Re: [-empyre-] Social Media Use across Campaigns for Social Justice
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear David, and John, Your critiques of Ricardo's post seem unfair to me. Your claim that all social media is problematic and that artists who work through these platforms in a critical way seems to provide little leeway. The point of an artist using any tool (and social media is a tool) as a means to make a critical engagement is what artists have been doing for years. Are you saying that social media is evil and that therefore we as artists need to find other tools? Is all digital bad so therefore artists need to go back to the analog methods of the canvas, paint, pencil, and paper? It is very difficult for me to imagine that this is what you intended. Where would you then position this very list serve -empyre? Renate Ferro Ricardo writes: While the research and scholarship you present is extremely important to consider and to understand. It also assumes that artists and activist have no critical awareness of these issues of power above all things or below all things (of algorithms or robots), and I think this wrong. - we have never been utopian about technology or imagined the power and computing in the 20th century would be or become platforms of justice or concern. But we also did not want to fall into the no-waynout zone of the apocalyptic-that seems to some degree at play in your scholarship. -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) 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://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-empyre-] Welcome to week 2 on empye Social Media/Social Justice.
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi empyreans, While we set the rather practical tone for our December discussion Social Media/Social Justice last week, we will expand with three new guests: Ricardo Dominguez, Richard Grusin, and Rahul Mukherjee. Welcome to all three. Looking forward to it. Renate Week 2: Ricardo Dominguez is a co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), a group who developed virtual sit-in technologies in solidarity with the Zapatistas communities in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1998. His recent Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab project (http://bang.transreal.org/) with Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cardenas, Amy Sara Carroll, and Elle Mehrmand, the Transborder Immigrant Tool (a GPS cell phone safety net tool for crossing the Mexico/US border) was the winner of “Transnational Communities Award” (2008), an award funded by Cultural Contact, Endowment for Culture Mexico–US and handed out by the US Embassy in Mexico. It also was funded by CALIT2 and the UCSD Center for the Humanities. The Transborder Immigrant Tool has been exhibited at the 2010 California Biennial (OCMA), Toronto Free Gallery, Canada (2011), The Van Abbemuseum, Netherlands (2013), ZKM, Germany (2013), as well as a number of other national and international venues. The project was also under investigation by the US Congress in 2009-2010 and was reviewed by Glenn Beck in 2010 as a gesture that potentially “dissolved” the U.S. border with its poetry. Dominguez is an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, in the Visual Arts Department, a Hellman Fellow, and Principal/Principle Investigator at CALIT2 and the Performative Nano-Robotics Lab at SME, UCSD. He also is co-founder of *particle group*, with artists Diane Ludin, Nina Waisman, Amy Sara Carroll, whose art project about nano-toxicology entitled *Particles of Interest: Tales of the Matter Market* has been presented at the House of World Cultures, Berlin (2007), the San Diego Museum of Art (2008), Oi Futuro, Brazil (2008), CAL NanoSystems Institute, UCLA (2009), Medialab-Prado, Madrid (2009), E-Poetry Festival, Barcelona, Spain (2009), Nanosférica, NYU (2010), and SOMA, Mexico City, Mexico (2012, and the Cornell Biennial, “Intimate Cosmologies: The Aesthetics of Scale in an Age of Nanotechnology,” (2014). *particle group* Richard Grusin (US) is Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies and Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, a position he assumed in July 2010. He received his Ph.D. in 1983 from the University of California-Berkeley. He has published numerous chapters and articles and written four books. The first, Transcendentalist Hermeneutics: Institutional Authority and the Higher Criticism of the Bible (Duke, 1991), concerns the influence of European (primarily German) theories of biblical interpretation on the New England Transcendentalists. His more recent work concerns historical, cultural, and aesthetic aspects of technologies of visual representation. With Jay David Bolter he is the author of Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT, 1999), which sketches out a genealogy of new media, beginning with the contradictory visual logics underlying contemporary digital media; Remediation has become required reading for undergraduates and graduate students in the field of new media studies. Culture, Technology, and the Creation of America’s National Parks (Cambridge, 2004), focuses on the problematics of visual representation involved in the founding of America's national parks. His fourth book, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (Palgrave, 2010), argues that in an era of heightened securitization, socially networked US and global media work to pre-mediate collective affects of anticipation and connectivity, while also perpetuating low levels of apprehension or fear. As Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies he has organized three successful international conferences: The Nonhuman Turn in 21st Century Studies; Dark Side of the Digital; and Anthropocene Feminism. He is currently editing books based upon the plenary addresses for these conferences. Rahul Mukherjee (IN, US) Rahul Mukherjee is Assistant Professor of Television and New Media Studies in the Cinema Studies Program, Department of English at University of Pennsylvania. He is working towards conceptualizing the materiality of mediated technoscience publics based on case studies of environmental debates related to cell towers and nuclear energy. https://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/people/RahulMukherjee ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] in solidarity--an open call to our subscriber list
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear Tony, Great to hear from you on these issues. This one portion of your email in relation to the voter turnout thought would be interesting to consider in light of our topic Social Media/Social Justice. You wrote: We recently passed through a mid-term election where the Obama administration seemed to be (mis)recognized as a prime symptom / cause of the U.S. polity and economy's problems rather than attempting their solution in some limited fashion (and against fierce and consistent obstruction from the GOP, by the way). Portions of Democratic support in the electorate stayed home, hence the loss of the Senate.. Why does the electorate stay home? I wonder what would have happened to the election if the Ferguson case had occurred before the election. Statistics now cite that only 36.4 per cent age of eligible voters actually went to the polls this past November. Only 21 percent of young voters between the ages of 18 to 24 went out to vote. I recently heard a report that questioned the outdated voting methods of our election process. Shouldn't it be possible to digitize the voting process? To vote via email, or social media, or phone, or text or whatever? The New York Legislature and the Board of Elections was the very last state to update voting machines to electronic ones in 2010 despite the fact that since 1985 officials had been suggesting that the old lever machines were outdated. Our own state assemblywoman, Barbara Lifton, spent hours working with researchers and investigating the the fairest and most just machines to replace the antiquated machines. Tim and I spend quite a bit of time organizing and volunteering to get out the vote in the Town of Caroline in upstate New York. We have an extraordinarily high voter turn out but we call each family to remind them to vote, we offer rides to the polls, we send out get out the vote information the week before the election, and we poll watch the night of the election calling every voter that has not voted before 6pm. Yes that takes close to twenty to thirty volunteers in a national election and a few less in off elections. I just read that some municipalities in Canada actually have instituted online voting. The country of Estonia also has national pins that they have instituted to confirm online identities in the voting process. How easy it would be if everything was networked digitally online. Some sources say that close to 95 per cent of Americans have access online. How much could be saved in improving the efficiency of the system. Just a thought after reflecting about the frustration of low voter turnout but high energy in the streets over the past few weeks. How and will this energy translate to the next election will be something to watch and hope for. Back in Ithaca, Renate -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) 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://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Welcome Patty Zimmermann
