Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to our June topic on -empyre: Plant Art and New Media
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I also just have a technical question for Jasmeen and Yi's project The Language of Plants. Are we listening to the sound of water moving through the plant, which changes depending on environmental conditions? I think that s what the the diagram explains on your site (http://studioforlandscapeculture.com/The-Language-of-Plants), but the writing is a little fuzzy (or I need new glasses!). Patrick Keilty Assistant Professor Faculty of Information Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies University of Toronto http://www.patrickkeilty.com/ On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 10:09 AM, Patrick Keilty p.kei...@utoronto.ca wrote: Thanks Natasha! These are great questions. Hope to hear from our featured discussants soon. I absolutely *love* both of these projects. One question these two projects brings to mind is whether the plants are trying to communicate, and to whom? And what does it say about us that we primarily understand communication in auditory terms? While Jo SiMalaya Alcampo's Singing Plants Reconstruct Memory is a combination of the auditory, kinaesthetic, and visual, sound is what make the installation so compelling. Why do we feel the need to enhance our auditory perception and the auditory system the plants produce? Are there other ways in which plants communicate? Do plants care if we hear them? If plants are not communicating to us per se, then perhaps our attempt to hear plants is a symptom of our own humanity. If that's the case, then we haven't de-centered the human. Instead, plants help us better understand ourselves and our relation to the the world out there. I realize now that I'm just asking a series of questions. Give me some time to think about it. Maybe I'll have some answers in a future post. ;) Patrick Keilty Assistant Professor Faculty of Information Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies University of Toronto http://www.patrickkeilty.com/ On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 3:18 PM, Natasha Myers natasha.my...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks Patrick for getting us started on this exciting topic! I am really thrilled that this week we have Jasmeen Bains, Yi Zhou and Jo Simalaya Alcampo leading off the discussion. One of the great things about this particular grouping is that Jasmeen and Yi's recent project The Language of Plants resonates so well with Jo Simalaya's Singing Plants Reconstruct Memory. Both projects sonify plants through electro-acoustic assemblages. And yet, these interactive installation/performance pieces approach plants in very different ways, and their works produce very different meanings and effects. One project begins from the premise that plants generate their own sounds, just outside of human perception, while the other engages the electro-conductivity of plants to draw human sounds out of plant bodies. Here are links to these different projects: http://studioforlandscapeculture.com/The-Language-of-Plants http://www.josimalaya.com/singing-plants.html I wonder as a way of starting off the discussion, our artists might reflect on the question of plant sonification. How do these works produce a kind of plant vocality? Why bring sound and voice to plants? What does it mean to bring plant soundings and responsivity into human perception? What are some of the remarkable things you learned about plants both in making these works and in sharing them with others? I'm sure these questions will generate many more! Looking forward to following how this unfolds! best wishes, Natasha Natasha Myers Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology | Convenor, Politics of Evidence Working Group | York University 310 Bethune College, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3 Canada | Tel. (416) 736-2100 x 70660 | Fax (416) 736-5768 | nmy...@yorku.ca Website | Plant Studies Collaboratory | Sensorium | The Technoscience Salon | Politics of Evidence | The Write2Know Project On 2015-06-01, at 11:39 AM, Patrick Keilty wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi all, I just have some minor revisions to our schedule for guest discussants, and I mistakenly left out a bio in my introduction. My apologies. Below please find the corrected schedule and additional bio. I'll of course introduce the discussants again at the beginning of their weeks. June 1 - 7: Week 1: Jasmeen Bains, Yi Zhou, and Jo Simalaya Alcampo June 8 - 14: Week 2: Alana Bartol and Pei-Ying Lin (with Dimitrios Stamatis, and Jasmina Weiss) June 15 - 21: Week 3: Amanda White and Špela Petrič (with Dimitrios Stamatis, and Jasmina Weiss) June 22 - 28: Week 4: Laura Cinti, Grégory Lasserre, and Anaïs met den Ancxt Scenocosme is a collaboration between Gregory Lasserre Anais met den Ancxt. Gregory Lasserre and Anais met den Ancxt are two artists working together as a duo under the name Scenocosme
Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to our June topic on -empyre: Plant Art and New Media
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks Yi! This is a great project, and I admire your shift back onto the intrinsic ecological functions and relationships of an ecosystem as a whole. I guess what I was trying to ask is whether our turn to the nonhuman actually dislocates the human as the center of our inquiry. Or is a turn to the nonhuman just another symptom of the human? To Murat, I love the way this project challenges our current ideology (by altering our prevailing ideas about language and perception). But isn't that goal ultimately a humanist one? For ultimately, aren't we asking about our own subjectivity? Just trying to think this through Patrick Keilty Assistant Professor Faculty of Information Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies University of Toronto http://www.patrickkeilty.com/ On Fri, Jun 5, 2015 at 7:12 AM, Yi Zhou yzho...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks Patrick, Natasha, and Selmin for such thoughtful questions to introduce this fascinating new field! Murat - you were reading my mind! I agree that it's curious that the discussion is revolving around the idea of human perception as a reference point for defining and categorizing nature and our recent project The Language of Plants (LoP) actually began as a critique to this very point! Jasmeen and I are both formally trained as landscape architects, though we very much disagree with the direction that the field of landscape (and design in general) has moved in the last 30~ years. Sustainable design exists as a small and highly specialized niche, but overall the focus has been on form, aesthetics, and the commoditization of nature as an idea of place and refuge and individual plant species as tools or props. Our objective was to shift this focus back onto the intrinsic ecological functions and relationships of an ecosystem as a whole and reconcile this reductionist view by engaging in a discussion that emphasized holism, complexity, and nuance. Though imperceptible to the human ear, plants are constantly emitting sounds due to the processes of transpiration and growth (Patrick - you were right in your guess!) From an anthropogenic perspective these sounds exist at the ultrasonic range, too quiet and too high a frequency for the human ear. To the plant, these are just the sounds of their ongoing biological process, so it's natural that these sounds differ based on species type, habitat preference, time of day, environmental conditions, and even whether the plant is growing in isolation or within a healthy vegetative community. In truth, though it was our art direction, we became mere translators over the course of our explorations, as we were able to unlock an entirely new biological language that had never been accessible, relatable, or even considered within our narrow anthropogenic terms of understanding and seeing the world. Our objective was ultimately successful too, as visitors to our exhibit were shocked to learn of this new reality and, in large, left with a new reverence for these intrinsic though unseen qualities and processes of plants. I think sound is an especially powerful medium to engage people with because it is so inherently tied to memory, identity, and agency. It's human instinct to anthropomorphize things when we are first connecting to them, however these views are a necessary launching point for developing a more nuanced relationship to plants and to the world around us. Yi On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 8:01 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat mura...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- I am interested in the sound connection too. I wonder if there is a discourse of sensitivity in the attempts to make us more perceptive to the vitality of plants through sound, vibration, and movement. In films like *Upstream Colour*, a parasite transmitted from orchids to pigs and then to humans makes those who carry it sensitive/responsive to infrasound. That becomes a connection between the human and nonhuman, and forces the human characters to rethink their forms of sociality... Hi Selmin, hi Patrick, what is the exact purpose of our discussions along this thread? Do we want to comprehend the animal, the vegetal, the mineral, etc. in our terms (basically expanding our technical, or otherwise, language capabilities) or do we want to extend our concepts of language to such a degree that our ideas about perception itself gets altered? From the comments up to now, I think we are doing the former, trying to see the other (plant, animal or othrrwise) in our ideological terms. Ciao, Murat On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 6:31 PM, Selmin Kara selmink...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks Natasha and Patrick: I am interested in the sound connection too. I wonder
Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to our June topic on -empyre: Plant Art and New Media
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Murat, We're all pushing for a point of view that challenges the hegemony of liberal humanism. I certainly think a turn to the nonhuman is an excellent approach. Methodologically it's a major intervention. It raises a series of important questions, and I am always happy to gleefully engage those important questions. But I wonder, too, if we can truly understand the other, in its own terms, as you suggest, and whether our desire to do so is not simply a symptom of our own humanity. As you say, we are bound by our own humanity, and the result will remain human. I wonder, then, what those boundaries mean for trying to understand the nonhuman. Can it ever mean we access the nonhuman on its own terms? Does the plant care (so to speak) that we want to understand it? Or is this turn to the nonhuman still ultimately about humans/ humanity? Doesn't it speak more to our own wants, desire, needs? Does it/ can it speak to/ for/ with the plant? It's an ontological question. Perhaps the plant is totally subaltern? Patrick Keilty Assistant Professor Faculty of Information Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies University of Toronto http://www.patrickkeilty.com/ On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 9:31 AM, Murat Nemet-Nejat mura...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi Yi, thank you for your post. I am glad I won't be the only person pushing that point of view. Exactly as you say, part of the purpose of exploration needs to be a way of understanding the other, truly other, in its own terms. Such an approach would have conceptual, ethical, political, therefore, artistic ramifications. Both your project and the singing of the plants project seem to be along those lines. Interestingly, in my long essay *The Peripheral Space of Photography *(which emerged from a critic of the Metropolitan Museum's exhibition of the Gillian collection on the first hundred years of photography *The Waking Dream)* I make a similar argument. The essay starts with an attack on the excessive framing of the photographs by the museum in the exhibition which sees the photographs as aesthetics objects. That is the way the majority of photographers and critics saw them (particularly in France and England, but not necessarily in the States) comparing photographs to painting. My assertion in the essay is that photography is a new medium very different from painting. Its heart is the dialogue between the viewer of the photograph and what is before the lens,what I call the pose (the pose can be human, animal, vegetal or mineral, it doesn't matter. They create a unified field). The photographer himself/herself is less important. The most potent spots in a photograph are often off the focus of the lens, in a small detail, a mistake, etc. It's a very interesting essay in my opinion and relevant to our present discussions (Green Integer Press, USA, 2004). Hi Patrick, ...But isn't that goal ultimately a humanist one? For ultimately, aren't we asking about our own subjectivity? Just trying to think this through I am not sure I agree with you. As I said in my post to Yin, our purpose in this discussion should not be human but extra-terrrestial. It is true that finally we are bound by our own humanity, own language, etc. Ultimately, the result will remain human. But I don't think humanist (or humanism) is the same thing. It is a more ideological, therefore, already set, term. Ciao, Murat On Fri, Jun 5, 2015 at 10:10 PM, Selmin Kara selmink...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thank you for the post, Yi; it's wonderful to hear more about your project! I didn't intend to insist on the idea of human perception as a reference point for defining and categorizing nature in my questioning. I was only trying to respond to Patrick's comment about communication (who is the receiver and what is being communicated, etc.) and the wording of your project with references to things like the language of plants made me think that perhaps you were trying to draw a parallelism between plant behaviour or processes and human communicative systems. Hence my allusion to anthropomorphizing but other than that, I am much more interested in the shift towards a more complex understanding of the nonhuman too. Selmin On Fri, Jun 5, 2015 at 7:12 AM, Yi Zhou yzho...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks Patrick, Natasha, and Selmin for such thoughtful questions to introduce this fascinating new field! Murat - you were reading my mind! I agree that it's curious that the discussion is revolving around the idea of human perception as a reference point for defining and categorizing nature and our recent project The Language of Plants (LoP) actually began as a critique to this very point
[-empyre-] Week Four with Laura Cinti, Grégory Lasserre, and Anaïs met den Ancxt
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Great discussion heading into our final week of Plant Art and New Media! Week four brings us three guest discussants, Laura Cinti, Grégory Lasserre, and Anaïs met den Ancxt. Looking forward to continuing the conversation! Dr Laura Cinti is an research-based artist working with biology, co-founder and co-director of C-LAB - a transdisciplinary bio art collective and organisation. C-LAB has been invited to range of international conferences, exhibitions and continues to contribute in publications to broker discussions on the intersections of art and science. Laura has been involved in art projects, exhibitions and workshops with support from the European Commission, scientific institutes, pharmaceutical companies, councils, universities, cultural institutes and commercial partners. Laura has a PhD from UCL (Slade School of Fine Art in interdisciplinary capacity with UCL Centre of Biomedical Imaging), a Masters in Interactive Media: Critical Theory Practice (Distinction) from Goldsmiths College, University of London and BA (Hons) Fine Art (First Class) from University of Hertfordshire. Scenocosme is a collaboration between Gregory Lasserre Anais met den Ancxt. Gregory Lasserre and Anais met den Ancxt are two artists working together as a duo under the name Scenocosme. They work and live in France. They develop the concept of interactivity in their artworks by using multiple kinds of expression. They mix art and digital technology in order to find substances of dreams, poetries, sensitivities and delicacies. Their works come from possible hybridizations between the living world and technology which meeting points incite them to invent sensitive and poetic languages. They also explore invisible relationships with our environment : they can feel energetic variations of living beings. They design interactive artworks, and choreographic collective performances, in which spectators share extraordinary sensory experiences. Plants of their artwork Akousmaflore react to the human touch by different sounds. They use also water (Fluides), stones (Kymapetra) and wood (Ecorces; Matières sensibles) as elements capable to generate tactile, visual and sound sensory interactivity. Their artworks were presented in several contemporary art and digital art spaces. Since 2004, they have exhibited their interactive installation artworks at ZKM Karlsruhe Centre for Art and Media (Germany), at Museum Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (Canada), at Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh (USA), at Daejeon Museum of Art (Korea), at Bòlit / Centre d’Art Contemporani (Girona) and in many international biennals and festivals. http://www.scenocosme.com/ Patrick Keilty Assistant Professor Faculty of Information Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies University of Toronto http://www.patrickkeilty.com/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-empyre-] Gardens By the Bay
