Re: [-empyre-] Introducing John Cayley and Penny Florence
Thanks, Renate, Just to say I'm here and have been watching/reading with interest. We fall victim to time zones - it's 11.15 PM here in LA, so I can't say much now. But I will be up early - so watch this space about 7 hours hence. Penny On 11 October 2010 19:54, Renate Ferro r...@cornell.edu wrote: * * At this time I would like to introduce John Cayley and Penny Florence to our empyre members. Both John and Penny will be describing their own work and what they will be doing at the Making Sense event. I am hoping that Fred and Janice will also join the conversation that Lorna has initiated during the first few posts. * * John Cayley is Visiting Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University, leading the programme Writing in Digital Media. He has practiced as a poet, translator, publisher, and bookdealer, and all these activities have often intersected with his training in Chinese culture and language. His poetry is internationally recognised, twice winning the Electronic Literature Organization's Award for Poetry (in 2001 and 2010). He has held a number of research positions at universities in the UK and the US. Penny Florence is Chair of Humanities and Design Sciences at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. Until recently, she was Professor of Fine Art History and Theory, Head of Research Programmes at The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, where she is now Professor Emerita. She has published a number of books and articles on issues related to this conference and presentation, including the prefiguring of the digital in Mallarmé's Un coup de dés She has worked as an artist and filmmaker and is an interdisciplinary scholar and experimentalist, deploying practice and practice-related metholodogies to explore visuality in and through language. SA. Renate ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] always negotiating
All art is a negotiation of some sort. Unless the artist is a hermit or an art Naif or Art Brut, art is made with an eye to context. It's also about the patron. For some artists the patron is the university. They make art that reflects the academic environment. For some artists the patron is the non-profit alternative spaces. Of course there is also the gallery/museum/market system which is a big patron. All of these patronage systems are negotiated with during the process of art creation. I had hoped that the internet would present a new system that was not of these existing systems. That was the case with the early internet but now it's been subsumed. Personally I'm always looking for a way around these systems. I know one must negotiate but each system has it's restraints which inhibit the free flowing creative process. One of the principals of creativity is to engage these systems and enlarge their scope to include your own point of view and discourse. That appears to be the negotiation of which you speak. On Oct 11, 2010, at 1:09 PM, Renate Ferro wrote: Would you agree that there is always a negotiation in the process of art making? ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] always negotiating
My response was to this comment that Lorna made: The problem with Rancière's aesthetics as politics is that he seems to be utterly unaware of the technology that, Stiegler says, defines the human and the present. In a recent conversation with Rancière I asked him where were new media and techné, and the 21st century, in his thinking, and he said to me that he is not Bernard Stiegler and there was a difference of opinion. When I asked Stiegler what his philosophy would say to Rancière's he said that Rancière's 'partage du sensible' had no sense of sharing the distribution of virtual reality or cyberspace, et cetera. Now this is politics... We did not invite Rancière to this year's colloquium, this year the theoretical focus is on Stiegler. But we want to impress the sensuous over the theoretical, the making and doing rather than get involved in French politics... To privilege the sensuous over the theoretical and the making over the doing would be impossible for me. Instead I suggested a negotiation. Renate On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 8:27 AM, gh hovagimyan g...@thing.net wrote: All art is a negotiation of some sort. Unless the artist is a hermit or an art Naif or Art Brut, art is made with an eye to context. It's also about the patron. For some artists the patron is the university. They make art that reflects the academic environment. For some artists the patron is the non-profit alternative spaces. Of course there is also the gallery/museum/market system which is a big patron. All of these patronage systems are negotiated with during the process of art creation. I had hoped that the internet would present a new system that was not of these existing systems. That was the case with the early internet but now it's been subsumed. Personally I'm always looking for a way around these systems. I know one must negotiate but each system has it's restraints which inhibit the free flowing creative process. One of the principals of creativity is to engage these systems and enlarge their scope to include your own point of view and discourse. That appears to be the negotiation of which you speak. On Oct 11, 2010, at 1:09 PM, Renate Ferro wrote: Would you agree that there is always a negotiation in the process of art making? ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] A further thought Re: Cambridge and Paris
