Re: [-empyre-] escaping work having your mass and monad too
Thinking this into a new formation of practice. Praxis. Discursively and actively--against forgetting. The project I am working on performs operationally in 'information war' 'post-event'. It includes resources such as a school and library. http://occupyeverything.com/category/features/ It is a site of militant research and radical cultural formation. On Mar 12, 2011, at 4:30 PM, simon s...@clear.net.nz wrote: Dear empyreans, Two moments: [to talk to Aristide Antonas's post] escaping work or the work of escaping the representation according to which the telos of every field is visibility correlates with the work of resisting. How to encourage escape but by an escapist's strategy that doesn't end up in escapism? What David Foster Wallace calls the liberal education has this good and admirable goal in its sights, by giving the student to gain insight into the chains binding them to ways of thinking and ways of behaving, leading the student to ask questions, which in themselves are nodal points of escape - points all too soon coopted into an optic of resistance, like the field of a mass action. Recuperation of resistance as information. A new barbarism is intriguing. It smacks of a desire for an effort of thought, of critical thought, or archeology - shouldn't that be a geology? as in a crossing of the threshold of slowmo? - with the quick violence of the earth as the upsetter? The point is taken, however, that this cooption of liberatory knowledge to information, that is, representation, and this appropriation of action to the field of visibility, likewise, representation, tank up civilization - but as we know it, uncommonly well. The desperation of facing urgent situations without recourse to action, is it more or less a black hole for the civilian, more or less a barbarism, for the city, than spontaneous unorganised violence due to the urgency of desperate situations? The political space need not immediately become a place enclosed by the three theatrical walls of a living archive accessible by screen imagery, its fourth porous wall, its magic. If it is not an open space any more, we should look for the exits? I must admit, I am attracted rather than repelled by the concatenation of political space, live archive and interweb or net. And I would like to add the note that it might be precisely the violence and the urgency of desperate situations that make the thought think. Less a tank, than a gnawing at the earth, a disturbance in the field, a sudden inrush, a tremour, more than surface, less than depth. An illiberal, illegal, unauthorised, unorganised and nonhuman violence to the fields of thought and action. Secondly, I have been thrown by recent posts seeking to establish fields of names and negotiate those fields in terms of singular actions, singular movements. To identify them with the singularity of an event or a monad. Whether talking of an historically unfolding field of political action, liberatory or encapturing. Or, in fact, enchanting and magical. If we are with Badiou, then the event itself, in its singularity, has given rise to this open set of subjectivities we know by their names. If however we are with Deleuze, then the individual as a diffuse, clear confused, distinct obscure field is the event and the mass captured by its monadic singularity has escaped representation and cannot in turn comprise representatives of whatever revolution in thought and action has occurred. Except as a branding exercise? Best, Simon Taylor www.squarewhiteworld.com www.brazilcoffee.co.nz ___ 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-] escaping work having your mass and monad too
I'm neither 'with' Deleuze or Badiou. I am a feminist. On Mar 12, 2011, at 6:26 PM, Cara Baldwin carabaldwi...@gmail.com wrote: Thinking this into a new formation of practice. Praxis. Discursively and actively--against forgetting. The project I am working on performs operationally in 'information war' 'post-event'. It includes resources such as a school and library. http://occupyeverything.com/category/features/ It is a site of militant research and radical cultural formation. On Mar 12, 2011, at 4:30 PM, simon s...