Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to Week 2 on Contamination
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hello Bishnu, Renate, Tim and everyone! Bishnu writes, "Terranova argues infinite zeroes and ones better simulate the “sudden discontinuous variations” in microscopic states. In this view, organisms are not complex machines but aggregates of large populations of simple machines whose variable actions are calculable. Therefore new media (as in disease surveillance networks) are most capable of predicting where and how the next radical disturbance, the new event will emerge." A fascinating recognizance around organisms in aggregate beyond merely (20th Century) machinic dispositives. Terranova's observation (or reommendation?) leads me to a reading I just encountered in Katherine Behar's edited compilation, Object-Oriented Feminism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). In the last essay in this volume, , R. Joshua Scannell takes up the temporal and managerial effects of new media's capacity to attempt prediction of forthcoming 'radical' disturbance, where and how together. Scannell refers to a compelling and currently operational real world example--- as a case study -- the New York City Police Department's "Domain Awareness System," co-developed with Microsoft. "At once proactive and reactive, the system is designed to syncretically loop, making a cybernetic circuit aimed at clarifying generalized surveillance data into actionable policing information. DAS applies massive processing power to rapidly sort through NYC"s surveillance data. Built with Homeland Security funds under an anti-terrorism mandate, its surveillance extends far beyond the obviously 'criminal' to include data as exotic as feeds from radiation detectors--sensitive enough to pick up recent chemotherapy treatment in passing bodies--and sophisticated enough to rapidly recall up to five years' worth of stored 'metadata' and temporally unbounded (and undefined) 'environmental' data in its continuously mined databases." Here's where the overlap to Terranova's assertion around predictive capacity enters into an ominous glare. Scannell writes, 'The DAS converts these massive information streams, on the order of several petabytes, into preemptive spatial representations (maps) that are rapidly filtered down the department hierarchy to identify locations and classes of possible criminal activity. The department argues that if it 'knows' where the 'criminals' will be, when they will be 'there.' and what 'crimes' they will commit before the 'criminals' do, then the department can proactively prevent them. 'Real time' capacity to process massive streams of seemingly innocuous or unrelated bits of surveillance data will, the logic goes, produce patterns in the space-time and human geography of criminality that will allow police personnel and material to be applied with maximum efficiency." (Scannell, "Both a Cyborg and a Goddess: Deep Managerial Time and Informatic Governance," in Object-Oriented Feminism, pp. 255-6). For me the really innovative way this writer thinks about this 'predictive' capacity has to do with how temporalities and the so called new events come into being and sustain themselves from within a structural context he calls 'deep managerial time' -- structural in literally an ontologic sense. Scannell is scathing (pardon the bad alliteration, but it's irresistable!)-- about the customization of 'deep managerial time' as an epic transfer from plantation economies to neoliberal statehood. He writes, I call this ontological stabilization of populations deep managerial time. I do so in an effort to push back against a narrative of neoliberalism as an individuating practice that upends coherent space-time, and as a reminder that the violent organization of populations subjected to state violence is an inheritance of plantation capitalism given a technocratic veneer. The ontological requirements of plantation capitalism’s metamorphosis into neoliberalism demanded a putatively “flexible” human subject in order to mask the essential stability of state violence and capital expropriation, particularly against women, people of color, and queer populations." (p. 251). (Happily, if you want to read more excerpts from this analysis, a blogger has kindly culled a set for online readers here: https://rowanlear.wordpress.com/2017/06/16/both-a-cyborg-and-a-goddess/#more-3742 ) From my own perspective, aesthetically and politically, the presumed-criminal, formerly citizen 'object'-constiituencies are as particulates in large population-mass-mappings, they no longer enjoy representation as actors (whether Latourian actors or just people on the street in the most quotidien and banal sense), rather, they percolate through the already-auto-producing data-strata as chemical or chimerical re-agents, whose presenceing as detected by the DAS simultaneously justifies the existence of DAS and allows the proliferation of its 'inherent vice,' aka managerially-induced physical vio
Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to Week 2 on Contamination
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Love these images, Renate. They exemplify virality as picked up in new media criticism. As we know, in those studies, the virus is fêted for its ability to contaminate—to replicate through informatic cutting, pasting, and multiplying (the meme). Its simple microprocessuality (the homegrown machine); its bottom-up hydra-headed acentered organization (the swarm or brood); and its ability to set in motion a series of sudden and unpredictable effects (contagion) are all celebrated as machinic possibilities. Jussi Parikka’s early *Digital Contagions *(2007) references HIV as a cultural figure for understanding the behaviors of computer bugs, worms, and viruses; in fact, in the 1980s, informatic contagion would be known as “computer AIDS.” Tony Sampson’s *Virality* (2012) extends the model of network contagion to rethink micro socialities and the capacity for social transformation through such contagious networks. Both Parikka and Sampson see contagion not as a fearsome force but an open-ended system that enables a jump cut to something qualitatively new. Some call it an emergence. Your students’ proliferating images—so gorgeous!