Dear friends,

I write this contribution on the heels of just reading Patricia's amazing 
Movement 1: Allegro... I had started writing something else. But was so deeply 
moved by P's text and stories that I have started again. Thank you for sharing 
those vivid moments, Patty.

I too thank Renate and Tim for making this space. I find at present - it is 
these spaces of exchange that mean so much to me, and are probably helping me 
to process much more than I would if left to my own devices.

Like many of us here on this particular chat I, too, am an academic. I will 
teach my last on-line classes for the semester today. I will encourage my 
students as best I can - many of whom are graduating seniors with nothing but 
an online graduation ceremony to look forward to. Others who will return next 
year are cautious and wary of engaging in yet another semester with possible 
online teaching. We all hate it and are not trained or it. It is tiring in 
unexpected ways. The processing of the little faces in the boxes draws all my 
energy as does speaking to a screen with little response. How much to talk 
about the virus? How much to not talk about the virus? 

Our university is in financial trouble - like so many others. It feels like 
it is dying. Having mismanaged funds probably and with an overinflated budget, 
it seems like a mini version of bigger institutions, governments. Everything is 
being decided top down. None of us can have any input. Our university president 
took only a 5% pay cut even while they have furloughed almost 300 university 
workers. We are told that faculty will be "sized" and assessed by their 
enrollment numbers for their classes. That doesn't bode well for the Humanities 
and Arts. Sounds like so many other institutions.

I am thinking these days about time as many of us are. With the uncertainty 
of when and how we can return to some other life besides the ones in our homes 
- and what that might look like. I have been influenced by writings in 
disabilities studies - in particular an article by Ellen Samuels "Six Ways of 
Looking at Crip Time."  -   https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/5824/4684

Samuels beautifully sums up what time is like for those with disabilities - 
unpredictable, non-linear and where scheduling is difficult or non-existent: 
"Crip time is time travel. Disability and illness have the power to extract us 
from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a 
wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious 
intervals and abrupt endings."

We float a bit seamlessly now and share some of that crip time space. As 
someone with chronic autoimmune diseases, I know this kind of time where your 
body disrupts your expectations and deadlines. Now we all have a kind of time 
disru

Re: [-empyre-] On Francis Danby's Opening of the Sixth Seal

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi Premesh and Johannes,

So great to see you both in dialogue regarding this broad challenge of what 
Bishnu so aptly terms "epidemic mediation" and what Soo Yon queries as "finding 
the invisible."One of the fascinating results so far of this month's deep 
and very wide-ranging discussion is its global resonance (here referenced from 
South Africa, Europe, South Korea, the US, and India) and how strongly 
theoretical concepts, which might initially have been formulated rather 
universally, here empower precise discussions of the virally fractious glocal 
-- indeed, isn't this the force of -empyre- at its best.   

It was in this context that I was fascinated to see Premesh formulating how  
"race became a matter of a circular causality in the age of cybernetics" and 
how he does so in view of the enigmatic concept of "digital baroque," which 
Premesh and I have been referencing backchannel, and which Johannes brings to 
the fore as a concept important to my book, "Digital Baroque: New Media Art and 
Cinematic Folds" (Minnesota, 2008).  In working on this project, I was 
fascinated by how new media art so frequently projection back into the 
epistemes of the early modern past to contribute to our understandings of 
contemporary ontological projection and cultural property in relation to the 
functions and properties of the interactive apparatus -- an apparatus whose 
applications and guerrilla practice have been as viral as circularly causal.  
One framework articulated by Walter Benjamin in his writing on the baroque was 
particularly important to my sense of the 'digital baroque': his prescient 
understanding of the process of storing and schemata of the emergent early 
modern library and literature which "pile up fragments ceaselessly without any 
strict idea of a goal, and .. to take the repetition of stereotypes for a 
process of intensification" and, thereby, how "chronological movement is 
grasped and analyzed in a spatial image."  It is within this context of a 
vibrant intensification of condensations that we might visualize how, in 
Premesh's words,: "the racial remains of slavery appear to be distributed 
across the spiral of biopolitics and industrial capitalism, while its uncertain 
energies were folded into mechanisms of communication and control."  

Such uncertain energies lingering in networked communications have been rewired 
by many activist artists important to my book, such as Keith Piper, Reginald 
Woolery, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and Grace Quintanilla, for whom the legacies 
race, sexual, and cultural identity weigh heavily and lend themselves to 
artistic rewiring in the emergent digital environment of the 1990s and early 
2000s.  I hear in their works strong echoes of how Premesh approaches Danby’s 
painting as providing "a space of convergence for thinking such a new history: 
the abolition of slavery, the expansion of technological resources, the work of 
art in an industrial age, changes in the circulation of commodities and the 
accompanying technical reproducibility of artwork, the distribution of art 
through exhibition and distribution of offprints, and stitching of the image of 
the slave into a canvas from which it had been excised. Not to mention a bolt 
of electricity."

What I also try to articulate in "Digital Baroque" is how such bolts of 
artistic electricity diverge from the calming and subjugating aesthetic norms 
of dialectical universalism that sustained modernism and the cultural apparati 
of colonialism, technological expansion, and theoretical transcendence. What I 
call "digital incompossibility" in the book is particularly important in this 
regard and bears a strong relation to how this month's guests have been 
articulating the diversification of viral impact and response in relation to 
same common bio-technological episteme: COVID 19. My sense of this notion 
derived from Gilles Deleuze's articulation of the bifurcating fabulations of 
seriality, "incompossible presents," through which each series -- each viral 
strain and carriage -- tells completely different stories that unfold 
simultaneously.  This vibrant process of incompossible intensification offers 
one avenue, as I understand it, of response to Premesh's important question of 
how  "the work of art both invites us to think ahead and live in the shadow of 
disappointment of communication thus conceived."  

While my conceptualizations tend of framed by philosophy and 'high theory' 
(which I appreciate are less welcoming in some communities than in others), 
this month's conversation also foregrounds more specifically artistic frames.  
In thinking about Premesh's prompt that we ponder the valence of art, I cannot 
help but also echo Ricardo Dominguez's sense of the performative matrix of such 
"digital incompossiblity," which he laments have been often set aside in 
readings of the viral media  art of his Electronic Disturbance Thea

Re: [-empyre-] Bio-Fascism: Eclipse of the Social /Decline of Politics

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thank you, Arthur, for your elegant and cutting analysis of the rise of 
bio-fascism.  Just today, Renate and I were witnessing news accounts of 
demonstrations in the US by Trump supporters encouraged by their 
fascist-in-chief  to protest the valiant efforts of Democratic governors to 
maintain temporary social distancing practices and policies.  While not 
necessarily the complete eclipse of politics, but certainly  the manipulation 
of fascist politics, Trump'scontinual  efforts to downplay science and promote 
the fiction of the deep state has gone hand in hand, as you say, with "surging 
gun sales and panic hoarding" as the death of the social.  Then there are the 
deaths of social services, education and the arts, three broad institutions 
that are hit particularly hard by the economic downturn while, in the US, real 
estate developers and major hotel chains seems to be reaping the rewards of 
public bailout funds. At stake is the future imaginary of social solidarity, 
erudition, and artistic imagination

Similarly, local governments, for which I am elected official, are told to fend 
for themselves (offered no US bail out funds that have so quickly been consumed 
by corporations) as they hope to continue to support desperately needed food 
pantries, health clinics, childcare, public transportation, etc.  These 
infrastructures are conveniently ignored by the capitalist superclass in a way 
that further exacerbates the chasm between hyper-rich (who can shelter in place 
in their comfortable vacation homes) and the beleaguered underclass who have 
little access to basic social services.   All of this in the interest, as you 
say, of bio-fascism.

Tim

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, Cornell Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 

On 4/16/20, 11:44 PM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of 
akroker"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

___
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[-empyre-] Contagion and -empyre-

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi everyone, 
As we pass through the first week of April on -empyre-, it's been amazing to 
have Melinda remind us how intricately engrained her founding of -empyre- was 
in response to medical challenge and isolation, just as the vast majority of 
-empyreans- are now probably welcoming the arrival of this discussion as they 
remain secluded at home with the assistance of our extensive cyberlife.   I 
remember well when Melinda introduced -empyre- in an interactive display at 
ISEA 2002 in Nagoya, Japan, at a moment when we were celebrating the networked 
arts as a hopeful intervention in a new millennium.  It's been incredible to 
witness the longevity of our community and its continual appetite for artistic 
exchange and critical discussion.

The past week in the States has been rather astonishing in which public 
discussion of technologies of prevention have highlighted the extent to which 
the global pandemic has enabled the enhancement of biopolitical technologies of 
contamination and repression.  In sharp contrast to a noble and thoughtful 
speech about the urgent need for equality just delivered by Bernie Sanders as 
he suspended his presidential campaign, we are confronted on our television 
screens nightly by our Barnum & Bailey President who hawks his perverted 
versions of reality, including dubious wonder drugs, while promoting capitalist 
competition for products essential to public health.  The past two days we 
witnessed his right wing appointed Supreme Court uphold the Republicans' wish 
to hold the Wisconsin primary yesterday in the midst of pandemic spread, rather 
than delay it or transfer it to paper ballot, another cynical attempt either to 
suppress voting or subject Democratic voters -- who joined long lines to vote 
-- to the potential dangers of the public touch of the virus.  We've been 
dismayed to see many state governors sneak into stay at home orders their 
devious plans to restrict access to female health coverage and abortion 
(declaring them as 'inessential').  And, as I noted earlier, we learn of daily 
Trump reversals, hidden behind COVID-19 headlines, of the widest range of U.S. 
standards and laws designed to protect the environment, from clean water to 
clean air.

As someone who theoretically and curatorially has embraced guerilla art and 
theoretical practices that step aside from the pessimism of biopolitical 
hegemony, I find it all the more deeply troubling to witness this consolidation 
of biopolitical sovereignty in my country, as across the globe, as the 
divisions of access to healthcare and welfare lead to greater death and 
poverty.  It is in this context of urgency, however, that I embrace the 
founding spirit of -empyre- as a dialogical project that can take advantage of 
global telecommunicational technology to pause or step aside from mainstream 
media in order to ponder the complex realities in which we live and the myriad 
side events -- social, artistic, medical -- that might continue to empower to 
work for social justice.  In this context, I find myself enlivened by my 
personal theoretical commitment to thinking the empowerment of "the event" and 
the extensive artistic interventions in bio and tactical art that embrace 
technicity and techne in contradiction of its technological contamination.

As we move from the month's framings by those who have managed -empyre- since 
its inception, Melinda Rackham, Christina McPhee, and Renate Ferro, I look 
forward to being challenged and enlightened by the incredible lineup of 
featured guests for the rest of the month, whose expertise cross the 
disciplines on which we so count for social improvement and guerilla 
intervention, from art and design to public health and political theory. 

This morning, Renate and I stood on the side our road -- the main country 
highway to New York City -- to applaud two busloads of Ithaca nurses and 
doctors willing to risk their lives to head to relieve exhausted health care 
workers in New York City.  We reflected on the extent to which this viral 
challenge offes us, across the fields of disciplines and practices, the 
opportunity to articulate various forms of response.  Thanks for joining us in 
this minor critical effort via -empyre-. 

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, Cornell Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 

On 4/3/20, 4:17 PM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of 
Renate Ferro"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Dear Christina and to all of you, 
I am responding quickly for now but will respond in depth more later 
tonight. 
First forgive me for not updating 

[-empyre-] Interfacing COVID-19

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hello everyone.  It’s strange to watch the sun shining on the bucolic setting 
in which we are sheltering at home while health and economic darkness looms 
over the world.  In planning this -empyre- month on “Interfacing COVID-19: the 
technologies of contagion, risk, and contamination,” Renate, Junting, and I 
were able to cull a broadly interdisciplinary and international set of guests 
who have been working for many years on various aspects of risk and 
contamination as thought through the arts and digital culture.  We want to 
thank all of our guests who have been willing to put aside their various 
responsibilities, professional and familial, to join in this month-long call 
and response to COVID-19.  Our hope is, indeed, to lean on our incredible 
community of artists, writers, and practitioners to bring some warmth into our 
world as we think through the moment, its challenges and whatever might end up 
as its short and long term results.

Like many of you, I’ve found my own projects thrown into suspension over the 
past month or so.  Many of our invited guests this month were hit with the 
realities of suspension and threat much, much earlier in the year.  Weirdly, 
I’ve spent the past many months planning the 2020 Cornell Biennial around the 
theme of “Swarm: Ecology, Digitality, Sociality,” whose artistic environments 
are meant to provide conversation about multitude, motion, sound, migration, 
and threat, while reflecting on precarity in an age of technological abundance. 
 Meant to roll out over the course of the next six months beginning next week, 
the Biennial was planned to open next week with installation of the “Tree of 40 
Fruits” by artist Sam Van Aken.  This spectacular tree was grafted by Sam to 
bear forty different historical varieties of stone fruits – a project of 
biological technicity that exemplifies the ecological productivity and 
longevity of swarm while also providing a timely bouquet of flowers to attract 
Cornell University’s swarms of research bees.  Not only is Cornell now closed, 
but the artwork itself ends up being locked behind the closed gates of nearby 
Syracuse University thus prohibiting Sam from access to his work which has been 
featured at global ecological and economic events, most recently in Davos, 
where it stood as an exemplar of new green interfaces of art, biology, and 
economy.  As my team has faced the sudden suspension of Swarm by the virus, we 
have been most troubled by the Trump government’s confused and cruel delay of 
response while it has strategically and cynically moved forward daily, during 
the same time period, with rollbacks of American regulations and laws enacted 
to protect the vulnerable environment.  As we necessarily concentrate on the 
interfaces of contagion and contamination, Trump and his cronies profit from 
the public distraction of human suffering to sneakily enhance ecological 
degradation for the profit of global corporate capital.

The sad reality is that once this COVID-19 is nipped in the bud, the world will 
be facing an ever greater disparity of wealth on the backs of both the 
underprivileged and the vulnerable environment – a combination for continual 
risk and contagion. This is a contamination, helas, that seems to know no 
bounds.

At least it is consoling to know that we will be thinking all of this together 
on -empyre- throughout the month via the mediations of art and digital culture. 
 Thanks for being with us, and feel free to join in call and response.

Hugs,

Tim

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

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


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Re: [-empyre-] that's all folks

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Dear McKenzie,

I don't know how this happened with the automated moderating software, but 
Renate and I corrected this manually.  Please feel free to continue your 
welcome participation.

All the best,

Tim

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, Cornell Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 

On 9/15/19, 1:01 PM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of 
warkk"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

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Re: [-empyre-] Legacies, and heritage: Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi Patrick,

Many congratulations on your recent news!

Well, when are close friend, Grace Quintanilla, died at 52 within the same two 
weeks at Barbara, Carolee, and Agnès, Renate and I thought it would be 
important to spend a month on -empyre- reflecting on the feminist legacy in 
video and new media art.  Our thought wasn't that we would celebrate "good 
people," although we're happy that so many empyreans have shared their 
heartwarming memories of these artists, but to reflect on the incredible impact 
on art by these groundbreaking women artists.  Although such discussions may 
well touch on issues of preservation, etc., we hadn't anticipated that the 
discussion would flow in this direction.

Now that it has, I appreciate your mention of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New 
Media Ar http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu), which I have curated in the 
Cornell Library since I founded it in 2002 -- I guess the Goldsen Archive now 
has somewhat of a short legacy of its own now that its well through its 17th 
year..  Regarding its preservation, I was happy when we negotiated its location 
in the Cornell Library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections (RMC) -- 
otherwise known generally as "rare books."  Goldsen's initial success then 
catalyzed other Cornell Library curators to work on other media archives, with 
the result that RMC also houses America's largest Hip Hop Archive.  The 
advantage is that all materials that fall within RMC will be maintained and, 
ideally, preserved by the Cornell Library -- in contrast to materials that end 
up in the general stacks which are more vulnerable to deaccession over the long 
haul.  My main goal as curator has not been to select special artists for the 
preservation of their work, but to gather together very broad archives across 
video and new media so that future artists and researchers might find these 
collections inspirational for the creation of new work and scholarship.  As a 
result we have broad holdings across the media and institutions, including 
large holdings in video art,  CD-Rom and net.art,  the Rockefeller Foundation 
Fellowships in New Media competition, which ran from 2003-2008 with dossiers of 
roughly 300 leading American new media artists; the Experimental Television 
Center Archives (including 3,000 titles of video art and documentation);  the 
Wen Pulin Archive of Chinese Avant-Garde Art (360 hours of digitized 
documentary footage of Chinese contemporary art from 1986-2002, including 
documentation of early works by artists such as Xu Bing, Song Dong, and the 
female performance artists who helped catalyze the Tiananmen episode, etc.; the 
paper archives of the Electronic Media and Film Program of the New York State 
Council on the Arts (NYSCA); and tapes from the 1970s Ithaca Video Festival 
which was founded and curated by the incomparable artist, Philip Mallory Jones, 
etc.  It is true that Goldsen maintains a large collection of individual artist 
portfolios donated by participating artists whose contributions have helped 
grow Goldsen since its founding, but my emphasis has not been on the 
handpicking of individual artists.  The result of this curatorial strategy also 
has helped us bring in grants from American and Asian sources for broad 
research in preservation, such as three grants with Turbulence.org from 
National Endowment for the Arts for the preservation of net.art, a very large 
grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to research preservation 
and access of interaction art on CD-Rom, and a very recent grant from NYSCA to 
better organize public access to its "memory" archives held in Goldsen.  

Of course, Goldsen also serves as the Cornell home for -empyre- (although we 
currently need to respond better to Renate's pleas to bring the homepage up to 
date!!!), and we aim to preserve the archive of all -empyre- postings since its 
founding by Melinda Rackham in 2002 (the same year as Goldsen began).

Regarding this month's celebration of such incredible pioneering feminist 
figures in media art, I can say that this strategy of making accessible broad 
swatches of artistic production has enabled us to bring together exciting sets 
of dossiers representing the incredible contributions made to our art forms by 
experimental feminist art workers and innumerable artists of color working 
across the genres  and the globe.  This commitment to celebrating the diversity 
of media arts has been key to the growth of Goldsen. Two years ago, I curated 
with Mickey Casad (now at Vanderbilt University)  a large exhibition of Goldsen 
holdings, whose online catalogue provides an extensive overview of our 
philosophy and holdings: Signal to Code: 50 Years of Media Art in the Goldsen 
Archive (http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/signaltocode/), which featured works by 
Barbara Hammer and Grace Quintanilla.   I was so pleased that Grace came from 
Mexico's Center for Digit

Re: [-empyre-] abstraction an multiple possiibilities

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
For those of you who happen to be in the Central New York area today, I invite 
you to join us today, Thursday, at 4:30 p.m. in Willard Straight Hall for an 
event to pay homage to the late filmmaker Agnès Varda. A free screening of 
Varda's La Pointe courte will be followed by a roundtable discussion featuring 
Laurent Dubreuil, Claire Ménard, Tim Murray, and Marie-Claire Vallois.

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 

On 4/17/19, 12:59 PM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of 
Renate Ferro"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Interesting video featuring Barbara Hammer on Art Forum


https://www.artforum.com/video/excerpts-from-an-interview-with-barbara-hammer-71388

Living within abstraction and multiple possibilities. 

Renate Ferro
Visiting Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of Art
Tjaden Hall 306
rfe...@cornell.edu
 
 

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[-empyre-] Grace Quintanilla

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hello everyone,

As we celebrate the legacies of Grace, Barbara, Carolee and Agnes, I want to 
make sure to give a shout out to the incredible organization that Grace 
Quintanilla nurtured in Mexico, Centro de Cultural Digital 
(https://centroculturadigital.mx/el-ccd) which she directed since its opening 
in 2012 and expanded into a formidable slice of Mexican cultural life. Being 
"the first governmental initiative in Mexico devoted to spread and cause the 
production of cultural projects that are born like consequence to live in a 
technological world" the CCD is a physical and virtual space that directs to 
the general public and devotes to investigate the cultural implications, social 
and economic of the daily use of the digital technology. It treats, besides, of 
a forum of communication, artistic creation and entertainment whose aim is to 
promote the consciousness of what means to live in a world where the 
individuals are, simultaneously, “users” and “creators” of digital culture."

Under Grace's leadership, the CDC has afforded opportunities for participants 
of all ages to experiment with and communicate through all forms of digital 
expression.  I was especially pleased when Grace partnered with the Rose 
Goldsen Archive of New Media Art by donating the DVD set, (Ready) Media: Hacia 
una Arqueología de los Medios y la Invencíon en México, set of 6 DVDs (Mexico 
City: Laboratoria Arte Alameda, 2010).  This unique collection documents public 
new media programming with adolescents and adults at Mexico City’s the 
Laboratoria Arte Alamedam, which provided something of a creative template as 
Grace and her colleagues developed the CDC.  The collection was featured in the 
Cornell exhibition, Signal to Code: 50 Years of Media Art, for which Grace came 
to celebrate the opening: 
http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/signaltocode/exhibition/globalmediaheritage/index.html

As was typical, although we invited her to present her own videos and CD-Rom 
artwork at the opening, she spent most of the time extolling the importance of 
providing the broader public with avenues for artistic expression.  While her 
artwork focused on family and memory, her tireless public service understood 
everyone to part of her digital family.

Happy spring (which finally arrived in Ithaca this weekend).

Tim




Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu <http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/>
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 

On 4/8/19, 5:35 PM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of 
Timothy Conway Murray"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi, everyone, before I share some thoughts about Grace later tonight, I'd 
like to open by thanking you all for sharing your admiration for Barbara Hammer.

My last contact with Barbara, was already three years ago when she attended 
the opening of the exhibition, Experimental Television Center, etc., at Hunter 
College Galleries of Art, which I curated along with Sarah Watson and Sherry 
Hocking Miller.  We were delighted to be able to feature her marvelous piece, 
"TV Tart," in the show.  To our extreme delight, Barbara (who was already ill) 
insisted on remounting her installation of "TV Tart," for which she decorated a 
monitor as a candy tart, which framed the screening of her piece.  I mention 
this not only to celebrate her unfailing generosity to the media community but 
also to keep alive the active memory of her playful spirit.  

I've been meaning to post this during the past week, especially because I 
had the pleasure of screening "TV Tart" last week for my Cornell video and new 
media art class.  It was so cool to see these young students responding to 
positively to this fun but very challenging piece.

More later tonight after class, when I'm looking forward to sharing my 
fondness of the incredible Grace Quintanilla with you.

Cheers,

Tim

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu <http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/>
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 

On 4/8/19, 10:22 AM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf 
of Renate Ferro"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Welcome Tim Murray and Ana Valdes to our April Discussion: Between the 
Body, Memory, S

[-empyre-] Grace Quintanilla

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
As I mentioned in my last post, my first encounter with Grace was when she I 
received her submission to my 1999 exhibition, Contact Zones: The Art of 
CD-Rom.  Her inventive and playful CD-Rom, Vice-Versa: Presenting the Past, the 
Present, and the Depths of Roberto and Chelo Cobo, engaged in such a forceful 
repositioning of cinematic codes that I featured it in my book, Digital 
Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota, 2008).  Although I don't 
usually recommend excerpting passages from published writing for -empyre-, I 
can't think of a better way to celebrate the artistic life and memory of Grace 
Quintanilla that by presenting her CD-Rom via selected passages over the next 
couple of days:

"Few, if any, multimedia projects interface with the history of cinema without 
assuming an ambivalent relation to the cinematic code.  Of the many CD-Roms I 
could choose from Contact Zones: the Art of CD-Rom tht might illustrate this 
ambivalence, one seems particularly appropriate to the task at hand.  A playful 
example is the 1999 Vice-Versa: Presenting the Past, the Present, and the 
Depths of Roberto and Chelo Cobo, by the Mexican artist, Grace Quintanilla.  
Vice-Versa literally presents the miniaturized trace of cinema as something 
"like the photo of a loved one carried with us."  Aiming "to experiment with 
the boundaries of traditional documentary in which the narrative structure is 
conceived in a linear way and predetermined by the director," Quintanilla plots 
the life stories of the nationally known cabaret performer, Chelo Cobo and her 
movie star brother, Roberto Cobo (Roberto would be most familiar to readers for 
his role as the young protagonist El Jaibo in Bunuel's Los Olvidados).  Now in 
the twilight of their lives, they reflect back on their pasts through their 
meditation on recent photographs of their naked bodies that were taken by their 
niece, Grace.  Structured not around film, but around the psychic zone of the 
family photo album, the CD-Rom permits users to access historical photo and 
video files as well as digitally altered contemporary footage of the personages 
who subsequently perform nude for the camera as if acting out the nude 
photographs around which they nervously shaped their retrospective narratives."

"To the aged brother and sister born from actor parents, the professing of 
acting always doubled as their primal scene.  They took to acting and dancing 
before they could distance themselves from the mirror stage and the family 
code.  The narrated photo novella of the CD-Rom reveals that both child actors 
incorporated or naturalized the codes of cinema and caberet almost before the 
procedures of mimicry could be symbolized.  Crucial to the CD-Rom is the 
digital method of morphing that Quintanilla uses to represent the ebb an flow 
of time through which memory confronts the subject with fantasy's retrospective 
traumas and pleasures.  Notable is the morph of footage of Chelo's first film 
role, as an infant of six months lying in a crib, into an image of the elder, 
nude Chelo curled up in the fetal position.  Throughout the CD-Rom, the faces 
of Roberto and Chelo transform so fluidly into morphed versions of their 
younger and older selves that even the nude, curled-up figure of the aged Chelo 
looks naturalized in the cinematic crib she occupied as an infant.  Rather than 
simply permitting "history's elision and repression" through "the endlessly 
regenerative self-creation of morphing," as Scott Bukatman and others have 
argued about mainstream cinema's repetitive display of morphing, Quintanilla's 
morphing is marshalled to foreground the dynamics of aleatory time and motion 
through which the psyche maintains a charged relation to the complexity of 
history's incorporation.  Digital toggling between past photo albums and 
present moments thus confronts the user, not to mention the family subjects, 
with the specter of specialized codes that have become naturalized, perhaps too 
much so, in the aleatory zone of family history."