@clear.net.nz wrote: Dear empyreans, Two moments: [to talk to Aristide Antonas's post] escaping work or the work of escaping the representation according to which the telos of every field is visibility correlates with the work of resisting. How to encourage escape but by an escapist's strategy that doesn't end up in escapism? What David Foster Wallace calls the liberal education has this good and admirable goal in its sights, by giving the student to gain insight into the chains binding them to ways of thinking and ways of behaving, leading the student to ask questions, which in themselves are nodal points of escape - points all too soon coopted into an optic of resistance, like the field of a mass action. Recuperation of resistance as information. A new barbarism is intriguing. It smacks of a desire for an effort of thought, of critical thought, or archeology - shouldn't that be a geology? as in a crossing of the threshold of slowmo? - with the quick violence of the earth as the upsetter? The point is taken, however, that this cooption of liberatory knowledge to information, that is, representation, and this appropriation of action to the field of visibility, likewise, representation, tank up civilization - but as we know it, uncommonly well. The desperation of facing urgent situations without recourse to action, is it more or less a black hole for the civilian, more or less a barbarism, for the city, than spontaneous unorganised violence due to the urgency of desperate situations? The political space need not immediately become a place enclosed by the three theatrical walls of a living archive accessible by screen imagery, its fourth porous wall, its magic. If it is not an open space any more, we should look for the exits? I must admit, I am attracted rather than repelled by the concatenation of political space, live archive and interweb or net. And I would like to add the note that it might be precisely the violence and the urgency of desperate situations that make the thought think. Less a tank, than a gnawing at the earth, a disturbance in the field, a sudden inrush, a tremour, more than surface, less than depth. An illiberal, illegal, unauthorised, unorganised and nonhuman violence to the fields of thought and action. Secondly, I have been thrown by recent posts seeking to establish fields of names and negotiate those fields in terms of singular actions, singular movements. To identify them with the singularity of an event or a monad. Whether talking of an historically unfolding field of political action, liberatory or encapturing. Or, in fact, enchanting and magical. If we are with Badiou, then the event itself, in its singularity, has given rise to this open set of subjectivities we know by their names. If however we are with Deleuze, then the individual as a diffuse, clear confused, distinct obscure field is the event and the mass captured by its monadic singularity has escaped representation and cannot in turn comprise representatives of whatever revolution in thought and action has occurred. Except as a branding exercise? Best, Simon Taylor www.squarewhiteworld.com www.brazilcoffee.co.nz ___ 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-] the act of forgetting
Thinking this into a new formation of practice. A move--against forgetting. The project I am working on exists solidly in a declared 'information war': http://occupyeverything.com/category/features/ and includes resources such as a school and library... On 12/03/2011 05:56, Joel Tauber joeltau...@gmail.com wrote: Although we are all bombarded by seemingly endless amounts of imagery and “news”, I am convinced that we are also all suffering from information deprivation, and in a multiplicity of ways. While media conglomerates and government powers shield information from us continually – and spin the information that we are being fed – I think we are also all guilty of collectively forgetting our histories. Information is ignored even when we have access to it. Certain things are just too difficult to face. Government handouts, unregulated corporations, corporate takeovers of the media and of the government, industry’s devastation of the environmentS These are very old stories. Why should we be surprised by these things when they continue to happen? How can we continue to allow them to occur? Simon Biggs si...@littlepig.org.uk http://www.littlepig.org.uk/ s.bi...@eca.ac.uk http://www.elmcip.net/ http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201 ___ 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-] most influential, most dangerous, most courageous women
What does this have to do with drawing, you ask? In a typically modernist approach to figure and field we're instructed to balance figure and ground in a way that is 'convincing'. Even if we 'solve' this problem by way of recourse to an overall composition-the multitudes-we are left with the responsibility for our own discernment and action. Sent from my iPhone On Mar 6, 2011, at 10:51 PM, Cara Baldwin carabaldwi...@gmail.com wrote: where might 'we' might best focus our energies; figure and ground or the multitude? My answer to this question took less than a second, actually-- the multitudes. Figure and ground will take care of themselves. This is an expanded field, certainly; and one in which figures are articulate led not just differently-but more or less visibly. 