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Related to our discussion, I just wanted to share Natasha Myer's essay Edenic Apocalypse: Singapore’s End-of-Time Botanical Tourism: https://www.academia.edu/12783355/Edenic_Apocalypse_A_Photo-essay_of_Singapores_End-of-Time_Botanical_Tourism I recently visited Singapore's Gardens By the Bay -- an eco-capitalist tourist trap. This is government and corporate sponsored plant art on a massive scale, showing how plant art can be taken up as part of an argument for eco-friendly capitalism. Best, Patrick Keilty Assistant Professor Faculty of Information Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies University of Toronto http://www.patrickkeilty.com/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-empyre-] Week Three: Amanda White and Špela Petrič (with Dimitrios Stamatis, and Jasmina Weiss)
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks Alana for introducing your work last week. It raised some great questions, which I hope we address as the discussion progresses. Week three brings us two new guests, Špela Petrič and Amanda White, with Dimitrios Stamatis, and Jasmina Weiss, who we introduced last week. Looking forward to this week's discussion! Špela Petrič (SI), BSc, MA, PhD, is a Slovenian new media artist and scientific researcher currently based in Amsterdam, NL. Her artistic practice combines natural sciences, new media and performance. While working towards an egalitarian and critical discourse between the professional and public spheres, she tries to envision artistic experiments that produce questions relevant to anthropology, psychology, and philosophy. She extends her artistic research with art/sci workshops devoted to informing and sensitizing the interested public, particularly younger generations. In particular, she is interested in all aspects of anthropocentrism, the reconstruction and reappropriation of scientific knowledge in the context of cultural phenomena, living systems in connection to inanimate systems manifesting life-like properties, and terRabiology, an ontological view of the evolution and terraformative process on Earth. Her work has been shown at many festivals, exhibitions and educational events in Slovenia and around the world (Touch Me Festival (CRO), Pixxelpoint (IT), European Conference on Artificial Life (IT), Playaround (TW), Harvard (ZDA), Ars Electronica (AT), National Center for Biological Sciences (IN), HAIP (SI), Arscope (GER), Mutamorphosis (CZ), Galleries de la Reine (BE)…). Amanda White (CA) is a Toronto-based artist and a PhD student in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University. Her current practice-led research is a body of work investigating social and cultural imaginations of nature through a program of research and collaborative, participatory and interdisciplinary arts practices. With a particular interest in human-plant encounters and relationships, she explores ideas around interspecies exchange, permaculture, symbiosis, and the real vs. Imagined in nature. Recent exhibitions and projects include: The Neighborhood Spaces Residency Program (Windsor), Plug-In ICA (Winnipeg), ArtSci Salon (Toronto), the Ontario Science Centre, Grow-Op -The Culture of Landscape (Toronto), Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, and the thematic residency Food, Water, Life with Lucy and Jorge Orta at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Amanda received an MFA from the University of Windsor and a BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design. Further info: amandawhite.com Patrick Keilty Assistant Professor Faculty of Information Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies University of Toronto http://www.patrickkeilty.com/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to our June topic on -empyre: Plant Art and New Media
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thank you Renate! Welcome to June, 2015 on –empyre soft-skinned space: Plant Art and New Media Moderated by Natasha Myers, Selmin Kara, and Patrick Keilty and with invited discussants Jo Simalaya Alcampo, Jasmeen Bains, Alana Bartol, Laura Cinti, Pei-Ying Lin, Špela Petrič, Dimitrios Stamatis, Jasmina Weiss, Amanda White, and Yi Zhou June 1 - 7: Week 1: Jasmeen Bains, Yi Zhou, and Jo Simalaya Alcampo June 8 - 14: Week 2: Alana Bartol, Amanda White, and Pei-Ying Lin June 15 - 21: Week 3: Špela Petrič, Dimitrios Stamatis, and Jasmina Weiss June 22 - 28: Week 4: Laura Cinti Welcome to the June discussion, “Plant Art and New Media”. A recent efflorescence of artistic experimentation with plants in the realm of new media is taking shape around a much broader turn to plants in science, popular culture, philosophy, and anthropology. Artists are reaching into the seemingly silent and static lives of plants with electronic, filmic, and electro-acoustic technologies, exploring ways to bridge gaps between human and nonhuman realms. Artists are engaging new media technologies to investigate and alter plant behaviour, communication, responsivity and movement, and to simulate natural processes. A wide range of artists and researchers are turning their work around plant life, including sculptors, performance artists, architects, media makers, creative coders, metabolic/genetic engineers, transgenic artists, and generative designers. Their experiments with sound, light, growth, and decay, for example, encourage us to think about more than human perception, and the creative entanglements between human and nonhuman, and organic and machinic life. As wider philosophical interests in nature philosophies such as vitalism and panpsychism are rekindled, these experiments are beginning to trace new contours around the active, sensitive and sentient lives of plants. Plant artists are working at the cusp of new media: sonifying plants to amplify their muted registers and perform plant/human intimacies; remediating plant life through forms of cultivation, and through filmic and digital media; and developing forms of biomimicry that code the morphogenesis of plants into 3D/4D printing technologies for digital fabrication to generate plant-like forms and materials that inspire fashion, wearables, architectural modeling, and animation. In this discussion, we wish to explore: *Why are plants so compelling to new media artists? Why this turn to plants today? *How do technological mediations in new media plant art make perceptible the otherwise imperceptible (invisible or inaudible) nature of plant life, and how in the process do these experiments transform our understandings of plant life and behaviour? *How do our interactions with plants through technologies of articulation, cultivation, modification, mutation, and simulation deepen our understanding of the imbrication of culture and nature? *What is life becoming as artists redefine the vegetal as active, perceptive and sentient? *What are the peculiarities of plant life teaching those artists who work with plants? How do plants change the ways these artists think about design, perception, relationality, ecology, and the anthropocene? TO MAKE A POST TO THE SUBSCRIPTION LIST USE: empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au TO ACCESS TEN YEARS WORTH OR 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: Natasha Myers is Associate Professor of Anthropology at York University, the Director of the Plant Studies Collaboratory, Convenor of the Politics of Evidence Working Group, and co-organizer of Toronto's Technoscience Salon. Her anthropological research examines forms of life in the arts and biosciences. She is the author of Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers and Excitable Matter (Duke, 2015), and has published articles on modes of embodiment, the senses, and affects in the life sciences in differences, Social Studies of Science, Science Studies, and edited volumes. Her recent research examines the arts and sciences of botanical experimentation, the contours of the vegetal sensorium, and the affective ecologies of plant/insect relations. Her new work tracks the formation and propagation of plant publics as artists and scientists stage interventions in sites like botanical gardens. Links to her research, research-creation projects, and publications can be found at http://natashamyers.org Selmin Kara is Assistant Professor of Film and New Media at OCAD University. She has critical interests in digital aesthetics and tropes related to the anthropocene and extinction in cinema as well as the use of sound and new technologies in contemporary documentary. Selmin’s work has appeared and is forthcoming in Studies in Documentary Film, Poiesis
Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to our June topic on -empyre: Plant Art and New Media
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Please welcome Jo SiMalaya Alcampo, Jasmeen Bains, and Yi Zhou as our featured discussants for the first week of our discussion on Plant Art and New Media. We're looking forward to a dynamic and engaging conversation! Jo SiMalaya Alcampo is an interdisciplinary artist who explores cultural/body memory and the healing of intergenerational soul wounds through community storytelling, installation-based art, and electroacoustic soundscapes. Jo has exhibited internationally in festivals and galleries including: A Space Gallery, FADO Performance Art Centre, The Images Festival, InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre, Nuit Blanche-Toronto, and Xpace Cultural Centre. Jo studied Integrated Media at OCADU. Advisors in the Indigenous Visual Culture Program inspired Jo to reconnect with her roots. Jo travelled to Baguio, Bontoc, and Sagada in the Cordillera mountain region in the Philippines. She met with traditional teachers and indigenous rights organizations to learn how to develop an ethical code of conduct when integrating Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Practices within an art practice. One response to this ongoing inquiry is Singing Plants Reconstruct Memory - an interactive installation in which living plants are keepers of story, cultural history and memory. When participants touch the plants, they sing Hudhud chants of the Ifugao People, play instruments indigenous to the Philippines, and tell a story of Paalaala/ Remembrance. Website: www.singingplants.org Jasmeen Bains is a landscape designer based in Seattle, Vancouver, and Toronto. Her work focuses on the creation of resilient ecologies in the urban realm. Yi Zhou is a landscape designer based in Toronto concerned with creating ecologically appropriate rooftop landscapes. Jasmeen and Yi belong to Studio for Landscape Culture, a research-based practice focused on the connection between culture and ecology within the medium of the landscape. Their recent work, the Language of Plants, creates a complete acoustic encounter that aims to illuminate the nuances and complexities of the black oak savannah ecosystem by making the unheard voices of its vegetative community accessible to a human audience. Patrick Keilty Assistant Professor Faculty of Information Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies University of Toronto http://www.patrickkeilty.com/ On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 10:42 AM, Patrick Keilty p.kei...@utoronto.ca wrote: Thank you Renate! Welcome to June, 2015 on –empyre soft-skinned space: Plant Art and New Media Moderated by Natasha Myers, Selmin Kara, and Patrick Keilty and with invited discussants Jo Simalaya Alcampo, Jasmeen Bains, Alana Bartol, Laura Cinti, Pei-Ying Lin, Špela Petrič, Dimitrios Stamatis, Jasmina Weiss, Amanda White, and Yi Zhou June 1 - 7: Week 1: Jasmeen Bains, Yi Zhou, and Jo Simalaya Alcampo June 8 - 14: Week 2: Alana Bartol, Amanda White, and Pei-Ying Lin June 15 - 21: Week 3: Špela Petrič, Dimitrios Stamatis, and Jasmina Weiss June 22 - 28: Week 4: Laura Cinti Welcome to the June discussion, “Plant Art and New Media”. A recent efflorescence of artistic experimentation with plants in the realm of new media is taking shape around a much broader turn to plants in science, popular culture, philosophy, and anthropology. Artists are reaching into the seemingly silent and static lives of plants with electronic, filmic, and electro-acoustic technologies, exploring ways to bridge gaps between human and nonhuman realms. Artists are engaging new media technologies to investigate and alter plant behaviour, communication, responsivity and movement, and to simulate natural processes. A wide range of artists and researchers are turning their work around plant life, including sculptors, performance artists, architects, media makers, creative coders, metabolic/genetic engineers, transgenic artists, and generative designers. Their experiments with sound, light, growth, and decay, for example, encourage us to think about more than human perception, and the creative entanglements between human and nonhuman, and organic and machinic life. As wider philosophical interests in nature philosophies such as vitalism and panpsychism are rekindled, these experiments are beginning to trace new contours around the active, sensitive and sentient lives of plants. Plant artists are working at the cusp of new media: sonifying plants to amplify their muted registers and perform plant/human intimacies; remediating plant life through forms of cultivation, and through filmic and digital media; and developing forms of biomimicry that code the morphogenesis of plants into 3D/4D printing technologies for digital fabrication to generate plant-like forms and materials that inspire fashion, wearables, architectural modeling, and animation. In this discussion, we wish to explore: *Why are plants so compelling to new media artists? Why this turn to plants
Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to our June topic on -empyre: Plant Art and New Media
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi all, I just have some minor revisions to our schedule for guest discussants, and I mistakenly left out a bio in my introduction. My apologies. Below please find the corrected schedule and additional bio. I'll of course introduce the discussants again at the beginning of their weeks. June 1 - 7: Week 1: Jasmeen Bains, Yi Zhou, and Jo Simalaya Alcampo June 8 - 14: Week 2: Alana Bartol and Pei-Ying Lin (with Dimitrios Stamatis, and Jasmina Weiss) June 15 - 21: Week 3: Amanda White and Špela Petrič (with Dimitrios Stamatis, and Jasmina Weiss) June 22 - 28: Week 4: Laura Cinti, Grégory Lasserre, and Anaïs met den Ancxt Scenocosme is a collaboration between Gregory Lasserre Anais met den Ancxt. Gregory Lasserre and Anais met den Ancxt are two artists working together as a duo under the name Scenocosme. They work and live in France. They develop the concept of interactivity in their artworks by using multiple kinds of expression. They mix art and digital technology in order to find substances of dreams, poetries, sensitivities and delicacies. Their works come from possible hybridizations between the living world and technology which meeting points incite them to invent sensitive and poetic languages. They also explore invisible relationships with our environment : they can feel energetic variations of living beings. They design interactive artworks, and choreographic collective performances, in which spectators share extraordinary sensory experiences. Plants of their artwork Akousmaflore react to the human touch by different sounds. They use also water (Fluides), stones (Kymapetra) and wood (Ecorces; Matières sensibles) as elements capable to generate tactile, visual and sound sensory interactivity. Their artworks were presented in several contemporary art and digital art spaces. Since 2004, they have exhibited their interactive installation artworks at ZKM Karlsruhe Centre for Art and Media (Germany), at Museum Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (Canada), at Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh (USA), at Daejeon Museum of Art (Korea), at Bòlit / Centre d’Art Contemporani (Girona) and in many international biennals and festivals. http://www.scenocosme.com/ Patrick Keilty Assistant Professor Faculty of Information Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies University of Toronto http://www.patrickkeilty.com/ On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 10:34 AM, Renate Terese Ferro rfe...@cornell.