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Anyone following twitter on the demonstrations? Occupy wall street is calling for a massive day of demonstrations next weekend. Anyone have information about that? Also thought I would post this Newsweek article about the protests worldwide including Tokyo. http://www.newsweek.com/ferguson-eric-garner-protests-sprawl-worldwide-289867 On Sat, Dec 6, 2014 at 10:48 PM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- I was now on the live Ustream and saw Denver march, amazing and encouraging Ana On Sun, Dec 7, 2014 at 1:41 AM, Renate Ferro renatefe...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- aggregate, permeate, migrate. Thanks Patty for your insightful post. Tonight Tim and I are in New York City staying in midtown just a few blocks from Grand Central Station. It has been incredibly rainy here in the city but just a few minutes ago as our taxi skirted between hoards of police cars with lights and sirens blaring, most traffic was being diverted away from Grand Central. Via twitter we found out that there is a massive die in in Grand Central Station. Reports are that there are a hundred or so mass demonstrators but the spectacle is created by the flashing lights and non-stop sirens and noise blasts of the police. I am wondering if our subscribers have any thoughts about twitter's force in not only in catalyzing the protestors #ICantBreathe #EricGarner and but also those of the police actions. What about Vine and Instagram? Are urban and regional/local movements being organized, catalyzed in similar ways or are their other distinctions? What do you think? On Sat, Dec 6, 2014 at 11:24 AM, Patricia Zimmermann pa...@ithaca.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- DISPATCHES FROM ITHACA NEW YORK USA Permeable media ecologies in the age of I CAN'T BREATHE protests: Local independent online only newspaper sources from students newspaper spot reporting multimedia, a student print journalist, and an amateur cell phone vertical-composed video of speech by Tom Rochon, President of Ithaca College, in a story about Ithaca College demonstrations in the campus center and administration building Thursday December 4. Collaging sources, perspectives, and recycling here. I am noticing all of the push outs via email forwards, listservs, and social media of the major demonstrations and actions in urban areas with all their spectacle. But I find the multiplying of these smaller, localized, microterritory demonstrations so compelling as they aggregate, permeate, migrate. http://ithacavoice.com/2014/12/student-protesters-hold-demonstration-confront-ithaca-colleges-president/ Patricia R. Zimmermann, Ph.D. Professor of Screen Studies Roy H. Park School of Communication Codirector, Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival Ithaca College 953 Danby Road Ithaca, New York 14850 USA http://faculty.ithaca.edu:83/patty/ http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Renate Ferro renatefe...@gmail.com Sent: Saturday, December 6, 2014 9:21 AM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: [-empyre-] Welcome Patty Zimmermann --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Over the next couple of days we will be joined by Patty Zimmerman. We welcome Patty to empyre once again. We are always so appreciative of her participation on empyre and respect not only her political and moral compass but the amazing work she does at our neighborhood institution Ithaca College and the curatorial work she does with FLEFF, the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. Welcome Patty. Patricia Zimmermann (US)is professor of screen studies at Ithaca College. She also serves codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff), a multidisciplinary festival that embraces and interrogates sustainability across all of its forms-- economic, social, ecological, political, cultural, technological, aesthetic and sustainable development--through film, video, new media, installation, performance, literature, music, panels, and dialogues. She is the author of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Indiana)and States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies (Minnesota) as well as coeditor of Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (California). With coauthor Dale Hudson, her forthcoming book is Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places (Palgrave), to be published in Spring 2015, which examines over 130 new media and performance projects from across the globe. She was the Ida Beam Professor in Cinema and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa
[-empyre-] Welcome Patty Zimmermann
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Over the next couple of days we will be joined by Patty Zimmerman. We welcome Patty to empyre once again. We are always so appreciative of her participation on empyre and respect not only her political and moral compass but the amazing work she does at our neighborhood institution Ithaca College and the curatorial work she does with FLEFF, the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. Welcome Patty. Patricia Zimmermann (US)is professor of screen studies at Ithaca College. She also serves codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff), a multidisciplinary festival that embraces and interrogates sustainability across all of its forms-- economic, social, ecological, political, cultural, technological, aesthetic and sustainable development--through film, video, new media, installation, performance, literature, music, panels, and dialogues. She is the author of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Indiana)and States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies (Minnesota) as well as coeditor of Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (California). With coauthor Dale Hudson, her forthcoming book is Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places (Palgrave), to be published in Spring 2015, which examines over 130 new media and performance projects from across the globe. She was the Ida Beam Professor in Cinema and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa and the Shaw Foundation Professor of New Media in the School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She also serves as an envoy for documentary film and new media for the American Film Showcase of the US State Department. She has published over 200 scholarly essays and journalistic articles on documentary, media history, screen theory, and new media in Screen, Genders, Journal of Film and Video, Afterimage, Framework, Asian Communications Quarterly, Cinema Journal, Wide Angle, Cultural Studies, DOX, Film History, Socialist Review, Journal of Communications Inquiry, Afterimage, The Moving Image. The Independent, Gannett Newspapers, Afterimage. Website: http://faculty.ithaca.edu/patty/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Welcome Patty Zimmermann