'According to a study by the Centre for Women and Gender Studies, nearly 85 per cent of the United Arab Emirates population of four million is migrant workers. In Bahrain and Saudi Arabia 65 per cent of the workforce are expats. In Kuwait it is 82 per cent, and in Qatar almost 90 per cent.' Women are systematically and historically divested of rights and representation. They resist definition and are difficult to organize because of their illegibility-at a scale that is global, and radically local. On Mar 6, 2011, at 3:06 PM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: Dear Christina, allow me to dissent a little bit :) At the Intifada the women had a very crucial role, I met Leila Khaled some years ago in Amman and her tale of her hitchjacking of two planes in the Eighties: is really atonishing. And I come myself from a generation of women engaged in gerilla warfare in South America. I spent four years as political prisoner in Uruguay for that. I think it's a kind of media issue, we common women don't fit in the hero's stereotyps. Cheers Ana On Sun, Mar 6, 2011 at 7:14 AM, christina christ...@christinamcphee.net wrote: 'most dangerous' --... with help from friends-- Vera Zasulich, Hélène Cixhous, Patti Smith, Judith Butler Amelia Bloomer, Scheherazade, Rosa Robata, Sofia Perovskaya Lilith, Hildegard of Bingen, Carolee Schneemann, Adrian Piper Cindy Sherman, Julian of Norwich, bel hooks, Camille Paglia Jingyu Xiang,Vivienne Westwood, Isak Dinesen, Jeanne d'Arc Gertrude Stein, Duygy Asena , Donna Haraway, Maria Callas Grace Paley, Colette, Margaret Atwood, Regina Jose Galindo Leslie Marmon Silko, Eliabeth Cady Stanton, Nan Goldin, Linda Nochlin Boadicea, Lee Lozano, Sofia Perovskaya, Valie Export Hannah Wilke,Rosa Robata,Lee Krasner,Lourdes Casal Valdes Tracey Emin, Scheherazade,Billie Holliday, Amelia Bloomer Marina Abramovic, Angela Davis, Edie Sedgwick, Jessica Mitford Marguerite Duras, Phoolan Devi, Joan Didion, Felipa de Souza Kate Millett, Pina Bausch, Charlotte Corday, Lidia Cabrera yet there are more On Mar 5, 2011, at 9:42 PM, christina wrote: Something is happening when a field becomes visible-- a field of women in Bahrain countering a police line, a field of women in Ivory Coast (shot down, six)--it's impossible not to speak of this new site of action. Remember when the only (s)hero job for women in the intifada was to get oneself blown up? Two days from now will be March 8-- Internatinal Women's Day Centenary 1911-2011. http://www.internationalwomensday.com/ What happens when finally enough people start to have faith that it actually matters for half of humankind to have human rights? How does this field become visible? ___ 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 -- http://anavaldes.wordpress.com http://passagenwerk.wordpress.com http://caravia.stumbleupon.com http://www.crusading.se Gondolgatan 2 l tr 12832 Skarpnäck Sweden tel +468-943288 mobil 4670-3213370 When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. — Leonardo da Vinci ___ 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-] most influential, most dangerous, most courageous women
where might 'we' might best focus our energies; figure and ground or the multitude? My answer to this question took less than a second, actually-- the multitudes. Figure and ground will take care of themselves. This is an expanded field, certainly; and one in which figures are articulate led not just differently-but more or less visibly. 'According to a study by the Centre for Women and Gender Studies, nearly 85 per cent of the United Arab Emirates population of four million is migrant workers. In Bahrain and Saudi Arabia 65 per cent of the workforce are expats. In Kuwait it is 82 per cent, and in Qatar almost 90 per cent.' Women are systematically and historically divested of rights and representation. They resist definition and are difficult to organize because of their illegibility-at a scale that is global, and radically local. On Mar 6, 2011, at 3:06 PM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: Dear Christina, allow me to dissent a little bit :) At the Intifada the women had a very crucial role, I met Leila Khaled some years ago in Amman and her tale of her hitchjacking of two planes in the Eighties: is really atonishing. And I come myself from a generation of women engaged in gerilla warfare in South America. I spent four years as political prisoner in Uruguay for that. I think it's a kind of media issue, we common women don't fit in the hero's stereotyps. Cheers Ana On Sun, Mar 6, 2011 at 7:14 AM, christina christ...