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Welcome Natasha Myers and thank you for joining our -empyre moderating team members Selmin Kara, and Patrick Keilty for the June discussion on -empyre soft-skinned space,Plant Art and New Media². This cross-disciplinary topic will bring together those interested in art, science, popular culture, philosophy and anthropology to examine the dynamics between culture and nature. We look forward to a topic that tests the grounds for discussions between human and nonhuman, and organic and machinic life. Natasha, Selmin and Patrick will be introducing this topic shortly as well as this month¹s guests but I did want to thank them for organizing the monthly topic. We all look forward to it. Happy June to all Renate Natasha Myers is Associate Professor of Anthropology at York University, the Director of the Plant Studies Collaboratory, Convenor of the Politics of Evidence Working Group, and co-organizer of Toronto's Technoscience Salon. Her anthropological research examines forms of life in the arts and biosciences. She is the author of Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers and Excitable Matter (Duke, 2015), and has published articles on modes of embodiment, the senses, and affects in the life sciences indifferences, Social Studies of Science, Science Studies, and edited volumes. Her recent research examines the arts and sciences of botanical experimentation, the contours of the vegetal sensorium, and the affective ecologies of plant/insect relations. Her new work tracks the formation and propagation of plant publics as artists and scientists stage interventions in sites like botanical gardens. Links to her research, research-creation projects, and publications can be found at http://natashamyers.org http://natashamyers.org/ Selmin Kara is Assistant Professor of Film and New Media at OCAD University. She has critical interests in digital aesthetics and tropes related to the anthropocene and extinction in cinema as well as the use of sound and new technologies in contemporary documentary. Selmin¹s work has appeared and is forthcoming in Studies in Documentary Film, Poiesis, the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, Music and Sound in Nonfiction Film, Post-Cinema, and The Philosophy of Documentary Film. She has recently co-edited a journal issue on documentary art activism and is currently co-editing an anthology on emergent forms and genres in contemporary
[-empyre-] Thank you! Plant Art and New Media
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi all, I just wanted to wrap up last month's discussion by thanking all of the discussants. It was an excellent conversation, and one I am sure I will refer back to as a resource for future research. Just a reminder that you can find an automated archive of the empyre discussions here: http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/ Specifically, I also want to thank Natasha Myers for her incredible patience, and for inspiring this month's discussion. Thank you to Selmin for helping to organize the month. Once again, I want to thank Jasmeen Bains, Yi Zhou, Jo Simalaya Alcampo, Alana Bartol, Amanda White, Pei-Ying Lin, Špela Petrič, Dimitrios Stamatis, Jasmina Weiss, Laura Cinti, Grégory Lasserre, and Anaïs met den Ancxt! Finally, I also want to thank Murat Nemet-Nejat, Johannes Birringer, and everyone else who helped to make this such a galvanizing discussion. Now I'll let Renate open up the month of July. Happy summer! Patrick Keilty Assistant Professor Faculty of Information Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies University of Toronto http://www.patrickkeilty.com/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Compulsion vs. Distraction
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Jacob, I love your question about whether compulsion is always recuperable as extracted value through advertising. I agree that there are significant differences between compulsion in gambling and compulsion in pornography. And you're right that interface design and software design on online pornography sites, such as xtube or pornhub, are very different from the designs we find in penny slot machines (I love comparing and contrasting the two). While online porn might be less scripted, viewers can still only search/ browse/ explore within certain constraints according to the design of the interface and the database management system (including metadata and algorithmic elements). Browsing occurs according to certain cues. So it's a kind of guided exploration, like a navigation with many prescribed routes. I am fascinated by compilation videos as part of my broader interest in new narrative techniques in online pornography (a topic for a whole other empyre discussion!). One thing I wonder about is whether viewers actually watch compilation videos all the way through, or do viewers jumnp around within the video and jump between videos. If viewers jump around, then I do think it lends itself to extraction through advertising as a form of browsing. I agree that the 2+ hour extended cuts don't lend themselves to the same kind of revenue model, but I wonder if most people get access to those cuts through a different financial model, like a subscription. Maybe not. I don't know. I haven't really thought as much about the 2+ hour videos as I have about short clips. It's a good question, and maybe something I should think more about. Also, *love* the meme. The promise of something better is partly what drives this form of compulsion. Patrick Keilty Assistant Professor Faculty of Information Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies University of Toronto On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 11:36 AM, Jacob Gaboury < jacob.gabo...@stonybrook.edu> wrote: > --empyre- soft-skinned space-- > Hello All, > > It's been a fascinating discussion so far, and I just wanted to pick up on > a few key points made by Patrick and others over the past few weeks. The > question of design and compulsion rings true on several levels, > particularly as it relates to certain kinds of gamified use and play. > However I don’t want to ascribe all forms of compulsive use to design *per > se*, at lease not design as some kind of calculated practice. I’m > particularly interested in the question of vernacular and improper use, > which I wrote about in a brief piece for Art Papers this past January < > http://www.artpapers.org/feature_articles/2015_0102-feature3.html>. When > is compulsion not designed for, and is it always recuperable as extracted > value through advertising, in-app purchases, etc. As Natasha Schüll’s > fantastic work on machine gambling shows, certain spaces and forms of use > are highly scripted and designed, but I don’t think that is entirely the > case when it comes to the pornographic context that many contributors have > discussed over the past few weeks. I immediately think of the tendency > toward compilation videos that string together only the climaxes or “money > shots” of a collection of videos, or 2+ hour extended cuts that can be set > to play uninterrupted, which seem designed instead for some kind of > distracted use. Is this form of use equally recuperable, or does it somehow > fall outside of design? After all a single two hour video would seem to > frustrate the ad revenue model of many porn sites. > > This kind of distracted use also brings to mind James Hodge’s earlier > question regarding the temporality of compulsion. This kind of distracted > use brings to mind not only the compulsion associated with our phones, but > also other forms of mobile game technology as Samuel Tobin’s research shows > <http://www.amazon.com/Portable-Play-Everyday-Life-Nintendo/dp/113739658X>. > This kind of distracted but habitual engagement brings us outside of both > the temporality of riveted engagement as well as the space of something > like a casino or the home. > > I suppose my question is if this is also a form of compulsion as we are > seeking to articulate it, and if this distinction is in some way > significant. > > I also couldn’t help but attach this meme image, which feels relevant to > our discussion. > > > Jacob Gaboury > -- > Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Visual Culture > Dept. of Cultural Analysis and Theory, Stony Brook University > -- > Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Dept II) > Berlin, Germany 2015 - 2016 > -- > http://www.jacobgaboury.com/ > > ___ > empyre f
Re: [-empyre-] Week 4: Lilly Irani, Shaka McGlotten, John Stadler, and Luke Stark