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- aggregate, permeate, migrate. Thanks Patty for your insightful post. Tonight Tim and I are in New York City staying in midtown just a few blocks from Grand Central Station. It has been incredibly rainy here in the city but just a few minutes ago as our taxi skirted between hoards of police cars with lights and sirens blaring, most traffic was being diverted away from Grand Central. Via twitter we found out that there is a massive die in in Grand Central Station. Reports are that there are a hundred or so mass demonstrators but the spectacle is created by the flashing lights and non-stop sirens and noise blasts of the police. I am wondering if our subscribers have any thoughts about twitter's force in not only in catalyzing the protestors #ICantBreathe #EricGarner and but also those of the police actions. What about Vine and Instagram? Are urban and regional/local movements being organized, catalyzed in similar ways or are their other distinctions? What do you think? On Sat, Dec 6, 2014 at 11:24 AM, Patricia Zimmermann pa...@ithaca.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- DISPATCHES FROM ITHACA NEW YORK USA Permeable media ecologies in the age of I CAN'T BREATHE protests: Local independent online only newspaper sources from students newspaper spot reporting multimedia, a student print journalist, and an amateur cell phone vertical-composed video of speech by Tom Rochon, President of Ithaca College, in a story about Ithaca College demonstrations in the campus center and administration building Thursday December 4. Collaging sources, perspectives, and recycling here. I am noticing all of the push outs via email forwards, listservs, and social media of the major demonstrations and actions in urban areas with all their spectacle. But I find the multiplying of these smaller, localized, microterritory demonstrations so compelling as they aggregate, permeate, migrate. http://ithacavoice.com/2014/12/student-protesters-hold-demonstration-confront-ithaca-colleges-president/ Patricia R. Zimmermann, Ph.D. Professor of Screen Studies Roy H. Park School of Communication Codirector, Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival Ithaca College 953 Danby Road Ithaca, New York 14850 USA http://faculty.ithaca.edu:83/patty/ http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Renate Ferro renatefe...@gmail.com Sent: Saturday, December 6, 2014 9:21 AM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: [-empyre-] Welcome Patty Zimmermann --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Over the next couple of days we will be joined by Patty Zimmerman. We welcome Patty to empyre once again. We are always so appreciative of her participation on empyre and respect not only her political and moral compass but the amazing work she does at our neighborhood institution Ithaca College and the curatorial work she does with FLEFF, the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. Welcome Patty. Patricia Zimmermann (US)is professor of screen studies at Ithaca College. She also serves codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff), a multidisciplinary festival that embraces and interrogates sustainability across all of its forms-- economic, social, ecological, political, cultural, technological, aesthetic and sustainable development--through film, video, new media, installation, performance, literature, music, panels, and dialogues. She is the author of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Indiana)and States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies (Minnesota) as well as coeditor of Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (California). With coauthor Dale Hudson, her forthcoming book is Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places (Palgrave), to be published in Spring 2015, which examines over 130 new media and performance projects from across the globe. She was the Ida Beam Professor in Cinema and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa and the Shaw Foundation Professor of New Media in the School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She also serves as an envoy for documentary film and new media for the American Film Showcase of the US State Department. She has published over 200 scholarly essays and journalistic articles on documentary, media history, screen theory, and new media in Screen, Genders, Journal of Film and Video, Afterimage, Framework, Asian Communications Quarterly, Cinema Journal, Wide Angle, Cultural Studies, DOX, Film History, Socialist Review, Journal of Communications Inquiry, Afterimage, The Moving Image. The Independent, Gannett Newspapers, Afterimage. Website
[-empyre-] in solidarity--an open call to our subscriber list
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello to our -empyre-subscriber list. Tim Murray and myself are eagerly anticipating our discussion on the list serve this month. We have decided to do a bit of an impromptu discussion inspired by the recent events in Ferguson and New York City over the past week though realizing that other social and political events and movements such as in Iguala, Mexico and Hong Kong may provide an important opportunity for all of us to devote a month in solidarity. Tim and I have just arrived in New York City. We are right now just a few blocks from Time Square and Rockefeller Center where thousands marched last night. Our monthly discussion Social Media/ Social Justice will feature a few guests over the next three weeks but we are hoping that all of you will feel free to post about this issue. We are reaching out to all of our global subscribers and not just those in the western hemisphere. We are hoping that our subscribers will consider and respond to the moment but also critically look at the relationship between social media in the broad sense and political movements. Our Introductory post will follow this. In solidarity. Renate Ferro and Tim Murray from New York City -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) 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://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-empyre-] Welcome to December on -empyre-: Social Media/ Social Justice
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Welcome to December, 2014 on –empyre soft-skinned space: We have listed guests below but there may be others added as the month progresses. Social Media / Social Justice Moderated by Renate Ferro (US) and Tim Murray (US) with invited guests December 5th to the 8th: Week 1: Renate Ferro (US) , Tim Murray (US), Patricia Zimmermann (US) December 9th to the 15th: Week 2: Ricardo Dominguez (US), Rahul Mukherjee (IN, US) , Richard Grusin (US) December 16th to the 21st: Week 3: Patrick Lichty (US), Nicholas Knouf (US), Cherian George (HK), Omar Figueredo (US) For the month of December, -empyre- proposes a discussion of the relation of social media to efforts in acquiring social justice and social change. The complexities of this issue were foregrounded in the past weeks by a number of international events. The District Attorney in Ferguson, Missouri, lashed out at social media for questioning the grand jury’s case that failed to indict Darren Wilson -- the white policeman who shot down the unarmed black eighteen year-old, Michael Brown. Social media actions also protested the disappearance of 43 college students in Iguala, Mexico. Across the globe, a variety of social media actions contributed to the umbrella protests in Hong Kong. Throughout the past few years, moreover, members of –empyre- have had occasion to reflect on rough parallels between social media and social justice in other geopolitical cases, perhaps most tellingly in relation to the Arab Spring. Given the timeliness of this topic, we have decided to suspend the discussion planned for December in order to invite –empyreans- and leading thinkers in this area to share their thoughts before taking a holiday break toward the end of the month. Our hope is both to reflect on the particular issues raised by the Ferguson controversy in the U.S. and to discuss parallel examples on the international stage. Participants might be interested in discussing not only how the flow of information over social media might facilitate efforts toward social justice but also how new media software and interfaces might themselves make specific contributions to social struggle. Might we also reflect on appropriations of social media by authorities or reactionary communities opposed to social justice? Others may be interested in introducing the –empyre- community to their public or academic programs in the broad area of social media and social justice across the globe. Newer members of –empyre- may be interested in reviewing some past discussions that have touched indirectly on this topic, such as these discussions over the past three years: May 2013 May: Collaboration: Art Practice, Theory, Activism http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2013-May/thread.html June 2012 Queer Media Art and Theory http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2012-June/thread.html February 2011, New Media and the Middle East http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2011-February/thread.html Biographies: Moderators: Renate Ferro (US) is Managing Co-Moderator of –empyre- and a conceptual artist working in emerging technology and culture. Most recently her work has been featured at The Freud Museum (London), The Dorksy Gallery (NY), The Hemispheric Institute and FOMMA (Mexico), The Janus Pannonius Muzeum (Hungary), and The Free University Berlin (Germany). Her work has been published in such journals as Diacritics, Theatre Journal, and Epoch. Ferro is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at Cornell University teaching