[-empyre-] Seeking new moderators for our moderating team at -empyre soft-skinned space
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- The -empyre moderating team is looking for energetic new media theorists, practitioners, curators, programmers or others with interests in new media and other emergent forms who represent perspectives that are not already represented on the moderating team, We are particularly interested in welcoming those from outside North America given the broad global audience of subscribers we enlist. We ask that you send an email of intent to Renate Ferro. See info below and at our website: http://empyre.library.cornell.edu -empyre- is a global community of new media artists, curators, theorists, producers, and others who participate in monthly thematic discussions via an e-mail listserv. -empyre- facilitates online discussion encouraging critical perspectives on contemporary cross-disciplinary issues, practices and events in networked media. The list is currently co-managed by Renate Ferro (USA) and Tim Murray (USA) with the moderating team of Simon Biggs (UK), and Patrick Lichty (USA). Melinda Rackham (AU) initiated -empyre- as part of her doctoral research in 2002. -empyre- also welcomes guest moderators who organize discussions for one month. After more than ten years, -empyre- soft-skinned space continues to be a platform dedicated to the plurality of global perspectives reaching out beyond Australia and the Northern Hemisphere to greater Asia and Latin America. -empyre- website is generously hosted by the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, a repository of emergent ideas amongst those working at the leading edge of contemporary artistic practice. All discussions are currently archived by Pandora, a project of the National Library of Australia. Both of these institutions are dedicated to preserving online publications of national significance for future generations. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Welcome Adam AJ Nocek, September 2014: Design That Matters
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- We welcome Adam A.J. Nocek once again as our guest moderator for September. A.J. Nocek is a PhD candidate in the Comparative Literature Department and instructor in the Comparative History of Ideas Program at the University of Washington. His research lies at the intersections of media and aesthetics, design and biotechnology, and algorithmic culture and global-scale neoliberalism. Nocek has published essays on the philosophy of A.N. Whitehead, media theory, artificial life, and architecture. He is the co-editor of the collection, The Lure of Whitehead (Minnesota 2014), and a special issue of the journal, Inflexions, titled Animating Biophilosophy (2014). Tim Murray and I first met Adam at Syracuse University just north of Cornell during a conference.. He was our guest moderator last September hosting a rigorous month on BioArt: Materials, Practices, Politics. He joins us again this September hosting a topic: Design That Matters. Welcome Adam and thanks so much. Renate Ferro -empyre soft-skinned space http://empyre.library.cornell.edu -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office: 306 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: rfe...@cornell.edu URL: http://www.renateferro.net http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net Lab: http://www.tinkerfactory.net Managing Co-moderator of -empyre- soft skinned space http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Fwd: empyre
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear empyreans, Welcome to September. We have had a break from -empyre soft-skin discussions this past August and are ready to introduce the September discussion but before we do I would like to take the opportunity to announce changes to our moderating team, Timothy Murray (US), Simon Biggs ( AU), and myself, Renate Ferro (US) are pleased to welcome Selmin Kara (TR and CA) and Patrick Keilty (CA and US). I have included their biographies below. We also wish to thank Patrick Lichty who since April 2011 when he introduced a discussion on The Re-emergence of the Augment has helped round out our moderating team. He has managed other discussions since then including Glitches, Cracked, and Dirty Media in December 2011 and The New Aesthetics: Seeing Like Machines in September 2012. We have valued his perspectives on the moderating team and thank him. We wish him the very best. We know he will remain an active subscriber to the list serve and even a guest moderator when his schedule permits. We appreciate all your work Patrick. Renate Ferro Managing Moderator, -empyre soft-skinned space Biographies: Welcome Selmin Kara and Patrick Keilty Originally from Turkey, Selmin Kara is an Assistant Professor of Film and New Media at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada. She has critical interests in the use of new technologies, tactical media, and sound in documentary, as well as post-cinematic aesthetics and new materialist approaches in film. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Studies in Documentary Film, Poiesis: A Journal of the Arts Communication, Sequence, the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, and Music and Sound in Nonfiction Film: Real Listening. Selmin is currently co-editing an anthology on contemporary documentary media and working on her book project Reassembling Documentary: From Actuality to Virtuality, which proposes a new materialist framework for understanding the sound and image relationships in documentary in the age of networks. Patrick Keilty is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. His primary teaching and research field is new media studies, with a particular focus on digital theory, technology studies, visual culture, gender, sexuality, and critical theory. He is co-editor of Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader (2013). His monograph project, provisionally titled Database Desire, engages the question of how our embodied engagements with labryinthine qualities of database design mediate aesthetic objects and structure sexual desire in ways that abound with expressive possibilities and new narrative and temporal structures. Recently, he has published and presented his SSHRC-funded research on a wide variety of topics, including embodiment and technology, algorithmic display, the history of information retrieval, technology and transformations of gendered labor, women in computing, design and experience, compulsion and control, metadata and the creation of fetishistic networks, new forms of sexual nomenclature as taxonomies for navigating pornographic databases, and feminist and queer new media and technoscience issues generally. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Neo-eco-liberalism