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks John! The mashup of these two genres is fascinating. I am tempted to do an entire empyre discussion on pornography, or some kind of virtual panel discussion that gets posted online, or maybe even a one-day conference in Toronto. I have grand ambitions, but very little time to make it happen at the moment. If I did something like this, I might include producers, actors, and web developers in the porn industry. PornHub, which claims to be the world's largest online video streaming site, did an AMA on Reddit about a year ago. Most people asked silly questions (as you can imagine), and PornHub ignored questions concerning propriety matters (understandably), but there are a few revealing moments here and there: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1un3wn/we_are_the_pornhub_team_ask_us_anything/ Best, Patrick Keilty Assistant Professor Faculty of Information Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies University of Toronto On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 12:14 AM, John Stadler <john.paul.stad...@gmail.com> wrote: > --empyre- soft-skinned space-- > Hello, all: > > I’m glad we broached the topic of porn compilation videos last week, > and I hope, Patrick, you’ll allow me to make that the focus of my post > this week (but also, yes, make it a whole empyre discussion unto > itself—I would love that!). The last time I participated in an > official capacity on empyre, it was around the question of “boredom” > and pornography, and whether boredom should be understood in this > context in its traditionally negative capacity or if it held other > potentialities or pleasures that could be interesting to pursue. > > This week I am back on another pornographic kick. My post comes out of > a paper I’ve been writing (and which hopefully will turn into > something larger) on the gamification of pornography. There are a > number of ways that this overlap could be approached and has already > been written about, but my point of entry concerns an online series of > pornography that is (to me, humorously) titled “Cock Hero.” > > “Cock Hero” is a series of compilation porn videos (I have only > encountered heterosexual versions), which borrow their gameplay from > the popular “Guitar Hero” games and dictates the user stroke his penis > (the question of whether this compilation video could be intended for > a female audience is, I think, not a silly question—despite the > series’ name—and one I can write about more should people be > interested in this question) to the beat of the electronica that now > overdubs a long string of porn clips. To facilitate this reception, > these compilations make rudimentary use of the same visual grammar of > “Guitar Hero,” where highlighted “beats” in the center of the screen > signal the user to “stroke once.” The user’s penis becomes his > instrument (or joystick), and the act of engaging what one might > presume is (rightly?) a boring compilation gains another interesting > function: the denial of orgasm or continuation of pleasure without > discernible end. Obviously, this gamification of pornography is rather > simplistic on some level. It operates on the "honors system" (no > apparatus makes sure the player is actually keeping up with the beats) > because it has no measurable feedback loop between the body and the > video (it's not quite at the level of some teledildonics), but its > conceit still intrigues me. > > This online porn compilation series does not actually want to > facilitate orgasm (or its gameplay suggests that is actually the > antithesis of the series)—but crucially, it seeks to delay orgasm and > build a user’s stamina. In the reorientation of pornography as a > skill-based interaction that can be trained—perhaps even won—“Cock > Hero” strikingly refuses some of the central tenets that we think of > as nearly universal to pornography. > > I am suggesting that the compulsive nature to this particular series > of pornography is not, at least wholly, the compilation form, but more > intriguingly is the overlaid game feature that this pornography adopts > as meta-language. The script of the game demands that compulsion be > the primary way of understanding its consumption as game: we are > trained by it to watch, to play, to refuse climax, and to compete with > others also playing it. But whereas the common wisdom would be that > pornography online already trains us in this manner, here we have the > act of browsing ironically stripped from our control, decided as it is > by the video's compilers. Nothing, of course, stops a user from > turning off a compilation video, or finding another one, but "Cock > Hero"'s gameplay suggests that compulsion may be one of the featur
[-empyre-] Week 4: Lilly Irani, Shaka McGlotten, John Stadler, and Luke Stark
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thank you all for a great discussion last week. I hope to respond more to your thought provoking comments when I get a chance. Meanwhile, welcome to Week 4! I am pleased to introduce guest discussants Lilly Irani (US), Shaka McGlotten (US/ DE), John Stadler (US), and Luke Stark (CA/ US). Lilly Irani is an Assistant Professor of Communication & Science Studies at University of California, San Diego. Her work examines and intervenes in the cultural politics of high tech work. She is currently writing a book on cultural politics of innovation and development in transnational India, entitled Entrepreneurial Citizenship: Innovators and their Others in Indian Development. She is also the co-founder and maintainer of digital labor activism tool Turkopticon. She has published her work at New Media & Society, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Science, Technology & Human Values, as well as at SIGCHI and CSCW. Her work has also been covered in The Nation, The Huffington Post, andNPR. Previously, she spent four years as a User Experience Designer at Google. She has a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science, both from Stanford University and a PhD from UC Irvine in Informatics. Shaka McGlotten is Associate Professor of media|society| arts at Purchase College-SUNY. He is an artist and anthropologist who works on digital cultures and screen media. His writing on race, sex, and technology appear in journals and anthologies. He is the author of Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality and co-editor of Black Genders and Sexualities, as well as Zombie Sexuality. John Stadler is a PhD candidate in the Program in Literature at Duke University. He is currently writing his dissertation, titled “Pornography and the Everyday,” which tracks how pornography’s saturation into everyday life has altered the manner in which pleasure is produced, received, and spoken of. His recent articles have appeared in Jump Cut and Art and Documentation. Luke Stark is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University under the supervision of Helen Nissenbaum. Hid dissertation project, “That Signal Feeling: Emotion and Interaction Design from Smartphones to the ‘Anxious Seat,’” explores how psychological tools and techniques have been built into the interaction design of the mobile digital device we use on a daily basis through a genealogy of human mood tracking from the 19th century to the present. Focusing on affect and emotion, his broader scholarship explores the changing nature of human subjectivity in the computational age. Some of his other projects examine the links between emotion and online privacy; the connection between values and design in digital information systems and coding/hacker/maker practice; everyday affect, user experience design, and the "on-command" economy; and the cultural and political potential of emoticons and emoji. He is currently in the preliminary stages of developing his second major project, a history of what I call "visceral data." Patrick Keilty Assistant Professor Faculty of Information Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies University of Toronto ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-empyre-] Thank you for "Designing Compulsion"
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thank you to everyone who participated in October's discussion! It was an excellent conversation, and one I am sure I will refer back to as a resource for future research. Just a reminder that you can find an automated archive of the empyre discussions here: http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/ Best, Patrick Keilty Assistant Professor Faculty of Information Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies University of Toronto ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Ludic loops and vertiginous compulsions