digital media and theory. She also directs the Tinker Factory, a creative research lab for Research Design, Creativity, and Interdisciplinary Research. Tim Murray (US) is Managing Co-Moderator of –empyre-, Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Director of the Society for the Humanities and Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Cornell University. He sits on the Executive Committee of the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) and is author of Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota 2008) and Zonas de Contacto: el arte en CD-ROM (Centro de la imagen, 1999). He is editing volumes on Jean-Luc Nancy and Xu Bing. With monthly guests: Week 1: Patricia Zimmermann (US)is professor of screen studies at Ithaca College. She also serves codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff), a multidisciplinary festival that embraces and interrogates sustainability across all of its forms-- economic, social, ecological, political, cultural, technological, aesthetic and sustainable development--through film, video, new media, installation, performance, literature, music, panels, and dialogues. She is the author of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Indiana)and States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies (Minnesota) as well
[-empyre-] from 5th Avenue New York City
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- It is raining here in New York City. Tim Murray and I just joined hundreds of protestors who marched down 5th Avenue, one of the most tourist, commodified streets in the world. Past the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree decorated in lights galore hundreds of tourists stood in line to watch on one side the lit tree and the other side a light/video show on the facade of Saks Fifth Avenue. Loud speakers filled the block and adjacent streets with holiday music. Disrupting that scene hundreds of what I noted as young activists marched directly down the side walks of this holiday scene shouting Hands Up, Don't Shoot, I can't breathe, and other chants to stop shoppers in their tracks. Shoppers had two choices: to clear out of the way for protestors or to join. Right now in Macy's protestors move into the inside of the shopping season, lay down and conduct a die in. I find it stunning (has to be another word) that reflects the confusion of the junta-postion between a commodity driven season and a politically driven movement that collides head to head. How crazy is it that just moments before when I opened my email via the smart phone I was using to video the moment, the White House sent out this message: We've been watching the economy steadily improve for years, but today there's new reason to really zoom in on that progress. Consider this: Last month, American businesses created 314,000 jobs, extending the longest streak of job growth on record. That's 10.9 million jobs added over the last 57 straight months. Let's put that in perspective: With 2.6 million jobs created in the first 11 months of the year, we've already added more jobs in 2014 than in any entire year since the late 1990s. It's been a long road to recovery since the Great Recession. And while there's more work to do, America is outpacing much of the world in putting people back to work. Take a look at how far our economy has come since President Obama took office -- then share the facts with everyone who needs to know: HELLO? What about the thousands of young and dis-engranchised who for the past three nights around the US have been shouting out to be heard about the injustices that have manifested themselves over the past several weeks. World-wide ordinary people from Hong Kong to Mexico to the US are shouting out as well about other injustices. Can we take a moment to reflect on how these movements may be organically generating? How does social media, list serves, networked media enable movements such as these? What else may be inspiring these gestures of resistance. I am looking forward to speaking to all of you now but for now I have to run. Renate Ferro (and Tim Murray from NYC) ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] from 5th Avenue New York City
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Gee Alan you totally misunderstood my post. My HELLO was an address to Mr. Obama who unabashedly today (while young people are taking the streets) decided to talk about the economy. The post was certainly not meant to diminish that a few more young people are getting jobs but amazingly that he did not recognize or acknowledge this grass roots movement. Hope to hear from more of you about the relationship between media and movement. Best, Renate On Fri, Dec 5, 2014 at 8:18 PM, Alan Sondheim sondh...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- HELLO? What about the thousands of young and dis-engranchised who for the past three nights around the US have been shouting out to be heard about the injustices that have manifested themselves over the past several weeks. -- But we're in Rhode Island where there are protests which are fantastic, everywhere here downtown - but the fact there are jobs, that's good, and your HELLO? does an injustice to people who can't find work, can't get food, can't get shelter; in Rhode Island we have the nation's highest or second-highest unemployment, and this brings real pain to the disenfranchised, in particular to people of color - any employment news like this is good news here, and one social injustice does not negate another which might be, somewhat barely, addressed. - Alan On Fri, Dec 5, 2014 at 7:59 PM, Renate Ferro renatefe...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- It is raining here in New York City. Tim Murray and I just joined hundreds of protestors who marched down 5th Avenue, one of the most tourist, commodified streets in the world. Past the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree decorated in lights galore hundreds of tourists stood in line to watch on one side the lit tree and the other side a light/video show on the facade of Saks Fifth Avenue. Loud speakers filled the block and adjacent streets with holiday music. Disrupting that scene hundreds of what I noted as young activists marched directly down the side walks of this holiday scene shouting Hands Up, Don't Shoot, I can't breathe, and other chants to stop shoppers in their tracks. Shoppers had two choices: to clear out of the way for protestors or to join. Right now in Macy's protestors move into the inside of the shopping season, lay down and conduct a die in. I find it stunning (has to be another word) that reflects the confusion of the junta-postion between a commodity driven season and a politically driven movement that collides head to head. How crazy is it that just moments before when I opened my email via the smart phone I was using to video the moment, the White House sent out this message: We've been watching the economy steadily improve for years, but today there's new reason to really zoom in on that progress. Consider this: Last month, American businesses created 314,000 jobs, extending the longest streak of job growth on record. That's 10.9 million jobs added over the last 57 straight months. Let's put that in perspective: With 2.6 million jobs created in the first 11 months of the year, we've already added more jobs in 2014 than in any entire year since the late 1990s. It's been a long road to recovery since the Great Recession. And while there's more work to do, America is outpacing much of the world in putting people back to work. Take a look at how far our economy has come since President Obama took office -- then share the facts with everyone who needs to know: HELLO? What about the thousands of young and dis-engranchised who for the past three nights around the US have been shouting out to be heard about the injustices that have manifested themselves over the past several weeks. World-wide ordinary people from Hong Kong to Mexico to the US are shouting out as well about other injustices. Can we take a moment to reflect on how these movements may be organically generating? How does social media, list serves, networked media enable movements such as these? What else may be inspiring these gestures of resistance. I am looking forward to speaking to all of you now but for now I have to run. Renate Ferro (and Tim Murray from NYC) ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu -- = directory http://www.alansondheim.org tel 718-813-3285 music/sound http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/ email sondheim ut panix.com, sondheim ut gmail.com = ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-empyre-] Interested in hosting a topic in 2015 on empyre?