"Two aspects of this 

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 

On 4/11/19, 10:42 AM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of 
Murat Nemet-Nejat"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

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[-empyre-] Agnes Varda and Angela Davis

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Ana, 

It's amazing that Angela Davis frames your memory of Agnes Varda.  I was active 
in the Vietnam resistance movement in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time of 
Angela's arrest.  One of my most vivid memories was the shock across the 
activist communities over her arrest.  One of my friends happened to live 
across the street was the county jail where she was said to be held while in 
transport.  I'll never forget the night where we sat on that porch serenading 
Angela with songs of protest and struggles, as if she could hear us.  It is 
this same spirit that Agnes Varda lent to the memory of the Panthers whose 
contributions to the communities of the Bay Area were legendary.

Tim

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 

On 4/9/19, 8:51 PM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of 
Ana Valdés"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

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[-empyre-] Grace Quintanilla (and Priamo Lozada)

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi, everyone,

This week, I plan to make a number of different posts in honor my dear friend, 
Grace Quintanilla, and it's great to be able to do so in dialogue with Ana 
Valdés.

To begin with, some background about our budding friendship and the early new 
media environment in Mexico.  In 1999 I curated a large exhibition of artworks 
created on/for CD-Rom, "Contact Zones: the Art of CD-Rom" 
(https://contactzones.cit.cornell.edu).  I had first thought that I would do a 
small exhibition at Cornell of works by some of my Australian friends who were 
blazing the trail in CD-Rom art, Norie Neumark & Maria Miranda, Stelarc, 
Suzanne Treister, Gary Zebbington, Michele Barker and others.  On a whim, I 
decided to put out a call for work on the emergent new listserv, Rhizome, with 
only a three-week window for submissions.  To my astonishment, packages began 
pouring in and I received around 120 submissions from all across the globe, and 
ended up curating a travelling exhibition of some 80 artworks from 22 
countries.  That this could have happened, and happened so quickly, was truly 
astonishing, and demonstrated the promise of curating across the network.

Among the works that appeared as if mysteriously were two fabulous submissions 
from Mexico, "Subterranean," by D.R. Isaias (Melquix) Ortega, and "Viceversa" 
by Grace Quintanilla.  I'll say more about "Viceversa" in another post but now 
want to provide a little more context about Grace.  After the Cornell show 
ended after a 6 week run in eight venues across the campus, I put out another 
call to see whether anyone might be interested in hosting it.  Again, rather 
out of the blue, I received an email from the fabulous curator, Priamo Lozada, 
that he would like to bring the show to Mexico for an exhibition in the brand 
new media room at the Centro de la Imagen, directed by Patricia Mendoza 
(Priamo, sadly, also has left us, having died from a tragic accident in Venice 
following the launch party celebrating his curation of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's 
Mexico Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale).   It was during the preparations 
and installation of this exhibition that I came to appreciate Grace Quintanilla 
and the energetic marvels of the new media community in Mexico.  Quietly behind 
the scenes, Grace assisted Priamo and me in the production of a full catalogue 
in Spanish in little over a month (with many long nights on the internet when 
even the thought of working virtually was still a turn on).  I still remember 
the force she brought to the opening party as she came with a full entourage 
from the Quintanilla and Cobo families including her uncle and aunt Cobo who 
she featured in Viceversa --  her uncle, Roberto Cobo is well known for his 
portrayal of "El Jaibo" in Bunuel's 1950 classic, "Los Olvidados" and her aunt 
was a well-known caberet dancer). It was only too cool to be sharing tequila 
shots with this artistic family.   As a result of that trip,  I still sit 
surrounded in my study by masks and artifacts that Grace encouraged me to bring 
home from the fabulous craft market near Centro de la Imagen -- Grace was so 
proud of the craft heritage of Mexico and so deeply wanted to share it with me 
and Renate, just as she continued so generously to send us copies of her 
digital and video works across the next two decades.

Since that time, Grace, Renate, and I had the occasion to conference together 
twice in Ithaca -- most recently only two years ago for the opening conference 
of my exhibition, "Signal to Code: 50 Years of Media Art in the Goldsen 
Archive" -- and also in Buenos Aires a few years back when I introduced her 
digital world to my Latin American colleagues in the traditional humanities.  
Although my fellow humanities center directors were often skeptical of my 
passion for new media, they fell head over heels during Grace's presentation of 
her heroic community building through her Center for Digital Culture in Mexico. 
 Grace had that kind of magnetism both in her presentation of her projects and 
in her impact on artistic minds across cultures and communities.  As proud as 
she was of her inventive and playful art projects (more on those in another 
post), Grace Quintanilla was most fiercely proud of the community building she 
achieved with the youth and the disadvantaged who flocked to her Center for 
Digital Culture.  I still remember the images of how she mobilized the staff 
and facilities at the Center for Digital Culture to assist those harmed by the 
devastating 2017 earthquake in Mexico City.

What's truly tragic is that two figures most responsible for nurturing the 
development and exhibition of digital art and culture in Mexico both left this 
earth at very young ages.  So this week, I'll be sharing my love and admiration 
for Grace Quintanilla and always in the shadows, her mentor and curator, Priamo 
Lozada.

Tim

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Coun

[-empyre-] Barbara Hammer at Hunter College Galleries

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi, everyone, before I share some thoughts about Grace later tonight, I'd like 
to open by thanking you all for sharing your admiration for Barbara Hammer.

My last contact with Barbara, was already three years ago when she attended the 
opening of the exhibition, Experimental Television Center, etc., at Hunter 
College Galleries of Art, which I curated along with Sarah Watson and Sherry 
Hocking Miller.  We were delighted to be able to feature her marvelous piece, 
"TV Tart," in the show.  To our extreme delight, Barbara (who was already ill) 
insisted on remounting her installation of "TV Tart," for which she decorated a 
monitor as a candy tart, which framed the screening of her piece.  I mention 
this not only to celebrate her unfailing generosity to the media community but 
also to keep alive the active memory of her playful spirit.  

I've been meaning to post this during the past week, especially because I had 
the pleasure of screening "TV Tart" last week for my Cornell video and new 
media art class.  It was so cool to see these young students responding to 
positively to this fun but very challenging piece.

More later tonight after class, when I'm looking forward to sharing my fondness 
of the incredible Grace Quintanilla with you.

Cheers,

Tim

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 

On 4/8/19, 10:22 AM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of 
Renate Ferro"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Welcome Tim Murray and Ana Valdes to our April Discussion: Between the 
Body, Memory, Screen and Culture.

We have spent the first week of our discussion discussing the physicality 
of Barbara Hammer’s film, video, performance, and installation work.  Hammer, a 
lesbian artist, died of cancer March 16th just a few weeks ago.  For the 
remainder of the month we will pay tribute to other feminist artists who passed 
away recently, curator and new media artist, Grace Quintanilla from Mexico 
City, performance and video artist, Carolee Scheemann, and filmmaker Agnes 
Varda from France.  Like Hammer these artists have incorporated discourse, 
action, and the use of technology in their work to conceptualize their ideas.  

We welcome –empyre- artists, curators, writers, historians, technologists 
and others to share with us narratives and recollections of how any of these 
artists may have influenced you.  We invite you all to post freely narratives, 
links to artistic work, or writings.  

We welcome curator and writer, Tim Murray, who has known Grace Quantanilla 
for the last twenty or so years.  He not only curated her artistic work but 
also invited her to collaborate on conferences and forums held here in the US , 
Mexico, and in South America.  Tim, I know will also be able to address the 
work of the other artists as well, not only on the production of their work but 
on the process of archiving and cataloging artistic work.  

We also welcome back Ana Valdes, a feminist, and ardent political activist. 
 
Ana will share her own work with us, but also comment on the influences 
that these artists have had on her. Looking forward to this week. 

Bios are below. Renate
___

Timothy Murray (US) is Professor of Comparative Literature and English and 
Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art in the Cornell Library. He 
is currently the Director of the Cornell Council for the arts and is curating 
the Cornell Biennial in fall, 2020. 
A curator of new media and contemporary art, and theorist of visual studies 
and digital culture, he has been forging international intersections in 
exhibition and print between the arts, humanities, and technology for over 
twenty-five years. In addition to programming innovative series in video and 
cinema, he has been at the curatorial forefront of international exhibitions in 
digital and conceptual art. He staged the largest international exhibition of 
digital art created for CD-Rom, “Contact Zones: The Art of CD-Rom” 
(https://contactzones.cit.cornell.edu), which toured from 1999-2004 in the US, 
Canada, Mexico, France, with offshoots in Macau and Johannesburg. With Arthur 
and Marilouise Kroker, he curated and designed the conceptual internet art 
journal, “CTHEORY Multimedia” (http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu), and, with 
Teo Spiller, he staged the first off-line internet art exhibition at INFOS 2000 
in Slovenia. Most recently, he collaborated with Sarah Watson and Sherry Miller 
Hocking on “The Experimental Television Center: A History,

Re: [-empyre-] Duration: Thanks to Week 3 Guests and Heading into Week 4

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--It’s hard to believe that we’re entering into week four of our discussion of 
Duration.  Thanks ever so much to this past week’s featured guests, Ruby 
Chishti, Annie Lewandowski, Denise Green, and Hans Baumann, and a special 
thanks as well to empyrean Brian Holmes for his thoughtful reflections on 
indigeneity.

For our final week on Duration, before -empyre- takes a December-January break, 
we are pleased to feature
Yasir Ahmed-Braimah (US), Juan Felipe Beltrán (US/Colombia), Kevin Ernste (US), 
Kate Greder (US), Josh Strable (US).  We are looking forward to an 
exceptionally multidisciplinary group of guests whose approaches to duration 
range from electromusic and fiber arts to biology and genetics.

Yasir Ahmed-Braimah (US)
Yasir Ahmed-Braimah is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of 
Molecular Biology and Genetics at Cornell. His research utilizes various 
approaches to understand classical evolutionary genetics problems, such as 
adaptation and speciation. Yasir earned his PhD in Biology from the University 
of Rochester, and holds an M.S. and B.S. in Biology from the University of Iowa.

Juan Felipe Beltrán (US/Colombia)
Juan Felipe Beltrán is a Colombian Ph.D. Student in Computational Biology at 
Cornell. Before coming to Cornell, Juan Felipe worked on Human-Computer 
Interaction and Musical Rhythm Analysis at NYU in Abu Dhabi, where he completed 
his Bachelor's in Computer Science. His research at Cornell focuses on the 
application of machine learning and similarity analysis to study genetic 
disease and the human microbiome.

Kevin Ernste (US)
Kevin Ernste is a composer, performer, and teacher of composition and 
electronic music at Cornell University where he is Director of the Cornell 
Electroacoustic Music Center  (CEMC). He is 
a founding member of the Cornell Avant-Garde Ensemble (CAGE, 
http://digital.music.cornell.edu/cage/) whose performance was featured in the 
2018 CCA Biennial.  He was the Acting Director of the Eastman Computer Music 
Center and Co-director of the ImageMovementSound festival. His recent music 
includes Nisi [nee-see] (“Island” in Greek) for hornist Adam Unsworth released 
on Equilibrium Records,  Numina for Brooklyn-based Janus Trio (flute, viola, 
harp) presented recently at the Spark Festival in MN, Seiend for brass quintet 
premiered by Ensemble Paris Lodron(Salzburg, Austria, Roses Don’t Need Perfume 
for guitarist Kenneth Meyer (gtr. and electronic sounds, 2009) recently 
presented by Dr. Meyer on a Hungary/Romania tour, a piece for saxophone and 
electronics called To Be Neither Proud Nor Ashamed (released on Innova 
Records), and Birches for viola with electronic sounds for John Graham 
performed on Mr. Graham’s recent China tour (Beijing, Wuhan, Xiamen, Hong Kong) 
as well as at the Aspen Summer Music Festival.  Mr, Graham presented Birches 
again in August 2011 at the International Computer Music Conference  (ICMC) in 
Huddersfield, UK. Kevin’s recently commissioned works include Chorale for 
chamber ensemble and electronics (after Stucky on Purcell), Palimpsest for the 
JACK Quartet,  and a half-evening-length work in progress for viola, 
percussion, and “unmanned” prepared piano.

Kate Greder (US)
Kate Greder is a PhD student in the Department of Fiber Science and Apparel 
Design, at Cornell University.  Her research focuses on spatialization in the 
fashion system and the subsequent onto-epistemological questions that emerge 
within design theory.  Prior to Cornell, she worked in art conservation at Iowa 
State University and she holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy from the 
University of California at Santa Cruz.

Josh Strable (US)
Josh Strable is an NSF-NPGI Postdoctoral Fellow in the Plant Biology Section of 
the School of Integrative Plant Science at Cornell University.  His research 
identifies and characterizes genes and genetic networks that underlie leaf and 
floral development in the grasses, as well as understanding the genetic basis 
of how environmental stress influences plant growth and development.  Josh 
earned his Ph.D. in Plant Biology from Iowa State University and holds a M.S. 
and B.S. in Biology from the University of Iowa.



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

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


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

Re: [-empyre-] Jolene Rickard on settler colonialism

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi, Brian,

Thanks so much for entering into this dialogue with Hans on settler 
colonialism.  In case you missed Jolene Rickard's comments on the Cayuga's 
response, I'm copying it again here.  

Jolene Rickard wrote:

Apologies that this is overlapping with week 3, as it relates to my earlier 
posts for CCA Duration week 2.
Like Renate, the early snow interrupted our movement and magnified our 
insistence on defying what the earth is telling us. I will get to the Cayuga 
artists in a moment, but I just wanted to share an experience over the past few 
days. Hopi filmmaker, Victor Masayesva was invited to Cornell to screen his new 
work, WAAKI / Sanctuary.
As expected his flights were canceled and he missed his screening but made it 
in to share a dinner. He reflected on the fact that when the snow flies, it’s 
the time when the Hopi are supposed to be quiet, not causing too much vibration 
in the world and resting. He knew he defied his own teaching by joining us in 
Ithaca, and spent the past three days in airports and bad hotel rooms. 
Indigenous peoples globally all have these insights about their relationship to 
place, but we aren’t always observing these teachings. In the United States, 
November is “Native American Heritage,” and most Indigenous peoples in North 
America ignore it or politely decline invitations to participate in 
Thanksgiving school presentations. PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) aired 
‘Native Americas’ with the visual representation of deep geology and 
petroglyphs as a core theme in the series. As rich as these observations are, 
without, a critical connection to the conditions of contemporary Indigenous 
peoples, the geological focus continues to construct these spaces as abandoned 
and available for settlement-occupation. This on-going colonial gaze assigns 
the ‘ownership’ of the geological past to science, even the word geological, 
reinforces this authority. The relationship of the Cayuga artists to the theme 
of the biennale will undoubtedly question a number of the assumed ‘authorities’ 
in play in their homeland. The Cayuga dispossession and return is an emblematic 
modern experience in dialogue with migrant and refugee populations globally. 
But, their insistence on maintaining a ‘storied’ memory of the land will be at 
the center of their work. Collectively, the ancient Haudenosaunee (Iroquoian) 
Confederacy, of which the Cayuga are a member nation, has a relationship to 
this particular land that is intricately entwined with their origin story. 
Environmentalists describe the ecological space as a biome, but this does not 
accurately represent the relationship of the Cayuga to this place. The terms, 
‘biome, environment, nature’ do not automatically map it as a co-evolved 
peopled and nature space. The collaborative process with Cayuga knowledge 
holders; linguists, artists, and political and cultural leaders will 
contemplate these issues. Their ideas will guide the physically artistic 
gesture in the spring of 2019 as the contribution to the CCA Biennale: Passage, 
Persistence, Survival – or a duration. It is important to acknowledge that this 
is the first time a broad gathering and dialogue of Cayuga artists and 
knowledge keepers will respond to their homeland since their dispossession in 
1779.

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 

On 11/23/18, 11:14 AM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf 
of Brian Holmes"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

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

Re: [-empyre-] Post from Ruby Chishti

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi, all, I've been asked by Ruby Chisti to send this along:

My lifelong fascination with the tenacious and fragile nature of existence has 
inspired me to reinvent sculptural forms through a variety of materials that 
forge an intrinsic impression of the collective human experience. In order to 
create art that is visually, intellectually, and emotionally compelling, my 
core focus is the personal and societal narratives that both comfort and 
confront an audience.
 Through the ephemeral, yet loaded with the essence of life itself as well as a 
witness of lives ripped and rebuilt, these castoffs are arranged like each 
sediment in the earth stays as a physical marker of time. The clothing is 
transformed into small architectural spaces perhaps livable to a child’s 
imagination.
The work that appears as a distorted world map, as if drawn from the memory 
reminds us of the spaces we lived in and left, that we never wanted to 
leave….and that make us  return endlessly. 
The sound envelops the listener and transports to a theatre of war and to the 
silence of ruins where individual feels protected.
 “An intangible sanctuary of ocean and stars” analyzes the concept of an 
atmosphere of shelter almost inaccessible; the lifelong seeking of security to 
indemnify persisting inner destitution. The 8 1/12’ men’s overcoat is a 
vulnerable portrayal of mortality’s dual-nature; the extrinsic, corporeal 
reality and its transient truth within."

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 


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

Re: [-empyre-] Jolen Rickard, further thoughts

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Jolene's post got rendered into digital non-sense by our softward, so we are 
forwarding it directly here:

Apologies that this is overlapping with week 3, as it relates to my earlier 
posts for CCA Duration week 2.
Like Renate, the early snow interrupted our movement and magnified our 
insistence on defying what the earth is telling us. I will get to the Cayuga 
artists in a moment, but I just wanted to share an experience over the past few 
days. Hopi filmmaker, Victor Masayesva was invited to Cornell to screen his new 
work, WAAKI / Sanctuary.
As expected his flights were canceled and he missed his screening but made it 
in to share a dinner. He reflected on the fact that when the snow flies, it’s 
the time when the Hopi are supposed to be quiet, not causing too much vibration 
in the world and resting. He knew he defied his own teaching by joining us in 
Ithaca, and spent the past three days in airports and bad hotel rooms. 
Indigenous peoples globally all have these insights about their relationship to 
place, but we aren’t always observing these teachings. In the United States, 
November is “Native American Heritage,” and most Indigenous peoples in North 
America ignore it or politely decline invitations to participate in 
Thanksgiving school presentations. PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) aired 
‘Native Americas’ with the visual representation of deep geology and 
petroglyphs as a core theme in the series. As rich as these observations are, 
without, a critical connection to the conditions of contemporary Indigenous 
peoples, the geological focus continues to construct these spaces as abandoned 
and available for settlement-occupation. This on-going colonial gaze assigns 
the ‘ownership’ of the geological past to science, even the word geological, 
reinforces this authority. The relationship of the Cayuga artists to the theme 
of the biennale will undoubtedly question a number of the assumed ‘authorities’ 
in play in their homeland. The Cayuga dispossession and return is an emblematic 
modern experience in dialogue with migrant and refugee populations globally. 
But, their insistence on maintaining a ‘storied’ memory of the land will be at 
the center of their work. Collectively, the ancient Haudenosaunee (Iroquoian) 
Confederacy, of which the Cayuga are a member nation, has a relationship to 
this particular land that is intricately entwined with their origin story. 
Environmentalists describe the ecological space as a biome, but this does not 
accurately represent the relationship of the Cayuga to this place. The terms, 
‘biome, environment, nature’ do not automatically map it as a co-evolved 
peopled and nature space. The collaborative process with Cayuga knowledge 
holders; linguists, artists, and political and cultural leaders will 
contemplate these issues. Their ideas will guide the physically artistic 
gesture in the spring of 2019 as the contribution to the CCA Biennale: Passage, 
Persistence, Survival – or a duration. It is important to acknowledge that this 
is the first time a broad gathering and dialogue of Cayuga artists and 
knowledge keepers will respond to their homeland since their dispossession in 
1779.

Jolene Rickard



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

Re: [-empyre-] Thanks to guests Week 2 and welcome to Week 3

[Timothy Conway Murray]

, inspired by work with 
bioacoustics researcher Katy Payne. Lewandowski has performed at festivals and 
venues across the United States and Europe, including the Casa da Música 
(Porto, Portugal), the Hippodrome (London), Musica Nelle Valli (San Martin 
Spino, Italy), the End of the Road Festival (Dorset, England), the Great 
American Music Hall (San Francisco), the Frieze Arts Fair (London), Avalon (Los 
Angeles), and Redcat (Los Angeles). She is a 2014 Civitella Ranieri Foundation 
Fellow.

So welcome to -empyre- Hans, Ruby, Denise, and Annie.  We're looking forward to 
hearing your voices this week.

Tim



Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu <http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/>
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 

On 11/16/18, 11:20 PM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf 
of Renate Terese Ferro"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Jolene wrote…
“The term 'resurgence' can be applied to the robust recovery of Cayuga 
culture in this moment as redress for the 'burnt earth' campaign waged against 
these peoples at the birth of America… this artistic intervention seeks to 
reclaim a distinct culture space.”

Thank you Jolene for a preview of the upcoming intervention of the 
Haudenosaunee Nation near “Cayuga.” Many of us who live on this rich land of 
the Haudenosaunee are humbled by the incredible expanse of its natural 
resources.  Amidst the acreage surrounding us I realize how important our role 
of caretaker is. I am grateful for the rich fertile land and clear water that 
surround us and there are many days I feel the aura of those who planted the 
land before me. 

Can you tell our –empyre- subscribers a bit more about the artists and the 
work that you refer to?  Would love to hear a bit more. 
Best.  Renate
    
On 11/14/18, 10:04 AM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on 
behalf of Timothy Conway Murray"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thank you for joining us, Jolene.  It is so fantastic to share your 
voice and work with the -empyre- community.

What you term as the 'resurgence' of Cayuga culture and art provides a 
crucially poignant resonance to the notions of "passage, persistence, survival" 
that frame the "Duration" theme of our month's discussion, which also is the 
theme of the 2018 Cornell Biennial in which your project participates.  Most 
telling is your juxtaposition of the "averted erasure" of Cayuga culture with 
the "hegemonic blending of culture" which far too often papers over the 
distinctness of cultural space.

I think this is a point that Kate Brettkelly made in her introductory 
post last week in reflecting on her writing on "works of art by Darren Almond, 
Nicholas Mangan and Olafur Eliasson [that] have similarly centred on seemingly 
wondrous encounters with geological durations or glacial deep time. But looking 
more critically at this artistic interest in deep time, I have wondered whether 
it risks the presumption of an absolute, universal frame of reference. Does it 
presuppose a primordial time that is rather conveniently indifferent to 
histories of social inequality and subjugation? More pointedly, when we 
celebrate the deep time of earth, do we actively overlook the durations and 
experiences of indigenous peoples?" 

In our conversations over the years, I recall your making similar 
contrasts between the Tuscarora reverence of the land and sustenance of 
indigenous corn in resistence to blended residues of the "burnt earth" campaign 
waged against the Cayuga and Tuscarora in our region.

I'm wondering if you would mind saying a bit about how this is 
inflected in your personal artistic practice as well.

Best,

Tim

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu <http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/>
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 

On 11/13/18, 5:01 AM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on 
behalf of Jolene K. Rickard"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Nya:weh (Thanks) to Tim Murry and Renate Ferro for inviting me to 
be a part of the

Re: [-empyre-] Lyrae van Clief-Stefanon post on Duration

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
For her posts, Lyrae van Clief-Stefanon is generously sharing with us poems 
from her Cornell Biennial performance with Emily Stark-Menneg, "Measured/The 
Clover Project."  For today, we share her poem,
"Measured."

Measured

If space makes the pattern, her absence is filling a quota.

The president says, 
“we’re a nation of laws” :—
The limerick 
under her dreaming :—that lilting.

At seven a Seuss-rhyme’s still funny.
And who’s to say wouldn’t have been, still, at 30?
The Sneetches or What Was I Scared Of?

She’s seven, asleep on the living room sofa.

 in amphibrachs—:
who hears her, breathing?

If space makes the pattern, her absence is filling a quota.

This absence—: Aiyana.

But what was the officer scared of?
What reaches for him in the recesses of his attention?
What formal suggestion of darkness
needs stagger
to formless? 

If space makes the pattern—: egregious—:

This grief in the rhythm of—: uplift
too :— graphic—: a measure of struggle.
Which struggle with law holds

the dark in it? Keeps 
the dark of 
 Quinletta, LaToya, Kimkesia, Oneka, Tawana…
my still-breathing cousins
] your still-breathing cousins [
 alive in it.   Aiyana. Her breath in perfection—: at seven—: This 
measure
for measure on measure on measure
or else—:

︶
Law is dead, Aiyana. It never was
 
July 14, 2013
Statement by the President
 
“The death of Trayvon Martin was a tragedy.  Not just for his family, or for 
any one community, but for America.  I know this case has elicited strong 
passions.  And in the wake of the verdict, I know those passions may be running 
even higher.  But we are a nation of laws, and a jury has spoken.  I now ask 
every American to respect the call for calm reflection from two parents who 
lost their young son.  And as we do, we should ask ourselves if we’re doing all 
we can to widen the circle of compassion and understanding in our own 
communities.  We should ask ourselves if we’re doing all we can to stem the 
tide of gun violence that claims too many lives across this country on a daily 
basis.  We should ask ourselves, as individuals and as a society, how we can 
prevent future tragedies like this.  As citizens, that’s a job for all of us.  
That’s the way to honor Trayvon Martin.”

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/07/14/statement-president


Link to the Sneetches

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VohyMXB4FLo

Link to article on Aiyana Stanley-Jones

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/17/aiyana-stanley-jones-joseph-weekley-trial_n_5824684.html

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 


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

Re: [-empyre-] Hongbin Wu post on Duration

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
For her posts, Lyrae van Clief-Stefanon is generously sharing with us poems 
from her Cornell Biennial performance with Emily Stark-Menneg, "Measured/The 
Clover Project."  For today, we share her poem,
"Measured."

Measured

If space makes the pattern, her absence is filling a quota.

The president says, 
“we’re a nation of laws” :—
The limerick 
under her dreaming :—that lilting.

At seven a Seuss-rhyme’s still funny.
And who’s to say wouldn’t have been, still, at 30?
The Sneetches or What Was I Scared Of?

She’s seven, asleep on the living room sofa.

 in amphibrachs—:
who hears her, breathing?

If space makes the pattern, her absence is filling a quota.

This absence—: Aiyana.

But what was the officer scared of?
What reaches for him in the recesses of his attention?
What formal suggestion of darkness
needs stagger
to formless? 