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks for this great post, Luke. I especially like that you picked up on the relatively simply interface of Grindr and Tindr. I am trying to think through the visual genealogy of rows and columns right now. It's very objectifying, but also one that I think create juxtapositions and invites comparisons between seemingly static objects. I think part of the way this particular form of display as an aesthetic contrivance solicits us is through the performance of juxtapositional events, creating differential relations between embodiment and technics by placing body and machine, sensation and concept, in ongoing relations of discordance and concordance with each other. Yeh, rows and columns. They're everywhere. It's simple but deceptively so. Patrick Keilty Assistant Professor Faculty of Information Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies University of Toronto On Wed, Oct 28, 2015 at 7:58 PM, Luke Stark <luke.st...@nyu.edu> wrote: > --empyre- soft-skinned space-- > Hi folks, > > This has been an amazing dialogue thus far - my apologies that I'm coming a > little late to it. It's inspiring to be a doctoral student in an area where > so much compelling *ahem* work is being done, and to have the chance to > bounce ideas off of so many great people. > > My dissertation project explores how psychological tools, theories and > techniques have been built into the interaction design of the digital device > we use on a daily basis, through a genealogy of human mood tracking from the > 19th century to the present. Like Natasha and Katie, I'm also part of a body > of scholars who are explicitly thinking about questions of values and design > - how tools and objects (particularly digitally-connected ones, in my case) > are designed to elicit or prompt different kinds of norms, ethics, habits, > codes, or what have you. I'm also starting work on a longer history of the > concept of the "visceral," which is one way of classing the the embodied > mechanisms through which we feel compelled to tap a Grindr profile or play > another level of Candy Crush. > > Natasha, I love the phrase "ludic loops." This semester I'm teaching an > undergraduate course on game studies, and in reacquainting myself with some > of the seminal literature in that field, I've been struck by what Roger > Caillois, in his 1960s classic "Man, Play, and Games," calls the qualities of > "alea" and "ilinx" in games. "Alea" distinguishes games of chance; Caillois > describes games featuring ilinx as ones which: > > "...are based on the pursuit of vertigo and which consist of an attempt to > momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of > voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind. In all cases, it is a question > of surrendering to a kind of spasm, seizure, or shock which destroys reality > with sovereign brusqueness." > > So, spinning, bungee jumping, and the like - seemingly far away from the > measured nature of digitally designed feedback designed for "juiciness" and > repeated compulsive use. Natasha, we'd both connect the "machine zone" of the > gambling addict or the "ludic loop" to Caillois' concept of "alea" "a > negation of the will, a surrender to destiny," in Caillois' poetically Gallic > turn of phrase. > > I'm beginning to wonder, though, if compulsion and its appearance in the > machine zone is as much about ilinx, vertigo, as it is about the aleatory. > The etymological dictionary reminds me that the word "compel" stems from a > Latin root that involves driving cattle into one place - a surrender, yes, > but a surrender through movement. As Caillois points out, truly aleatory > games are ones in which all players are equal in the face of Fate, a > condition that you've brilliantly exposed as completely inoperative in the > face of digital gambling systems, and which I'd say extends to all digital > media (our devices are designed, they don't appear sui generis). Natasha, one > of your gambling interlocutors describes the machine zone thus: "It's like > being in the eye of the storm...your vision is clear on the machine around > you but the whole world is spinning around you, and you can't really hear > anything. You aren't really there -- you're with the machine and that's all > you're with."* It's as if vertigo has somehow been frozen, tamed so that embrace of aleatory quietism seems all the more appealing. As you suggest, maybe it's the switching between that certainty and uncertainty, between ilinx and alea, which produces the compulsiveness of digital media. "Fragmen
Re: [-empyre-] Week 4: Lilly Irani, Shaka McGlotten, John Stadler, and Luke Stark
--empyre- soft-skinned space--John, I keep thinking about how your post reminds me of two points from Natasha's book. 1) There's a part where she talks about interactive involvement (p. 114) and how we might consider choice making and skill to be at odds with dissociative flow, but in fact they actually heighten a player's absorption. 2) While I don't think Natasha talks about stamina specifically, she does mention the way gambling technologies introduce increments of intensity, which provoke responsive adjustments on the part of the player (p. 133). I found both of these passages helpful for thinking about the intensity of traffic between human and machine in masturbation. Patrick Keilty Assistant Professor Faculty of Information Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies University of Toronto On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 11:48 AM, Patrick Keilty <p.kei...@utoronto.ca> wrote: > Thanks John! The mashup of these two genres is fascinating. I am tempted > to do an entire empyre discussion on pornography, or some kind of virtual > panel discussion that gets posted online, or maybe even a one-day > conference in Toronto. I have grand ambitions, but very little time to make > it happen at the moment. If I did something like this, I might include > producers, actors, and web developers in the porn industry. > > PornHub, which claims to be the world's largest online video streaming > site, did an AMA on Reddit about a year ago. Most people asked silly > questions (as you can imagine), and PornHub ignored questions concerning > propriety matters (understandably), but there are a few revealing moments > here and there: > https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1un3wn/we_are_the_pornhub_team_ask_us_anything/ > > Best, > > > Patrick Keilty > Assistant Professor > Faculty of Information > Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies > University of Toronto > > On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 12:14 AM, John Stadler < > john.paul.stad...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> --empyre- soft-skinned space-- >> Hello, all: >> >> I’m glad we broached the topic of porn compilation videos last week, >> and I hope, Patrick, you’ll allow me to make that the focus of my post >> this week (but also, yes, make it a whole empyre discussion unto >> itself—I would love that!). The last time I participated in an >> official capacity on empyre, it was around the question of “boredom” >> and pornography, and whether boredom should be understood in this >> context in its traditionally negative capacity or if it held other >> potentialities or pleasures that could be interesting to pursue. >> >> This week I am back on another pornographic kick. My post comes out of >> a paper I’ve been writing (and which hopefully will turn into >> something larger) on the gamification of pornography. There are a >> number of ways that this overlap could be approached and has already >> been written about, but my point of entry concerns an online series of >> pornography that is (to me, humorously) titled “Cock Hero.” >> >> “Cock Hero” is a series of compilation porn videos (I have only >> encountered heterosexual versions), which borrow their gameplay from >> the popular “Guitar Hero” games and dictates the user stroke his penis >> (the question of whether this compilation video could be intended for >> a female audience is, I think, not a silly question—despite the >> series’ name—and one I can write about more should people be >> interested in this question) to the beat of the electronica that now >> overdubs a long string of porn clips. To facilitate this reception, >> these compilations make rudimentary use of the same visual grammar of >> “Guitar Hero,” where highlighted “beats” in the center of the screen >> signal the user to “stroke once.” The user’s penis becomes his >> instrument (or joystick), and the act of engaging what one might >> presume is (rightly?) a boring compilation gains another interesting >> function: the denial of orgasm or continuation of pleasure without >> discernible end. Obviously, this gamification of pornography is rather >> simplistic on some level. It operates on the "honors system" (no >> apparatus makes sure the player is actually keeping up with the beats) >> because it has no measurable feedback loop between the body and the >> video (it's not quite at the level of some teledildonics), but its >> conceit still intrigues me. >> >> This online porn compilation series does not actually want to >> facilitate orgasm (or its gameplay suggests that is actually the >> antithesis of the series)—but crucially, it seeks to delay orgasm and >>
Re: [-empyre-] Compulsion and control . . .