@christinamcphee.net wrote: 'most dangerous' --... with help from friends-- Vera Zasulich, Hélène Cixhous, Patti Smith, Judith Butler Amelia Bloomer, Scheherazade, Rosa Robata, Sofia Perovskaya Lilith, Hildegard of Bingen, Carolee Schneemann, Adrian Piper Cindy Sherman, Julian of Norwich, bel hooks, Camille Paglia Jingyu Xiang,Vivienne Westwood, Isak Dinesen, Jeanne d'Arc Gertrude Stein, Duygy Asena , Donna Haraway, Maria Callas Grace Paley, Colette, Margaret Atwood, Regina Jose Galindo Leslie Marmon Silko, Eliabeth Cady Stanton, Nan Goldin, Linda Nochlin Boadicea, Lee Lozano, Sofia Perovskaya, Valie Export Hannah Wilke,Rosa Robata,Lee Krasner,Lourdes Casal Valdes Tracey Emin, Scheherazade,Billie Holliday, Amelia Bloomer Marina Abramovic, Angela Davis, Edie Sedgwick, Jessica Mitford Marguerite Duras, Phoolan Devi, Joan Didion, Felipa de Souza Kate Millett, Pina Bausch, Charlotte Corday, Lidia Cabrera yet there are more On Mar 5, 2011, at 9:42 PM, christina wrote: Something is happening when a field becomes visible-- a field of women in Bahrain countering a police line, a field of women in Ivory Coast (shot down, six)--it's impossible not to speak of this new site of action. Remember when the only (s)hero job for women in the intifada was to get oneself blown up? Two days from now will be March 8-- Internatinal Women's Day Centenary 1911-2011. http://www.internationalwomensday.com/ What happens when finally enough people start to have faith that it actually matters for half of humankind to have human rights? How does this field become visible? ___ 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 -- http://anavaldes.wordpress.com http://passagenwerk.wordpress.com http://caravia.stumbleupon.com http://www.crusading.se Gondolgatan 2 l tr 12832 Skarpnäck Sweden tel +468-943288 mobil 4670-3213370 When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. — Leonardo da Vinci ___ 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-] most influential, most dangerous, most courageous women
I hear you, Christina. I was thinking we working additively and collectively and I wanted to shift ever so slightly to Andre Mesquita's writing about Monica Rizzolli's work through the lens of Laura Mulvey's Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. I also wanted to fade, or suggest return to this idea in light of a paradigm shift that has / is in the process of unfolding now in terms of media and women's legibility, discursive and corporeal action. And here, I should outline my own figure as a Marxist feminist and artist/art historian. I think what you've done, and what Andre and Monica are doing challenges our perceived notions of disciplines and the discourses around them in a way that makes use of the open field--occupies it as an area of settlement and research. On Mar 7, 2011, at 12:24 PM, christina christ...@christinamcphee.net wrote: Try finding information online about many of these women. These are not all famous people. Check it out. Some are, many are not. Yes, Les Annalistes had a profound contribution to 'the history of everyday life' (Aries, etc.) Natalie Zemon Davis is a particularly notable historian in re the 'invisible' in women's history. The heretics of Carcasson-- I used Ladurie's book as the basis of a new media studio at Santa Cruz (undergraduate digital lab). Let this exercise support one another , not tear each other down. Hoda Aminan Eula Gray Mary Wollstronecraft Mary Whang Choi Elizabeth Gurley Fl Sussan Tamassebi Rosa Luxembourg Asadah Faramaziha Parvin Ardalan Suely Rolnick Esha Momeimi Axelline Soloman Elena Gil Phyllis Wheatly Frances E. W. Harper Gloria Anzaldua Shirin Ebadi Ingrid Washinawatok Ana Mendieta Marija Gimbutas Helen Keller Mercedes Amaiana Fusae Ichikawa Lola Rodriguez de Tio Florence Kelly Victoria Mxenge Nawal El-Saadawi Ada Lovelace Eileen Gray Pat Hearn Elizabeth Peratrovich Minerva Mirabal Sappho Sylvia Beach Marilyn Monroe Nancy Spero Minerva Bernardino Ginetta Sagan Lee Bul Margaret Atwood Lee Lozano Charlotte Moorman Jane Jacobs Joan Mitchell On Mar 7, 2011, at 8:54 AM, Ana Valdés wrote: Allow me to add some Marxistic perspective to the discussion :) But if we see which kind of women we know about, for their lives or for their deeds: the most of them are aristocrats, nuns or well educated women, an exception at the beginning of this century. The class prospective is also applicable to men, we know about generals, emperors or kings, but very little about peasants, soldiers and workers. The Academy and the books are often written from above and it was only the Annales School, in France, who started to talk about les petites histoires, it means the tales of everydays life. As in Mointalloux, the book written by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladourie or Bread of Dreams, written by the Italian historian Piero Camporesi. These books are about European heresies, crushed by the authority of the Church of Rome in alliance with wealthy princes. Very few women were able to fight with their own class and with the oppression of the system. Many of them chose to be nuns, as Hildegard of Bingen, to avoid matrimony and mootherhood, to be able to sing, write and create. Ana On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 8:02 AM, cara baldwin carabaldwi...