If space makes the pattern—: egregious—:

This grief in the rhythm of—: uplift
too :— graphic—: a measure of struggle.
Which struggle with law holds

the dark in it? Keeps 
the dark of 
 Quinletta, LaToya, Kimkesia, Oneka, Tawana…
my still-breathing cousins
] your still-breathing cousins [
 alive in it.   Aiyana. Her breath in perfection—: at seven—: This 
measure
for measure on measure on measure
or else—:

︶
Law is dead, Aiyana. It never was
 
July 14, 2013
Statement by the President
 
“The death of Trayvon Martin was a tragedy.  Not just for his family, or for 
any one community, but for America.  I know this case has elicited strong 
passions.  And in the wake of the verdict, I know those passions may be running 
even higher.  But we are a nation of laws, and a jury has spoken.  I now ask 
every American to respect the call for calm reflection from two parents who 
lost their young son.  And as we do, we should ask ourselves if we’re doing all 
we can to widen the circle of compassion and understanding in our own 
communities.  We should ask ourselves if we’re doing all we can to stem the 
tide of gun violence that claims too many lives across this country on a daily 
basis.  We should ask ourselves, as individuals and as a society, how we can 
prevent future tragedies like this.  As citizens, that’s a job for all of us.  
That’s the way to honor Trayvon Martin.”

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/07/14/statement-president


Link to the Sneetches

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VohyMXB4FLo

Link to article on Aiyana Stanley-Jones

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/17/aiyana-stanley-jones-joseph-weekley-trial_n_5824684.html

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 


empyre forum
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[-empyre-] Hongbin Wu post on Duration

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thanks, Tim, for inviting me to join the discussion on "Duration" in November. 
It's such a coincidence that the theme of the China Art Exhibition in 11th 
Florence Biennale which I curated in 2017 is also "Duration". So when I first 
met Tim in Beijing in August this year, Tim said humorously that it is fate! I 
think this is also the discussion and cognition of the same concept by the East 
and West curators from different contexts at roughly the same time, as 
described in a poem "Time flows through here, we happen to be present." Maybe 
our thinking subtly corresponds to the "Duration" theory of the French 
philosopher Henri Bergson. Indeed, when I was determining the theme of the 
exhibition, it was precisely because I saw the compatibility between Bergson's 
philosophy of time and the individual perceptual understanding experience of 
Chinese traditional philosophy.
 "Duration" has a poetic translation in Chinese -- "绵延". The translation uses a 
synaesthesia about space to explain time, however opposing the "spatiality" of 
time is exactly what Bergson wants to do. I think there may be different 
presentation ways when we face the "Duration". 
 The theme of this year's Cornell Biennale is "Duration: Passage, Persistence, 
Survival." It is a clear and broad topic. Ethnic, gender, political, cultural, 
ecological and even scientific issues are included in the discussion. It has a 
sociological constructive possibility to explore contemporary people's duration 
consciousness from different perspectives.
 Exhibition "Duration" which I curated was presented from the perspective of 
"something lacking". Such as the "shadowing" of the time process. The existence 
of history and the present presence are two main endpoints that China presents 
to the world. Complex, diverse and even contradictory time experiences are 
vague. Additionally, as we all know, China currently lacks context for 
discussing race, gender, and some sensitive topics. These problems are hidden 
in the "temporality" of art to be discovered. The works of the artists I 
selected are based on it.Back to Bergson,"Duration" is a truth of life, and 
people should think in the time.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts about our East/West common interest in 
Duration.

Best,

Hongbin Wu

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 




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Re: [-empyre-] Greetings empyre

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thank you for joining us, Jolene.  It is so fantastic to share your voice and 
work with the -empyre- community.

What you term as the 'resurgence' of Cayuga culture and art provides a 
crucially poignant resonance to the notions of "passage, persistence, survival" 
that frame the "Duration" theme of our month's discussion, which also is the 
theme of the 2018 Cornell Biennial in which your project participates.  Most 
telling is your juxtaposition of the "averted erasure" of Cayuga culture with 
the "hegemonic blending of culture" which far too often papers over the 
distinctness of cultural space.

I think this is a point that Kate Brettkelly made in her introductory post last 
week in reflecting on her writing on "works of art by Darren Almond, Nicholas 
Mangan and Olafur Eliasson [that] have similarly centred on seemingly wondrous 
encounters with geological durations or glacial deep time. But looking more 
critically at this artistic interest in deep time, I have wondered whether it 
risks the presumption of an absolute, universal frame of reference. Does it 
presuppose a primordial time that is rather conveniently indifferent to 
histories of social inequality and subjugation? More pointedly, when we 
celebrate the deep time of earth, do we actively overlook the durations and 
experiences of indigenous peoples?" 

In our conversations over the years, I recall your making similar contrasts 
between the Tuscarora reverence of the land and sustenance of indigenous corn 
in resistence to blended residues of the "burnt earth" campaign waged against 
the Cayuga and Tuscarora in our region.

I'm wondering if you would mind saying a bit about how this is inflected in 
your personal artistic practice as well.

Best,

Tim

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 

On 11/13/18, 5:01 AM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of 
Jolene K. Rickard"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Nya:weh (Thanks) to Tim Murry and Renate Ferro for inviting me to be a part 
of the -empyre-soft_skinned space. 
My participation in Duration: Passage, Persistence, Survival is as convener 
in collaboration with artists from the GAYOGOHÓ:NÓ or Cayuga Nation diaspora. 
As noted by Tim Murry, Cornell is located within Cayuga homelands but does not 
fully recognize it's obligation to 'territory.' The Cayuga were dispossessed 
and forced from their homeland in 1779 by a systematic military campaign during 
the American Revolution known as the Clinton-Sullivan Expedition. The Cayuga 
sheltered throughout Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Nations for over 229 years and 
have now embarked on the remarkable resistance of returning to their 
territorial space. 
The relationship between Indigenous peoples and the United States is 
relevant but not at the core of the collaborative project with Cayuga artists. 
This tentative assemblage of these artists will be the first time since their 
forced removal that they will be coming together as "Cayuga" artists. The 
process of conversation, reclamation of Cayuga space and history will be at the 
center of a proposed installation at Akwe:kon, an Indigenous student residence 
on campus. Marking space as Cayuga will be an important action in this 
collaboration, but there isn't a distinct aesthetic Cayuga practice but their 
relationship to place is richly detailed in their language. The term 
'resurgence' can be applied to the robust recovery of Cayuga culture in this 
moment as redress for the 'burnt earth' campaign waged against these peoples at 
the birth of America. 
I recognize that this emblematic experience of the relationship between 
Indigenous peoples and settler states as a global condition. Indigenous peoples 
have endured the modern epoch of colonialism and are emerging from an averted 
erasure. But, at a moment when most have accepted the hegemonic blending of 
culture, this artistic intervention seeks to reclaim a distinct culture space. 
How will this return to Cayuga be read in an arts context insistent upon the 
flattening of epistemological and ontological difference? 

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Re: [-empyre-] Week 2. Duration: Passage, Persistence, Survival

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
We follow this past week's broad reflections on art and duration by introducing 
a wide-ranging group of featured guests who will address during Week 2.

For this week, I am joined a number of curators and artists whose international 
exhibitionds and interventions probe the extent of duration across the broadest 
spectrum of the arts: performance, poetry, installation, architecture, 
painting, and new media.   Following up last week's reflections on indigeneity, 
we will feature Jolene Rickard of the Tuscarora Nation, along with voices from 
China and Germany and the US.  So welcome to our discussion, featured guests, 
Renate Ferro (US), Jolene Rickard (Tuscarora Nation), Jolene Rickard (Tuscarora 
Nation), Lyrae van Clief-Stefanon (US), Hongbin Wu (China), and Sasa Zivkovic 
(US/Germany).

Renate Ferro (US), 
Renate Ferro is a conceptual artist working in emerging technology and culture. 
Most recently her work has been featured at The Freud Museum (London), The 
Dorksy Gallery (NY), The Hemispheric Institute and FOMMA (Mexico), and The 
Janus Pannonius Muzeum (Hungary). Her work has been published in such journals 
as Diacritics, Theatre Journal, and Epoch. She is a managing moderator for the 
online new media list serve -empyre-soft-skinned space. Ferro is a Visiting 
Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of 
Art at Cornell University teaching digital media and theory. She also directs 
the Tinker Factory, a creative research lab for Interdisciplinary Research.

Jolene Rickard (Tuscarora Nation)
As the Director of the American Indian Program and Associate Professor in the 
History of Art and Art Departments at Cornell University, Jolene Rickard is 
primarily interested in issues of indigeneity within a global context. She is 
currently engaged in a documentation project of Seneca Culture for the 2018 
Cornell Council for the Arts Biennial that will result in the installation of a 
sculpture by a Seneca artist.  Her recent projects include serving as the 
advisor for Sakahàn: 1st International Quinquennial of New Indigenous Art at 
the National Gallery of Canada in 2013, conducting research through a Ford 
Foundation Research Grant in 2008–11, participating in New Zealand’s Te Tihi 
Scholar/Artist Gathering in 2010, and co-curating the inaugural exhibition for 
the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC in 
2004. She is from the Tuscarora Nation (Haudenosaunee). Her book, Visualizing 
Sovereignty, is forthcoming. 

Lyrae van Clief-Stefanon (US)
Associate Professor of Creative Writing and English at Cornell University, 
Lyrae van Clief-Stefanon is the author of Open Interval, a 2009 National Book 
Award finalist, and Black Swan winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, as 
well as Poems in Conversation and a Conversation, a chapbook collaboration with 
Elizabeth Alexander. She is currently at work on The Coal Tar Colors, her third 
poetry collection, and Purchase, a collection of essays. She was one of ten 
celebrated poets commissioned to write poems inspired by Jacob Lawrence’s 
Migration Series in conjunction with the 2015 exhibit One-Way Ticket: Jacob 
Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Works for MoMA. For the 2018 Cornell 
Biennial, she collaborated with Emilie Stark-Menneg on Measured/The Clover 
Project which springs from tensions of an urgent present moment marked by 
breakdowns and failures between women living on the edge of violence.

Hongbin Wu (China)
Hongbin Wu is a Visiting Scholar at Cornell University and Associate Professor 
of Art History at Renmin University in Beijing, China.  He is a prolific 
curator of contemporary Chinese art with recent exhibitions in Bonn, Germany, 
Toronto, Canada, and Beijing China.  He recently curated a Chinese exhibition 
around the theme of Duration in Contemporary Chinese Art.

Sasa Zivkovic (US/Germany)
An Assistant Professor of Architeture at Cornell University, Sasa Zivkovic is a 
principal of Hannah, an architecture practice based in the United States and 
Germany. Hannah's research focuses on advancing traditional building 
construction techniques by implementing new technologies and processes of 
making, addressing subjects of rapid urbanization and mass customized housing 
design.. At Cornell, he directs the Robotic Construction Laboratory (RCL), an 
interdisciplinary research group investigating advanced materials and novel 
construction technology, and teaches graduate and undergraduate design studios 
and seminars with a focus on digital fabrication, computation, and 
representation.  He oversaw Robotic Construction Laboratory's 2018 Cornell 
Biennial project, Log Knot, which developed a large scale outdoor sculpture 
through the recycling of large pieces of logs cut to fit by RCL's large robotic 
saw.





Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Cura

[-empyre-] Thanks so Liz and Kate and Levinas/Merleau-Ponty on duration

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thanks so much, Liz, for pointing us toward the varying approaches to duration 
that crop up in Levinas and Merleau-Ponty.  It will be interesting to hear how 
this notion of something of an enfolded duration of past/future in the extend 
present plays out through the rest of the month's discussion of duration.

Thanks very much to Liz Wijaya and Kate Brettkelly for introducing their 
conceptual orientations to duration and art as we begin this month's -empyre- 
discussion of  "Duration: Passage, Persistence, Survival."

More about this week's guests soon.

Best,

Tim

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 

On 11/11/18, 4:21 PM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of 
Elizabeth Wijaya"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

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Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 167, Issue 2

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Elizabeth Wijaya wrote  "On Kate's point on deep time and the danger of 
obscuring/forgetting
historical subjugation and social inequality,  maybe there is also such a
thing as mountain time that's inhabited and experienced differently by
people attracted to mountains for the sublime/universal time or as in
Chiang's film, for the duration of survival."

Something I've been discussing with artists and students over the past couple 
of months are the traversals and transversals of duration as cross-inhabited by 
differing populations and by differing epistemologies.  While nature frequently 
has been figured vis à vis the "sublime" or the "universal," its understanding 
remains contingent on the populations inhabiting it.  Just as "understanding" 
itself carries the footprint of historically fraught philosophical traditions.  
For Liz's cinematic characters, habitation runs contrary to the inhibitions of 
constrained passage and labor.  Flight itself is both liberatory and 
terroristic depending on whether the look goes backward or forward.  But in 
this case, the artistic engine still might remain to be tied to "projection" in 
relation to "distance" or "distancing."  I'm wondering whether this isn't a 
peculiarly cinematic condition, one that signals the historical discussion of 
the gaze in all of its complexities.  Might Chiang's cinematography and still 
off something different?  

Along the lines of plastic arts, I'm also wondering whether the counter-to-deep 
time of indigenous art might not signal something different both in apparatus 
and epistemology? In this case, duration itself might be running still and 
flowing deep but not in the sense of 'movement' or 'perspectival depth.'  Just 
a thought provoked by Kate and Liz's posts.

Tim

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 

On 11/7/18, 1:16 PM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of 
Elizabeth Wijaya"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

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[-empyre-] deep time and indigenous peoples

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
kate.brettke...@gmail.com> wrote: "But looking more critically at this artistic 
interest in deep time, I have
wondered whether it risks the presumption of an absolute, universal frame
of reference. Does it presuppose a primordial time that is rather
conveniently indifferent to histories of social inequality and subjugation?
More pointedly, when we celebrate the deep time of earth, do we actively
overlook the durations and experiences of indigenous peoples?""

Thank you Kate for opening up the month with this important warning.  We live 
down the road in Upstate New York from the GAYOGOHÓ:NÓ or the Cayuga Nation 
which has been fighting in the courts to retrieve part of its lands at the top 
of Cayuga Lake.  Cornell University is situated on Cayuga homelands.  Since the 
Cayuga's never signed a nineteenth-century "treaty" with the US giving them 
'nationhood,'" their efforts to reclaim just a small section of their land for 
a formal territory has been rebuffed by the courts.One of our guests this 
month, Jolene Rickard, will be discussing her work to articulate and preserve 
the cultural heritage of the Cayugas, a project which will culminate in the 
commission of a new Cayuga sculpture.

Your post also reminds me of another work by Smithson, his salt sculptures 
created for the 1969 Cornell University "Earth Art" exhibition 
(http://78.media.tumblr.com/8c044a34d4c024796e1958f953b4e5bb/tumblr_mr4dtbfQ6N1r70t2xo1_1280.jpg).
 For this series of works, installed in the University art museum, Smithson 
dis-played salt retrieved from the mines running under Cayuga Lake, the home 
waters of the Cayuga.  A lot can be said about these underdiscussed works, but 
I've always appreciated them as countering, through an emphasis on artistic 
constructivism and deconstructionism, the kind of universalist approach to the 
environment that Smithson later describes Spiral Jetty to be.  Here the 
approach to this earthly material seems dependent, contingent, on its placement 
within the very institutional history -- a University art museum on Cayuga 
homelands -- of its artistic transformation.  But, as Kate cautions, even the 
'deconstruction' of such universalisms depends on the very centrality of the 
universalisms themselves.  Indeed, it was not until last year that the 
President of Cornell University first openly acknowledged in formal settings 
the Cayuga homelands on which the University sits.

It is in this complex regard that I'm hoping our discussions of 'duration' in 
contemporary art will dwell on the cultural persistence of passage and survival.

Thanks for opening this window, Kate.

Tim


Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 

On 11/5/18, 3:22 PM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of 
Kate Brettkelly"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

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Re: [-empyre-] Week 1. Duration: Passage, Persistence, Survival

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Welcome to the end of fall, everyone.  The last of the leaves are falling in 
Upstate New York and we are on the edges of our seats awaiting the US election 
results tomorrow night after an election cycle of harrowing, racist attacks on 
the world's most disenfranchised.  The results of last week's election results 
in Brazil make us all the more nervous.  Bizarrely, I too await my own election 
results as I am on tomorrow's ballot (unopposed, so no mystery) for election to 
my town council (I've always wanted to have a say in how to preserve snow plows 
and which potholes should be filled!).

But on a more serious note, I've chosen to moderate this month as a follow-up 
to the deeply thoughtful conversations that have been catalyzed by artworks and 
performances mounted over the past three months for the Cornell Council for the 
Arts Biennial, which I have curated under the same theme as we'll have for this 
month's discussion: Duration: Passage, Persistence, Survival.  I'll say more 
about that as the week and month progresses, but for now just want to say that 
many of the participating artists have agreed to join us after this week.

For this week, I am joined by three international curators and theoreticians 
whose work probes the extent of duration across the arts and philosophy.  Their 
experiences and projects across the globe -- New Zealand, Singapore, Canada -- 
should provide our discussion with some exciting framing about how duration has 
been throught within the arts and digital culture.  So welcome to our 
discussion, featured guests, Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers (New Zealand), Justine 
Kohleal (Canada), Elizabeth Wijaya (US/Singapore).

Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers (New Zealand)
Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers is a contemporary art historian, public engagement 
specialist and arts writer based in Auckland, New Zealand. In 2017, she was 
awarded the Vice-Chancellor's Prize for Best Doctoral Thesis at the University 
of Auckland. She is the author of the forthcoming book, Time, Duration and 
Change in Contemporary Art published by Intellect and distributed through 
Chicago University Press. She has lectured at the University of Auckland and 
AUT University, worked as a curator at Artspace, NZ and currently manages a 
public engagement team at Auckland Transport.Her book, Time,
 Duration and Change in Contemporary Art,  presents a major study of time as  a 
key aesthetic dimension of recent art practices. This book explores different 
aspects of time across a broad range of artistic media and draws on recent 
movements in philosophy, science, and technology to show how artists generate 
temporal experiences that resist the standardized time of modernity: Olafur 
Eliasson’s melting icebergs produce fragile temporal ecologies; Marina 
Abramović’s performances test the durations of the human body; Christian 
Marclay’s The Clock  conflates past and present chronologies. This book 
examines alternative frameworks of time, duration, and change in prominent 
philosophical, scientific, and technological traditions, including physics, 
psychology, phenomenology, neuroscience, media theory, and selected 
environmental sciences. It suggests that art makes a crucial contribution to 
these discourses not by “visualizing” time, but by entangling viewers in 
different sensory, material, and imaginary temporalities.

Justine Kohleal (Canada).
Justine Kohleal is a Toronto-based curator and art critic. Prior to her 
appointment as RBC Curatorial Fellow at The Power Plant Contemporary Art 
Gallery, Kohleal worked as an independent curator and arts writer in Edmonton, 
Alberta. Select past curatorial projects include [INTERFACE] (Fringe Gallery, 
Edmonton); No Job More Dangerous and Intellectual Play (dc3 Art Projects, 
Edmonton); Sounding the Alarm: The Poetics of Connection (Art Gallery of 
Ontario); and Beth Stuart: Length, Breadth, Thickness and—Duration (The Power 
Plant Contemporary Art Gallery). She acted as a curatorial assistant to Gerald 
McMaster and Denise Birkhofer at Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto for The Faraway 
Nearby: Photographs of Canada from The New York Times Photo Archive and to 
writer and curator Kari Cwynar for Duane Linklater’s installation Monsters for 
Beauty, Permanence and Individuality (Evergreen Brickworks, Toronto). She has 
interned with The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Luce Foundation Centre for 
American Art and with the Art Gallery of Ontario. Kohleal holds a curatorial 
M.F.A from OCAD University and a B.A. from the University of Alberta with a 
focus in Art, Design, and Visual Culture. Currently, her research focuses on 
the intersection of space, the body/senses and boredom within performance-based 
art and curatorial practice.

Elizabeth Wijaya (US/Singapore)
Elzabeth Wijaya is a President's Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Asian 
Languages and Literature of the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities). She 
receive

[-empyre-] Announcing November 2018. Duration: Passage, Persistence, Survival

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
-empyre- soft_skinned space, November 2018
Topic: Duration: Passage, Persistence, Survival
Moderator: Timothy Murray (US)

Our guests range from international curators, theorists, and artists whose work 
touches on the complexities of Duration.
Featured Guests.
Week 1: Kate Brettkelly (New Zealand), Justine Kohleal (Canada), Elizabeth 
Wijaya (US/Singapore)
Week 2: Renate Ferro (US), Jolene Rickard (Tuscarora Nation), Lyrae van 
Clief-Stefanon (US), Hongbin Wu (China), Sasa Zivkovic (US/Germany)
Week 3: Hans Baumann (US/Switzerland), Ruby Chishti (US/Pakistan), Denise Green 
(US),
Annie Lewandowski (US)

Week 4: Yasir Ahmed-Braimah (US), Juan Felipe Beltrán (US/Colombia), Kevin 
Ernste (US), Kate Greder (US), Josh Strable (US)

Duration: Passage, Persistence, Survival 
As the globe is the witness to new incidents of mass shootings of people of 
color and religion, the likely passage between borders of a journalist’s sawed 
up body parts, new migratory flows that are met with declarations of war 
against victims of violence, and renewed declarations of the urgency of 
addressing global warming, -empyre- invites you to discuss Duration throughout 
the month of November.

This topic builds on the discourse around artworks and performances featured at 
the 2018 Cornell Council for the Arts Biennial, running through December in 
Ithaca, New York, which is organized around the same theme of Duration: 
Passage, Persistence, Survival (ccabiennial.cornell.edu).  The aim is to 
capitalize on discursive exchange and artistic environments that provoke 
conversation about the persistence of passage, from environments to 
communities, while emphasizing the challenge of survival in hostile 
socio-ecological climates.

Artistically, duration lies at the core of conceptual, architectural, and media 
art, whether through the experience of the ephemeral media of installation, 
performance, screen, sound, and time-based art or through the representation of 
the passage of time via creation, migration, memory, and motion. The idea of 
duration thus foregrounds the artistic horizons of both temporality and 
corporeity, indicating the persistence and continued presence of the material 
world through which the historical and virtual are experienced in their 
potentiality. Duration can be “short” in its transience, ephemerality, 
volatility, and perishability. And it can be “long” in its durability, 
endurance, steadfastness, longevity, and survival. We invite discussion of 
institutional and racial violence, the temporality of indigenous culture, the 
“long durée” of gradual historical alterations, trans gender and sexualities, 
contemplations of the built environment, “deep time” of ecology and volatile 
encroachments of global warming, passage of sound, and historical imperatives 
of persistence and survival under threatening cultural, ethnic, racial, sexual, 
and ecological conditions.

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 


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Re: [-empyre-] October: This Mess We're In Week 4.5

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
We want to extend our warmest gratitude to -empyre- Editorial Board member, 
Tarsh Bates, for moderating the October discussion "This Mess We're In."  It's 
almost hard to believe that the "mess" seems to have gotten worse throughout 
the month with the elections in Brazil and the election cycle and racial 
demonizations in the US.

Somewhat along these lines, I will host and will soon introduced the November 
discussion on "Duration: Passage, Persistence, Survival."  

On behalf of Renate Ferro and the -empyre- Editorial Board, thanks go out to 
Tarsh and her guests for the month.

All my best,

Tim

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 

On 10/29/18, 12:53 AM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf 
of Tarsh Bates"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thanks Kathy and WhiteFeather for your contributions. Your comments 
about control, violence and management have provoked a lot of thoughts, 
which I will discuss further. Last week was a trouble shooting week for 
the show and recovery from the conference. Control, violence and 
management indeed!

This is a bit late, but I want to introduce the last mess of guests for 
October...

*Helen Pynor* is an artist whose practice explores philosophically and 
experientially ambiguous zones such as the life-death boundary. Her work 
is informed by in-depth residencies in scientific institutions, most 
recently The Francis Crick Institute, London; The Max Planck Institute 
of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden; and The Heart and Lung 
Transplant Unit, St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney. Pynor frequently 
collaborates with members of the broader community whose embodied 
experiences connect with the themes of her work. Pynor has exhibited 
widely nationally and internationally including at The National Taiwan 
Museum of Fine Arts; The National Centre for Contemporary Art, Russia; 
Science Gallery Dublin; Science Gallery London; FACT, Liverpool UK; 
Wellcome Collection, London; and The Australian Centre for Photography. 
She has received an Honorary Mention at Prix Ars Electronica, Linz, and 
national awards in Australia. Pynor holds a Bachelor of Science (1st 
Class Hons), a Bachelor of Visual Arts, and a PhD. Pynor lives and works 
in Sydney and London.

*Marietta Radomska* is a feminist philosopher and transdisciplinary 
Gender Studies scholar. She works as a Postdoc at the Department of 
Thematic Studies – unit: Gender Studies, Linköping University, Sweden, 
within the research area of Gender, Nature, Culture and The 
Posthumanities Hub. Since 1 July 2018 Radomska has also been a Visiting 
Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Cultures, University of 
Helsinki, Finland. She holds a PhD in Gender Studies (Linköping 
University, SE), Research MA in Gender and Ethnicity (Utrecht 
University, NL) and MA in Philosophy specialised in Social Communication 
(Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan,PL). Currently, Radomska works on 
the research project “Ecologies of Death: Environment, Body and Ethics 
in Contemporary Art”, funded by The Swedish Research Council 
(Vetenskapsrådet) International Postdoc Grant. She is the founder of The 
Eco- and Bioart Research Network, co-director of The Posthumanities Hub, 
a founding member of Queer Death Studies Network, co-founder of The 
International Network for Ecocritical and Decolonial Research, and 
co-coordinator of GEXcel International Collegium for Advanced 
Transdisciplinary Gender Studies research strand “Death Studies: 
Queerfeminist Materialist Perspectives” (together with Nina Lykke and 
Tara Mehrabi). Radomska is the author of the monograph Uncontainable 
Life: A Biophilosophy of Bioart (2016).

*Mary Maggic* is a non-binary artist working at the intersection of 
biotechnology, cultural discourse, and civil disobedience. Their work 
spans documentary video, scientific methodology, public workshopology, 
performance, and large scale installation. Maggic's most recent projects 
Open Source Estrogen and Estrofem! Lab generate DIY protocols for the 
extraction and detection of estrogen hormone from bodies and 
environments, demonstrating its micro-performativity and potential for 
mutagenesis, i.e. gender-hacking. They hold a BSA in Biological Science 
and Art from Carnegie Mellon University and a MS in Media Arts and 
Sciences from MIT Media Lab and have had the privilege to exhib

Re: [-empyre-] In memory of Marilouise Kroker 1943-2018

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Forwarded from Ashley Ferro-Murray

Good afternoon everyone from Festival TransAmeriques in Montreal — funny that 
I’ve just arrived in Canada where I am catching up on this sad news.