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi Shaka, I feel I am constantly concerned with compulsion and control by going off the grid. The biggest obstacle to hunkering down and getting some writing done is of course, the internet. Social media sites in particular are perfect for gregarious introverts such as myself. I can interact with people without having to interact with people. We often think of distractions as problems of self-discipline. I am thinking especially of Sedgwick's essay "Epidemics of the Will." Sometimes the only way I get work done is by turning off my wifi. That's not quite off the grid, but it's a step in that direction. I think what Natasha and others show is that compulsion is not something that simply resides in the subject, but it's part of a mediational logic, in this case, between human and machine. To paraphrase Latour, I am a different subject when I interact with the computer; the computer is a different object when I interact with it. Is this a form of intimacy? Is mediation a form of intimacy? Maybe that's a silly question now that I think about it. Patrick Keilty Assistant Professor Faculty of Information Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies University of Toronto On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 5:21 PM, Shaka McGlotten <shaka.mcglot...@gmail.com> wrote: > --empyre- soft-skinned space-- > > Thanks to everyone for a pretty amazing discussion so far. I’m grateful > for the invitation to participate and am happy to be in the company of some > intellectual friends. > > > > I’ve spent much of the day reading this month’s posts. Of course, I was > interrupted—by phone calls, meetings, and the whiny demands of my dog to be > taken out. She’s jealous of the time I spend in front of screens. If she > were a cat, she’d walk in front of it or on it. > > > > Was my need to read everything first (and take notes and formulate > possible responses) compelled? Is compulsion the same as repetition > compulsion, or might it also orient toward something we might think of as a > completionist impulse (collecting, bookmarking, endless browsing, ordering > and organizing, academic rigor)? The many discussions about flow, its > machine zone dark side, and their relation to neoliberal techniques that > manage both labor and subjectification are apropos here. These days, > temporalities of work and play alike seem extended; there are stretched out > times of desire and pleasure (porn, gossipy phone calls, binge-watching > Veep) entangled with equally stretched and suspended, if more quotidian, > labors (all those fucking emails). > > > > For years I have thought of my computer as a sex machine demanding > engagement in patterns of excitation-capital-frustration-excitation-capital > (I am glad that Mathew added Preciado to the discussion, someone I’ve found > enormously useful in thinking about desire and technology). And obviously > my computer is a labor siphon, too, endlessly addressing itself to me, > promising some other set of possibilities, like crossing everything off my > to-do list, even while it exhausts me. If only I could put in just a little > more time. On the days I do put in that extra time (every day it seems), > there’s the f.lux app to make sure that I’m not too agitated by the > emanations of blue light constantly working on my body and its rhythms. > > > > This activity, that is, this very post, had been planned (dozens of > scribbled iterations on notes or reminders on my digital to do lists); > deferred (I had to do that other thing to do first, and then that one, > too); and then it became immersive, or as Gordon Calleja put it, I became > absorbed, incorporated into what is still as much a virtual as a real > dialogue, a enactment of potential interactions as much as real ones. > > > > Reading this, do you still feel lonely? What is calling to you right now? > Are you compelled, impelled, both? > > > > When I finish writing, a whole host of potential activities await: 27 tabs > open across two browsers of things to read, or maybe I’ll just stream some > yoga from Yogaglo, or get in touch with the pot dealer and find someone who > just wants to engage in an emergent structure of feeling particular I’ve > recently encountered in social media like Yik Yak: “Netflix and cuddle.” > > > > If this post seems somewhat elliptical or obtuse, my apologies. Part of > that has to do with the fact that my absorption in these threads has > created many resonances with my past and ongoing thinking about affect and > online sociality, as well with a concept I recently heard Jasbir Puar use > in a discussion of Israel/Palestine at the Affect Theory: Worldings, > Tensions, and Futures conference, where Natasha an
[-empyre-] Week 3: Jacob Gaboury (US), Matthew Gagne (CA/ LB), Ava Lew (CA), and Natasha Dow Schüll (US)
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Welcome to Week 3. I am pleased to introduce guest discussants Jacob Gaboury (US), Matthew Gagne (CA/ LB), Ava Lew (CA), and Natasha Dow Schüll (US). Jacob Gaboury is Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Visual Culture at Stony Brook University and Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. His work engages the history and critical theory of digital media through the fields of visual culture, media archaeology, and queer theory. He is currently finishing a manuscript on the archaeology of computer graphics titled Image Objects and beginning a book on the queer history of computation titled On Uncomputable Numbers. His work has been previously published or is forthcoming in the Journal of Visual Culture, Media-N, and Camera Obscura. Mathew Gagne is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Mathew's dissertation research examines the impact of globally networked gay dating technologies on queer intimacy, sexuality, and subjectivity in Beirut, Lebanon. This research focuses on the relationship between sex, fantasy/reality, and information within digitally mediated intimate lives. His work has previously been published in the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, and the websites Jadaliyya.com and Muftah.org. Ava Lew is a PhD student in the iSchool at the University of Toronto. Her research interests revolves around the development, uses and effects of information communication technologies as part of larger socio-technical systems. With a background in communication, she has conducted research on website development and relationship building with users. Ava’s current research entails examining the design, use and role of human-to-computer and human-to-human interactions, as mediated by the user interface, as well as to what degree such interactivity affect group collaboration and individual engagement in social causes or politically-oriented activities. Natasha Dow Schüll is Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. Her recent book, ADDICTION BY DESIGN: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton University Press 2012), draws on extended research among compulsive gamblers and the designers of the slot machines they play to explore the relationship between technology design and the experience of addiction. Her next book, KEEPING TRACK: Personal Informatics, Self-Regulation, and the Data-Driven Life (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, forthcoming 2016), concerns the rise of digital self-tracking technologies and the new modes of introspection and self-governance they engender. Her documentary film, BUFFET: All You Can Eat Las Vegas, has screened multiple times on PBS and appeared in numerous film festivals. Patrick Keilty Assistant Professor Faculty of Information Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies University of Toronto http://www.patrickkeilty.com/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