@gmail.com wrote: What does this have to do with drawing, you ask? In a typically modernist approach to figure and field we're instructed to balance figure and ground in a way that is 'convincing'. Even if we 'solve' this problem by way of recourse to an overall composition-the multitudes-we are left with the responsibility for our own discernment and action. Sent from my iPhone On Mar 6, 2011, at 10:51 PM, Cara Baldwin carabaldwi...@gmail.com wrote: where might 'we' might best focus our energies; figure and ground or the multitude? My answer to this question took less than a second, actually-- the multitudes. Figure and ground will take care of themselves. This is an expanded field, certainly; and one in which figures are articulate led not just differently-but more or less visibly. 'According to a study by the Centre for Women and Gender Studies, nearly 85 per cent of the United Arab Emirates population of four million is migrant workers. In Bahrain and Saudi Arabia 65 per cent of the workforce are expats. In Kuwait it is 82 per cent, and in Qatar almost 90 per cent.' Women are systematically and historically divested of rights and representation. They resist definition and are difficult to organize because of their illegibility-at a scale that is global, and radically local. On Mar 6, 2011, at 3:06 PM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: Dear Christina, allow me to dissent a little bit :) At the Intifada the women had a very crucial role, I met Leila Khaled some years ago in Amman and her tale of her hitchjacking of two planes in the Eighties: is really atonishing. And I come
Re: [-empyre-] most influential, most dangerous, most courageous women
And what I'm struck by is the glorious impossibility of completing this project-the excess beyond what is known and visible. On Mar 7, 2011, at 1:11 PM, Ana Valdes agora...@gmail.com wrote: Some names I should like to add, Flora Tristan, grandmother of Gauguin and one of the first socialists, Florence Nightingale, the writer Nathalie Barney, the Nobelprize Rigoberta Menchu, Emma Goldman, Virginia Woolf, Christine de Pisan, The Rennaisance painter Artemisia Gentileschi, the suden Kristina of Sweden, who abdicated and died in Rome. Ana Sent from my iPad On 7 mar 2011, at 21:24, christina christ...@christinamcphee.net wrote: Try finding information online about many of these women. These are not all famous people. Check it out. Some are, many are not. Yes, Les Annalistes had a profound contribution to 'the history of everyday life' (Aries, etc.) Natalie Zemon Davis is a particularly notable historian in re the 'invisible' in women's history. The heretics of Carcasson-- I used Ladurie's book as the basis of a new media studio at Santa Cruz (undergraduate digital lab). Let this exercise support one another , not tear each other down. Hoda Aminan Eula Gray Mary Wollstronecraft Mary Whang Choi Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Sussan Tamassebi Rosa Luxembourg Asadah Faramaziha Parvin Ardalan Suely Rolnick Esha Momeimi Axelline Soloman Elena Gil Phyllis Wheatly Frances E. W. Harper Gloria Anzaldua Shirin Ebadi Ingrid Washinawatok Ana Mendieta Marija Gimbutas Helen Keller Mercedes Amaiana Fusae Ichikawa Lola Rodriguez de Tio Florence Kelly Victoria Mxenge Nawal El-Saadawi Ada Lovelace Eileen Gray Pat Hearn Elizabeth Peratrovich Minerva Mirabal Sappho Sylvia Beach Marilyn Monroe Nancy Spero Minerva Bernardino Ginetta Sagan Lee Bul Margaret Atwood Lee Lozano Charlotte Moorman Jane Jacobs Joan Mitchell On Mar 7, 2011, at 8:54 AM, Ana Valdés wrote: Allow me to add some Marxistic perspective to the discussion :) But if we see which kind of women we know about, for their lives or for their deeds: the most of them are aristocrats, nuns or well educated women, an exception at the beginning of this century. The class prospective is also applicable to men, we know about generals, emperors or kings, but very little about peasants, soldiers and workers. The Academy and the books are often written from above and it was only the Annales School, in France, who started to talk about les petites histoires, it means the tales of everydays life. As in Mointalloux, the book written by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladourie or Bread of Dreams, written by the Italian historian Piero Camporesi. These books are about European heresies, crushed by the authority of the Church of Rome in alliance with wealthy princes. Very few women were able to fight with their own class and with the oppression of the system. Many of them chose to be nuns, as Hildegard of Bingen, to avoid matrimony and mootherhood, to be able to sing, write and create. Ana On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 8:02 AM, cara baldwin carabaldwi...