Hi Everyone, Penny Florence here, one of the contributors to Making Sense, in Cambridge and, soon, in Paris. Making work for me is much closer to Lorna's epistemological take than it is to Renate's negotiation (though I expect you deliberately avoid that word, Lorna!) I've worked with practice-related research in the context of leading Fine Art PhD departments for over 15 years. Lorna is the first person I know of to get anything like this off the ground from an academic department with no direct relation to practice (such as art, design or architecture). It is no mean feat. The philosophical divide between aesthetics/philosophy and the practice/s of artists is thoroughly entrenched, even, or especially, where those engaged think it is not. It stands in the way of those of us trying to bring new media and web-based art into constructive, contested and uneasy relation with mainstream traditions of art practice, art histories and critical thinking. There is a kind of precedent to Lorna's collective in second wave feminism. Art was highly significant in that movement because so many of us realised that it was not only a way of making sense, but also of making new sense, the kinds of sense that were blocked elsewhere. By bringing that general principle out of the (then necessarily) reactive space of a counter-cultural movement, Lorna's move represents a further stage, not a return. Jean-baptiste's remarks contrast the autonomous space of the art work with situated spaces and embodied symbolic machines without looking closely at the way the artwork can be just such a machine (a word that itself has a long history in art and in politics). That is what it began to become in the 80s, and that is what eventually dissolved, or perhaps, was submerged. And it evolves in and through the autonomy of the art work. To say that is not to go off into some mystified space, but to go deeper into the materiality of thought and transformative experience. With transformation, there can be no new politics. Which brings me e-poetry. I could say a lot more about the above, but I don't want to be further deflected, and I'm not making any direct political claims for my efforts in general or for my collaboration with John Cayley. I'll just say that any truly new politics will have to abandon the romance of revolution and opposition. That's an uncomfortable place for certainty. This is how we described what we are doing for Making Sense: (start abstract) The presentation is a collaborative performance between John Cayley and Penny Florence, consisting of a screening of a 5-minute digital poem, followed by a ten minute commentary/debate from the presenters that elaborates on it from their different points of view. This is the first of a series of enacted doubles: between collaborators; between source and target texts; between sound and image; music and poetry; and between textual subjectivities. Through these, we explore the potential of digital poetry as critique and translation, hypothesising an analogy or stronger between the Mallarméen text and the digital, and, more broadly, the present and early Modernism. The starting-point is the layering of Le Pitre châtié. over stanzas 3-5 of Prose (pour des Esseintes), programmed in a variant of Cayley's Translation ( go to http://www.shadoof.net/ and click on Translation 6). The two passages from Mallarmé are layered over and through each other via English. This follows in part the process of transliteral morphs, whereby letters are moved from source to target text in a sound-related trajectory. This reveals abstracted underlying structures supporting and articulating the 'higher-level' relationships between the texts (in Cayley's words). The sound is adapted from Debussy's Chansons de Bilitis - Le Tombeau des Naïades http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuxvwYNInZk , itself both resonating with Louÿs' fake translation of Bilitis, and thus a doubled identity of sex and authorship, and with Mallarmé. There is a further, visual dimension, that of interliteral graphic morphs. These terms will be clarified in the course of showing and commenting on the work. (end of abstract) As we have worked on this via Googlewave (we are currently on opposite seaboards of the USA), the question of transposition, of the changes that occur between word, code, visuality, motion, natural languages, music, has become increasingly intense, and increasingly expansive at the same time. Taking transposition to be both destruction and invention (creation bothers me slightly, with its religious and/or mystifying overtones), the potential that is emerging appears very exciting. At the level of the body, none of these elements is separate. In the art work, there is the potential for that relation to the body to be communicated in the aesthetic encounter - first of all as sensation. This is what I take Mallarmé to mean when he writes of poetic language as distinct from instrumental language. It's not about elitism.
Re: [-empyre-] A further thought Re: Cambridge and Paris
Hello, Le 12/10/2010 18:06, Penny Florence a écrit : The two passages from Mallarmé are layered over and through each other via English. This follows in part the process of transliteral morphs, whereby letters are moved from source to target text in a sound-related trajectory. This reveals abstracted underlying structures supporting and articulating the 'higher-level' relationships between the texts (in Cayley's words). The sound is adapted from Debussy's Chansons de Bilitis - Le Tombeau des Naïades http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuxvwYNInZk , itself both resonating with Louÿs' fake translation of Bilitis, and thus a doubled identity of sex and authorship, and with Mallarmé. There is a further, visual dimension, that of interliteral graphic morphs. These terms will be clarified in the course of showing and commenting on the work. (end of abstract) This sounds like a perfect example of a recombinant archive (like i tried to describe it during previous thematic discussion). In a sense, it's always about making/finding links, building/removing relations, between existing things, and looking how the system emerging from these relations is evolving. Things can be concepts, ideas, shapes, objects, materials. From this point of view, any devide, between thinking/practices/materials/contexts, becomes an oportunity for a new relation/link/interaction, and conversely, and there is no end to this process, at all scales, in all dimensions. -- Yann Le Guennec http://www.yannleguennec.com/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