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- We have had numberous empyreans come forth with a diverse set of topics for 2015 but we have a few openings. If you are interested in proposing something please see below. Currently our list-serve consists of over 1900 members. -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), Patrick Keilty (US and CA) and Selmin Kara (TR, CA) -empyre- also welcomes guest moderators who organize discussions for one month. -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. If you would like to propose and moderate a topic for the 2015 yearly calendar please send the following information below to this email as soon as possible. empyre.listserve at gmail.com Our -empyre moderating team will review all of the proposals and our 2015 schedule will be announced in December 2015. We will provide training, support and assistance to all monthly moderators and their guests. Thank you. We are hoping to hear from many of you. Your name: email: Short Description of proposed topic:1 to 2 paragraphs Possible weekly guests: at least eight, 2 per week though more is preferable -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) 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://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-empyre-] Welcome to our moderators Alan Sondheim and Johannes Birringer
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Welcome to Alan Sondheim and Johannes Birringer for organizing our November m monthly topics. They will be posting their Introductory posts shortly on the topic for this month: ISIS, Absolute Terror, Performance. Their biographies are below. ALAN SONDHEIM is a Providence-based new media artist, musician, writer, and performer. He's concerned with issues of virtuality, and the stake that the real world has in the virtual. He has worked with his partner, Azure Carter, and the performer/choreographer Foofwa d'Imobilite. Sondheim is interested in examining the grounds of the virtual and how the body is inhabited. He performs in virtual, real, and cross-over worlds; his virtual work is known for its highly complex and mobile architectures. He has used altered motion-capture technology extensively for examining and creating new lexicons of behavior. He current work is centered around the phenomenology of the terrorized, sexualized, or dying body. He can be reached at sondheim at panix.com. useful URLs - webpage http://www.alansondheim.org (directory) email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ Johannes Birringer is a choreographer and artistic director of AlienNation Co (www.aliennationcompany.com), and co-founder of a telematic performance collective (ADaPT). He has directed numerous multimedia theatre, dance, and digital performances in Europe, the Americas, Japan and China; collaborated on site-specific installations, and exhibited work at film and video festivals. Author of Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism (1991), Media and Performance (1998), Performance on the Edge (2000), Performance, Technology and Science (2009). Founder of Interaktionslabor (http://interaktionslabor.de), and co-director of DAP-Lab, Brunel University (London), where he is Professor of Performance -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) 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://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-empyre-] call for proposals_empyre monthly discussions for 2015
--empyre- soft-skinned space--To all -empyre subscribers. We are currently soliciting ideas for monthly discussion for 2015. 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. Currently our list-serve consists of over 1800 members. -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), Patrick Keilty (US and CA) and Selmin Kara (TR, CA) -empyre- also welcomes guest moderators who organize discussions for one month. -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. If you would like to propose and moderate a topic for the 2015 yearly calendar please send the following information below to this email by November 5th. empyre.listse...@gmail.com Our -empyre moderating team will review all of the proposals and our 2015 schedule will be announced in December 2015. We will provide training, support and assistance to all monthly moderators and their guests. Thank you. We are hoping to hear from many of you. Your name: email: Short Description of proposed topic:1 to 2 paragraphs Possible weekly guests: at least eight, 2 per week though more is preferable ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-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-] Closing down June from Paris
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Sent from my iPad This month has just whizzed by and Tim and I sadly close down our June discussion Paris time so that Simon Biggs and Sue Hawkings can launch July's topic Australian time on the first of July. Asha you and your guests should feel free to finish out your discussions but I am sending this from the airport in Paris now as we will be offline until we touch down in Newark at noon EST. Time presents such an interesting dynamic in this list serve as anyone who has moderated a month's discussion has come to know. At this time we would like to thank our moderators for Sound Paths: Sound Studies Expanded. The breadth of the month's topics on sound has been provocative in many ways. Week 1: The Creation of Labor through Action moderated by Timothy Taylor (US) Week 2: Vibratory Matters: moderated by Marcus Boon(CA) with Nina Eldsheim and Douglas Kahn Week 3: Sound Art, Curating, Technology, Theory moderated by Jim Drobnick (CA) with Darren Copeland, David Cecchetto, Marc Couroux, Christoph Cox, Kevin deForest, Ryan Alexander Diduck, Paul Dolden, Dave Dyment, Anna Friz, Seth Kim-Cohen, Andra McCartney, John Oswald, Eldritch Priest, Salome Voegelin Week 4:Feminism Confronts Audio Technology moderated by Asha Tamirisa (US) with Rachel Devorah Trapp (US) , Monisola Gbadebo (US), Lyn Goeringer (US), Caroline Park (US) Though we have touched on a number of sound related topics if any of our participants are interested in designating an entire month to extend the discussion we do have a month towards the latter part of this year open. Just send an email our way. I want to take the time to give a shout out to Asha and her guests for offering a feminist perspective on sound this past week. My travels have prevented me from having the internet access I needed to participate fully but I do have so many questions for you that extend beyond the practice of making but imply more political implications. I would love to spend more time in nurturing topics relating to feminism and technology. I mentioned that a couple of weeks ago I attended the FemTechNet workshop at the New School. An international discussion involving feminist technologies would interest me and I know many of our guests so if anyone is willing to co-moderate a month with me in the future let me know as well. Simon and Sue thanks for taking over July. Just a note to let you all know that -empyre will be offline in August once again for our yearly break. au revoir, Renate and Tim ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Closing down Week 3, Thanks Jim Drobnick
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Sent from my iPad Many thanks to Jim Drobnick for organizing and introducing us to so many new guests who specialize in sound studies: Darren Copeland, David Cecchetto, Marc Couroux, Christoph Cox, Kevin deForest, Ryan Alexander Diduck, Paul Dolden, Dave Dyment, Anna Friz, Seth Kim-Cohen, Andra McCartney, John Oswald, Eldritch Priest, Salome Voegelin, Jennifer Fisher, and Lewis Kaye. We are in Paris right now and are enjoying the sounds of Paris that are so differentiated from home. The humming moto, the screaming children, the regularity of garbage trucks, the fast flow and pitch of the language and so much more puts us in a pleasurably nostalgic summer mood. Thanks to Jim for ushering Week 3 for us. We have enjoyed it. Renate ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Week 4 Sonic Paths: Feminism Confronts Audio Technology