@gmail.com wrote: What does this have to do with drawing, you ask? In a typically modernist approach to figure and field we're instructed to balance figure and ground in a way that is 'convincing'. Even if we 'solve' this problem by way of recourse to an overall composition-the multitudes-we are left with the responsibility for our own discernment and action. Sent from my iPhone On Mar 6, 2011, at 10:51 PM, Cara Baldwin carabaldwi...@gmail.com wrote: where might 'we' might best focus our energies; figure and ground or the multitude? My answer to this question took less than a second, actually-- the multitudes. Figure and ground will take care of themselves. This is an expanded field, certainly; and one in which figures are articulate led not just differently-but more or less visibly. 'According to a study by the Centre for Women and Gender Studies, nearly 85 per cent of the United Arab Emirates population of four million is migrant workers. In Bahrain and Saudi Arabia 65 per cent of the workforce are expats. In Kuwait it is 82 per cent, and in Qatar almost 90 per cent.' Women are systematically and historically divested of rights and representation. They resist definition and are difficult to organize because of their illegibility-at a scale that is global, and radically local. On Mar 6, 2011, at 3:06 PM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: Dear Christina, allow me to dissent a little bit :) At the Intifada the women had a very crucial role, I met Leila Khaled some years ago in Amman and her tale of her hitchjacking of two planes in the Eighties: is really atonishing. And I come myself from a generation of women engaged in gerilla warfare in South America. I spent four years as political prisoner in Uruguay for that. I think it's a kind of media issue, we common women don't fit
Re: [-empyre-] Hactivating Design
we're fine phones are dead and they cut off internet at kerr hall 33 minutes ago On 11/21/09 12:41 PM, Kevin Hamilton k...@uiuc.edu wrote: Glad to see the HCI discussion come up here, and in the context of questions about Design in education. Perhaps I'm just pessimistic, but I don't think we have long before today's New Media programs are squeezed out of fine arts curricula by HCI and its cousins in Industrial Design and Graphic Design. HCI is hard to distinguish for many an upper-level administrator from the Digital Media / New Media programs born in the last ten years. The confusion is understandable from a distance, as HCI borrows increasingly from New Media and Computer Arts for methods, media, and even critical language - all to the consumerist ends outlined by Nick. It's easy for students to distinguish between the two, however, given the easy product tie-ins of HCI and other design education. Much current design education is, as Nick implies, essentially an exercise in meta-shopping. (Who's a better shopper than the one who hangs around the factory line?) I fully expect that the sort of hires that resulted in our current, even mildly-critical digital arts programs will not come again, except perhaps for in the most elite and high- price-tag programs of the world. So what are we to do, if we care about exercising a role as educators and researchers beyond the provision of politicized recess for students who won't need to work for a living after school? 1 - Make hay (or raise Cain?) while the sun shines - this seems to be the bang.lab approach, as far as I can tell ( I can't imagine that Calit2 will support these projects for long-term? If so, then great!) T.A.Z., tactics over strategies, all that temporary stuff is always possible, and maybe the only way. (I also think here of Wodizcko, trained as an Industrial Designer, but taking Papandek's ideas and moving right out of that field in the 60s/70s.) 2 - Prepare for the inevitable change in our institutional waters, by acquainting ourselves with the methods of our future partners/bosses/ overlords, making ready to live in their world as critical members who ask tough, informed questions. 3 - Identify our current work as preservable, something to be protected in the name of knowledge, like the older arts of traditional glass and ceramics. 