[-empyre-] more on the grid
hello everyone-- thanks so much for all the questions and comments on my previous post. i’ve got a bit of time before my flight leaves new york for durham, so i’ll try to address your points and questions. mark, i really like your point that “one worm's vulnerabilities were previously the systems' opportunities. Or, put another way, a virus operationalizes a vulnerability.” this is precisely the way that Queer Technologies tries to intervene in capital. it’s about starting from a point of working within the system, finding / locating those vulnerabilities, and then exploiting them. virginia, i’m glad you brought up krauss. in a larger paper, i am working somewhat with her article called “grids.” (if she has any more writings on grids, perhaps you could recommend?) I’d like to share with you a small fragment of text I’ve written on this awhile back. I’ll be returning to it soon, so I’d love to hear your feedback. “But first, what is a grid? Grids appear to permeate contemporary life: there are the grids of urban planning and the geographical locations they correlate to, various electrical power grids of communication and the social grids they enable and foster through their use, grids of digitization from the pixel upwards through larger scales of construction and the representations and objects that embody them, as well as vast networked grids of computation, biology, and capital that formulate and structure new ontologies, epistemologies, and relationalities. Indeed, in her 1979 article on grids in art, Rosalind Krauss heralds the grid as our declaration of modernity, for while the grid is ubiquitous in the 20th century, it appears in no artworks of the previous one.2 Krauss also points out that the grid is antimimetic, in that its organization is not one of imitation but of it own “aesthetic decree.”3 Importantly for Krauss, this autonomy of the grid reveals a paradox at the heart of its construction between matter and spirit (or socialities), in that the grid both masks and exposes the dimensions of its spirit through its material make-up. Emerging from that, I’d like to say a grid is a form endemic to our time that materially and visually organizes something through its own logic--a logic that emerges as a relationality between various forces that come to constitute a thing. Of course, a thing may be constituted by many grids; certainly, this is the circumstance rather than not. Furthermore, the work of the grid is always in flux, as material and social processes alter and mutate. Grids may rigidify but they may also hyperfluctuate.” To address specifically why I want to use the grid in the context of my artwork moves toward Renate’s point that my grid “seems like a phenomenological system of being.” I’m really drawn to the grid for a number of visual / nonvisual and theoretical reasons. i’ll just share these as sketchy points: --as i’ve previously stated...as queer technologies takes a position within dominant systems, the grid, as a emblem of our time (taken from krauss), offers a kind of dominant visuality to work inside. to be in the grid, corrupt it, break and fragment that visuality. Queer Technologies is always very interested in working subversively with high fine art. thus, the grid seems to offer a way in to making “minimal art” that can circulate as such with an infectious / critical component built inside. --i’m also extremely interested in current calls to go beyond a form of representational cultural analysis to a topologically centered one. Media theorists like Jussi Parikka have called for a topologically focused form of cultural analysis that moves beyond representation to take into account the nonvisual aspects of digital networked culture. In the spam book, a new book he co-edited with tony sampson, in a section titled “no metaphors, just diagrams,” it is suggested that a “becoming-viral” offers the topological potential for new diagrams. I’m trying to think about the GRID as a visual form of this call for topological engagement and what a politics of this diagram can offer / bring about. --i have also been drawn to brian massumi’s discussion in his chapter on “the autonomy of affect” in his book “parables of the virtual” on grids, abstract structuralism, movement, and emergence. importantly, massumi points of that a grid--or abstract structure--does not pre-determine a subject, someone, or something. rather, it is all co-relational and emergent..in that it there is dynamic movement in time and space. i completely agree with massumi on this point, but paradoxically, i want to keep the term “grid” because of its etymological relations to homosexuality and the viral references the term contains. the grid here lets queer technologies work toward topologically visualizing an assemblage theory of existence, which includes all the emergent relationalities that bear upon affect, bodies, anything. --lastly, i’m interested in what the grid can actually show and not show. perhaps the
Re: [-empyre-] grids, affect, (im)measurability and (in)visibility
Hello Zach et al., I am interested in conceptualizing the GRID as a choreographic practice (I am struggling lately to find something that is not...), but am curious to hear your thoughts on this. I am particularly interested in the grid as movement practice in relation to success. The queer grid will crash, succeed, re-chart, change always, replicate always. Its value lies within the fact that each node in the topology--as a gay bomb--has the potential to explode into a queer relationality, encrypted by another grid, that can generate a whole new set of infections against GRID. Here you identify the possibility for another grid and imply that there is a constant maneuverability through nodes and between grids. I am interested in how when there is a multiplicity of grids there becomes a movement in-between, or an in-between movement. The potentiality for movement increases and the choreographic pattern continues. The unmappable leads to another GRID and it is through the crash, success, change and replication that you find a political choreography that becomes relational, but to what? To the relation that is in the in-between. Here movement becomes the viral agent. The virus is then a spatial and durational process, a choreography that illustrates a theoretical model for providing an anything but an other to heterosexuality and the nation for performance. Thoughts? Ashley On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 7:26 AM, Renate Ferro r...@cornell.edu wrote: the GRID as Zach describes it seems like a phenomenological system of being given that you are operating within an art context, I wonder how you are thinking your use of GRID in light of the modernist use of the grid, particularly in relation to krauss' deconstruction of the avant-garde vis a vis the grid? On Sat, Nov 14, 2009 at 4:56 PM, Zach Blas zachb...