—resonate with this understanding of mediatic virality. The contamination jumps to the new, something creative and qualitatively different, a series of micro-actions generating a network. Of course, it is now commonplace to think biological and machinic together in some strains of new media criticism. I find Tiziana Terranova’s *Network Culture* (2004) most persuasive: thinking of virality, she theorizes the actions of “relatively simple machines” as the bases of radical transformation, social and political. Emphasizing the informatic turn in the biological sciences, Terranova argues infinite zeroes and ones better simulate the “sudden discontinuous variations” in microscopic states. In this view, organisms are not complex machines but aggregates of large populations of simple machines whose variable actions are calculable. Therefore new media (as in disease surveillance networks) are most capable of predicting where and how the next radical disturbance, the new event will emerge. On Tue, Nov 14, 2017 at 9:27 PM, Renate Terese Ferro wrote: > --empyre- soft-skinned space-- > Dear Bishnu and Tim, > > Thanks Bishnu so much for writing about the research for this new book. > It sounds fascinating in light of the panicked contangion that permeates > the news so frequently. I find the visual documentation related to these > accounts fascinating for examble a few years ago, the photographs of the > doctors and nursers in fully sealed protective suits caring for Ebola > patients and the videos of their boides being hosed down after a work day > provided us with visual documentation but also an imagined understanding of > the Ebola virus but also the cultural, racial, and political complications > that became so entwined with that epidemic. Looking forward to hearing > more about your research on media and virsuses. > > Thanks Tim for the link to C-Theory Digital Terror and also reminding us > of how contemporary networks of contamination can fluidly slip across > borders via politics, language, images, and media My intention in > introducing this topic was to encourage cross-disciplinary ways that > contamination manifests itself in contemporary global environments and this > week’s news of North and South Korea is a great example. > > Earlier this semster my students in Introduction to Digital Media > brainstormed a list of media—books, tv, movies—inspried by a prompt I posed > to them. What happens when bio-networks go awry? We looked at ways that > artists, writers, filmmakers simulate contagion and other models of > contamination. With the creative research as inspiration the students > wrote creative narratives. After writing they were asked to collect an > assemblage of found natural objects from nature and with high definition > scanning they composited visual models. Using magnification, repetition, > overlap, inverting color and other visual strategies they imapped the > microsopic contamination of their narratives. We took multiple projectors > and projected their simulated models on bodies and surfaces interjecting > them back into the environment as a final intervention. The simplified > prompt I gave to these 1st year art students prompted engaging discussions > about health and safety, politics, the environment, language, truth, and > more not to mention to resulting creative visual interventions. > > I have attached a couple of images here. Hoping you will share more about > your ideas of media, viruses, and panic this week. > Welcome back Christina McPHee who should be joining us tomorrow. > > Renate > > > > --empyre- soft-skinned space-- > Hi Renate, Christina, Tim, and others in the contamination > conversation, > > Last week
Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to Week 2 on Contamination
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi Renate, Christina, Tim, and others in the contamination conversation, Last week brought up some really key ideas around contamination and boundaries that it assumes between organic units or states. My research is on epidemic media, specifically focuses on how humans have learned to “live with” pathogenic viruses. I am writing a book titled “The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media,” which essentially looks at the role of media in living with viruses: that is, how do media modify biological processes so as to “intervene,” as Anna Tsing puts it, in planetary damage. I’m excited Tsing’s and Haraway’s pathbreaking works are already in the discussion—they are central to the project. After all, the Human Microbiome Project confirms microbial cells weighing as little as 200 grams outnumber human cells 10 to 1. The “new biology,” argues Rodney Dietert (*The Human Superorganism: How the Microbiome is Revolutionizing the Pursuit of Healthy Life*, 2016), suggests humans are multispecies “super-organisms” and not a single species at all. And yet, there is cause for alarm when a new species relation endangers one species at individual and populational scale. This is what happens when new viruses skip into new populations. At that point, we think about contamination as contagion. When the imminent takeover of one species by another--virus proliferation killing off hosts--is at hand, technological interventions materialize a series of mediatic interfaces. For example, living as undetectable with HIV is one such interface realized as numeric threshold. Such interfaces separate microbial and human life; they are not ontological barriers but a series of effects (as media theorist, Alex Galloway calls them) contrused to regulate the existing or the potential coexistence of different species. Because these interfaces build livable microbial-human futures; because they enable multispecies accommodations, I think of them as *environmental media*. Yet every time I say I’m writing a book on epidemic media, folks think I’m writing about