As my parents, Tim and Renate, have said, Arthur and Marilouise were a part of 
our family circle for years. I fondly remember for empyre times with them both 
in Ithaca. As a child I didn’t understand Marilouise’s work, but more her 
amazing affect and attention to details. Later in life I discovered hers and 
Arthur’s work while in graduate school where I discovered how the sharpness of 
Marilouise’s scholarship matched her personality and style so perfectly. I 
could hear her voice through her work. I know that presence will live on — it 
certainly continues to vibrate through the fabrics of my curatorial practice at 
EMPAC.

Thinking of you dear Marilouise,

Ashley

Ashley Ferro-Murray
Curator of Dance and Performance
EMPAC, RPI


 


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Re: [-empyre-] In memory of Marilouise Kroker 1943-2018

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
What a shock it was to learn of Marilouise Kroker’s death on Tuesday after an 
extremely short illness.  Renate and I have so valued our years of friendship 
and collaboration with Marilouise.  As Renate mentioned, it was very much the 
influence of Arthur and Marilouise that urged us to join in collaboration for 
–empyre- and other writing and curatorial projects after firmly keeping our 
work separate for the first period of our professional lives together, when 
Renate would work separately in her studio and I would write my stuff across 
the house in my study, only to meet in the middle of house at the end of the 
day to share our creations.  Marilouise and Arthur helped us to understand that 
it could be exciting and creative to share our voices in public.  Strangely the 
other couple similarly influencing us were Helen and Newton Harrison, with 
Helen also leaving us in April (at 90, with a good fifteen years of more 
production than Marilouise would be granted).

Marilouise joined with Arthur to usher in the first wave of “critical digital 
studies” with their tireless work on CTHEORY – the first online journal – and 
their many publishing projects.  So many –empyre- subscribers will remember the 
verve and edge of their infamous public critical performances when, clad in 
cool black and amplified by body mics, they would alternate reading their 
experimental prose with their characteristic flat and edgy voices as if cyborgs 
clad in human bodies.  Marilouise was one of the early critical figures to 
insist on the fractious rub of the feminist voice on the culture of the big 
daddy mainframe.  Her 1993 collection with Arthur, The Last Sex: Feminism and 
Outlaw Bodies, provided a  cyberfeminist stage for the likes of Kathy Acker and 
provided an added echo chamber for the growing and loud resonance of global 
cyberfeminist voices of those pioneering figures and collectives such as Donna 
Haraway, Sadie Plant, VNS Matrix, Old Boys Network, and subRosa.

Renate and I enjoyed a magical semester with Marilouise in Ithaca when she and 
Arthur were in residence at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities for the 
1998-99 theme year, “The Virtual.”  Even when Marilouise was struggling with 
severe back pain at the time, she was always laughing and mischievous in 
planning the next critical disruption of the utopic digital scene or when 
sending me and Arthur off to the ice rink for what she would call our 
“philosophical skates.”  And I so well recall her infectious glee when Reggie 
Woolery and Srinivas Aravamudan cooked up the idea to launch a pirate internet 
radio program of music and critical interviews in which she and Arthur starred 
(perhaps one of the very first such online radio shows, which Cornell soon shut 
down over copyright paranoia).  Just before they came to Ithaca, Marilouise and 
Arthur seized upon the emergent multimedia capacities of the internet to launch 
their first multimedia version of CTHEORY: “Digital Dirt”  
(http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu).  Aiming to infect “the antiseptic 
cleanliness” of “the ruling illusion of digital reality,” “Digital Dirt” 
provided a mixed media platform for interventions in noise, e-art, and text.  
As we spent that Virtual period together at Cornell, we hatched the idea of 
creating a separate space for critical net.art, “CTHEORY Multimedia,” which we 
opened at the Cornell Library with the help of Associate Librarian, Tom 
Hickerson.  Profiting from library programmers and designers dedicated to 
CTHEORY Multimedia, we produced three additional issues of net.art whose 
criticality and artistic breadth were unparalleled on the international scene: 
“Tech Flesh: The Promise and Perils of the Human Genome Project,” “Wired Ruins: 
Digital Terror and Ethnic Paranoia,” and “NetNoise” for which we jointly wrote 
curatorial statements.  These issues are remarkably still accessible.  
Co-writing with Marilouise and Arthur was such an intellectual and stylistic 
thrill for me.  My critical style has never been the same!  One of my favorite 
memories was joining them on a phone call, when I dialed them in Montreal as I 
sat in the parking lot of Arthur and my favorite Ithaca ice rink, when 
Marilouise characteristically and so gently yet firmly always came up with the 
perfect solution to the prosaic differences we were struggling over.   For 
NetNoise, we also recorded our readings of our curatorial statements.  We 
combined our voices for the introductory curatorial statement and then each of 
our voices were featured on the statements framing the individual net.art pods. 
On Tuesday night, after learning the sad news from Arthur, I clicked on the 
link to the curatorial note for “Sound Culture” and marveled, as I’m doing 
again right now, at the remarkable grain of Marilouise’s voice.  As I conclude 
this brief homage to Marilouise, I invite you all to join me in listening to 
the critical verve a

Re: [-empyre-] noise - reference

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Ps. Just saw your –empyre- post.  Funny, I was once a student of Serres when he 
was writing his book on Lucretius – fond memories of wild dancing parties in my 
grad student apartment.

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 

On 3/7/18, 1:41 PM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of 
Alan Sondheim"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--


Re: Noise - might want to look at Michel Serres' The Parasite - very 
useful here - there's also this -


https://abstractgeology.wordpress.com/2013/05/06/system-seminar-michel-serres-the-parasite/

- Alan
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Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to the March 2018 Discussion!

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thank you for your introductory post, Junting, and for organizing this fabulous 
month around the topic of Noise.  I am so looking forward to profiting over the 
month from your incredible international list of guests.

Your introductory riff on David Novak, that “noise is a moving subject of 
circulation, of sound and listening, that emerges in the process of navigating 
the world and its differences" reminds of the project I collaborated on, now 
almost fifteen years ago, with Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. For an issue of 
CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA, the online collection of net.art we curated together, we 
focused on the theme of “NetNoise.”  The issue is still available online and 
most of the pieces still work.  The issue is organized around three noise pods, 
“Sound Motion,” “Culture Pitch,” and “Noise Velocity” that navigate the 
worldwide web and its difference.  The issue, itself designed by Ritsu 
Katsumata as an artistic noise field, features works from a host of artists who 
we now retroactively recognize as important shapers of new media art: Shu Lea 
Cheang (who sits on –empyre’s- new Editorial Board), Simon Biggs (a former 
–empyre- moderator), Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, MEZ, Christina McPhee 
(who was the glue of –empyre- through the 2000s), Jody Zellen, Akuvido, Candy 
Factory, Michaël Sellam, and Zvonka Simcic and Tanja Vujinovic.. Interestingly, 
this issue on NetNoise was launched in same time period as –empyre-s first few 
years.  

Perhaps it might be interesting for me copy, in dialogue with you and Novak, 
the Curatorial Note that Arthur, Marilouise, and I composed to frame NetNoise:

“Imagine the manifold sounds of Art on the Net.  Listen to what’s happening 
when CTHEORY morphs into CSOUND.  Then enter the zone of CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA 
coming of age on the pulsating horizon of NET.NOISE. A sound of wireless motion 
and dark noise. The surging sound of coding, network streaming and 
file-surfing. The almost undetectable whispers of splicing, mixing and mutating 
noise into a brilliant tattoo on the skin of the digital.  The viral background 
of digital culture, NetNoise sounds the electronic pulse of connectivity, the 
babble of chat, the pints of hits, and the silent tracking of back-orifice 
hacking.. What happens when sound resonates images with such intensity that art 
shudders, finds itself wandering in a spectral space of its own making?  What 
happens when the net hears murmurs of strange new codes – digital looping, 
sound displacement, time compression, phasal syncopation – and suddenly opens 
up into a new electronic universe, speaking the vernacular of sounds 
recombinant fit for speed travel across the crystal palaces of the image 
matrix?. What happens the pitch and sigh of digital noise envelopes and 
expresses the complexity of decaying material culture and corporeal politics?  
When the Net finally begins to speak, when the codes of the wired world finally 
find utterance, global surfers are suddenly projected into an art of the 
cyber-ear, listening intently to what artists of net.noise have to tell us 
about the distended ear of digital sounds and images.”  

Because the citation of this text so calls to mind the verve and grain of the 
performative voices of the Krokers whose theorizing and public performances 
were so crucial to the conceptualization of digital culture, I recommend that 
you attend to the multimedial presentation of this text as we all spoke it for 
NetNoise: http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu/four.php (click on “Curatorial 
Notes” button – we also provided similarly multimedial curatorial notes for 
each sound pod).

Looking forward to a fantastic month.

Tim

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 

On 3/2/18, 11:43 AM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of 
Junting Huang"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

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Re: [-empyre-] -empyre- in 2002- a trip down memory lane

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi, Christina,

Johannes’ post helped me discover that your post too was cycled into my 
‘clutter’ by dear Microsoft.  Yeah, one of the coolest experiments you launched 
was letting non-English speakers publish in their home languages – I remember 
Spanish and French, no?One of the earliest challenges of the “universal” 
internet was its exclusion of non-English speakers (still an issue of course – 
and we still encourage folks to write in their home languages when helpful to 
them).  Of course, you also worked so hard to bring –empyre- off the net, via 
the Documenta project, and the cool scholarships you arranged at Anderson Ranch 
in Colorado.  It’s great that we’ve all been able to extend this “outreach” in 
gatherings at ISEA, CAA, etc., and it would be great if our subscribers were to 
host similar cocktail meetings or break out sessions in their orbits.  The 
online  –empyre- archive, which continues to make available all posts on 
–empyre-, is an incredible resource that would be great to promote even for 
those who don’t have the energy to be active participants in our community.  
We, of course, also remain grateful to the institutional hosts, University of 
New South Wales and Cornell University, that continue to support –empyre- with 
server and programming assistance.

Hope you are enjoying the likely arrival of spring in California.

Cheers,

Tim

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
114 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853

 

On 2/6/18, 10:38 PM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of 
Christina McPhee"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

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Re: [-empyre-] digital tools

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi, Ana,

I’m sorry that your post got cycled into my “clutter” box and I’ve just located 
it.  It’s so interesting and important that you flag the significance of early 
listservs for their activism.  Thanks ever so much for calling attention to the 
history of Stumble Upon.  Your own posts have so motivated and informed me over 
the years.

Another parallel project from the early days of listservs and what I think of 
as “digital discourse” is CTHEORY (ctheory.net) overseen by Arthur and 
Marilouise Kroker.  Although an electronic journal, the Kroker’s project served 
very much as a forum for digital activism at the moment that listservs where 
assembling themselves.  A couple of years before Melinda founded –empyre-, I 
collaborated with Arthur and Marilouise to co-curate CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA 
(ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu) as a means to providing a conceptual home for 
activist pieces of internet art, addressing focused subjects such as “Tech 
Flesh: The Promise and Perils of the Human Genome Project,” “Wired Ruins: 
Digital Terror and Ethnic Paranoia,” and “Netnoise.”  

I remember first talking with Melinda about –empyre- when she presented it at 
ISEA Nagoya in 2002 and feeling empowered by how this interactive discursive 
network could activate and extend the kind of uni-directional projects of 
CTHEORY.  Some of the most satisfying months I’ve moderated on –empyre- over 
the years have brought together various international artists and digital 
activists whose posts have enlivened the community.  Your positive and 
affirmative posts always have worked to bring together –empyreans- to think 
collectively about the challenges and opportunities presented to us by digital 
culture.

Ricardo and Patrick already have signaled nettime and other early listservs, 
and it would be cool if others on the list could also post about their activist 
work on listservs and social media.  

Cheers,

Tim

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 


On 2/11/18, 12:10 AM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of 
Ana Valdés"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

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[-empyre-] -empyre- a digital unconscious?

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi, all, it’s very interesting to think about the duration of –empyre- and the 
particular intervention of the listserv.  Next fall, I’ll be moderating a month 
on “Duration: Passage, Persistence, Survival” in conjunction with the Biennial 
for the Cornell Council for the Arts, which I’m curating on the same theme.  
While the CCA Biennial will be slanted to addressing the emergencies of 
duration now facing us -- immigration, ecology, sexual difference, politics – 
the notion of ‘staying with’ –empyre- over the fifteen years of its duration is 
certainly central to my thinking of the durational possibilities of digital 
communication.  One of the things that’s fascinated and encouraged me and 
Renate as she’s worked tirelessly to continue invigorating –empyre- over recent 
years has been the surfacing – sometimes almost out of the blue – of subscriber 
voices whose participatory mode has been one of lurking.   When this happens, 
it’s like an energetic spark that disrupts the comfortable discourse of 
–empyre’s-s more habitual participants.  Somewhat like the role of our 
accumulating archive as described by Theresa, these surfacings suggest, indeed, 
that the conceptual and affective threads of –empyre- are marked by both 
passage and persistence, and serve the individual participants in tremendously 
unique and particular ways.   Some of this is no doubt due to the listerv’s 
particular modes of address.  Unlike a blog, it doesn’t require polished 
writing and doesn’t wait for habitual users to call it up, but it summons and 
hails the participants through the antiquated mechanisms of email and impromptu 
thinking  to attend to threads coming into their boxes or to guard them as 
durational for later reflection if not dialogue.   Maybe, I’m thinking of 
–empyre- as serving  as something of a digital unconscious that can surface at 
any moment to intervene in our conscious conversations.  Just some thoughts 
jogged by Theresa and Renate.

Happy arrival of February (it’s cold and snowy but beautifully sunny in Ithaca, 
New York, today).

Tim

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
114 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
2017-18 International Sea-Sky Scholar, School of Architecture and Fine Art, 
Dalian University of Technology, China
 

On 2/3/18, 12:27 PM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of 
Renate Terese Ferro"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
February 3, 2018
Hello Theresa, 
Your comment echoes what Tim Murray, our other long -term moderator here, 
and I have been hearing from so many of our subscribers.  The tempo of the 
listserv can move exceedingly too fast.  We all can acknowledge that there are 
times we just don’t have the time to open and read posts carefully let alone 
respond to them.  The bio-artist Paul Vanouse shared with me his frustration 
that he had intended to respond to a fascinating post and by the time he got to 
writing a week had passed and he felt that his comment was not timely. 
Alternatively, there are other times when it moves at a snail’s pace or simply 
remains silent.  Over the years we have become quite comfortable with the 
pacing that is so inherent in a listserv which is so directly related to the 
ebbs and flows of those who are participating.  That is also why we often take 
the months of August and December completely off.  

I want to add that the anxiety of some over responding to a post later in 
the week or month is not a problem.  Take a look at our archives and you will 
see that the discussion is organized according to SUBJECT, AUTHOR, THREAD, or 
DATE.  The THREAD organizational tool allows a reader now or later or organize 
posts and responses to posts that are delayed.  The only caveat being that we 
cut off all posts not related to the topic at the end of the month. All of our 
subscribers are encouraged to respond to posts at any time in the month just be 
sure subject line in the email is identical to the thread it is in response to. 
 

You wrote
I prefer Empyre as a listserve. I have gone back through previous
discussions and looked up artists, followed threads and ideas when I
had time. I've gone deeper; the list moves fast for me.

I think that everyone agrees that our archive is the jewel of our online 
community.  
http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/
Since 2002 the University of New South Wales in Australia has generously 
hosted our history thanks to Melinda Rackham.  Tim Murray and I are also 
suggesting to our Editorial Board that in the coming year we archive the site 
at Cornell University as well

Re: [-empyre-] Kathirveechu Kathihal (Radiation Stories)

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thanks, Rahul and Andrea, for describing such compelling medial reflections on 
contaminations.  I posted earlier on the “Wired Ruins” issue of CTHEORY 
Multimedia that Arthur & Marilouise Kroker and I edited on ethnic paranoia.  
Your postings also bring to mind a prior issue we did on “Tech Flesh: The 
Promise and Perils of the Human Genome Project.”  The net.art pieces in that 
issue commented on the confusing infections of capital into body by the rising 
genome industry.  One of the pieces, “Machine Organs,” by Norie Neumark and 
Maria Maranda (Norie was active in last month’s –empyre- discussion) went a 
step further to figure the contamination of the body by “information” itself.  
While speaking of ‘machine organs’ metaphorically, Rahul’s work transforms the 
metaphorical into the symbolic as the rare earth materials sustaining digital 
culture contaminate the body as well as the machine.  Neumark and Miranda also 
maintain, in their writing on “Machine Organs” that information, as the 
symbolic, has the added effect of contaminating cultural representation by 
effacing difference: “Information culture's promise of pure exchangabilty masks 
its paradigm of sameness. This degradation of information theory is a cultural 
move parallel to the way psychoanalysis was reduced to ego psychology, thus 
eliminating the frightening, messy, noisy unconscious. With its trajectory 
across races, species and places, information crosses out differences. Excising 
excess as it goes. We are learning to know the body as if outside culture and 
history. And we are being habituated to understand corporeality only in the 
narrowest of biological discourses. Now there is (only) DNA to inform you of 
who you are and then to re/form you.”   Whether in performance, documentary, or 
net.art, medial interventions can give rise to the very messiness at the core 
of the projects featured by Neumark & Miranda, Andrea and Rahul.  Best,  Tim

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
114 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
2017-18 International Sea-Sky Scholar, School of Architecture and Fine Art, 
Dalian University of Technology, China
 

On 11/26/17, 9:36 AM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of 
Rahul Mukherjee"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

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Re: [-empyre-] Contamination, Toxic Assets, Hazardous Waste: AND MEDIAL ART

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thanks, Renate, for reflecting on the commonalities of our thoughts on 
contamination and toxic assets.  It’s great to be back in dialogue with 
Christina who steered the –empyre- platform for many years and with whom Renate 
and I enjoyed collaborating.  Bishnu’s work on toxicity and contamination was 
on my mind last week when I participated with Alex Taek-Gwang Lee on a panel 
about the exhibition of Fahrenttin Orenli, “Money Without Nationality,” at Art 
Sonje Center in Seoul.  Among the themes of the multimedia exhibition are how 
money and oil have permeated, contaminated, everyday life in cities, not to 
mention the art world.  Most telling was one sculpture in which Orenli wrapped 
small models of skyscrapers in printed condoms so that the exterior of the city 
read as prophylactic.  While my response was to read this piece as a figuration 
of the phallologocentrism driving corporate culture and, indeed, the current 
American government, the artist explained that his aim in exhibiting this 
electronic sculpture was to represent how corporate culture protects itself 
from critical reflections on the extent of its redefinition of urban life just 
as the urban passerby tends of walk by the monuments of urban capital without 
stopping to reflect on the implications of their social and cultural 
contamination.  It is exciting for –empyre- to pause this month to emphasize 
this very reflection, whose networks range from the biomedical and biopolitical 
to the artistic and the governmental

I join Renate in encouraging our –empyre- subscribers to pause in the daily 
passage through networked culture to share their reflections on contamination, 
mediality, and toxic “assets.”  It would be very interesting for our featured 
guests this week, Bishnu and Christina, to hear some of your thoughts.

Best,

Tim

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
114 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
2017-18 International Sea-Sky Scholar, School of Architecture and Fine Art, 
Dalian University of Technology, China
 

On 11/19/17, 11:52 AM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of 
Renate Ferro"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

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Re: [-empyre-] Digital Terror and Ethnic Paranoia

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thank you all for such a stimulating first week of contamination on –empyre-.  
While keeping on the screen the contaminations of foodstuffs, I would like to 
shift the discourse a bit, as if something of a palimpsest, to follow Bishnu’s 
thread of environmental media in which one lives and acts among the ruins of 
contamination.  Regarding which natural or social disturbances command our 
attention, I found myself returning to a special issue of CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA I 
worked on with Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, now fifteen years back in the wake 
of 9/11: “Wired Ruins: Digital Terror and Ethnic Paranoia”: 
http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu/issue3/ [believe it or not, the issue’s 
fifteen pieces of net.art still work, including one by this week’s guest, 
Christina McPhee!].  In putting together this issue, we were interested in 
turning to the virtual solicitations of internet art to summon the cultural and 
psychic ruins of the moment that required response and action – this is why we 
doubled digital terror with the response of ethnic paranoia.  

In rereading our opening curatorial statement, especially as I now write from 
Seoul only days after Trump’s physical contamination of Korea 
(Seoul/soil/soul), I thought of sharing it anew today, now fifteen years later 
as the discourse of digital terror and ethnic paranoia continues to contaminate 
daily life.  

With any luck, this will cross the screens of Arthur and Marilouise Kroker in 
hopes that they might also move forward by looking back to CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA 
in adding to this month’s discussion of contamination:

“Wired Ruins reflects on the digital and viral networks of ethnic identities 
that now so urgently emit fain signals for recognition among the overlapping 
diffusions of cultural angst and digital terror.  A vibrantly pulsating network 
resisting the repression of the new age of censorship, “Wired Ruins” is a 
simulacrum of cross-cultural infection and cross-border fluidity.  Reacting to 
the complex horrors of terrorism while resisting the surveillance regimes of 
the disciplinary state, its practitioners work passionately to reposition the 
power of the code in counter-response to the aggressive parasites of religious 
fanaticism and ethnic paranoia.  “Wired Ruins” will haunt the future as the 
skeletal archive of the many unrecorded artistic responses to digital terror 
and ethnic paranoia.  In the end, power only responds to challenges of its 
survival.  An equivalence of challenge and counter-challenge.  And so, to the 
challenge of viral terrorism, the state immediately adopts the language of 
viral power.  Power grafts itself onto the psychological terrain of anxiety and 
fear.  Circulating in the deepest streams of popular culture, viral power puts 
everyone on alert for the terrorist within.  This psycho-geography of digital 
terrorism and ethnic paranoia is, of course, the beginning-point for the 
artistic imagination.  As ever, art exists as the hallucinatory force that says 
‘no’ to both viral power and viral terrorism.”

Of course, this hallucinatory force is just as vital to the food chain as it is 
to the psychic and media chain.

Best,

Tim

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


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Re: [-empyre-] Speaking of Fake...

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi, everyone,
 
The posts of the past 2 weeks have me thinking about artistic performances of 
the fakery of news.  One of my favorites is the well-known 1975 San Francisco 
performance, “Media Burn,” by Ant Farm.  Chip Lord and Doug Michels drove their 
Cadillac, transformed into something of a surreal space machine, into a wall of 
flaming television sets.  Prior to the event, Doug Hall arrived in the guise of 
John F. Kennedy and delivered a speech critical of the control assumed by the 
mainstream media.  What’s interesting in view of the current demonization of 
the media by Trump is that Ant Farm’s idea for the speech derived from a 
Rolling Stone article written by former presidential candidate George McGovern, 
who decried the power being accrued by the mass media.  Another delight was 
that the San Francisco television media become befuddled by the parody as they 
covered the news story of “Media Burn.”  For those of you who would like to 
relive this fantastical performance, you can view it at: 
http://mediaburn.org/video/media-burn-by-ant-farm-1975-edit/
 
All my best,
 
Tim


Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu 
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853
2017-18 International Sea-Sky Scholar, School of Architecture and Fine Art, 
Dalian University of Technology, China
 

On 6/12/17, 8:43 PM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of 
Randall Packer"  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

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[-empyre-] resolving to dissolve

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi, everyone,

Just want to thank all of you who have called us to critical attention
with your New Year's resolutions on the eve of new global fascism.  We're
now moving into the February discussion, which Reante will introduce in a
bit.  Stay vigilant, and please remain dedicated to the critical
imperatives of -empyre-.

Best,

Tim

Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853




>

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Re: [-empyre-] A New Year's Resolution

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
As a partner with Renate in her tireless toil to schedule monthly
discussions on -empyre- and to keep the moderating team robust, I find
myself worried more and more about the future of online dialogical
listservs.  When -empyre- was founded by Melinda Rackham in 2002, it
created a spark and buzz just for providing an online site where
international artistic, curatorial, coding, and theoretical partners might
collaborate with each other through discourse.  If you peruse the
incredible online archive of -empyre- discussions over the years, you will
enjoy the community's robust interactions when subscribers actively
dialogued with the posts of featured ghosts.

You all have noticed, no doubt, that the response level to -empyre- posts
has diminished readically over the past 2-3 years.  A lot of this, no
doubt, is due to the vitality of other social media projects, from the
corporate one of Facebook, Twitter, etc. to robust small groups of
sharers.  But the sharing of links, aphorisms, images, and selfies seems
to have swamped the international exchange of critical thought and
discourse.  It is the exchange of discourse, the sharing of artistic and
theoretical strategies, and the accident of revelation occurring in
conceptual conversation that has motivated my work for -empyre- for over a
decade.

As part of my resolution to fight for international net neutrality, which
the Trump people are about to gut, I call for a regeneration of activist
dialogue.  This is important not just through the dissemination of new
sources via Facebook and Twitter, but also through concerted conversation
among the new media community about current challenges and potential
responses to the issues that most impact us.  What's needed is not simply
combative responses to the fascist and capitalist policies that are even
more rapidly enslaving us or depressed summaries of the sovereign hegemony
of the corporate network, but creative, provocative and even contentious
discussion among ourselves about the critial imperatives to which we might
respond in word and art.  So,

I resolve to enliven the discourse of aesthetics AND politics.

I resolve to curate and preserve artworks, projects, and critical
responses that reflect critically on the socio-cultural conditions and
politics of production, display, and disseminatio
I resolve to collaborate with critical media projects that respond to and
combat the rising discourses of fascism, racism, sexism, and ethnocentrism.

I resolve to motivate my students to break the bonds of academic decorum
in their writing and artwork as a means of unleashing unspoken passion and
fervor over the personal and political issues most crucial to them.

I resolve to insist that hate speech is not free speech.

I resolve to work to revive the enthusiasm for the -empyre- listserv as a
safe zone for critical discourse and debate over the issues most important
to digital culture.

Please join me over the next week by posting your resolutions.  Let's
strike back together.