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Welcome Asha Tamirisa to empyre and many thanks for moderating week 4. We learned of Asha's work through the HASTAC network and are very thrilled that she and her guests will be featuring Feminism. I just returned from the FemTechNet summer 2014 workshop at the New School in New York women from all over North America and beyond have networked together to share their work and am hoping that important intersections with technology and global feminism will be a part of our empyre future a bit more frequently. Thanks Asha. Week 4: Feminism Confronts Audio Technology Moderated by Asha Tamirisa, Rachel Devorah Trapp, Monisola Gbadebo, Lyn Goeringer, Caroline Park In The Poetics of Signal Processing, authors Tara Rodgers and Jonathan Sterne discuss how metaphorical language in electronic sound privileges particular subjects-- for example, how the use of water metaphors in audio (waves, current, channel, flow, streams) suggest the archetypical maritime navigator of the white male. This week’s discussion will draw inspiration from this analysis to think further about the ways in which rhetorical weight is built into audio technologies, how audiotechnical language and design reflect particular ideas of gender, race, and power. How might audio technologies look without these, and with other, ideas of subjectivity? As Judy Wacjman states in Feminism Confronts Technology (after which this week’s topic is named), this week’s discussion is a means for “opening up possibilities for feminist scholarship and action” in the field of electronic sound. The objective is to discuss and document what a feminist approach to electronic sound or feminist audio technology has been/might be. = = = bios = = = Asha Tamirisa is an interdisciplinary artist often found working with some combination of sound, video, light, sculpture, and movement. She graduated from Oberlin College with a degree in Technology in Music and Related Arts [TIMARA] and is currently a doctoral student in the Multimedia and Electronic Music Experiments [MEME] program at Brown University. She is also working towards an M.A. in Modern Culture and Media. Current research interests include feminist posthumanism, modular interfaces, and structural film and visual music. Recent projects include a digital emulation of the ARP2500. She is a founding member of OPENSIGNAL, a group of artists concerned with the state of gender and race in electronic/computer based art practices. Rachel Devorah Trapp is a variable media sound artist and digital archivist trained as a composer and a librarian. Her works have been performed by artists such as Rhymes with Opera, Fred Frith, and Laurel Jay Carpenter and have been heard at places such as the International SuperCollider Symposium, the Music for People and Thingamajigs Festival, and Art in Odd Places. In 2013 she served as Digital Archivist for the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, and in 2014 she was the Digital Archive Fellow at the New Museum. This Fall she will begin her pursuit of a Doctoral degree at the University of Virginia in Music Composition and Computer Technologies as a Jefferson Scholar Fellow. Monisola Gbadebo (b.1986) is a composer who works extensively with electronics, text, spacialized rhythm. A recent MFA recipient from Mills college, she began her work as a composer of electronic music at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Her music, which often incorporates narrative, acts on the viscera semantically to elicit responses consistent with the underlying story. Her music is influenced by west african musical idioms and aesthetic ideologies--hence the attention to rhythm, narrative, and a destabilized sense of temporality. Lyn Goeringer is an Intermedia artist and experimental musician/composer who creates site specific works that focus on the intersection of psychoacoustics, natural acoustic response in space, and how the human body listens and looks at things at a given space. As an active composer, performer and artist, she has presented creative works in Seattle, Rhode Island, Ohio, New York, Boston, England, Hong Kong, and Dubai. When she is not working on a new installation or piece, she can be found doing research in space, place and the everyday or teaching at Oberlin Conservatory in the TIMARA program. Caroline Park is a composer, musician, and artist working primarily within minimal means. As a composer-performer, she has shared the stage with Mem1, Steve Roden, a canary torsi, Evidence, Dollshot, and Arnold Dreyblatt, and has performed at the Stone, AS220, and in Jordan Hall. Solo releases can be found on labels Private Chronology, Bathetic Records, VisceralMediaRecords, Pure Potentiality Records, Absence of Wax, and Single Action Rider. Caroline is a founding member of OPENSIGNAL, a group of artists concerned with the state of gender and race within electronic
Re: [-empyre-] vibration and movememt (cosmic scale)
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I just returned back from a technology and feminism workshop in NY and am now getting back into the flow of the conversation. Thanks to Marcus, Nina, and Douglas but yes I would also love to hear more about what you are thinking in terms of modes of sensing. I just saw the Lygia Clark exhibition at the MOMA and am thinking about the resonances of the discussion on vibrations, movement, the gesture, and sound within the broad expanses of installation and performance art from of course Clark's work but also Fluxus. Great exhibition also at MOMA on Cage's sound classes at The New School for Social Research where Cage's influences resonated through to artist's working across the arts. Thanks to all of you and Johannes for the posts. Returning to reality Renate Sent from my iPad On Jun 13, 2014, at 2:55 PM, Nina Eidsheim neidsh...@ucla.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi, Johannes! Nina could you please expand on that past part, what modes of sensing do you not subscribe to? I simply meant that if modes of sensing refers to human range of sensing, I am not sure where I stand in regards to that. (But, it does seem limiting.) When I wrote that yesterday, I wrote it thinking I was in agreement with Marcus. Is that right, Marcus, or perhaps I am misreading you? I think it was actually Marcus who first brought up the phrase, modes of sensing, in this conversation. Would you mind sharing more about what that mean to you? Nina On Jun 13, 2014, at 7:58 AM, Johannes Birringer johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- dear all thanks for the thoughtful response, Douglas and Nina, and and I am reading on, the discussion is opening up such a wide horizon now, yes, up to the cosmic scale you invoke Douglas, but also a scale that goes much beyond what Nina called the more narrow body and material focussed sense perceptions sensation, the anthropomorphized versions of sensation (and motion analysis / motion capture)? ...visit to the Lab of Ornithology, I am reminded of the anthropomorphic undertone with which the concept of the body and epistemology through sensation is often infused. Does paying attention to the body means attending to the vibration as I feel the vibrations through the flesh and bones as it stands on the airport floor? Or, does only a given material's seeming continuous material connection to what I think of as the object that is body constitute thinking about the body? The latter position, then, to address Marcus' question, does come down to modes of sensing. At this point, I am not ready to subscribe to that. And, I doubt whether all of the artists with which Douglas deals in Earth Sound would subscribe to that as well. Nina could you please expand on that past part, what modes of sensing do you not subscribe to? The ritual and cosmic associations now brought up by Douglas's re-reference to Benjamin's One-Way Street and On the Mimetic Faculty – recontexted to war-time destruction (through technologies), self-annihilation and ecological catastrophe -- where are you pointing the sonic pathways now? Many here may not have read your book yet (sorry, I have not yet), and thus I feel the framework of course seems to have been hugely expanded, and I cannot follow yet, and I think the nereges or forces have not been fully discussed yet, only where you wish to stay away from (new age and psychic channeling etc, the Rausch of the trance folks out in the desert at the Burning Man revelations..) You very recent example of Pauline Oliveros – or Nina's and Marcus's reference to ornithology or rather to the birds, animals and other species interests me obviously, as does Benjamin's imaginary dance with the clouds, dancing the storms [= sensuous similarity] – interests me, and there could be a political reading desired by Marcus, not sure, when you speak of Oliveros produce[s] overtones from subaudible fundamentals, even if they cannot be felt, the audible sounds do not necessarily abdicate their epiphenomenal relationship. that is a daring formulation, I feel, anthropomorphizing sound into an agent, and there then are co-agencies, some that are not known/recognized (like invisible drones that capture us or shoot us, not drone music) But maybe you read waves and ultrasound etc as forces that operate on the universe, on the earth, on social spaces and habitats, but the imperceptible ones, what effect do they have on humans, animals, objects, architectures, ecologies? what type of agency would be that that could be resisted or coopted, or in-corporated (whether along the axis of an anatomy or furtherfield) or contested (the sounds and epiphenemena that are dangerous to the health of the planet or