@gmail.com wrote: following along the lines of my preview post on tactics of nonexistence and the viral, i’d like to share Queer Technologies’ current work-in-progress called GRID. this project is a type of diagramming that works with and against that which can be diagrammed and that which cannot--in this instance, the diagrammed product and unmappable. i saw a great talk last night by patricia clough at the new school on affect, branding, immeasurability, incalculability, and incomputability--it was amazing stuff! GRID, in a sense, is attempting deal with these ideas and problems too. here’s a general explication: The design, fabrication, production, dissemination, and use of Queer Technologies operates on / as a grid. Today, two grids can be identified that mutually form and construct the biosocialities of homosexuality: Importantly, these grids are not a static positioning structure but rather comprise an assemblage--unstable, in movement, of material. They do not pin the homosexual by abstractness by actually constitute it. Firstly, a history of viral contagion and disease interlocks with and generates conceptions, representations, and bodies of homosexuality. G.R.I.D., or Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, the identifier given to AIDS until 1982, is a locus of this infectious “rhetoric.” The term, as words that explicitly order homosexuals into markers of sickness from health, etymologically links homosexuality beyond its all-too-real, continuing struggles with AIDS, to other modulating constructions of “disease” and “sickness.” Secondly, contemporary grids of communication and capital virally generate a dominant assemblage of the homosexual that is complicit within flows of consumption and nationalism, a “sterility” of sorts. As Jasbir Puar has suggested, homonationalism is the enfolding of homosexuals into these machinations, visually projecting and materially constructing a form of homosexuality as included within the nation-state and mass culture, while simultaneously excluding homosexuals who exist outside of these homonormative representations and life formations. These two grids are collapsed into one another, interlocked in a viral logic that frames the homosexual body from a diseased or infected formation, while generating a dominant form of homosexuality as anything but an other to heterosexuality and the nation. I would like to refer to this larger construction simply as GRID. This assemblage called GRID--the relationalities and interactions that come to form the homonormative homosexual of today, infects the multiplicitous biosocialities of homosexuality. Yet, I would like to argue that through an exploitation of the viralities at work here, another grid can be replicated--a queer grid that provides viral tactics of infection and escape from the representations and formations of GRID. Queer Technologies sees this grid developing through the potential of product deployment and distribution. The question is: How do we escape GRID?
[-empyre-] Introducing Week 3 on empyre: Viral Economies: Hactivating Design
Many thanks to Zach, Daniel and David for being our guests this week on empyre. I'm am hoping that they will continue to participate throughout the rest of the month as their schedules permit. As the discussion threads continue on grids and viruses I'd like to introduce Art Jones, Ricardo Dominguez, and Brooke Singer as our guests this week. They are great friends and have all visited us in Upstate New York here at Cornell. I have attach their biographies below and look forward hearing about their recent work. Art Jones is an image/sound manipulator working with film, digital video, and hybrid media. His films/videos, CD-ROMs, live audio/videomixes and installations often concern the inter-relationships between popular music, visual culture, history, and power. As a VJ he has performed with a variety of musicians and artists, including Soundlab, DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, DJ T-Ina, Amiri Baraka, Femmes with Fatal Breaks, and Alec Empire and Phillip Virus. He has completed a trilogy of music videos and a CD-ROM, and continues to perform at various locations in Chicago and New York. He is from the Bronx and lives and works in and between Chicago and New York. Ricardo Dominguez is a co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), a group who developed Virtual-Sit-In technologies in 1998 in solidarity with the Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico. He is a co-Director of Thing (http://post.thing.net) an ISP for artists and activists. His recent Electronic Disturbance Theater project with Brett Stabaum, Micha Cardenas and Amy Sara Carroll the *Transborder Immigrant Tool* (http://bang.calit2.net/xborder ) - (a GPS cellphone safety net tool for crossing the Mexico/U.S border was the winner of Transnational Communities Award, this award was funded by *Cultural Contact*, Endowment for Culture Mexico - U.S. and handed out by the U.S. Embassy in Mexico), also funded by CALIT2 and two Transborder Awards from the UCSD Center for the Humanities. Ricardo is an Associate Professor at UCSD in the Visual Arts Department, a Hellman Fellow, and Principal/Principle Investigator at CALIT2 (http://bang.calit2.net). He also co-founder of *particle group* with artists Diane Ludin, Nina Waisman, Amy Sara Carroll (http://pitmm.net). *particle group* has a new project archive entitled nanosfÉRICA at (http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/particle-group-intro) and you can also find a video meditation by EDT and *particle group entitled, (nano_Garage(s): Speculations about (Open Fabbing) here: http://medialabprado.es/article/nanogarajes_especulaciones_sobre_fabbing_abierto Brooke Singer is a media artist who lives in New York City. Her work blurs the borders between science, technology, politics and arts practices. She works across media to provide entry into important social issues that are often characterized as specialized to a general public. She has exhibited at the Warhol Museum of Art, The Banff Centre, Neuberger Museum of Art,Diverseworks, Exit Art, FILE Electronic Festival, Sonar Music and Multimedia Festival, The Whitney Artport, among others. Recent awards and commissions include a New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) Individual Artist award, a Headlands Center for Arts residency, New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) award, a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) fellowship and an Eyebeam and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Social Sculpture commission. She is currently Associate Professor of New Media at Purchase College, State University of New York, and co-founder of the art, technology and activist group Preemptive Media. Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor Department of Art Cornell University, Tjaden Hall Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@cornell.edu Website: http://www.renateferro.net Co-moderator of _empyre soft skinned space http://www.subtle.net/empyre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre Art Editor, diacritics http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dia/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