contagion as purely negative—you know, the contagion media that enthrone human heroism against pathogenic hordes. There is excellent scholarship on contagion fiction and non-fiction, movies and television shows, video games and comic books. Fed a steady diet of realistic fictional outbreak narratives and apocalyptic futures, we have become comfortably numb to the horror of coming plagues: to the symptomatic Ebola infection-like hemorrhage, to the inevitable segregation of the sick and the well, to the tales of military heroism and scientific triumph. Ebola plays the phantom microbe in these contagion media; it is the iconic instance of the resurgent bugs that scientist Joshua Lederberg once christened “the deadliest threat to mankind.” We have grown accustomed to its sudden emergences and drug-resistant mutations after the outbreaks of Marburg, Ebola, and HIV in the early 1980s. The introduction of a new course in infectious diseases at the Center for Disease Control in 1985, argues Melinda Cooper, serves as one marker for crossing the historical threshold into the age of “viral storms. In popular discourse, Laurie Garrett’s non-fictional *The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance* (1994) was the tipping point for public panic. Since then “living with” such deadly pathogens, living in anticipation of the next outbreak has become historical necessity. That panic is now folded into the productive agendas of living as multispecies. Here, Anna Tsing is a key thinker, urging us to intervene in the “blasted ruins of the Anthropocene” (*The Mushroom at the End of the World*, 2017). The idea is not to return to a mythic natural contract, but to live among the ruins, to act among the ruins, to tend the garden. For Tsing, even “the most promising oasis of natural plenty requires massive intervention” (85). The real question is which natural and social disturbances can we live with? Which ones command our attention? This is the ecological angle—I thought it has a good resonance with last week’s concerns on residual contamination. I’ll post later on how contamination re virality has been taken up in media studies. cheers, Bishnu Renate Ferro Visiting Associate Professor Director of Undergraduate Studies Department of Art Tjaden Hall 306 rfe...@cornell.edu On 11/13/17, 2:41 PM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Bishnupriya Ghosh" wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to Week 2 on Contamination
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi Renate, Christina, Tim, and others in the contamination conversation, Last week brought up some really key ideas around contamination and boundaries that it assumes between organic units or states. My research is on epidemic media, specifically focuses on how humans have learned to “live with” pathogenic viruses. I am writing a book titled “The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media,” which essentially looks at the role of media in living with viruses: that is, how do media modify biological processes so as to “intervene,” as Anna Tsing puts it, in planetary damage. I’m excited Tsing’s and Haraway’s pathbreaking works are already in the discussion—they are central to the project. After all, the Human Microbiome Project confirms microbial cells weighing as little as 200 grams outnumber human cells 10 to 1. The “new biology,” argues Rodney Dietert (*The Human Superorganism: How the Microbiome is Revolutionizing the Pursuit of Healthy Life*, 2016), suggests humans are multispecies “super-organisms” and not a single species at all. And yet, there is cause for alarm when a new species relation endangers one species at individual and populational scale. This is what happens when new viruses skip into new populations. At that point, we think about contamination as contagion. When the imminent takeover of one species by another--virus proliferation killing off hosts--is at hand, technological interventions materialize a series of mediatic interfaces. For example, living as undetectable with HIV is one such interface realized as numeric threshold. Such interfaces separate microbial and human life; they are not ontological barriers but a series of effects (as media theorist, Alex Galloway calls them) contrused to regulate the existing or the potential coexistence of different species. Because these interfaces build livable microbial-human futures; because they enable multispecies accommodations, I think of them as *environmental media*. Yet every time I say I’m writing a book on epidemic media, folks think I’m writing about contagion as purely negative—you know, the contagion media that enthrone human heroism against pathogenic hordes. There is excellent scholarship on contagion fiction and non-fiction, movies and television shows, video games and comic books. Fed a steady diet of realistic fictional outbreak narratives and apocalyptic futures, we have become comfortably numb to the horror of coming plagues: to the symptomatic Ebola infection-like hemorrhage, to the inevitable segregation of the sick and the well, to the tales of military heroism and scientific triumph. Ebola plays the phantom microbe in these contagion media; it is the iconic instance of the resurgent bugs that scientist Joshua Lederberg once christened “the deadliest threat to mankind.” We have grown accustomed to its sudden emergences and drug-resistant mutations after the outbreaks of Marburg, Ebola, and HIV in the early 1980s. The introduction of a new course in infectious diseases at the Center for Disease Control in 1985, argues Melinda Cooper, serves as one marker for crossing the historical threshold into the age of “viral storms. In popular discourse, Laurie Garrett’s non-fictional *The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance* (1994) was the tipping point for public panic. Since then “living with” such deadly pathogens, living in anticipation of the next outbreak has become historical necessity. That panic is now folded into the productive agendas of living as multispecies. Here, Anna Tsing is a key thinker, urging us to