4 - Depart from the arts and sciences altogether, to identify ourselves with media studies in the humanities. (Christiane, can you speak to this option?) Bank on the whole practice-based research trend, keeping a wary eye on the Social Sciences as possible, occasional, collaborator. I'm trying a little bit of all these things myself, with increasing hope for option #4. In addition to skepticism about the consumerist ends of design and arts education, I'm also looking to steer clear of the technocratic, ahistorical progress machine of modern science (sustainability as economic catalyst). Any thoughts? Maybe a public listserv isn't the safest place to have this conversation? Kevin Hamilton On Nov 20, 2009, at 2:38 PM, nicholas knouf wrote: Brooke, Ricardo, and everyone, Thanks for your interesting points regarding notions of design, designing, and designers. This has also been on my mind recently, especially as a result of my position within a traditional human-computer interaction program. Here there is no questioning the role of the designer: the designer is to be subservient to the needs of the user, where the user is defined as that constructed by corporations and the market. Researchers actively seek out relationships with corporate sponsors and corporate research labs. As a result, there is no discussion regarding broader societal issues, excepting where they intersect with present corporate priorities, as in the rhetoric of sustainability---and of course there the limits of the conversation are already set, again by the market. This situation caused me to write a polemical paper for the main conference in HCI, ACM SIGCHI, called HCI for the Real World (http://zeitkunst.org/publications/hci-real-world). In it, and this is the main point of my post, I draw heavily on on the work of Victor Papanek, an industrial designer who wrote, for me, a very influential book originally published in 1970 entitled _Design for the Real World_. He focuses on the role of the designer, not only in the composition of the products made, but prior to that, in the very selection of projects to work on: ...I must agree that the designer bears a responsibility for the way the products he designs are received at the market place. But this is still a narrow and parochial view. The designer¹s responsibility must go far beyond these considerations. His social and moral judgment must be brought into place long before he begins to design, since he has to make a judgment, and a prior judgment at that, as to whether the
Re: [-empyre-] Demand Nothing, Occupy Everything?
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/11/21/18629828.php On 11/21/09 10:24 PM, Cara Baldwin feraly...@earthlink.net wrote: --- Cynthia Walker Approximately 300 supporters outside Kerr Hall. #kerroccupation about a minute ago · Comment · Like Hide Cynthia Walker 9:51 The barricades are up! 2 minutes ago · Comment · Like On 11/21/09 12:31 PM, micha cardenas / azdel slade azdelsl...@gmail.com wrote: I think its curious how all of these websites, like the Tarnac 9, the invisible committee calling for uc occupations and the necrosocial all have the same wordpress theme... 2009/11/20 nicholas knouf na...@cornell.edu: And on this point, a text by a group at Berkeley on The Necrosocial: http://anticapitalprojects.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/the-necrosocial/ Their interrogation of the role of high theory, capital, and the University qua Institution is extremely cogent at this moment. nick Marco Deseriis wrote: Hi Micha, yes, thank you for sharing those precious links. At UCSD, very few students, faculty and staff that I've talked to knew about or support the strike do. Myself and a handful of other faculty, staff and students are striking, but is the very idea of a strike not viral but more based in monolothic constituencies and factory models of labor? No, I just think that after 3-4 decades of resting on dreams of unabated growth Americans (and Californians in particular) need to be re-educated and reawakened as to what it means to lose one's job, as to what it means to fight for it, and what it means to risk of losing your job for defending it. So thank you for taking on this rather humongous task ;-) To me it is not a matter of virality but of culture. People in Latin America, Asia, Europe and all over the world keep going on strike for defending their jobs, demanding higher wages, security on the workplace, etc. It is only in this country that three decades of brainwashing have led to the obliteration of historic memory (the cancellation of May1st being the most notable example), and to the perception that going on strike is somehow out of fashion. In actual fact, there exists a growing global movement to defend public education, and to build an entirely different model of knowledge sharing. You are probably familiar with this site: http://www.edu-factory.org which reports the news of 15 arrests at UCLA: http://www.edu-factory.org/edu15/index.php?option=com_contentview=article; i d=240:students-arrested-at-uclacatid=34:strugglesItemid=53 and whose picture eloquently show the response of public authorities to this growing mobilization. Perhaps the spreading occupations are more viral? I wonder about this as I start going on strike tomorrow and join actions at UCSD... Well, it is not up to me to say that strikes and occupations are just two sides of the same coin. ___ 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 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