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi all, I'd like to welcome Ross Exo Adams and Adrian Parr to the first week at -empyre! This week's topic addresses what I'm calling, Neo-eco-liberalism. The title references the complicated way that ecological catastrophe dominates so many design discourses today. In an era when the Anthropocene (hypo)thesis is hotly debated in nearly all academic fields, it is designers in particular who often feel a responsibility to correct for the footprint left by modern, industrial-scale design, and design with an eye to the deep time of the planet. No doubt the myriad discourses on “sustainable,” “ecological,” or “smart” technologies come to mind as possible ways of addressing the deep time of design. For example, great progress has been made in the application of biotechnology, synthetic biology, and nanotechnology to design fields, so that “programmable” or “mediated matter” now provides a viable means for designing complex (even semi-living) systems that adapt and evolve in response to wider, non-human environments— surely a post-humanist framework for design. But as our guests know, the many discourses and technologies surrounding “sustainable” and “eco design do not easily avoid neoliberal capture, and in fact, have too often become a resource for private investors to strengthen the firm grip of capital. Urban developers in particular, as Ross has noted elsewhere, have been quick to embrace the discourse of “ecological catastrophe” as a way to ensure that the private development of urban space proceeds without reproach, and destroys the last vestiges of public space. As a way into this week's topic, I'm wondering if our guests would begin the conversation by meditating or complicating this tension. Here are our guests bios one more time: Ross Exo Adams (US) is an architect, urbanist and educator whose work looks at the political and historical intersection between circulation and urbanization. He is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Iowa State University. His writing has been published in Log, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Radical Philosophy, Thresholds, Architectural Review among others. Previously he has taught at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, The Architectural Association, the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, NL and at Brighton University in the UK. His work has been exhibited in the Venice Biennale, the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City, the Centre of Contemporary Architecture in Moscow and the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam. As an architect and urban designer he has worked in offices such as MVRDV, Foster Partners, Arup Urban Design and Productora-DF. He holds a Master of Architecture from the Berlage Institute and a Ph.D. from the London Consortium for which he was awarded the 2011 LKE Ozolins Studentship by the RIBA. Adrian Parr (US/AU) specialist on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and has published widely on the sustainability movement, climate change politics, activist culture, and creative practice. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and School of Architecture and Interior Design at the University of Cincinnati. Some of her recent books include the _Deleuze Dictionary_ (ed.) (2005), _Hijacking Sustainability_ (2009), _New Directions in Sustainable Design_ (ed. with Michael Zaretsky) (2010), and _The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics_ (2013). Thanks again! ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Welcome Adam AJ Nocek, September 2014: Design That Matters
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks for the kind introduction, Renate. I'm very happy to be back moderating another month at -empyre! We invite our network of –empyre subscribers to post with our invited guests, Ross Exo Adams (US), Adrian Parr (US/AU), Luciana Parisi (UK), Oron Catts (AU), Etienne Turpin (ID), Davide Panagia (US), and others on the topic, Design that Matters. Let’s make this an exciting and open discussion! This month at –empyre our invited guests will consider how extant and future design practices (operating at an indeterminate number of scales) deserve more attention in the theoretical humanities, and media studies in particular. Surely a case could be made that media studies already has a close relation to design practice/theory, and this is particularly evident in the last couple decades with the ubiquity of digital and parametric design, as well as open-source and DIY design practices, etc. Our guests will consider how this convergence is but one expression of a much larger problematic that occupies many designers/theorists today: namely, how to guide, redirect, or re-channel the many forces (chemical, atmospheric, digital, migratory, and urban) that mediate human experience in the age of global-scale capitalism. I’m partly inspired this month by Bruno Latour’s suggestion in a keynote address that he gave in 2008, in which he argues that design today implies (or in any case, should imply) a kind of modesty in the face of much wider environmental forces. Design is not a Promethean effort, that is, creation _ex nihilo_, but a subtle process of retooling what already exists. Design never begins from scratch, he contends; there is always something “_remedial_ in design.” This proposition will be explored in various registers this month at –empyre, with particular attention paid to the way in which design practices/theories are attentive to the “modest remediation” of experience in today’s political economy. In particular, we endeavor to find or invent conceptual tools to think design at the intersections of planetary urbanization and deep time, bio/nano-technology and neoliberal investment, architecture and computational capital, and design and media studies. We invite you to join in on the conversation! Here is the schedule: Neo-eco-liberalism: Ross Exo Adams (US) and Adrian Parr (US/AU) Mediated Matters: Oron Catts (AU), Luciana Parisi (UK), and A.J. Nocek (US) Urban Data Politics: Etienne Turpin (ID) and Davide Panagia Here are the Bios: Ross Exo Adams (US) is an architect, urbanist and educator whose work looks at the political and historical intersection between circulation and urbanization. He is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Iowa State University. His writing has been published in Log, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Radical Philosophy, Thresholds, Architectural Review among others. Previously he has taught at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, The Architectural Association, the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, NL and at Brighton University in the UK. His work has been exhibited in the Venice Biennale, the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City, the Centre of Contemporary Architecture in Moscow and the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam. As an architect and urban designer he has worked in offices such as MVRDV, Foster Partners, Arup Urban Design and Productora-DF. He holds a Master of Architecture from the Berlage Institute and a Ph.D. from the London Consortium for which he was awarded the 2011 LKE Ozolins Studentship by the RIBA. Adrian Parr (US/AU) specialist on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and has published widely on the sustainability movement, climate change politics, activist culture, and creative practice. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and School of Architecture and Interior Design at the University of Cincinnati. Some of her recent books include the _Deleuze Dictionary_ (ed.) (2005), _Hijacking Sustainability_ (2009), _New Directions in Sustainable Design_ (ed. with Michael Zaretsky) (2010), and _The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics_ (2013). Luciana Parisi (UK) is Reader and Convenor of the PhD programme in Cultural Studies, Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research focuses on philosophy and science to investigate potential conditions for ontological and epistemological change in culture, aesthetics and politics. Specifically engaging with cybernetics, information theories, computation and evolutionary theories, her work analyses the radical transformations of the body, nature, matter and thought in the context of technocapitalist developments in biotechnologies and computation. In 2004, she published _Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire_ (Continuum Press). She has also written within the field of Media Philosophy and