intervene in the “blasted ruins of the Anthropocene” (*The Mushroom at the End of the World*, 2017). The idea is not to return to a mythic natural contract, but to live among the ruins, to act among the ruins, to tend the garden. For Tsing, even “the most promising oasis of natural plenty requires massive intervention” (85). The real question is which natural and social disturbances can we live with? Which ones command our attention? This is the ecological angle—I thought it has a good resonance with last week’s concerns on residual contamination. I’ll post later on how contamination re virality has been taken up in media studies. cheers, Bishnu On Sun, Nov 12, 2017 at 8:40 PM, Renate Terese Ferro wrote: > --empyre- soft-skinned space-- > I would like to welcome Bishnu Ghosh, Christina McPhee, and Tim Murray to > Week two of our discussion. All of these guests our friends our > subscribers all know from past years of participation on –empyre- and in > their research and writing. . Bishnu Gosh has been a strong advocate and > leader in the fields of cultural globalization and humanities. We were so > lucky to teach with her at Cornell at the Society for the Humanities when > the topic was RISK from 2012 to 2113 https://societyhumanities.as. > cornell.edu/2012-13-risk > Christina McPhee
[-empyre-] Welcome to Week 2 on Contamination
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I would like to welcome Bishnu Ghosh, Christina McPhee, and Tim Murray to Week two of our discussion. All of these guests our friends our subscribers all know from past years of participation on –empyre- and in their research and writing. . Bishnu Gosh has been a strong advocate and leader in the fields of cultural globalization and humanities. We were so lucky to teach with her at Cornell at the Society for the Humanities when the topic was RISK from 2012 to 2113 https://societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/2012-13-risk Christina McPhee worked closely with us on this –empyre- platform organizing and moderating many years of –empyre- discussions. Her work as a painter and artist are simulations of evolving life-forms. Tim Murray ,also a long-time facilitator on –empyre-, has created web-platforms, writings, and curatorial projects evolving around the issues of environmental risk and contamination. I have attached their biographies below. Thanks to all of you for joining in. Catherine and Marissa I hope you will also chime in throughout the rest of the month when your schedules permit. Thank you again for getting us started. Best to all of you. Renate Biographies Bishnupriya Ghosh (US) teaches global media studies at UC Santa Barbara’s Departments of English and Global Studies. Her first monograph, When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (Rutgers UP, 2004) addressed cultural globalization and the market for world literatures; and her second, Global Icons: Apertures into the Global (Duke UP, 2011) focused on globally circulating iconic images that constitute media environments. Around 2009, Ghosh turned to research on risk media from perspectives in the humanities. Both her current projects arise from this turn: she is writing her third monograph, *The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media,* and co-editing *The Routledge Handbook on Media and Risk* (forthcoming 2018). Christina McPhee’s (US) images move from within a matrix of abstraction, shadowing figures and contingent effects. Her work emulates potential forms of life, in various systems and territories, and in real and imagined ecologies. Her dynamic, performative, physical engagement with drawing, in both her analogue and digital works, is a seduction into surface-skidding calligraphies and mark-making. Her work is in the museum collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum-Rhizome Artbase, and International Center for Photography, New York; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; and Thresholds New Media Collection, Scotland. Solo museum exhibitions include the American University Museum, Washington, D.C., and Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden. She has participated in group exhibitions, notably documenta 12 (Magazine Project) with -empyre-, Bucharest Biennial 3, Museum of Modern Art Medellin, Bildmuseet Umea, and Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive at the University of California. A new book, “Christina McPhee: A Commonplace Book,” edited by Eileen Joy, is a collection of essays by international critics and artists, is out this autumn with Punctum Books. https://punctumbooks.com/titles/christina-mcphee-a-commonplace-book/ http://www.christinamcphee.net Tim Murray (US) is a Professor of Comparative Literature and English and Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art in the Cornell Library. 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. He is currently the Director of Cornell Council for the Arts at Cornell. He has been a moderator for -empyre since 2007. A recipient of fellowships and grants from NEA, NEH, Mellon, Rockefeller, Fulbright, and Korea National Research Foundation, Murray is currently working on a book, Archival Events @ New Media Art, which is a sequel to Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota, 2008). Among his publications are the books Medium Philosophicum: Thinking Art Technologically (Universidad de Murcia, forthcoming, 2017), Zonas de Contacto: el arte en CD-Rom (Centro de la Imagen, 1999), Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video, Art (Routledge, 1997), Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas (Routledge, 1993), Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius In XVIIth-Century England and France (Oxford, 1987), ed. with Alan Smith, Repossessions: Psychoanalysis and the Phantasms of Early-Modern Culture (Minnesota, 1998), ed., Mimesis, Masochism & Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (Michigan, 1997), ed. Xu Bing’s Background Story and his Oeuvre (Mandarin), co-edited with Yang Shin-Yi (Beijing: Life Bookstore Publishing, 2016), and ed. with Ir