Tim




Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853





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Re: [-empyre-] -empyre- STRIKES BACK

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hello, -empyreans-,

Given the general paralysis wrought internationally by the Trumpocalypse
(and Chinese New Year), we'll be extending our call for -empyre- STRIKES
BACK through the first week of February.

Please post your political, social, and cultural New Year's Resolutions,
short or long, as they pertain to your geopolitical conditions.

This is the first non-moderated, open call for discussion we have
conducted in a couple of years.  We hoped a robust response might provide
us with a good read of the enthusiasm temperature for -empyre- among our
2,000 subscribers as we ponder the future of -empyre-, now in its
fifteenth year.  Hopefully, the next week will witness the kind of jump in
participation that will continue to motivate the moderators!

Thanks so much for strking back!!!

 

Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853



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[-empyre-] January 2017: -empyre- STRIKES BACK

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space-- -empyre- STRIKES BACK, January 2017
Moderated by Renate Ferro (US) and Timothy Murray (US)

Rather than feature weekly guests throughout the month of January, we urge all 
2,000 members of -empyre- to crank up the noise of the net by submitting your 
New Year's resolutions against oppression, fascism, neoliberalism, and 
conservatism.  While we cannot forestall the US inauguration of Donald Trump 
and its international celebration by opponents of network neutrality and human 
dignity, we can contribute to filling the network with critical discourse, the 
soul of -empyre-.

January 2017 promises to be a memorable year of cataclysmic proportions, marked 
by rising international tides of conservatism, nationalism, and fascism that 
rides the waves of xenophobia, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.  Challenged by 
state-sponsored hacking, on one end, and corporate interference of 
net-neutrality, on the other end, the once utopian celebration of the world 
wide web might now seem but a bad dream.

January 2017 marks the month of the shocking inauguration of Donald Trump in 
the US, the onset of BREXIT in the UK, international attacks on queer and 
racial rights, the ongoing umbrella movement in Hong Kong, and the neoliberal 
choke hold of global commerce, and depressingly, on and on..

2017 also marks the fifteenth anniversary of -empyre- soft-skinned space, 
founded by Melinda Rackham (AU) in 2002 to facilitate online discussion that 
encourages critical perspectives on contemporary cross-disciplinary issues, 
practices and events in networked media.  We want to launch this anniversary 
year (also the tenth year of our collaborative moderating of -empyre-) by 
providing the -empyre- community with a platform to strike back against the 
global reactionary environment that threatens -empyre-'s critical values.

We invite you all to post your political, social, and cultural New Year's 
Resolutions, short or long, as they pertain to your geopolitical conditions.   
Posts can be made to: soft_skinned_space 

Happy New Year from Tim and Renate


Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853



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Re: [-empyre-] Starting the First Week / Valente and Ziyalan

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thank you, Renate.  Yes, isn't the US being threatened as we speak with a
potential President who assumes that all women make themselves sexually
available to him?  Don't images, especially sexual ones, have complex
discursive structures that we must continually grapple with? Speaking of
Mapplethorpe, didn't we learn from the many Mapplethorpe controversies
that images read differently to different publics?  Remember the
objections of Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer that Mapplethorpe's "Black
Book" failed to account for the potential fetishization of the male black
body?  We must not take these issues lightly or merely smooth out
resistance to particular sets of imagery as representing conservative
prudishness in the face of some kind of unfiltered utopian desire.  As
Renate points out, we have spent years on -empyre- and elsewhere
reflecting on sexualities in much more complicated ways than this, and, I
might add for all of my male interlocutors on -empyre-, that we shouldn't
always need to rely on our female colleagues to point this out.

I recognize that Peter is trying to find a space outside politics and
where sexual pleasure is not "reduced" to fit some contemporary theory.
But isn't this precisely Donald Trump's response to his misogyny?

Looking forward to a more political layering of this conversation, even
when I recognize that this might run against the grain of a desire for
some kinds of utopian thought.

Best,

Tim


Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853





On 11/2/16 9:12 AM, "Renate Terese Ferro"  wrote:

>--empyre- soft-skinned space--
>As an artist and a feminist I am puzzled by the lack of acknowledgment
>here that there has been years of historical discussion and theorizing
>about the male gaze, scopophilia, and the whole canon of gender,
>sexuality and visual theory that has put characterizations such as this
>to rest I thought.
>
> R
>
>
>
>On 11/2/16, 7:11 AM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on
>behalf of Peter Valente" behalf of p.valente.f...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>--empyre- soft-skinned space--
>>Murat, I was just trying to designate a space outside politics where
>>sexual pleasure is not codified or politicized or reduced to fit some
>>contemporary theory. Perhaps this remains an ideal, especially in
>>anglophone countries. In the case of photographers like Gatewood or
>>Mapplethorpe, whose work can be extreme i.e. potentially obscene to
>>certain groups, it seems like political factions struggle to confine
>>it, find a language for it, and failing that, instead reject it
>>completely. That was the case with Mapplethorpe. I think, with regard
>>to my own photos, the image of a woman who makes herself sexually
>>available, i.e. a woman comfortable with her sexuality, is still a
>>very provocative image in the U.S.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>On Wed, Nov 2, 2016 at 2:03 AM, Murat Nemet-Nejat 
>>wrote:
>>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>>> Alan, are you not assuming the photos are all of women though many
>>>are? There is at least one among these where the figure is a man. Also,
>>>I understand these are pictures from a much longer series. The photos
>>>reminded me of selfies also, I think because they are not voyeuristic.
>>>They are intimate. The photographer seems somehow to be in front of the
>>>lens also sharing the experience.
>>>
>>> Peter, could you elaborate more why in an extreme world pleasure needs
>>>no defence?
>>>
>>> Ciao,
>>> Murat
>>>
>>> On Tue, Nov 1, 2016 at 8:20 PM, Peter Valente
>>> wrote:

 --empyre- soft-skinned space--
 Hi Alan,

 I have no problem with 'selfies.' Of course, my own photos are not
 'selfties' since no one in the photos took pictures of themselves. I
 photographed all of them. But I can imagine ways in which 'selfies'
 can be used to make interesting images. And I can't remember his name,
 but a filmmaker shot an entire film on a smartphone and it won some
 award in Berlin. I shot an entire film with the camera focused on
 myself.

 I don't think my images are 'pornographic.' And there's an interesting
 writer I'm translating, Guillaume Dustan, whose extreme depictions of
 sex acts and drug use are without explanation, or defense, or
 rationalization. Edmund White's blurb on one of Dustan's books:
 "...the book features a narrator whose wants are to fuck, listen to
 house music and visit London. 'Let the Good Times Roll' is the motto
 of this ecstatic celebration of a way of life unaffected by the
 demands of safe sex and queer politics."
>>

Re: [-empyre-] thanks to Simon Biggs and Madeleine Casad AND introducing Dene Grigar and Claudia Pederson

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks ever so much, Simon and Madeleine, for sharing your probing thoughts 
with us on -empyre-.  It has been such a gift for us to be challenged 
conceptually by both of you again.

I'm sorry that a diversion yesterday has delayed my introduction of our last 
guests for the week (believe it or not, Renate and I spent yesterday in a 
Buffalo NY US border patrol office getting our travel documents in order, 
where, it turns out, no phones were allowed).  So no access to Net.Art on the 
border!!!

It's my great pleasure to introduce this month's concluding featured guests as 
we wrap up our dialogue on "Through the Net: Net Art Then and Now." Many of you 
will have worked alongside Dene Grigar (US) in her role as President of the 
Electronic Literature Organization and has recently been working with me, the 
Rose Goldsen Archive, and other to guarantee that the net.art site, 
Turbulence.org, will remain archived and online when Helen Thorington and 
Joanne Greene discontinue thei heroic hosting of the site and its artistic 
commissions at the end of 2016.  Claudia is a frequent participant on -empyre- 
and has collaborated frequently with me and Renate on various projects in and 
around Ithaca and the Finger Lakes Environment Film Festival.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts, Dene and Claudia, on Net Art Then and 
Now as we conclude this month's discussion on -empyre-.


Dene Grigar (US)   is Professor and Director of The Creative Media & Digital 
Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver whose research focuses 
on the creation, curation, preservation, and criticism of Electronic 
Literature, specifically building multimedial environments and experiences for 
live performance, installations, and curated spaces; desktop computers; and 
mobile media devices. She has authored 14 media works such as "Curlew" (2014), 
"A Villager's Tale" (2011), the "24-Hour Micro E-Lit Project" (2009), "When 
Ghosts Will Die" (2008), and "Fallow Field: A Story in Two Parts" (2005), as 
well as 52 scholarly articles. She also curates exhibits of electronic 
literature and media art, mounting shows at the Library of Congress and for the 
Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) and the Modern Language Association (MLA), 
among other venues. With Stuart Moulthrop (U of Wisconsin Milwaukee) she is the 
recipient of a 2013 NEH Start Up grant to support the digital preservation of 
early electronic literature, a project that culminated in an open-source, 
multimedia book entitled Pathfinders and book of criticism, entitled 
Traversals, for The MIT Press. She is President of the Electronic Literature 
Organization and Associate Editor of Leonardo Reviews.

Claudia Pederson (US) is an Assistant Professor of Art History in New Media & 
Technology.  Claudia's writings on play, games, digital photography, and 
techno-ecological art are published in Afterimage, Intelligent Agent, Eludamos, 
as well as the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), Design 
Automation Conference (DAC), and CHI conference proceedings. Her most recent 
essay on contemporary Latin American artists working with robotics is 
forthcoming in an anthology on Latin American Modernism. She has been a 
curatorial contributor to the Finger Lakes Film Festival (FLEFF) since 2007. 
Other recent curatorial projects include, Gün, with Turkish women working in 
the intersections of media and feminism (2011-2012), and Home/s, a curatorial 
event with Turkish, Greek, and Bulgarian women at the Benaki Museum, Athens, 
Greece in 2013.

All our best,

Tim and Renate


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[-empyre-] Forwarded message from Madeleine Casad, Muntadas and forward

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Muntadas 1979: this is great.  Thanks, Simon.
 
Our exchange so far has me thinking of some of the idealistic, direct
interventions of projects brought up last week, efforts that are engaged
with rewriting the terms of corporate power.
 
I¹m reminded especially here of two titles from the list rybn shared a
while back:  GWEI (Ubermorgen, 2005-8; http://www.gwei.org/index.php ), a
project I¹ve admired and mulled over for years; and the Robin Hood Asset
Management Cooperative (Akseli Virtanen & collective, 2013;
http://robinhoodcoop.org/ ).  The role of algorithmic autonomy and
automated actions in both of these endeavors is, of course, significant.
To the extent that they express a desire to change the world, these
projects promote a kind of idealism ­ but I get hung up on the ways they
construe management and agency.  Posthumanism comes in lots of flavors.
 
Tamiko Thiel¹s message about Christin Lahr¹s MACHT GESCHENKE, DAS CAPITAL
(http://e-flux.com/timebank/event/christin-lahr-macht-geschenke-das-kapital
 ) comes to mind here as well ­ a project fundamentally about transcoding
political memory and exploiting tiny gaps in automated bureaucratic
procedures of financial institutions.
 
I also think of online projects that are more traditionally activist (ie
efforts that play up the idea of collective political and economic agency)
and focus on debt strikes and crowd-funding of debt relief.
The Debt Collective https://debtcollective.org  (Strike Debt 2014) and
Rolling Jubilee (Strike Debt, 2012) https://rollingjubilee.org/ are great
examples of this.  Thom Feeney¹s attempted Greek bailout fund on Indiegogo
pops up for me, also (
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/greek-bailout-fund ), though it may
strain our working definitions of net.art.
 
Does anyone have thoughts about these works, or others deal with idealism,
change, and the (post)human  .Š or perhaps we should return to Simon¹s
initial question of ³whether we shouldn¹t bother²?!
 
mik



Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853



>

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[-empyre-] Thanks so much Anna Munster, and Welcome Simon Biggs and Madeleine Casad

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
It is so fitting that end the week featuring Anna Munster with her
important recollection of the feminist roots of Melindha Rackham's
founding of -empyre-.  Thanks so much, Anna, for your helpful focusing of
the week's discussion of net.art and finance as well as for your other
important contextualizing of net.art and the -empyre- list.

We are now pleased to welcome to the third week of "Through the Net: Net
Art Then and Now," two other long time participants and supporters of
-empyre-, Simon Biggs (AU) and Madeleine Casad (US). I still remember how
energized I was to run across Simon's pionneering interactive digital art
in the early 1990s.   Many subscribers will recall with fondness that he
worked with Renate and me as a moderator of -empyre- and shaped so many
important discussions, which remain accessible on the -empyre- archive:
http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/.  Mickey also has been a
vital part of the -empyre- community ever since Cornell's Rose Goldsen
Archive of New Media Art stepped in as a cosponsor with the University of
New South Wales (where Anna Munster teaches, so the loops continue).  We
were very sad to see her leave Cornell for Vanderbilt University after
fifteen years of helping to build the infrastructures of the Goldsen
Archive since its founding in 2002.

So welcome back to -empyre- both Simon and Madeleine.


Simon Biggs (UU) is a media artist, writer and curator with interests in
digital poetics, auto-generative and interactive systems,
interdisciplinary research and co-creation. He is Professor of Art at the
University of South Australia and Honorary Professor at the University of
Edinburgh.  His work has been widely presented, including at Tate Modern,
Tate Liverpool, Tate Britain, Institute of Contemporary Arts London,
Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, Kettles Yard Cambridge, Centre
Georges Pompidou Paris, Academy de Kunste Berlin, Berlin Kulturforum,
Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Kunsthalle Bergen, Maxxi Rome, Palazzo della Arti
Naples, Macau Arts Museum, Oi Futuro Rio de Janeiro, Arizona State Art
Museum, San Francisco Cameraworks, Walker Art Center Minneapolis,
Queensland Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He has
presented at numerous international conferences, including the
International Symposium on Electronic Arts, ePoetry, Society for
Literature, Science and the Arts, Electronic Literature Organisation and
Festival International Literature Electronica Sao Paulo and lectured at
Cambridge, Newcastle, Cornell, UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara, Ohio State,
Paris 8, Sorbonne and Bergen Universities, amongst others. Publications
include Remediating the Social (2012, editor), Autopoeisis (with James
Leach, 2004), Great Wall of China (1999), Halo (1998), Magnet (1997) and
Book of Shadows (1996).  He has held lecturing posts at Middlesex
University and Academy Minerva Groningen and Professorships at Sheffield
Hallam University and the University of Edinburgh.  His URL is
http://www.littlepig.org.uk


Madeleine Casad (US) teaches in the Vanderbilt University Department of
Cinema and Media Arts and coordinates the Vanderbilt Center for Digital
Humanities.  She has been involved in efforts to preserve and historicize
digital media art practices since 2002, when she began working in Cornell
University¹s Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, a collection for which
she became Associate Curator that spans six decades of global history and
a complex variety of electronic media formats.  Until 2016, she managed
outreach, education, and preservation initiatives in the Goldsen Archive
and developed digital humanities programs for graduate students as part of
Cornell University¹s cross-institutional Digital Humanities Collaboratory.
 Her academic interests focus on narrative, identity, counter-history, and
contested public memory across varied technologies of storytelling.  In
2012, she defended one of Cornell University¹s first comparative media
dissertations. In 2016, she oversaw and co-authored the Goldsen Archive's
innovative white paper, "Preserving and Emulating Digital Art Objects"
(https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/41368).

So welcome back to -empyre- Simon and Madeleine.  We're really looking
forward to your thoughts on Net.Art.

All my best,

Tim 






Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853


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Re: [-empyre-] Response to Anna: Nick Knouf, MAICgregator

[Timothy Conway Murray]

 working with financial
>>>data as an artist are thus not concerns or fear about the subject
>>>matter itself, but rather more mundane questions of access and
>>>resources. And I think it's in the more mundane issues that we find the
>>>crux of the matter, and the difficulty I personally have with making
>>>net.art (or computational art in general) today, and that is
>>>uninteresting complexity. Paradoxically, when we now have access to
>>>things like arduinos or easy-to-program-in environments like
>>>Processing, I find it more difficult to make work I find interesting,
>>>especially if it falls outside of the confines of what these
>>>environments provide for by default. Building a website that wants to
>>>do something other than what WordPress or tumblr allows now requires
>>>the use of HTML frameworks, Javascript, and a large amount of backend
>>>code. Keeping up with all of the changes in these libraries is itself a
>>>full-time job. (Something interesting to consider is whether or not the
>>>proliferation of internet art on platforms like tumblr or Instagram is
>>>due in part to the uninteresting complexity of building websites from
>>>scratch today.)  If I step away from my iOS code for a few months I
>>>find that most of it won't compile anymore, there are new APIs to use,
>>>and Apple has changed the process for uploading apps to the AppStore,
>>>yet again. While it was complex to write code a decade, two decades,
>>>three decades ago, I feel as if surmounting that complexity through a
>>>kind of understanding was possible. Today the parts are so integrated,
>>>so often changing, that it takes a team of people working full-time to
>>>understand the full stack. Perhaps that means the net.artist needs to
>>>collaborate more, to hire people who devote their entire time to
>>>keeping up with these changes. To me these constant changes are
>>>uninteresting complexity. I'd rather learn and work with other things,
>>>other complex systems, things that change at a time scale or rhythm
>>>more suited to my body and my way of knowing and being, instead of a
>>>temporality dictated by trends, capital, or CPUs. I'm working out what
>>>those things and systems are, for me personally, over the coming year.
>>> 
>>> Best,
>>> 
>>> Nick
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 9/14/2016 11:43 PM, Anna Munster wrote:
>>>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>>>> Yes MAICgregator is a great example of how the question of finance
>>>>totally subtends all kinds of relations across the net, especially
>>>>pedagogical/knowledge ones! I also think this work was way ahead of
>>>>the game in that it perhaps signalled how an activism might arise
>>>>around Œouting¹ all kinds of knowledge-based institutions¹
>>>>Œinvestments¹ in dirty monies. Recently this has upscaled to demands
>>>>that universities and colleges divest from dirty financial networks.
>>>> 
>>>> If Nick¹s around I¹d love to hear from him about where he¹s going
>>>>with the finance-knowledge-network relationship and why he deactivated
>>>>MAICgregatorŠis finance too touchy a subject for art?
>>>> 
>>>> cheers
>>>> Anna
>>>> 
>>>> Anna Munster
>>>> Associate Professor,
>>>> Faculty of Art and Design
>>>> UNSW
>>>> P.O Box 259
>>>> Paddington
>>>> NSW 2021
>>>> Australia
>>>> 
>>>> a.muns...@unsw.edu.au
>>>> http://sensesofperception.info
>>>>  
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>> On 15 Sep 2016, at 7:52 AM, Timothy Conway Murray 
>>>>>  wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>>>>> Thanks so much for joining us, Anna, and for focusing our attention
>>>>>on net.art focusing on the finances of the web.  While not directly
>>>>>in with Heath Bunting's piece, which I'm very pleased to see
>>>>>recalled, you have me thinking fondly of Nick Knouf's MAICgregator (
>>>>> http://maicgregator.org
>>>>> ) that is a Firefox extension that aggregated information about the
>>>>>embeddedness of colleges and universities (I seem to recall that he
>>>>>focused on US institutions) in the military-academic-industrial
&

[-empyre-] Response to Anna: Nick Knouf, MAICgregator

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks so much for joining us, Anna, and for focusing our attention on net.art 
focusing on the finances of the web.  While not directly in with Heath 
Bunting's piece, which I'm very pleased to see recalled, you have me thinking 
fondly of Nick Knouf's MAICgregator (http://maicgregator.org) that is a Firefox 
extension that aggregated information about the embeddedness of colleges and 
universities (I seem to recall that he focused on US institutions) in the 
military-academic-industrial contex. The software provided an overlay on 
university homepages of the data culled from government funding databases and 
news sources, etc., as well as information about university trustees.

I recall Nick's being aggressed quite harshly by one of my colleagues for the 
"terrorism" of his project (whose aim was to reveal the disguistes of terrorism 
of a different sort).  I'm hoping that Nick will see this post and perhaps 
comment in more detail on this fascinating and innovative piece (which seems to 
be no longer active).   I seem to recall that Anna might have written something 
about this piece in her last book as well?

Cheers,

Tim


Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853

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Re: [-empyre-] Thanks to Craig Saper, and Welcome Anna Munster

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thanks ever so much Craig for your final instruction on Rhizomatic time,
in which net time always seems to travel in the future perfect of the new
instruction as the repetition of what (might) has been.  We appreciate
your opening the our September discussion, "Through the NET:  Net Art Then
and Now."

Our featured guest for this week, Anna Munster (AU), is someone with whom
I've dialogued then and now.  Anna and I first met in Sydney when we
shared our interests in the baroque and new media art a few years before
Melinda Rackham founded -empyre-.  Anna has long been a supporter and
interlocutor on -empyre- and remains at the University of New South Wales,
where we first met, and which still generously provides -empyre- with
server space and software.

Anna Munster is a artist, writer, educator and an associate professor in
art and design, University of New South Wales. She is the author of An
Aesthesia of Networks  (MIT
Press 2013) and Materializing New Media
 (Dartmouth University Press, 2006).
Both of these examine aspects of artists¹ engagements with networks and
digital culture. Anna is also an artist, regularly collaborating with
Michele Barker She has worked most recently on the installations evasion

(2014), and HokusPokus

(2011) using soundscapes, interaction and installation design to explore
both human and nonhuman movement and perception. She regularly contributes
to journals, writing on art, media, politics and culture and is a founding
member of the online peer-reviewed journal The Fibreculture Journal
. Her co-edited anthology, Immediations:
art, media, event, with Erin Manning and Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen will
be published with Open Humanities Press in 2017.

Renate and I are very pleased to welcome Anna back to -empyre- and we look
forward to benefiting from her discursive leadership this week.

Tim







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Re: [-empyre-] Wired Ruins: Digital Terror and Ethnic Paranoia

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thanks, Craig, for sharing your insightful and provocative instructions
with us this week.  Yesterday, on the 15th anniversary of 9/11, I found
myself wondering about the relation of net.art and 'address' in terms of
the net.art project that I staged with Arthur and Marilouise Kroker in the
wake of 9/11 for the issue of CTHEORY Multimedia on the topic: Wired
Ruins: Digital Terror and Ethnic Paranoia:
http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu/issue3/

Instead of giving into the stultifying pathos of trauma and angst floating
in the air, we invited net artists to claw back the discourse of the
network by addressing the critical paradigms sustaining our notion of
"Wired Ruins."  To do so, we sought out work that situated the
surveillance of 'digital terror' in relation to the paradoxes of global
"ethnic paranoia."  I still feel critically provoked and challenged by
these works as I look at them now by: Lewis LaCook, Davin Heckman, Dror
Eyal & Stacy Hardy, David Golumbia, Robert Hunter & Guillermo Aritza,
Horit Herman-Peled, Tracey Benson, Isabelle Sigal & Jay Murphy, Young-Hae
Chang Heavy Industries, Jason Nelson, Dirk J. Platzek & Han Gene Paik,
saibot & ssiess, Christina McPhee, Andrew Hieronymi & Tirdad Zolghadr.

It's still striking to me how many of these artists created in
collaboration, and in doing so, many were working across international
zones and datelines that challenged the veracity of digital terror and
ethnic paranoia: Lebanan & Switzerland, Korea and US, etc.

Before moving on tomorrow with this week's thread, led by Anna Munster,
perhaps it would be interesting if we were to hear from any of these
artists who are on the list, or from Craig regarding his thoughts about
his instructions retroactive relation to Wired Ruins.

Before closing, perhaps I can copy part of our curatorial statement for
this issue:

"Wired Ruins" reflects on the digital and viral networks of ethnic
identities that now so urgently emit faint signals for recognition among
the overlapping diffisions of cultural angst and digital terror.  A
vibrantly pulsating network resisting the repression of the new
censorship, "Wired Ruins" is a simulacrum of cross-cultural infection and
cross-border fluidity.  Reacting to the complex horrors of terrorism while
resisting the surveillance regimes of the disciplinary state, its
practictioners work passionately to reposition the power of the code in
counter-response to the aggressive parasites of religious fanaticism and
ethnic paranoia.  "Wired Ruins" will haunt the future [we hoped, and
perhaps, still hope] as the skeletal archive of the many unrecorded
artistic responses to digital terror and ethnic paranoia.

All my best,

Tim


Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853





On 9/8/16 8:57 PM, "Craig Saper"  wrote:

>--empyre- soft-skinned space--

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Re: [-empyre-] Week One on Through the NET: Net Art Then and Now

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thanks so much, Craig, for this provocative opening.  Our hope is to jump
on your question, "what are it's moods, textures, poetics,
amateur-hack-artist function, and visceral affects," to explore the
promise of net.art, as imagined over the past twenty years, and to discuss
its morph, migration, and flow into other networked (or not)
articulations.  

One thing that propelled net.art was the conjunction of densely miniature
artistic forms made available by digital technology with the expansive
push out of the web, a medium for localized condensed expression from the
personal desktop for, conversely, globalized outreach and conversation.
Another of net.art's contributions was to capitalize on the accessibility
of newly portable and networked archival databases for condensed artistic
expression that also lent themselves to the formation of pop-up
international artistic and conceptual communities via the emergent
listserves, Rhizome and net time, and the online journal, CTHEORY, which
which I collaborated on the net.art curatorial project, CTHEORY
Multimedia.   Arthur and Marilouise Kroker and I sought out artists and
works that seized on the portability of net.art to fashion concise
conceptual and political statements.  Somewhat in the vein of agit-prop,
we conceived of net.art as a mobile form whose combination of crude
(Quicktime) and delicate poetics would summon the international user into
political and conceptual dialogue.  We hoped that net.art's visceral
affect might effect practical reflection on the discourse of the net
itself, from the digital divide and bio capital to digital terror and its
inscription in ethnic paranoia.

Looking forward to hearing more about Craig's thinking and hopefully our
artistic community will reflect more specifically on their own projects.