[-empyre-] Welcome to Week 2: Sonic Paths
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Sent from my iPad Week two on - empyre. Welcome to our moderator Marcus Boon. Marcus has invited Nina Eidsheim and Douglas Kahn to discuss the Douglas Kahn's new book, Earth Sound, Earth Signal.. This book proposes a significant expansion of the field of sound studies (as well as the visual arts) by revealing the history of arts and artists that mobilize the electromagnetic spectrum. Douglas will discuss his work with Nina Eidsheim, author of the forthcoming Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (Duke UP) and Marcus Boon, author of In Praise of Copying (Harvard UP) and the forthcoming Politics of Vibration. We will think about sound studies and new media within Kahn's framework of vibration, inscription and transmission, and reflect on its implications for aesthetic theory and practice.Nina Sun Eidsheim is on the faculty of the UCLA Department of Musicology. As a scholar and singer she investigates the multi-sensory and performative aspects of the production, perception and reception of vocal timbre of twentieth and twenty-first century music. She is currently working on these ideas and repertoires in two monograph projects entitled Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (forthcoming, Duke University Press) and Measuring Race: Listening to Vocal Timbre and Vocality in African-American Popular Music. She is also co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies and a special issue on voice and materiality for the journal, Postmodern Culture. In addition, she is the principal investigator for the UC-wide, transdisciplinary research project entitled Keys to Voice Studies: Terminology, Methodology, and Questions Across Disciplines. Welcome Marcus, Nina, and Douglas! Biographies for this week: Marcus Boon is Professor of English at York University in Toronto. He is the author of The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs (Harvard UP, 2002) and In Praise of Copying (Harvard UP, 2010), and co-author with Timothy Morton and Eric Cazdyn, of Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism and Critical Theory (U. Chicago, forthcoming). He writes about music and sound for The Wire, Boing Boing, Bomb and others. He was a fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell, 2011-12. www.marcusboon.com. Nina Sun Eidsheim is on the faculty of the UCLA Department of Musicology. As a scholar and singer she investigates the multi-sensory and performative aspects of the production, perception and reception of vocal timbre of twentieth and twenty-first century music. She is currently working on these ideas and repertoires in two monograph projects entitled Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (forthcoming, Duke University Press) and Measuring Race: Listening to Vocal Timbre and Vocality in African-American Popular Music. She is also co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies and a special issue on voice and materiality for the journal, Postmodern Culture. In addition, she is the principal investigator for the UC-wide, transdisciplinary research project entitled Keys to Voice Studies: Terminology, Methodology, and Questions Across Disciplines. Douglas Kahn is Professor and Australia Research Council Fellow at the National Institute for Experimental Arts, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney. His authored and edited books include Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (University of California Press, 2013); Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (MIT Press, 1999); Mainframe: Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of Digital Art (UC Press, 2012); Source: Music of the Avant-garde, 1966-1973 (UC Press, 2011) and Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-garde (MIT Press, 1992). He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2006) and an Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation (2009). ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Processing value
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Sent from my iPad Dear Timothy, Thanks. so much about giving us a few more clues into your work on digital labor. Interestingly our sister list-serve iDC has just introduced a topic around Labor issues and capital related to networked technologies by Dr. Mark Graham.Tim, For me your post raises interesting questions about the specificities related to production, For example, about the labor involved that it takes a DJ to composite beats from appropriated digital sources and then distributes them via social media (twitter, Facebook, sound cloud)) as opposed to the musician who uses originally composed work, digitally edits and enhances via live performance and then distributes the work digitally. I am about to close this week's discussion but am hoping that those of our subscribers who are interested in Timothy Taylor's work to contact him back- channel to continue the discussion. The broader issue of labor as related to the process of any art object/ intervention is a ripe topic and one that is timely. if any of you would like to devote an entire monthly discussion on this related topic let us know rtf9 at cornell dot edu or tcm1 at cornell dot edu. Thanks so much Timothy Taylor for leading us into this month's discussion. I will be introducing Marcus Boon who will lead week 2 shortly. Renate Ferro ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Creation of value through action
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi Tim and welcome to empyre. It was great of you to agree to share your work on labor and cultural commodities but can you help us understand how sound making and sound making is at the crux of this argument? Looking forward to more. Renate On Tue, Jun 3, 2014 at 7:41 PM, Timothy Taylor tdtay...@ucla.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi all The creation of value through action is what I am actually concerned with. I have come to think that cultural commodities are commodities like any other, since they are produced as commodities. And if they are produced as commodities, then the labor that produces them is productive labor in Marx’s classic sense; it’s not somehow special as “creative” labor or “immaterial” labor or “affective” labor (I have found all of these arguments unconvincing because they are ahistorical, and seem to rely mainly on the theorist's belief that things used to be different back in the day, but today, everything has changed). I do think, however, that cultural commodities differ from other sorts of commodities in how people value them. Or perhaps I should say, how people create value for them. That’s my opening salvo! Tim ** timothydtaylor.com soundsofcapitalism.com musicsoundtech.org ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office: 306 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: rfe...@cornell.edu r...@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-] to Melinda: Digital Gardens