Best,

Tim
  
Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853





On 9/6/16 10:28 PM, "Craig Saper"  wrote:

>--empyre- soft-skinned space--
>Tim, Thanks for the introduction — and although we didn’t get to Ithaca
>this summer — fond memories. It seems fitting to have the theme this week
>correspond to the 20th anniversary of Rhizome.org. Congratulations to
>Mark Tribe and the network of folks who transformed a listserv (like
>-empyre -- just sayin') into something else for networked art (putting
>that notion of transformation of a listserv into something else
>("commissions, exhibits, preserves, and creates critical discussion
>around" net-art) as the implicit instruction/open-constraint for our
>discussion) . . . . still having a difficult time defining networks? Ten
>thousand books with “network” in their title, subtitle, or series title
>have appeared since my Networked Art appeared in 2001, and reading just a
>few of these titles begins to sound like a conceptual poem: Networks of
>Outrage and Hope; Network Forensics; Understanding Social Network; How
>Networks are Shaping the Modern Metropolis; Virality: Contagion Theory in
>the Age of Networks; Disrupting Dark Networks; Network Like an Introvert;
>Network Marketing; Network Management; The Network; Actor-Network Theory
>and Tourism; Charles Dickens's Networks; Social Network Analysis; Nomads
>and Networks; Networked: The New Social Operating System; Networks
>Without a Cause ... (with thanks to K.A. Wisniewski for digging up some
>of this list). Network is networked in every conceivable publisher's
>category: Computers & technical manuals. Science. Art. Photography.
>Biographies & Memoirs. Literature, Graphic novels, and literary
>criticism. Education.  History. Politics.  Sociology. Law.  Humor.
>Religion. Philosophy. Self-help. ... Trade publishers. University, or
>Small presses. Self-published. Television or Internet. ... Networks,
>Networking, Networked . . . Nouns. Adjectives.  Verbs.  Or, read as both
>or neither.  Something else? It's a one-word cliché either disliked and
>pernicious or liberating and utopian; it is a network of control in the
>"capitalocene" (the complex networks that have transformed lives for
>everybody on this planet whether they like it or not) or the anarchist
>rhizomatic hacktivists' web. Not in the same ways, but deeply still.
>Instead of it's meaning, what are it's moods, textures, poetics,
>amateur-hack-artist function, and visceral affects? That's what I hope we
>can explore here.
>
>
>
>
>On Sep 6, 2016, at 10:08 PM, Timothy Conway Murray 
>wrote:
>
>--empyre- soft-skinned sp

[-empyre-] Week One on Through the NET: Net Art Then and Now

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Welcome back everyone from summer or winter, depending on your location.
Renate and I have enjoyed the quiet of Cayuga Lake in Ithaca after
returning from Shanghai where we opened a new Summer School in Theory
between Cornell University and East China Normal University.  Our time off
in August gave us an opportunity to think about anniversary nodes of the
net and net.art, just as I was being challenged in keeping various pieces
of 1990s net.art online for my exhibition, Signal to Code: 50 Years of
Media Art in the Rose Goldsen Archive
(http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/signaltocode/).  So we thought it might be
interesting to open September with a discussion of Net Art Then and Now.

This week, I will look forward to the opportunity to think back on the
excitement of curatorial projects in net.art when the community imagined
that the challenging artworks of the net might reach a broader audience
than now seems to have been the case.  I will be joined by Craig Saper, a
challenging thinker of the network.  Craig Saper (US) is Professor in
the Language, Literacy, and Culture Doctoral Program at UMBC in Baltimore,
Maryland, US. Craig published Networked Art and, as dj Readies, Intimate
Bureaucracies ‹
both about net-art then (and now). His work on net-art also appears in the
Whitechapel Gallery's Networks, in their Documents of Contemporary Art
series and forthcoming in Beyond Critique: Contemporary Art in Theory,
Practice and Instruction. Hisrecently published "cross between an
intellectual biography Š and a picaresque novel,² and "a biography of a
lost twentieth century," The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown, tells the
comic story of a real-life Zelig and the ultimate networker.  He has also
edited or co-edited scholarly volumes including Electracy: Gregory L.
Ulmer Textshop Experiments
 (2015), a
special issue of the scholarly journal Hyperrhiz on mapping culture
 (2015), special issues of Rhizomes on
Posthumography (2010),
Imaging Place  (2009), and Drifts
 (2007), and many other volumes since
1990. Craig¹s curatorial projects include exhibits on ³Assemblings²
(1997), ³Noigandres: Concrete Poetry in Brazil² (1988) and ³TypeBound
² (2008), and folkvine.org
 (2003-6). In addition, he has published two
other artists¹s books On Being Read (1985) and Raw Material (2008).

Over the weekend, Renate and I enjoyed a lakeside lunch at a casual
restaurant on Cayuga Lake, and recalled that our last meal there was in
the pleasant company of Craig Saper.  So, Craig, we are very happy to be
back in conversation with you here on the network rather than the lake.
We look forward to receiving your opening post.

Tim

  


Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853


>



default[2].xml
Description: default[2].xml
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[-empyre-] September 2016: Through the NET: Net Art Then and Now

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Welcome to September,2016 on ­empyre- soft-skinned space:

 
Through the NET:  Net Art Then and Now moderated by Renate Ferro (US) and
Tim Murray (US) with featured discussants:

 
September 6 - 12: Craig Saper (US)
September 13 - 18th: Anna Munster (AU)
September 19 -  25th: Simon Biggs (AU)
September 26 - to 30: Claudia Pederson (US)

 
Welcome to the September discussion, Through the Net: Net Art Then and
Now.  Just this week on August 26th, news
organizations around the world were hailing the 25th Anniversary of Sir
Tim Berners-Lee conceptualized the centralized information hub of the
internet and its protocol markup language HTML. We will take the month of
September to not only reminisce about the grand plans that internet
art set out to accomplish, but also critically contemplate the historical
barrage of the commercial infiltration and how net artist have pushed back
by
using innovative methods for development and production.  From the first
buzzing hum of the slow and unreliable digital dialup through to the
evolution of tools such as email,
listservs, web sites, databases, software, and hardware intersected with
conceptual art notions linking hybrid text, image, animation, graphics,
audio
and/or video. Later tactical media, data visualization, and gaming gave
way to the speed and ubiquity of wireless where net art drives social
movements involving politics, ecology,
food, and so much more.
 
We gather this month a selection of experienced artists and new innovators
to ponder the history the past twenty-five years and its tension with the
world of art.  We plan to team our announced conversants with other
featured invited guests to be announced weekly.

 
TO MAKE A POST TO THE SUBSCRIPTION LIST USE:

 
TO ACCESS ARCHIVES USE THIS URL:
http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/
 
TO ACCESS THE WEBSITE FROM THE CORNELL SERVER
TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT EMPYRE GO TO:
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
 
Biographies:

Moderators:

Renate Ferro (US) rfe...@cornell.edu
Renate Ferro¹s creative work resides in the area of emerging technology,
new media and
culture. By aligning artistic,
creative practice with critical approaches to technology her work broadly
spans
installation, interactive net-based projects, digital time-based media,
drawing, text, and performance. Her artistic work has been featured The
Freud
Museum (London), The Dorksy Gallery (NY), The Hemispheric Institute and
FOMMA
(Mexico), The Janus Pannonius Muzeum (Hungary), and The Free University
Berlin
(Germany).  Her artwork has been published in such journals as Diacritics,
Theatre Journal, and Epoch..
She also is the founder of the Tinker Factory
 Lab. Ferro is a Visiting Associate
Professor of Art at Cornell
University.  She has been on the moderating team for -empyre soft-skinned
space since 2007 and is currently the
managing moderator.

 
Timothy Murray (US) t...@cornell.edu
Tim Murray is the Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media
Art, Director of the Society for the Humanities and Professor of
Comparative
Literature and English at Cornell University.  A curator of new media art
and a theorist of the digital humanities and arts, he is currently working
on
two monographs on new media art and curating and on  contemporary Asian
art, in dialogue with Digital
Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota,
2008).  Tim sits on the Executive Committee of the Humanities, Arts,
Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) and is editing
volumes
on Jean-Luc Nancy and Xu Bing. He is currently curating two exhibitions on
³Signal
to Code,² both at Cornell University, ³Fifty Years of Media Art in the
Goldsen
Archive² in the Cornell Library
(http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/signaltocode/),
and ³Video Art from the Goldsen Archive in the Herbert F. Johnson Museum
of Art²
(http://www.museum.cornell.edu/exhibitions/signal-code).  He has been an
­empyre moderator since 2007.
 
Featured Guests:
 
Simon Biggs (AU) is Professor of Art in the
School of Art, Architecture, and Design at the University of South
Australia.  A former member of the
­empyre- moderating team, Simon is a new media artist, writer and curator
with interests in digital
poetics, interactive, auto-generative and affective systems,
interdisciplinary
research and co-creation across the creative arts, humanities and physical
sciences. His work has been widely presented, including at the Tate
(London and
Liverpool), Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), Centre for
Contemporary
Art (Glasgow), Kettles Yard Cambridge), Pompidou (Paris), Academy de Kunste
(Berlin), Kulturforum (Berlin), Rijksmuseum (Twenthe), Maxxi (Rome), Macau
Arts
Museum, San Francisco Cameraworks, Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) and the
Art
Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney).

 
Anna Munster (AU) is an artist, writer, educator
and an Associate Professor in art and design, University of New South
Wales.
Sh

Re: [-empyre-] Transborder Immigrant Tool - global poetic system and its uses

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
So very glad to see you back publishing with Ctheory, Ricardo.  The
Transborder Immigrant Tool is an incredibly inventive project whose
graceful and watery poetry deserves very wide dissemination.  Indeed we
might consider electronic publishing, from journal to listserv, as an
exemplary means to transversing international borders.

Cheers,

Tim

Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853





On 2/17/16 9:42 AM, "Ricardo Dominguez"  wrote:

>--empyre- soft-skinned space--

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Re: [-empyre-] Tim Murray in 2016

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Happy 2016, empyreans.  To enter in the New Year, we hope that as many of
you as possible will join us in celebrating our community by posting brief
summaries of your current projects and/or bios this month.  We would very
much like to energize -empyre- at the beginning of 2016 by celebrating our
participants through the remainder of the month.

We realize that the new year's holidays slow things down but very much
hope that you'll all now take a second to flood the site over the next
three weeks with a description of your current projects or bios, which, of
course, will be archived on the site as well.  Although we promise not to
swamp your in-boxes like this again in the near future, we'd like to
encourage our 2,000 subscribers to let us all know who you are.

For me, I finished the fall by closing an extraordinary exhibition of the
40 year history of the Experimental Television Center (ETC), which I
co-curated with Sarah Watson and Sherry Miller Hocking for the Hunter
College Galleries of Art in New York City.  The ETC archives are housed at
the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, which I curate in the Cornell
Library 
(http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/communications/pressroom/news/hunter-college-ar
t-galleries-present-the-experimental-television-center-a-history-etc-.-.-1)
 .  I'M now working on developing a large exhibition of the collections of
the Goldsen Archive (http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu), which will be
held at the Archive from mid-March through next October.  We will feature
smatterings from 50 years of media art history, with emphases on video
art, CD-Rom and net.art, as well as the Goldsen special collections from
Asia, US, and Europe.   Since Upstate NY has been the epicenter for so
many developments in the creation, funding, and exhibition of the media
arts, we will feature that history in a segment of the show.  We'll be
holding the opening on March 17 with a public workshop on March 18.

I also continue to write broadly on aesthetics and new media art.  Some of
you might have seen my recent article on Jean-Luc Nancy and technology in
the special issue I co-edited with Irving Goh on Nancy for the journal,
diacritics (volume 42, no 2, 2014).  I am completing a book on curating,
archiving, and new media art, another on contemporary Asian art and am
working on a number of broader pieces on the history of new media art,
including one on Jacques Rancière and media art.

I also enjoy directing Cornell's Society for the Humanities, which
annually hosts fifteen international and Cornell colleagues who join
together to research a common theme.  It's been my mission to bring the
arts into more direct dialogue with the humanities.  In honor of this
year's 50th birthday of the Society, our current research theme is "Time."
 I am also very honored to serve on the Executive Committee of HASTAC.

One of my pleasures over the [ast decade or so has been my involvement on
the -empyre- mediating team, which is now held together by the tenacity
and efforts of Renate Ferro, and now includes Soraya and Derek Murray from
the University of California at Santa Cruz (no relation to me, although we
can always imagine!).  Now closing in on its fifteenth year, we are hoping
to hear this month from our many lurkers on the site and would very much
welcome your participation.

Best wishes for 2016.

Tim


Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853





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[-empyre-] Thanks for Video Š and Beyond

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thanks so much Peer and Sarah for your informative posts of the past few
days.  As throughout the month, we have been so energized by toggling
between the pasts of video history and the presents of curating,
archiving, and creating into the beyond.  Although it's been a challenge
to moderate the month as we worked up preparations for the ETC exhibition
here in the Goldsen Archive in Ithaca and at Ralph and Sherry's nearby,
and then enjoyed last week's opening of the ETC exhibition at Hunter
College, the effort has been well worth the while as Renate and I have
reconnected with older art forms and past friends, many of who we enjoyed
chatting with in New York as week.

We want to thank all of this month's elegant participants from nearby
Ithaca and afar (thinking, for instance, of John Conomos from Sydney), but
most of all Sherry Miller Hocking who took time out for her thoughtful
contributions as she was juggling so many last minute questions that Sarah
and I were bombarding her with prior to the exhibition.

-empyre-'s October discussion theme, "Designing Compulsion, will be
introduced tomorrow by Patrick Keilty of the -empyre- moderating team.

Thanks again, everyone, off and beyond video.

Tim and Renate 



On 9/30/15 8:31 PM, "Sarah Watson"  wrote:

>--empyre- soft-skinned space--
>Odd Sundays, what a wonderful name.
>
>Peer, thank you so much for sharing your insights and telling of the
>ETC's history.  I've throughly enjoyed reading your posts over the last
>couple days.  It is always exciting to learn more about the ETC, to
>realize that in researching for the exhibition that I have only scratched
>the surface of the complexity and importance of the Experimental
>Television Center in the development of  the medium. This opportunity for
>ongoing discovery is one of the things I enjoy most about working from
>archives, especially contemporary archives.   Most of the works and
>materials presented within the exhibition are culled from the
>Experimental Television Center's vast collection.The stories that unfold
>through the unpacking of the archive are complex and varied and involve
>an expansive ecosystem of artists, technologists, organizations, tapes,
>machines, and tools.  It has been tremendous meeting so many of these
>artists/scholars/technologists.  Last Friday we were fortunate to have
>Dave Jones, Debora Bernagozzi and Jason Bernagozzi give a workshop to
>students on the wobbulator, Dave's interactive videosnyth modules and
>about Signal Culture.  That afternoon Peer Bode gave an impromptu tour of
>the exhibition to a graduate studio seminar lead by MFA professor Susan
>Crile.  And when I saw Susan this morning, she was raving about how
>spectacular Peer's tour was and how much the students responded to it.
>This afternoon I had the chance to chat with Mona Jimenez, who brought
>some of her students to see the show and with Alan Sondheim, Azure Carter
>and Murat Nemet-Nejat.
>
>
>
>On Sep 30, 2015, at 6:14 PM, Timothy Conway Murray wrote:
>
>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>>> The ETC move in 1979 was to a three story brick building downtown in
>>>the
>>> village of Owego, directly on the river. When we were not looking at
>>> oscillator waves and camera based modulations in the studio we could
>>>look
>>> out the windows and see the Susquehanna River and in the winter the ice
>>> on it slow move towards the Chesapeake Bay.
>>> 
>>> Ralph and Sherry hosted an ³Odd Sundays ³gathering   at their home. It
>>> met most every other Sundays. David Jones and Paul Davis were regulars.
>>> Paul had studied geology at Alfred University. He became involved in
>>> microcomputers. Later in the 80¹s, as I understood it, he ran a company
>>> in Ithaca that manufactured a microcomputer that was sold in some large
>>> quantities in India. The ETC Odd Sunday afternoons were spent in
>>>software
>>> development and hardware building. Evenings were wonderful dinners and
>>> libations with lively discussions and arguments about mathematics
>>>versus
>>> fingers as knowledge, machines for thinking, the sheer power and
>>> intensity of image and sound experiences, the differences between those
>>> writers, film people, and video people, making art with electronics and
>>> art¹s electronic future. These were the kind of conversations that were
>>> also taking place at the ETC Owego studio on the river with and among
>>>the
>>> visiting artists.
>>> 
>>> I do not know all of what came out of those Od

[-empyre-] more thoughts from Peer Bode

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
>The ETC move in 1979 was to a three story brick building downtown in the
>village of Owego, directly on the river. When we were not looking at
>oscillator waves and camera based modulations in the studio we could look
>out the windows and see the Susquehanna River and in the winter the ice
>on it slow move towards the Chesapeake Bay.
> 
>Ralph and Sherry hosted an ³Odd Sundays ³gathering   at their home. It
>met most every other Sundays. David Jones and Paul Davis were regulars.
>Paul had studied geology at Alfred University. He became involved in
>microcomputers. Later in the 80¹s, as I understood it, he ran a company
>in Ithaca that manufactured a microcomputer that was sold in some large
>quantities in India. The ETC Odd Sunday afternoons were spent in software
>development and hardware building. Evenings were wonderful dinners and
>libations with lively discussions and arguments about mathematics versus
>fingers as knowledge, machines for thinking, the sheer power and
>intensity of image and sound experiences, the differences between those
>writers, film people, and video people, making art with electronics and
>art¹s electronic future. These were the kind of conversations that were
>also taking place at the ETC Owego studio on the river with and among the
>visiting artists.
> 
>I do not know all of what came out of those Odd Sunday gatherings. I do
>know that Ralph, David and Paul developed a computer interface box. One
>of them a 12 (?) channel in and out, with knobs for fingers, and voltage
>control in and out was built and then used at the ETC with the Cromemco
>Z80 micro computer, a hacker/designers computer at the time.  The system
>could grab video stills as well as grids of video images. Hotspot dots
>could be put on the image, reading gray levels and sending the gray level
>info out as control voltages that could be connected to control
>parameters on other video and sound processing tools.  Also Ralph, David
>and Paul worked on and David released a fantastic software product for
>dot-matrix printers that used the Amiga computer. It was called Fine
>Print. It controlled dot-matrix printers.  They used physical hammer pins
>to hit the  ribbon. If the ribbon was properly worn out, the printer pin
>hammers could be controlled to strike the ribbon anywhere from one to
>sixteen times. The result was a digital print with continuous tones of 4
>shades of grey. The digital prints you could make with it were fabulous!
>I made hundreds of prints with it. Ralph and Sherry made fantastic work
>with it. 
> 
>Harland Snodgrass at the School of Art and Design at the NYSCC at Alfred
>University was also working with David and Paul to get the Z80 there to
>output drawings and computer animations. He was part of the Odd Sunday
>activity. I still have the cardboard box interface unit and Z-80 that
>David and Paul built together with Harland. Harland and his painting
>class also built a Dan Sandin Video Image Processor. David and Paul
>helped to get it through the last stages of building. It is still used in
>the video program at Alfred and at the Institute for Electronic Arts.
>Harland Snodgrass started the first, if not one of the very earliest
>video arts programs in an art school in the United States. It would make
>sense that that would happen in a College of Ceramics, ie: materials,
>materials.
> 
>In the early 1980¹s a number of we living in Owego at the time and in the
>near vicinity formed the ³Tuesday Afternoon Building Club². The goal was
>to build, under David Jones¹s guidance, new and more advanced video
>processing prototypes that would become printed circuit boards. As
>printed boards there could be multiples and we in the club would be able
>to have the systems for our personal studios and the ETC would be able to
>have a new generation of video systems in the studio. Mimi Martin was
>building a colorizer, Barbara Buckner a computer interface, Neil Zusman a
>keyer, I was building a realtime video frame buffer. I maybe be
>forgetting some. What were you building Matt Schlanger?  We got together
>on many Tuesdays, ate ice cream sandwiches and soldered electronic parts
>onto perforated boards. It was like jewelry making. David knew the
>electronics. We were learning from him. We built our boxes.
> 
>As I remember Matt Schlanger and Richard Brewster worked with David at
>the ETC to layout the printed boards for the new processing systems. The
>boards were printed and the new boxes were built for the ETC studio. I
>built a second video buffer together with David that had printed boards.
>One of the printed digital video buffers, the FB-1, was installed and
>used in the ETC studio.  The old hand wired video processing units were
>retired as they became buggy. The ETC had new systems by the mid 1980s
>that were in use until the day the studio was unplugged in 2011. A number
>of the colorizers, keyers, oscillators and digital buffers that wer

[-empyre-] more from Peer Bode

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
As I am running out to work on other new and evolving media arts studios
here in Upstate New York,  I pause and I would suggest we reflect on the
design and building of tools and software that took place connected to the
ETC and directed to be part of the tool set for artists coming to ETC to
encounter. These tools evolved as they were used and shared by a large
number of artists. That simply describes a very simple, powerful and
immensely successful set of strategies that Ralph Hocking orchestrated.
 
As I recall it, one line of development with the ETC , beginning humbly,
was a young David Jones advertising that he had built and was selling
extended battery packs for use with the then new one half inch videotape
portapacks. Ralph Hocking bit the bait.   Shortly there after David was at
the ETC in Binghamton, making batteries, fixing video equipment that was
being loaned out to the community and beginning to modify  a b+w SEG and
video camera to extend their capabilities.
 
Somewhere around that time Shuya Abe and Nam June Paik came to the ETC to
complete the 6 channel video mixer colorizer known as the Paik Abe. WNET
did not yet have it¹s  Artists TV Lab in place.  There were Shuya and Nam
June hacking a video mixer and color camera encoder. It was sophisticated
and yet hacking, never the less. The music people were historically using
multi channel audio mixers. Why wouldn¹t  video/tv artists?  Somewhere
around that time, I am not sure who,  built the video rescan based raster
manipulation unit, the Wobulator.
 
Walter Wright was designing and writing software for a complete computer
based video imaging system. Steina and Woody Vasulka at Media Study
Buffalo were collaborating with Walter as well. Walter had a lovely Putney
audio synthesizer. Walter was traveling around New York State with his
video image processing workshop and live performances.
 
Don McArthur, teaching physics at Cortland community College was designing
and built a prototype real time video analog to digital and digital to
analog processing box. That was a unit for real time digital video.
 
David Joes was building and testing, sometimes smoking, video circuit
after video circuit, after video circuit.  He designed and built his first
video keyers, colorizer, output amp.  After meeting David Jones and
talking with him for the very first time I wrote in my notebook journal
that I had just met the person who was going to change the history of
television.  I was right.
 
David built a special multichannel performance video switcher that was
inspired by the ³Video and Dancing in Binghamton² performance that took
place at the ETC with Meryl Blackman and my self as well as Arnie Zane,
Bill T. Jones, Lois Welk and Neil Zusman. We then used the completed Jones
switcher as a basic component in the³Movements for Video, Dance and Music²
installation/performances, 1976,  that took place at the Herbert Johnson
Museum in Ithaca, NY and the Everson Museum in Syracuse New York. We
videoists were learning dance and the dancers were learning video. And we
were using new video systems to manifest the new work.
 
Somewhere around the time of 1978/79 was a person who had contacted Ralph
Hocking, need his name, who was making lenses out of sugar to create 3d tv.
 
Richard Brewster became involved building modular audio systems for sound
and also for specifically video control of the voltage controlled video
processors. Bernie Hutchins¹s³monthly ElectroNotes²from Ithaca, NY were a
great inspiration and learning tool for audio. The oscillators and control
were modified to deal with the higher frequencies of video.
 
In 1979, David Jones encouraged me to start building a digital video frame
buffer to better control some of the processing strategies I was
exploring. ³ It could be pretty easy. It wouln¹t take too long to
accomplish².  I took the bait. Three months later we had a real time video
analog to digital and digital to analog box with an ALU chip (arithmetic
and logic unit)  controlled with an Elf 2 microcomputer. It was programed
in hexadecimal. We could flip video gray tone bits and by mixing in video
color subcarrier we could display fabulous digitally intervened color.  I
remember Shalom Gorewitz being thrilled.
 
Then the Experimental Television Center moved to Qwego, New York.
 
 
 
Bests,
Peer





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empyre forum
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Re: [-empyre-] from Peer Bode: bold electronic experimenters

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Following up on Maureen's recollections of Kuntzel's time at ETC, I asked
him a decade later what it was that he enjoyed about Ithaca (which is 20
miles north of Owego, the location of the ETC studio, and the site of many
restaurants and bars). He looked at me, baffled, and said, "what is
Ithaca?"  All I wanted to do was remain in that loft where I could eat and
sleep with the machines!"


Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853





On 9/28/15 12:14 PM, "Turim,Maureen Cheryn"  wrote:

>--empyre- soft-skinned space--
>I love that Peer Bode remembered Thierry Kuntzel's visit to the ETC.  I
>remember chats Thierry and I had about the difference in working at the
>ETC from that of working with the technicians at INA l'Institut National
>de l'audio-visuel) in Paris, when he was a fellow there.  At INA the
>technical staff resisted any play with the image, and were hard to
>interest in the kind of experimentation he aimed to do.  Deregulating
>their standard imagery registration was not part of their customary
>practice.  So I know that his interaction with Peer was a pleasure for
>him.
>____________
>From: empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> on behalf of Timothy Conway
>Murray 
>Sent: Sunday, September 27, 2015 7:23 PM
>To: soft_skinned_space
>Subject: [-empyre-] from Peer Bode: bold electronic experimenters
>
>--empyre- soft-skinned space--
>Hi, everyone, I am forwarding this posting from Peer Bode:
>
>
>The ETC allowed many of we next generation young artists to participate in
>the adventures of electronic video thinking and making. When I think of
>making work at the ETC, I come back to the notions of experimentation,
>process and performance. There were the array of evolving electronically
>modified and electronically designed and built tools handed over to each
>artist, commonly for five days, in a space and location that had great
>ambience of comfort and particularly in Owego, great natural beauty, the
>Susquehanna river etc. The artists were given a fast workshop in equipment
>and system details by myself and in later years by Hank Rudolph. They were
>then left alone to explore and work. I was taken by Kristin Lucas¹s
>comment of how many tapes and recording she had made at her ETC
>residencies. Multiply that by the number of artists who worked in the ETC
>studios and you begin to see the sheer enormous scale of work, now
>history, that was made at the ETC. That is a cultural heritage, a huge
>virtual archive across many artists.
>
>The thinking regarding my personal video work at the ETC goes something
>like this. There was electronic learning and experimenting, process and
>performance. Having studied the New American Cinema in Binghamton and also
>being inspired by the New Music richness, including electronic music, wow,
>that was internalized as an understanding, a striving and teasing out a
>set of electronic practices, atmospheres, certain qualities, textures,
>certain rhythms and durations Šparticular occurrences and discoveries Š
>ways of opening a thinking space, a kind of breathing, a speeding up and
>slowing down. There was this electronic vibratory easing, the moving image
>and sound going from glancing to a being sticky. The point being, reactive
>spaces, processes and dialogues. Reflective surfaces to see, to
>electronically re-network and to internally discover and reinforce.
>
>All of this was in combinations with linguistic concerns. They were both
>influences bumping up against each other. The linguistic together with the
>direct intangible states, realisms, materialisms and art. We also had
>artists Ralph Hocking, Larry Gotham, Ken Jacobs, the dance artists Arnie
>Zane, Bill T, Jones and Lois Welk and the writer and theorist Maureen
>Turim to spar with.
>
>The actual moving image and sound makers are in fact the great fans, the
>experimenters, the researchers of the electronic moments. Video artist
>Shegiko Kubota came to the ETC several times. I very much liked Shegiko¹s
>writings, including she writing that video was ³the vacation of art². And
>there was also ³video as the vengeance of the vagina².  Video as a
>vacation of art Š interesting.  In that vein, we are free, if only
>intermittently and yes heroically, free of arts historical and critical
>burdensŠ open spaces, a kind of freedom.
>
>As still a new form, even now, video and 

[-empyre-] from Peer Bode: bold electronic experimenters

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi, everyone, I am forwarding this posting from Peer Bode:


The ETC allowed many of we next generation young artists to participate in
the adventures of electronic video thinking and making. When I think of
making work at the ETC, I come back to the notions of experimentation,
process and performance. There were the array of evolving electronically
modified and electronically designed and built tools handed over to each
artist, commonly for five days, in a space and location that had great
ambience of comfort and particularly in Owego, great natural beauty, the
Susquehanna river etc. The artists were given a fast workshop in equipment
and system details by myself and in later years by Hank Rudolph. They were
then left alone to explore and work. I was taken by Kristin Lucas¹s
comment of how many tapes and recording she had made at her ETC
residencies. Multiply that by the number of artists who worked in the ETC
studios and you begin to see the sheer enormous scale of work, now
history, that was made at the ETC. That is a cultural heritage, a huge
virtual archive across many artists.
 
The thinking regarding my personal video work at the ETC goes something
like this. There was electronic learning and experimenting, process and
performance. Having studied the New American Cinema in Binghamton and also
being inspired by the New Music richness, including electronic music, wow,
that was internalized as an understanding, a striving and teasing out a
set of electronic practices, atmospheres, certain qualities, textures,
certain rhythms and durations Šparticular occurrences and discoveries Š
ways of opening a thinking space, a kind of breathing, a speeding up and
slowing down. There was this electronic vibratory easing, the moving image
and sound going from glancing to a being sticky. The point being, reactive
spaces, processes and dialogues. Reflective surfaces to see, to
electronically re-network and to internally discover and reinforce.
 
All of this was in combinations with linguistic concerns. They were both
influences bumping up against each other. The linguistic together with the
direct intangible states, realisms, materialisms and art. We also had
artists Ralph Hocking, Larry Gotham, Ken Jacobs, the dance artists Arnie
Zane, Bill T, Jones and Lois Welk and the writer and theorist Maureen
Turim to spar with.
 
The actual moving image and sound makers are in fact the great fans, the
experimenters, the researchers of the electronic moments. Video artist
Shegiko Kubota came to the ETC several times. I very much liked Shegiko¹s
writings, including she writing that video was ³the vacation of art². And
there was also ³video as the vengeance of the vagina².  Video as a
vacation of art Š interesting.  In that vein, we are free, if only
intermittently and yes heroically, free of arts historical and critical
burdensŠ open spaces, a kind of freedom.
 
As still a new form, even now, video and electronic arts are free to be
used to experiment and work in those often contested strange and wonderful
regions, those spaces and durations of the unassigned. The photographer,
filmmaker, videomaker and digital artist Hollis Frampton also considered
and speculated in these ideas. He, by the way taught, early in his career,
at Hunter College.  Hollis suggested in a moment of humbleness or not,
that film art (the moving image and sound art) was superior as the single
art that incorporated the codes of all the other arts AND that film art
was 20 years ahead of the painting and sculpture arts. I still like his
conceit.  Maybe it is in fact 40 years, including the 20 years the
electronic arts have lost using commercial software, that forever renewing
commercial redesign product. As we get through this period and as hardware
and software settles around useful structures and systems, (open sourceŠ
new hardware instruments) interested people, young media artists, will
move quickly and deeply into more personal investigations using electronic
materials, tools, instruments, ideas and cultures.
 
The years of my engagement with the facilities of the Experimental
Television Center and the remarkable people guiding and participating in
its adventure have convinced me of the importance of pushing back, of the
value of alternative thinkings, practices and communities. Nicholas Ray
had thoughts about alternative cultures. Nicolas Ray, American auteur film
director, who we in Binghamton had the opportunity experience as filmmaker
and mentor and who together with Binghamton film students made a multi
image electronically inspired film had thoughts about alternative
cultures. Nick made video synthesizer recordings at the ETC.  The
multi-frame narrative feature film ³We Can¹t Go Home Again² offered the
suggestion for a 1970¹s generation of young people to ³find your
communities and take care of each other.²Not bad.  The film and the
accompanying documentary film, ³Don¹t Expect Too Much²by S

Re: [-empyre-] Week Four Guests: Bode, Watson, Rujoiu

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi, again, everyone,

Thanks so much to Maureen Turim, Jason Bernagozzi, and Benton Bainbridge
for sharing their thoughts in-between the ETC opening and the Jewish
holidays over the past week.

We are rounding out September's discussion of "Video: Behind and Beyond"
with contributions from one of the pionneers of the medium, Peer Bode, and
two curators who have been so successful in bringing together different
generations of international artists to exhibit and contemplate the
lasting legacy of video and its digital interfaces, Sarah Watson of the
Hunter College Galleries and Anca Rujoiu of the Centre for Contemporary
Art of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.  I have enjoyed
working closely with Sarah on the Hunter exhibition, and celebrate her
exciting and judicious installation of the show, and I also so admire the
curatorial interventions of Anca with whom I've had the pleasure of
working in Singapore.

We welcome all three of you to the final days of our discussion and look
forward to hearing your thoughts.

Peer Bode (US) is Professor of Video Arts at the School of Art and Design
and Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Institute for Electronic Arts (IEA),
NYSCC at Alfred University in Alfred, NY.  In 1976 Peer became the ETC
program¹s coordinator and artist in residence. It was during this period
that Peer made an impressive body of seminal early works. These were
exhibited broadly in New York, including exhibits at the Anthology Film
Archives, the Kitchen and the New York Avant Garde Film Festival. In
collaborations with David Jones at ETC, Peer assisted in the construction
of the Jones Frame Buffer, an instrument which has become a signature
processor within Peer's oeuvre. Peer has the distinction of creating some
of the earliest digital prints and digital video artworks. Other
collaborations from this period include video and dance works with
choreographers Bill T. Jones, Arnie Zane and Lois Welk together with Meryl
Blackman and Cara Brownell. As the ETC Program Coordinator, Peer assisted
numerous artists in realizing major works, including Shigeko Kubota,
Walter Wright, Doris Chase, Jud Yalcut, Gary Hill and Richard Kostelanetz.
In 1987 Peer became head of the Video Arts Program at the School of Art
and Design, NYSCC at Alfred University.  He has exhibited works in
international festivals and exhibitions, including the European Media Art
Festival (Osnabrück, Germany), Impakt Film and Video Art Festival (the
Netherlands), Viper Festival (Lucern, Switzerland), Image Farm (Hiroshima,
Japan), and across China.

Anca Rujoiu (SG), is a Romanian curator currently based in Singapore. She
is a curator for exhibitions at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore
and curator
at FormContent, a curatorial initiative in London. Previously, she
coordinated the public programme of the School of Fine Art at the Royal
College of Art (UK).
With FormContent she explored various curatorial models and challenged the
relationship between artist/curator often overlapping their roles in the
process. Her
recent project with FormContent, It's Moving from I to It unfolded as a
performative script within a nomadic structure testing formats of
production and distribution. She has been a visiting lecturer at various
universities including Goldsmiths College, Central Saint Martins
University and Newcastle and television productions, artists' publications.

Sarah Watson (US)is the Chief Curator of the Hunter College Art Galleries
and co-organized, designed, and mounted the current ETC exhibition at
Hunter College Art Galliers. Since joining the galleries in 2012, she has
co-organized numerous exhibitions and their accompanying public
programming, including: Robert Barry: All the things I know . . . 1962 to
the present; Robert Motherwell and the New York School at Hunter; Gego and
Gerd Leufert: a dialogue; Héctor Fuenmayor: Citrus 6906; Open Work in
Latin America, New York & Beyond: Conceptualism Reconsidered; William
Anastasi: Sound Works 1963 to 2013; and Conceptual Abstraction.
Watson has served as a juror for Independent Curators International
Curatorial Intensive Program and sits on the Foundation To-Life, Inc.,
Arthur and Carol
Kaufman Goldberg Visiting Curator Committee at Hunter College.  Prior to
her arrival at Hunter College, She worked as the assistant curator for an
international private art collection. Watson holds an MA in Art History
from Hunter College and a BFA in Art Photography from Syracuse University.
 
 


We look forward to hearing your thoughts, Peer, Sarah, and Anca.


Tim and Renate


Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853







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Descript

Re: [-empyre-] Week Three Guests: Bernagozzi (x2), Bainbridge, Turim

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Jason,

It was so great to see you and Deborah at the Hunter College exhibit.
Yesterday while Renate and I were meeting with Peer Bode in the gallery,
we admired the striking figure of the greats of Signal Culture, you,
Deborah and David Jones, walking past the gallery windows on your way
toward Soho.  It was as if the shadows of the show were reaching out into
the broader art and tool world of New York.

It is so interesting how you, Benton, and Maureen all echo the importance
of the conceptual emphasis of video art as produced and professed at ETC.
As you put it in your post: "It was a place that taught so many
generations of artists that media tools are still about process, that the
electronic image is intangible yet is material."

It is fantastic that Signal Culture carries on this tradition.  See you
soon in the media haunts of Upstate New York.

Tim

Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853





On 9/24/15 2:37 AM, "Jason Bernagozzi"  wrote:

>--empyre- soft-skinned space--

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Re: [-empyre-] Week Three Guests: Bernagozzi (x2), Bainbridge, Turim

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thanks so much for your informative post, Benton.  It was great to spend
some time with you at the ETC opening on Thursday night.  It's so
interesting to hear how the ETC tape library, a small portion of which is
being screened at the ETC show (about 40 of some 3,000 titles), also
played an informative role in the artmaking going on with the ETC
machines.  Especially important to recall is the strong role played by
Woody and Steina Vasulka, along with Nam June Paik, in the early days of
ETC, whose emphasis on conceptual experimentation seemed to inform later
works produced in the facility, which, in turn, have had such an
instrumental international impact on thinking the conceptualization of
video art and practice.

Thanks so much for sharing you work in the exhibition.

Best,

Tim
 
Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853





On 9/23/15 5:10 PM, "Benton C Bainbridge" 
wrote:

>--empyre- soft-skinned space--

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Re: [-empyre-] On camerawork and montage transformed by ETC video processing

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thanks for your post, Maureen.  So sorry for the delay.  We have been in
New York meeting with the ETC artists in the Hunter College exhibition,
and enjoyed a very successful opening.  We'll be sharing photos of the
opening on the -empyre- Facebook page over the next few days.

Your question is so interesting, and the wealth of videos on display in
the exhibition (over 40 titles) make clear what you call a para-cinematic
comparison. Of course it's little coincidence that ETC was founded by
Ralph Hocking when he was teaching in the SUNY Binghamton film program,
which included some of the great experimenters of cinematic form, such as
Ken Jacobs. For the show, Jason Bernagozzi developed a color prototype of
the Wobbulator, the tool develped at ETC that achieved the live motion
contorted raster and whirling effects.  At the exhibition at Hunter
College, this is connected to a live video feed that catalyzes the imagery
on the small wobbulator screen.

Also of interest, in this context of form and aesthetics shared by
experimental film and video, is the statement framing the exhibition,
composed by Sarah Watson, that now links the form of the archive with that
of video art (and, in which, we can hear the resonance of experimental
film): "The nature of the archive seems to mirror the inherent material
and immaterial qualities of the early medium, which the ETC has worked so
diligently to preserve: the lost frame, the glitch, the erasure.  These
limitations of the early technology were embraced by the artists for their
poetic potential  and have now become aesthetics that gesture toward the
liminal and tactile beginnings of video."

I might mention as well that this emphasis on "erasure" also reflects the
pressure placed by our guest, John Conomos and his collaborator, Brad
Buckley, in their fascinating recent collection of essays, Erasure: The
Spectre of Cultural Memory (Libri, 2015).

Renate and I are looking forward to today to enjoying some other NY
exhibitions that dialogue with this month's theme.  We wish you, and our
many Jewish participants, all the best for the holidays.

Best,

Tim

Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853





On 9/23/15 8:36 PM, "Turim,Maureen Cheryn"  wrote:

>--empyre- soft-skinned space--
>I have been following the past weeks of discussion with great interest,
>notably on the issues of preservation and on the theorization implied in
>the inventive analog technologies of the ETC.   To continue on this later
>notion, in light of my teaching an senior honors seminar this semester on
>cinematography, I want to raise the question of the camera in the ETC
>works.  Some artists brought externally shot material to the ETC to
>process (for example Shalom Gorewitz) while many others tended to set up
>one or multiple cameras at the ETC as studio, working with themselves or
>others as models/actors, or setting up still lives. In both cases the
>status of the camera image was reworked, but differently in the studio
>set-ups in which the immediacy of the transformation of the image was
>performed.  In other words, what in cinema constitutes post-production
>could be integral to the recording process itself.  I have long been
>fascinated by what that meant, and would like to hear more from others
>about the status of the camera image in these works. Some of my favorite
>images from the early days were those that reduced representational
>imagery to some ephemeral outlining (Barbara Buckner) that could
>fluctuate dynamically.  Its been so long since I¹ve seen this work, but
>for example, those transforming outlines remain etched in memory. Perhaps
>we can talk more about the camerawork + processing in both semiotic and
>perceptual terms. 
>
>The sequencing aspect of ETC works also brings up a comparison to filmic
>montage, and particularly theories of intervallic structure.  Peer Bode¹s
>Video Locomotion (man performing forward hand leap), 1978, made explicit
>a para-cinematic comparison, while contrasting the stillness and
>rectilinear structure of Muybridge¹s photo sheets with a contorted raster
>and whirling motion.   So signal transforms signifier into a
>meta-commentary on sequenced imagery.  We were all aware of the
>cubo-futurist components of the multiple cameras linked through a
>sequencer, but now, is there more to think about this process in
>retrospect?  
> 
>
>
>___
>empyre forum
>empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

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Re: [-empyre-] ETC to Rose Goldsen and on and on

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi, how much of these tapes are still readable, does anyone know?

Ciao,
Murat



All of the ETC tapes are very readable.

Tim

Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853





On 9/22/15 1:18 PM, "Murat Nemet-Nejat"  wrote:

>--empyre- soft-skinned space--

___
empyre forum
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[-empyre-] Week Three Guests: Bernagozzi (x2), Bainbridge, Turim

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Renate and I want to thank Lynn Sachs and Alan Sondheim for stimulating a
provocative discussion of the toggles between analogue and digital.  Their
own work has been at the forefront of conceptual and narrative
experimentations with mixed medial formats, and we're appreciative of
their very thoughtful reflections on their work and processes.

On Thursday we will celebrate the opening of the ETC show at Hunter
College in New York City, compromised of ETC tapes and ephemera held in
the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art. If you can brave the gridlock
caused by the Pope and his politician buddies from the UN, we hope to see
you down in the artsy quiet of Tribeca on Thursday night.

This week were are happy to feature two artists who have been prominent
over the years of ETC, Peer Bode and Benton C Bainbridge, as well as
Deborah Bernagozzi and Jason Bernagozzi who have picked up the ETC
tradition through their residency program, also in tiny Owego, New York,
Signal Culture.  Jason worked with Dave Jones to design a emulated Paik
'wobbulator' that will be on display in the Hunter College show (which
runs through November).  Also joining us is one of the preeminent
theoreticians of video art and cinema, Maureen Turim from the University
of Florida.  It was Maureen, during her years as a film professor at SUNY
Binghamton, who first took me over to Owego for a screening at ETC in the
waning months of the 1970s where I was stunned by the creative
abstractions pulsating before my wide eyes.  So it's with particular
pleasure that we welcome Maureen to -empyre- within the broader interface
that is ETC Today.


BENTON C BAINBRIDGE (US) is a media artist based in the Bronx. Working
with custom systems of his own design,
Bainbridge creates  immersive environments, interactive installations and
digital time-based artworks. He is best known for his visual performance
projects, both solo and in collaboration with a wide range of artists,
from pop musicians to underground legends. Bainbridge's commitment to
real-time
processes was nurtured through numerous residencies, and with the support
of, Experimental Television Center. Career highlights include video art
and VJ'ing
for two Beastie Boys world tours, analog video synthesizer FX for TV On
The Radio's "Staring at the Sun" music video, and Whitney Museum's
best-attended live event with video ensemble The Poool. Bainbridge's work
is being presented in THE EXPERIMENTAL TELEVISION CENTER: A HISTORY,
ETC . . . AN EXHIBITION AT HUNTER COLLEGE ART GALLERY. Examples of
Bainbridge's live video collaborations will be exhibited in the HCAG.
Benton will also conduct a video synthesis workshop for ETC, then perform
audiovisuals in collaboration with PhillipStearns.
Artistwebsite: bentoncbainbridge.com
Wikipedia article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benton_C_Bainbridge

Debora Bernagozzi is a video artist and photographer. She received her BFA
in Video from the Atlanta College of Art in 1999 and her MFA in Electronic
Integrated Art from Alfred University in 2002. Her work has been exhibited
in the US and internationally. She participated in repeated residencies at
the Experimental Television Center and was awarded a Regional Artist
Access Residency from Squeaky Wheel Media Arts Center. Bernagozzi and her
husband were honored to be artists in residence in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
in January 2012, co-sponsored by the Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film and
Video Festival and Multimedia University. She is Co-Founder and Executive
Director of Signal Culture, an experimental media arts organization that
offers residencies, resources, and exhibition opportunities.

Jason Bernagozzi is a video, sound and new media artist living and working
in upstate New York and is the co-founder of the experimental media arts
non-profit Signal Culture. His work has been featured nationally and
internationally at venues such as the 2015 ACM SIGGRAPH exhibition
"Enhanced Vision - Digital Video", the European Media Arts Festival in
Osnabruk, Germany, the LOOP Video Art Festival in Barcelona, Spain, the
Beyond/In Western NY Biennial in Buffalo, NY, and the Yan Gerber
International Arts Festival in Hebei Province, China. His work has
received several awards including grants from the New York State Council
for the Arts, free103point9 and the ARTS Council for the Southern Finger
Lakes. He is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media & Animation at Alfred
State College.

http://www.seeinginvideo.com 
http://www.signalculture.org 



 
MAUREEN TURIM (US) is professor of Film and Media Studies in the
Department of English at the University of Florida has published three
books, The Films of Oshima Nagisa. Images of a Japanese Iconoclast,
Berkeley: University of California Press 1998; Flashbacks in Film: Memory
and History, New York: Routledge, 1989; andAbstraction in Avant-Garde
Films, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Pre

Re: [-empyre-] ETC to Rose Goldsen and on and on

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thanks, Renate.  I recall vividly my amazement at the walls of videotapes
framing the synthesizers in the ETC space.  Little did we imagine moving
them all to the Goldsen Archive within less than a decade.  We are now so
happy to share so many of these titles with the public in the New York
exhibition at Hunter College opening this week.  By the way, the opening
of the exhibition is this Thursday (not Friday) from 7-9.

I meant mention, along the lines the fluid shifts between analogue and
digital at ETC, that the Goldsen Archive was initially conceived to hold
digital new media art and reference materials exclusively. But as a result
of a number of fortuitous collaborations, with Wen Pulin in Beijing,
Elayne Zalis in LA, and Sherry and Ralph up the road, it became clear that
any archive of new media art would need to establish a firm bridge between
the analogue and digital histories of the electronic arts.  What's come to
pass, as made evident by the posts of both Lynne and Alan, is how the
analogue is now looping back into practice in a kind of retroactive
dialogue with digital formats and thinking.  The digital is now more than
ever a morphing of analogue or, as I once put, the digital is the analogy
of the analogue.


Cheers,

Tim

Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853





On 9/21/15 1:00 PM, "Renate Terese Ferro"  wrote:

>--empyre- soft-skinned space--
>Thanks Alan and Lynne for you posts.  Alan your poetic description of the
>loft at ETC was spot on but I want to add to it by mentioning the iconic
>smell that was so distinctive of the space.  For me it reminded me of an
>attic.  The metaphor of the attic is an important one because of the
>reserves of artifacts and their histories.
>
>I am reminded this morning as I sit hear in my office of the residency
>that I did at ETC in the mid 2000¹s.  My project was to visit the studio
>and immerse myself in the Jitter tutorials. I remember on my first morning
>there Hank Rudolph graciously met me and set me up on a computer that was
>situated on a table directly in front of the analog image processors.  It
>did not take long for me to gravitate over to the immersive wall of analog
>mixers where I played for a couple of days mixing sequences and adding
>real filters. The situated microphones, cameras and other equipment around
>me at the time seemed to be speaking to me as I imagined how those before
>me had also experimented in the space. I also recall combing through the
>titles and authors of videotapes that comprised the video library in the
>room adjacent to where I worked every day.  Jitter took somewhat of a
>backseat that week!
>
>Ithaca is not far from Owego so every night I would make the trek back
>home to check in on what was happenings there.   On the occasion of one
>evening over a later dinner I mentioned to Tim (as in Tim Murray)  the
>amazing collection of video tapes that ETC had and how I wondered what
>would happen to their condition over time.  Like other artworks would they
>degrade in unguarded conditions?  Or perhaps they were never meant to be
>preserved? 
>
>The next day Tim stopped by the residency space and I showed him the
>amazing bookshelf  of videotapes and there was born the idea to
>investigate the possibilities of a collaboration between the Experimental
>Television Workshop and The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art.  A way
>to preserve the history of experimental video and sound.  To imagine that
>almost ten years later Hunter College features Electronic Television
>Workshop artists in a retrospective exhibition is an auspicious moment in
>time.  Not only have the videotapes been preserved and archived but the
>supporting papers and documentation.
>
>The  short week I spent at ETC not only experimenting freely with the
>tools around me but immersed in an aura of history has had a significant
>impact on my practice and my teaching.  I just came from my teaching
>studio at Cornell where I relayed the important beginnings of ETC by a
>Binghamton professor Ralph Hocking and his partner Sherry Miller Hocking
>who has persisted in not only Ralph¹s early visions but her own
>re-visions. 
>
>I am looking forward to Hunter College¹s opening on Friday evening. Though
>Sherry and Ralph will not be there their presence will be felt throughout
>the entire exhibition as so many former residency artist¹s and so many
>others decent upon the Hudson Street Gallery to celebrate.  If you are in
>the New York area this Friday please join in.
>
>Renate
>
>Opening: September 24, 7­9pm
>205 Hudson Street Gallery
>Hunter College MFA Campus
>New York
>September 25­November 21, 2015
>
>Hours: Wednesday­Sunday 1

[-empyre-] Week 2 -empyre- September, 2015, Video: Behind and Beyond

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi, everyone,

We would like to thank our pionneering and thoughtful guests of week one,
Sherry Miller Hocking, John Conomos, Kathy High, Carolyn Tennant, and Isak
Berbic, Megan Roberts who have gotten this month's discussion of "Video:
Behind and Beyond" off to a flying start.

This week we welcome four video artists who works have been front and
center in international festivals and discussions of video art, with all
of these artists toggling between analogue and video systems,
installation, and project.  Alan Sondheim has generously gifted his
archives to the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art where the ETC
archives are also housed.  Lynne Sachs also has been discussion archival
projects with the Goldsen Archive and has been so inventive in blending
platforms and venues in the productive of her provocative art -- most
recently last weekend in a laundromat!  And Ray Roberts Ghirardo and Megan
Roberts are our artistic neighbors in Ithaca, New York.  Just a couple of
weeks ago, Megan made a significant contribution to the Goldsen Archive of
the tapes she had stored for years of the pionneering Ithaca Video
Festival, which run in the late 1970s and early 1980s under the creative
care of Philip Mallory Jones.

We are very much looking forward to your thoughts this week, and we hope
that our -empyre- subscribers will jump into the discussion as well.

Welcome to -empyre_ Ray, Megan, Lynne, and Alan.

Tim and Renate


Megan Roberts (US) is a composer and media artist and Raymond Ghirardo
(US) is a sculptor and media
artist.  Collaborators since the mid-70s they have produced a large body
of installation work exhibited internationally
in a wide range of gallery, museum, festival, public and site-specific
venues including Walker Art Center, Anthology film Archives, Oakland
Museum, Center
for Contemporary Art, Prague, Visual Studies Workshop, Maselnice Gallery,
Cesky Krumlov, Consolidated Works, Seattle, and Infermental, Tokyo. Their
awards
include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York
Foundation for the Arts; grants and residencies from NYSCA, Yaddo,
MacDowell
Colony, Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice and Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder
in Norway, among many others.

 
 
Lynne Sachs (US) makes films, performances, installations and web projects
that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and
broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage,
painting, politics
and layered sound design. Since 1994, her five essay films have taken her
to
Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel and Germany ‹ sites affected by international
war­where
she tries to work in the space between a community¹s collective memory and
her
own subjective perceptions. Strongly committed to a dialogue between
cinematic
theory and practice, Lynne searches for a rigorous play between image and
sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with each and
every
new project.  Since 2006, she has collaborated with her partner Mark
Street in a series of playful, mixed-media performance collaborations they
call
The XY Chromosome Project. In addition to her work with the moving image,
Lynne
co-edited the Millennium Film Journal issue on ³Experiments in
Documentary².
Supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Jerome
Foundations and the New York State Council on the Arts, Lynne¹s films have
screened at the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival and
Toronto¹s Images Festival.  She is currently co-directing "Every Fold
Matters", a live film performance presented in laundromats around New York
City. In 2014, the China Women¹s Film Festival hosted Lynne in Beijing and
Shanghai during a mini-retrospective
of her films. Lynne teaches experimental film and video at New York
University and lives in Brooklyn.  For more info:  www.lynnesachs.com
 

ALAN SONDHEIM (US) is a Providence-based new media artist, musician,
writer and performer concerned with issues of
virtuality, and the stake that the real world has in the virtual. He has
worked with his partner, Azure
Carter and the performer/choreographer Foofwa d'Imobilite. Sondheim is
interested in examining the grounds of the
virtual and how the body is inhabited. He performs in virtual, real, and
cross-over worlds; his
virtual work is known for its highly complex and mobile architectures. He
has used altered motion-capture technology
extensively for examining and creating new lexicons of behavior. His
current work is centered around the
phenomenology of terrorism and anguish, and their cultural expression.



Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853





On 9/15/15 1:20 AM, "Isak Berbic"  wrote:

>--empyre- soft-skinned space--



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

[-empyre-] the glitch and beyond

[Timothy Conway Murray]

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

It's so interesting to recall the critical empowerment of the 'glitch' in
video aesthetics, as you both have termed it.  While the glitch is
frequently discussed in sound studies in relation to an "aesthetic of
failure" (via the capture of digital error and failure), it has been so
much more affirmatively instrumental in video aesthetics, especially given
the care in which it was frequently nurtured and crafted through the
artist's working with emergent tools.   Thanks so much for reminding us of
the conceptual force accompanying early experimentations with video tools,
as well their current elaborations in dialogue with digitality by artists
such as you both.

Tim

Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853


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empyre forum
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Re: [-empyre-] Video Behind: On the history

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
The screening list of the Hunter Show should be publicized within a week
or so, Maureen.  We're still working out some kinks with some of the
pieces and don't want to promise anything that the archived artworks won't
permit us to deliver.  But remarkably so much of this material is in
tremendously good shape.  I was thinking today about how relieved we were
with the arrival of digital platforms, thinking naively that they would
save us from ephemerality of videotape.   As I was reordering my
collection of interactive CD-Roms tonight, which I accrued while curating
that medium in the 90s, I couldn't help but be struck that the ETC tapes,
so much older and supposedly more fragile, all still run on standard tape
players.  The same cannot be said, helas, for interactive CD-Roms.

Tim

Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853





On 9/10/15 12:39 PM, "Turim,Maureen Cheryn"  wrote:

>--empyre- soft-skinned space--
>Is the list available, Tim?
>
>From: empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> on behalf of Timothy Conway
>Murray 
>Sent: Thursday, September 10, 2015 12:13 PM
>To: soft_skinned_space
>Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Video Behind:  On the history
>
>--empyre- soft-skinned space--
>Hi, Sherry,
>
>Sarah Watson and I have just completed preparing the videos for exhibition
>in the ETC show that will open on September 24 at Hunter College.  As I
>was reviewing the screening list, I remembered my early days of viewing
>experimental tapes during screenings at ETC.  What was particularly
>compelling to me as a young theorist was the conceptual verve of even the
>most formal experiments with the video tools that were developed in the
>ETC lab by Nam June Paik, Shuya Abe, David Jones, and others.  The
>flexible analogue tools available to artists at ETC catalyzed the
>theorization of video as an art form, as well as contributed to
>philosophies of time, movement, light, and the electronic extensions of
>montage/collage.
>
>As we move through the month discussing video art writ-large, I hope we
>can celebrate the cerebral demands on the artists who suspended their
>artistic conventions in order to give themselves over to the emergent
>concepts of time and space happening via their building and interaction
>with this emergent gear.
>
>Welcome to the month of Video, behind and beyond!
>
>Tim
>
>
>
> 9/10/15 10:15 AM, "Renate Terese Ferro"  wrote:
>
>
>>--empyre- soft-skinned space--
>>Dear Sherry,
>>Many thanks for making this initial post about ETC.  For our
>>international
>>subscribers who have never made the trek to Upstate New York I thought it
>>might be a good idea to talk about where the Experimental Television
>>Center was located and how it all began in 1972.  I was very lucky to
>>have
>>a residency at the center in 2006. The aura of years past and especially
>>from the international artists who where there before me seemed to be
>>seeped in the archive of equipment as I worked.  To have your insightful
>>perspective Sherry and our other guests on that early history I think
>>might fascinate our subscribers.
>>
>>Also subscribers for those of you who have a history in video both analog
>>and digital we hope you will join our conversation.
>>Really looking forward to the month.
>>
>>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/
>>
>>
>>On 9/8/15, 8:48 PM, "ETC"  wrote:
>>First, thanks to empyre ­ and especially to Tim and Renate ­ for the
>>invitation to participate this month. I have been a long time, mostly
>>silent observer, and have learned so much over the years from all of you.
>>
>>I have spent over 40 years working with the ETC, a (very) small ­ and
>>intentionally so ­ media arts ³organization² in Upstate New York. When we
>>decided to end the Residency, Research, Grants and Sponsorship programs
>>at
>>ETC in 2011, I

Re: [-empyre-] Video Behind: On the history

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
What a coincidence, Sherry.  As I spent the night doing archeology in my
study to make way for house renovations, I unearthed boxes and boxes of
catalogues and zeroxed articles on video art.  Nothing of the magnitude in
your incredible ETC archive, but a sharp reminder of the depth of critical
thought that was birthed by the rapid rise of video art. The rapid rise in
production of video art brought with it a similarly striking explosion of
thinking about video and its representations.

Your mention of the commonplace of "erasure" also brought my eyes to the
new collection edited by Brad Buckley and John Conomos (who will be one of
our guests later in the month), Erasure the Spectre of Cultural Memory.
It think it's fair to say that the recent return to "erasure" as well as
the emphatic emphasis on cultural memory carried forth by the trauma and
memory theorists of the 90s and early 2000s owes a good deal of its edge
to the practical and critical experimentations with the erasures of video
tape.  A really interesting, and important contribution.

Tim

Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853





On 9/10/15 3:32 PM, "ETC"  wrote:

>--empyre- soft-skinned space--
>Referring to a conversation with Lynn Hershman Renate wrote,  “During
>that chat I asked her why she archived so much and she reminded me
>that as a woman artist she had to ensure that her work was archived
>properly because ‘who else would do it.’”
>
>And Renate’s follow-up question to herself: “how much do we preserve,
>how much space do we have, who will record our history if we do not.”
>
>Both of these made me consider where this impulse to preserve comes from.
>
>In thinking back to the earliest days of video, I really don’t recall
>a lot of conversations about history, legacy, archival records and the
>like. It seems that we were all busy making work, making
>organizations, making structures and processes and weren’t engaged in
>thinking about the future of it all. Accepted was the fact of
>impermanence of this new medium, in all its many guises. The tapes
>were electromagnetic. They could – and often were – erased, often to
>allow for a new recording. The tapes were frequently palimpsests,
>imperfect erasures with the flicker of the ghosts of previous
>recordings haunting the imagery. The tapes were fragile, easily
>deformed – stretched, broken. We didn’t expect them to last, really.
>The longevity has been a surprise.
>
>Of course, that all changed as the medium evolved and became more
>accepted by society, the academy and the arts infrastructures.
>Practitioners had territory to carve out and protect, boundaries to
>mark. Our field struggled with how to turn a reproducible medium into
>one that rewards the precious object. Could some of us find a way to
>cash in? Could others of us even make a small mark on history?
>
>Others of us simply went on making work and figuring out strategies to
>help others make it too. And thinking about ways of exhibiting,
>distributing, and eventually saving the works for scholars and artists
>following us.
>
>There wasn’t much interest, really, in the tiny backwater of video
>often referred to as image processing. Those of us engaged,
>recognizing that little value was placed on this art, by default began
>saving materials, tools, letters. I think, though, that this impulse
>to collect, to order,  is probably more rooted within us as
>individuals. You either do this, and can’t imagine not doing it, or
>you don’t – you deaccession and move on.
>
>Renate’s point about saving our own histories is well taken, since
>with video in general there was very little interest in the art; if we
>didn’t value it, who would? None of the cultural institutions seemed
>engaged. So some of held on to our collections. Those of us Upstate
>often had the luxury of more space than our colleagues in the city.
>And some of us filled it.
>
>And now many are involved with trying to find homes for these
>collections – places which will put the materials in context, and
>place it in the hands of researchers, students, and scholars.
>
>Sherry
>
>On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 12:13 PM, Timothy Conway Murray
> wrote:
>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>> Hi, Sherry,
>>
>> Sarah Watson and I have just completed preparing the videos for
>>exhibition
>> in the ETC show that will open on September 24 at Hunter College.  As I
>> was revie

Re: [-empyre-] Video Behind: On the history

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi, Sherry,

Sarah Watson and I have just completed preparing the videos for exhibition
in the ETC show that will open on September 24 at Hunter College.  As I
was reviewing the screening list, I remembered my early days of viewing
experimental tapes during screenings at ETC.  What was particularly
compelling to me as a young theorist was the conceptual verve of even the
most formal experiments with the video tools that were developed in the
ETC lab by Nam June Paik, Shuya Abe, David Jones, and others.  The
flexible analogue tools available to artists at ETC catalyzed the
theorization of video as an art form, as well as contributed to
philosophies of time, movement, light, and the electronic extensions of
montage/collage.

As we move through the month discussing video art writ-large, I hope we
can celebrate the cerebral demands on the artists who suspended their
artistic conventions in order to give themselves over to the emergent
concepts of time and space happening via their building and interaction
with this emergent gear.

Welcome to the month of Video, behind and beyond!

Tim
 


 9/10/15 10:15 AM, "Renate Terese Ferro"  wrote:


>--empyre- soft-skinned space--
>Dear Sherry, 
>Many thanks for making this initial post about ETC.  For our international
>subscribers who have never made the trek to Upstate New York I thought it
>might be a good idea to talk about where the Experimental Television
>Center was located and how it all began in 1972.  I was very lucky to have
>a residency at the center in 2006. The aura of years past and especially
>from the international artists who where there before me seemed to be
>seeped in the archive of equipment as I worked.  To have your insightful
>perspective Sherry and our other guests on that early history I think
>might fascinate our subscribers.
>
>Also subscribers for those of you who have a history in video both analog
>and digital we hope you will join our conversation.
>Really looking forward to the month.
>
>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/
>
>
>On 9/8/15, 8:48 PM, "ETC"  wrote:
>First, thanks to empyre ­ and especially to Tim and Renate ­ for the
>invitation to participate this month. I have been a long time, mostly
>silent observer, and have learned so much over the years from all of you.
>
>I have spent over 40 years working with the ETC, a (very) small ­ and
>intentionally so ­ media arts ³organization² in Upstate New York. When we
>decided to end the Residency, Research, Grants and Sponsorship programs at
>ETC in 2011, I was often asked, ³So, are you closing? Will you retire?²
>
>I was unprepared for the query and had no answers. I didn¹t feel retired.
>I
>looked at the 1Ž2² open reel videotapes which still fill our beer cooler
>qua
>climate-controlled storage facility, and wondered about our respective
>fates.
>
>At the time we closed many of the ETC programs, I was very involved with
>Kathy High and Mona Jimenez, along with many brilliant scholars and
>artists, on completing the two volume book ³The Emergence of Video
>Processing Tools: Television Becoming Unglued². Once the book was finally
>published in 2014, I took a step back and reconsidered some of the topics
>we had tried to address: from ideas as general as how do art, science and
>technology intersect, and are the collaborations that evolve specific to
>cultural and social environments; to topics as specific as those involving
>talk of codecs, wrappers and containers.
>
>We became involved in the topics of media history and preservation in the
>1990s.
>   -  were among the founding organizations of the groups that became
>Media
>Alliance and Independent Media Arts Preservation
>   -  organized the conference Video History: Making Connections
>(Syracuse,
>1998)
>   -  participated in the National Moving Image Database (NAMID) project
>of
>the American Film Institute as they created a template for cataloging
>moving image media works, that addressed specific properties of electronic
>media as opposed to film
>   -  organized several symposia on preservation at Buffalo State College
>and in NYC in 2002
>   -  began (1996) and continue the History website.
>
>Some of you were also at some of those meetings, I'm sure.
>
>One result of the book was a mass of research materials, historical texts,
>artists¹ statements, technical descriptions which have not been put on the
>History site and even more questions:
>   -  how do we preserve instruments; what about functionality
>   -  where will the ephemera live: how do we preserve cultural context
>   -  can you preserve the ethos, the

[-empyre-] -empyre- September, 2015, Video: Behind and Beyond

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hello, -Empyreans-,

Now that the US holidays have passed and the heat of the summer has finally 
settled into Upstate New York, it's time to look to the fall startup of the 
2015-16 season of -empyre–.  We look forward to a a wide-ranging discussion 
throughout the remainder of September of "Video and Beyond."  Information about 
the topic and this week's guests is below:


September, 2015 Video: Behind and Beyond

Moderated by Tim Murray (US) and Renate Ferro(US) with invited discussants

Week 1 September 8-13: Andrew Deutsch (US) Kathy High (US), Sherry Hocking 
Miller (US), Renate Ferro (US), Tim Murray (US) Isak Berbic (US),  John Conomos 
(AU), Carolyn Tennant (US)

Week 2 September  14-20: Megan Roberts (US), Raymond Ghirardo (US), Lynne Sacks 
(US), Alan Sondheim (US)

Week 3 September  21-26 Maureen Turim (US), Benton C Bainbridge ( US)
Week 4 September  27-30  Sarah Watson (US), Gabriel Menotti (BR), Anca Rujoiu 
(SG)
In celebration of the legacy of the Experimental Television Center, -empyre- 
dedicates the month of September to discussion of “Video: Behind and Beyond.”  
For over forty years, the Experimental Television Center in Owego, New York, 
was one of North America’s preeminent residencies and funding sources for video 
art, fostering a community for creative and innovation in technology.  Through 
its residency program and practical research program artists worldwide passed 
through its doors.  The Experimental Television Center was founded by Ralph 
Hocking, in 1971, who collaborated with Nam June Paik and others in the 
creation of innovative tools used by ETC artists for experimental creation in 
and around video.  Throughout the years both Ralph Hocking and Sherry Miller 
Hocking have provided support and services to the media and technology 
community by encouraging electronic media technologies and honoring 
independently creating moving-image history.  They have single handedly 
initiated projects that encouraged partnerships for research, education, and 
preservation.
During the month of September, we encourage discussion of the early days of 
video art and its movement beyond the analogue into pairings with digital 
technologies.  ETC fostered and encouraged these pairings from the very 
beginning.  In addition to hearing from international guests with specialized 
artistic and critical interests in video art, we will be joined by many of the 
artists and technicians who have been affiliated with ETC.

The month’s discussion coincides with a major exhibition, opening September 24, 
at the Hunter College Art Gallery in New York City with the collaboration of 
the Rose Goldsen Archive for New Media Art, which holds the ETC archive.

 the center over these past several years to celebrate the history and heritage 
of ETC during Week 1, to examine the affect of the center’s influence beyond 
the scope of a regional video center to an influential player in the digital 
and internet age nationally and globally during Week 2 and 3, and finally 
during Week 4 to discuss the Center’s preservation and archival drive for the 
future.

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TO:
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Biographies:

Moderators:
Renate Ferro (US) Renate Ferro’s creative work resides in the area of emerging 
technology, new media and culture. By aligning artistic, creative practice with 
critical approaches to technology her work broadly spans installation, 
interactive net-based projects, digital time-based media, drawing, text, and 
performance. Her artistic work has been featured at The Freud Museum (London), 
The Dorksy Gallery (NY), The Hemispheric Institute and FOMMA (Mexico), The 
Janus Pannonius Muzeum (Hungary), and The Free University Berlin (Germany).  
Her writing has been published in such journals as Diacritics, Theatre Journal, 
and Epoch.. She also is the founder of the Tinker 
Factory Lab. Ferro is a Visiting Associate 
Professor of Art at Cornell University.  She has been on the moderating team 
for -empyre soft-skinned space since 2007 and is currently the managing 
moderator.


Tim Murray (US) Tim Murray is Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media 
Art, Director of the Society for the Humanities and Professor of Comparative 
Literature and English at Cornell University.  A Moderator of -empyre-, he sits 
on the Executive Committee of the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology 
Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC). Author of Digital Baroque: New Media Art and 
Cinematic Folds (Minnesota 2008) and Zonas de Contacto: el arte en CD-ROM 
(Centro de la imagen, 1999), he is completing two books on Virtual Archives and 
Media Art in Asia, and e

[-empyre-] the return of boredom

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi, all,

I'M sorry to break protocol by referring to last month's discussion topic,
but this just came across my screen, and I can't resist sharing it with
you:

http://www.wisecrack.co/shows/8-bit-philosophy/is-boredom-worse-than-death/
:
Press Start for ³Is Boredom Worse than Death?² by 8-Bit Philosophy, where
classic video games introduce famous thinkers, problems, and concepts with
quotes, teachings, and more.


Perhaps we could resituate this as "intersubjective boredom"

Cheers,

Tim


Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853





On 7/28/15 11:19 PM, "Ileana Selejan"  wrote:

>--empyre- soft-skinned space--

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

Re: [-empyre-] Week 4: Intersubjectivity

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Dear Ileana,

It's been so great to enjoy your moderated discussion this month (which I
have been reading when not sleeping!).  Congratulations on the launch of
your and Calin's work this week.  I'M very interested to hear even more
about Calin's time machine, and am wondering if he would have some time to
say more about it while this month's discussion is still open. As I'Ve
mentioned to you, Calin and I have had a wonderful curatorial relationship
since the late '90s when I curated his marvelous CD-Rom, Das Wanderbuch,
for my exhibition "Contact Zones: The Art of CD-Rom"
(https://contactzones.cit.cornell.edu/artists/man.html).  Calin is one of
the most inventive artists in Eastern Europe and I am delighted that your
co-moderation of -empyre- this month has brought wider attention to his
work.  Calin, might you have more to say something about how you
understand your time machine in relation to the discussion that has
unfolded this month?  Thanks so much, Tim

 
Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853





On 7/28/15 11:19 PM, "Ileana Selejan"  wrote:

>--empyre- soft-skinned space--

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

Re: [-empyre-] Week 3: Intersubjectivity

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi, everyone, thank you for an enlivening discussion in the heat of summer.

I am interested in Murat's suggestion that we turn our attention to
Leibniz, "Solipsism, as well, is present in the philosophy of Liebnitz
becoming more
and more important in definition of contemporary mediated universe. So, I
would like to propose a start of our discussion with Liebnitz Monadology,
in which I would like to propose a monad as a complex engine made out of
biological and technological compartments having any experience of self,
separately of experience of others. "

What I've found helpful in Leibniz, in view of articulating an aesthetics
of digitality in my book, "Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic
Folds," is Leibniz's notion of "incompossibility," not so much as a
condition of solipsism but as a construct of an intersubjective condition
that remains outside of the framework of what was later to be theorized as
dialectics.  He was writing about a condition in which the difference of
various monads might be understood outside of the binary of "possible" or
"impossible" so that they might exist, perhaps overlapped in the dense
complexity of digital folds, together in their impossible differences, a
condition that Leibniz termed "incompossible."  Empyreans unfamiliar with
this concept also might be interested in Gilles Deleuze's embrace of it in
his books Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition.  I have found the
term particularly helpful as a placeholder of political and conceptual
alliance in our fractured postcolonial world where various global
participants are able to assemble together momentarily without giving up
the specificities of their own cultural, artistic, racial, ethnic, and
gendered positions.

Best,

Tim


Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853





On 7/28/15 6:47 PM, "Murat Nemet-Nejat"  wrote:

>--empyre- soft-skinned space--

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

Re: [-empyre-] on feminism and the cyclical nature of tools and technologies

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Dear Melinda,


Thanks ever so much for your tremendously thoughtful, provocative, and
passionate posts. What a delight for us to enjoy your voice this month
back on your cherished -empyre-.  Your post made me cherish anew the first
time I met you when you were demonstrating -empyrean- in the huge musty
factory space of ISEA Nagoya in 2002.  What a keen coincidence it was for
me to discover the emergent listserv at the same moment that I was
founding the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art at Cornell, for which
the new media artwork from the Pacific Rim has been so fundamental.  Who
would have thought back then that Goldsen would end up sponsoring the
moderating end of -empyre- many years later, and that I would be (very
feebly and occasionally) assisting Renate in laboring for its continued
existence.  What's been fascinating to me has been to witness the
intersecting development of the many tools you so elegantly describe here.
 Indeed, this very multifaceted approach also has guided my efforts at
building the ever-changing edifice of the Goldsen Archive, which began as
a site to house a critical mass of artwork created on CD-Rom and the net,
and since has morphed into a space for all kinds of digital preservation,
creation and its documentation, as well as an acknowlegment, born of the
archival event, that the Goldsen should also expand to include the
analogue/digital bridge of video art and related disciplines.

It's difficult to guage the extent of the debt to the Goldsen framework to
your work with your Australian feminist peers who have so influenced me
since my first visit with many of them in Sydney in 2007 (thanks
especially to Norie Neumark and Maria Miranda who graciously introduced me
around).  What's been crucial is the collaborative spirit of our work
together that flows out into our approach to the tools of craft, language,
display, interaction, theorizing and even archiving.  So it's been very
important that the archived historical discourse of the many years of
-empyre- have a prominent place in the Goldsen imaginary and architecture,
and one we are committed to protecting if various Australian institutional
situations were to evolve.  Many of our newer subscribers might not
realize that one our list's most important tools, the server and
mail/archiving software, are still housed graciously by the University of
New South Wales.  Indeed we had a fascinating brief tools crisis a couple
of months back when our host, the former College of Fine Arts, changed its
name to the College of Art and Design and also changed the COFA URL
without thinking to tell its loyal users.  For a brief period, as we tried
to figure out from Ithaca, NY, why the site when dead, the life and memory
of -empyre- went as black as did the life and memory of COFA -- which for
me brings back my early conversations with current COFA faculty like Jill
Bennett, Brenda Croft, and Anna Munster at a moment when feminism, tech,
and politics were winding their way comfortably and uncomfortably through
the COFA hallways. Of course, your leadership in bringing together various
communinities via -empyre- no doubt assisted enormously in these kinds of
institutional transitions (or sparked them!).

So as we think through the cultural contexts of tools this month, I'M so
pleased that we've had the occasion to celebrate your creation of the tool
of -empyre-.  Our hope is to keep it flourishing as it morphs and changes.

All my best,

Tim




On 2/25/15 9:34 AM, "Melinda Rackham"  wrote:

>--empyre- soft-skinned space--
>hello again..
>
>Of FemTechNet Anne wrote  ³Our mantra became:  ³WHO you learn with is as
>important as what you learn.² What a wonderful initiative. Tracey posted
>many great project links as well. Reality creates Reality - the world is
>still owned by a few men who maintain the privilege of themselves and
>other men. Feminism has been using tools and technologies for 150 years
>with some good success, however we saw it at the Academy Awards:  70% of
>the stories we see are stories of men where women do not speak to each
>other except to talk about men, and women still only earn 40% of male
>wages in the entertainment industry.
>
>Writing is a tool. I recall years ago Australian video/performance art
>pioneer Jill Scott impressing on me the importance of writing on and
>citing other women. I particularly like the simple cut and paste tools of
>Elvis Richardson.. she cuts names out of art magazine with scissors and
>pastes them on boxboard monuments with glue to graphically illustrate the
>inequalities in writing on women artists.
>http://www.elvisrichardson.com/Versus.html
>
>Peer groups are a tool. Womens networked groups provided access to
>technologies and sistas -  dinners, in person meet ups, mentoring,
>introductions, and practicalities of art practice like travel and
>residences sublets and house swaps etc. Old Boys Network O

[-empyre-] -empyre- holiday wishes, conclusion of December discussion

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hello, everyone,  

We are winding down the month of December a little early so that Renate
and I can enjoy our family who will be visiting for the holiday week.

We have decided to take a bit of a rest, so we will not be hosting a
discussion during the month of January, but will be back online in
February with a discussion and moderators to be announced.  We anticipate
an exciting lineup for 2015.


Deep thanks go to our featured guests for this month of Social Media /
Social Justice: Patricia Zimmermann, Ricardo Dominguez, Rahul Mukherjee,
Richard Grusin, Claudia Pederson, Patrick Lichty,  Nicholas Knouf, Cherian
George, and
Omar Figueredo.  Thanks so much for rising to the occasion to reflect on
the 
important events that have so dominated the news this past month,
from Hong Kong to Mexico to the US.

Please accept our thanks for making 2014 on -empyre- so successful with
thoughtful discussions and interventions throughout the year.

Just a reminder that if you'd like to catch up on your reading over the
holidays, you can always access the -empyre- archives at:
http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/

Very best wishes for the New Year,

Tim Murray and Renate Ferro

Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853



>

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

Re: [-empyre-] EMPYRE

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thanks for your patience everyone.  I sent Murat's brief message through
and am now replying the normal way to make sure that all systems are now
go.  No need to reply to this since I'Ll receive it also.  Sorry to clog
your box with meaningless messages, but we're hoping to confirm that the
-empyre- system is now fully up and running.

Tim

Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853





On 12/16/14 12:03 PM, "Murat Nemet-Nejat"  wrote:

>--empyre- soft-skinned space--

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

[-empyre-] new -empyre- posting e-mail address

[Timothy Conway Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi, everyone,

You probably received a denial of access message if you tried
to post something in the past day.

Here's the explanation:

The -empyre- list has two hosts.  Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York,
hosts the homepage and front end at the URL empyre.library.cornell.edu .
In addition, the listserv software and archive is hosted by the College of
Fine Arts 
(COFA) at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia (where
-empyre- was founded by Melinda Rackham in 2002).  When you post
something, it goes to our email address at COFA.

It turns out that COFA just changed its name to: UNSW Art & Design.
Yesterday, they changed our
email address to reflect the name change.

If you would like to post something, please send your post to this new
address:  soft_skinned_space 

Once -empyreans- start using this address, you should then be able to push
'reply' to
a posted message and your post will go directly to the list (as
previously).  But if you wish to reply to any post that arrived in your
mailbox prior to this moment,  please use the new address.

We'll update you further if there are other changes.

Best,

Tim and Renate   
Co-Managers, -empyre-





On 12/15/14 7:32 AM, "Harold Wells"  wrote:

>--empyre- soft-skinned space--

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