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Melinda it is always such a joy to read your postings on -empyre. This month's discussions are indeed lateral and sparse perhaps related to the way we constructed the discussions. No weekly guests but instead postings by the selected authors and other randomly inspired subscribers. What has been interesting to watch on the moderation site is the unusually high number of new subscriptions this month. Must be joining the lurkers. It is interesting for me to hear stories particularly of friends who have chosen to retreat from media/technology in their work and their livelihoods. Your insights resonate with theirs or so it seems. It could be seen as a privileged withdrawal... the Duchampian retreat, or it could be seen as a form of situated resistance... living local. I am gearing up for my own situated resistance... as we have just finished the end of our academic year. I need time to center my head and soul. Digging in my garden and planting an array of vegetables and flowers is not only a way to sustain my vegan diet but indulge in the delights of connecting with the solid earth. Recently at Cornell our museum hosted a rather popular exhibition Beyond Earth Art http://museum.cornell.edu/exhibitions/beyond-earth-art-contemporary-artists-and-the-environment.html The related Atkinson Symposium brought together many artist's whose work merges the issues of art, sustainability, the environment but also the communication devices of the internet and social media to document their work. It occurred to me that this work would remain in local oblivion if it were not for the connected powers of technology. This exhibition included performance, sculpture, installation, and conceptual art all moving beyond the physical simplicity that the age of earth art so suitably hosted in 1969. In seeking to find ways to make sense of the location of the local within the networked I turned to the writings of Verena Andermatt Conley and others (Louise Dompierre) in *Digital Gardens: A World In Mutation*. The catalog written in conjunction with the 1998 Power Plant exhibition has provided intriguing and I think still rather relevant ways to think about the murky resonances between the physically situated spaces of our physical environment and our networked lives. Thank you Melinda for sharing your poetics and for reminding us again how geographically hinged we all are despite the network. Best, Renate -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office: 306 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: rfe...@cornell.edu r...@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-] new media theory as critical making: Jordan Crandall
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks Simon for the reminder about the early seeds of the internet. As I mentioned in yesterday’s discussion post, for Geert Lovink world politics and the military industrial complex is at the crux of new media theory. I do not believe he discounts the early evolutions of the internet as I read it, but merely uses that point in time during the late 20th century when perceived dreams for a networked decentralized free-access internet is a cyber-naïve counter point to the contemporary re-emergence of cold war political consciousness. “Everything you have ever clicked on can and will be used against you. In 2014 we have come full circle and returned to a world before 1984.” Lovink distances his own views on new media theory from those of Galloway, Thacker and Wark whose argument in their introduction in Excommunication appears to be grounded in cross-disciplinary intersections: we want to argue that media theory is not a new link in the grand chain of critical theory, literary criticism, cultural studies or visual culture. Rather, it exits the chain entirely, turning ninety degrees away from these disciplines. Moving orthogonally, media theory intersects with art theory, screen theory, science studies, the history of technology, and many other fields. When addressing media form, a number of different questions start to swell in importance, questions about the technics, politics, and economics of certain material layers of form. If I might suggest that we take a look at Jordan Crandall. Crandall’s cross-disciplinary, politically centered art interventions whose intersections between material making and cultural and identity politics concretizes for me new ways to think about new media theory and communication. Take a look at his past work on surveillance and war technologies (Homefront, Trigger and Heatseeking) http://jordancrandall.com and his most recent themes of masculinity and technology (Unmanned), intimacy and collaboration (Version) http://version.org/ and experimentation and material investigation (ASM fabrication lab ) http://humctr.ucsd.edu/actives/ But to get back to Galloway, Thacker and Wark, they posit new futures in excommunication or the alien or in absolutely no communication at all. “…we pursue not so much a post-media condition but rather a non-media condition, not so much the extensions of man but the exodus of man from this world. Our task is not so much a reinvigorated humanism no matter how complicated or qualified it might need to be, but rather glimpse into the realm of the non-human. We seek not so much a blasphemy but a heresy, not so much a miscommunication but an excommunication.” Looking forward to what others of you think. Links and information about the texts mentioned can be found in this month’s introductory post. http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2014-May/007121.html Renate -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) 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-] empyre all call: moderate a topic
--empyre- soft-skinned space---empyre subscribers Do you have a topic that you would like to moderate for a monthly -empyre discussion? Consider being a moderator. Just write a couple of paragraphs that clearly states your idea for the topic with ten to twelve potential guests who you might invite to join you. We will provide you and your guests with instructions and support on how to moderate and post. Your discussion will be archived at http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/ We are now looking for a few moderators to fill out our November and December schedule and are ready to fill the months of 2015. Please email our moderators at r...@cornell.edu Tim Murray Renate Ferro Simon Biggs Patrick Lichty -- ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Welcome to May on -empyre: In flux: New Media Theory in 2014
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Welcome to May on –empyre soft-skinned space: In flux: New Media Theory in 2014 Organized by Renate Ferro (US) We invite our open network of –empyre subscribers to post freely with our invited guests Geert Lovink (NL), Alexander Galloway (US), and McKenzie Wark (AU) and others. Our discussion will take place during four weeks in May beginning on the 5th and concluding on May 31st, 2014. Inspired by the impetus from last month's wide-ranging discussion of critical making, we are eager to receive your thoughts on how we might understand new media theory at this moment of openness to international productions and differences. We invite all –empyre- subscribers to collectively contribute to this month’s discussion. Our expansive and diverse list of artists, theorists, programmers, gamers, academics, activists from diverse geographies across the globe may provide very different responses to this provocation. Let’s take advantage of the “turn” of the seasons to consider the ever-changing territories we negotiate individually and collectively. Rather than featuring weekly featured guests in May, we propose holding an open discussion around issues about new media theory, In flux: New Media Theory in 2014. Related issues are raised by Alexander Galloway, McKenzie Wark, and Eugene Thacker's recent book, Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation. While the monograph is a must read (the bibliographic information is listed below), we also propose taking our momentum from a response to the book written by Geert Lovink and an online response by Mckenzie Wark (the links are listed below as well). We will be pleased to be joined by Geert, Alex, and Ken at various moments through the conversation this month. Their biographies are below. Excommunication by Alexander Galloway, Eugene Thacker and McKenzie Wark For information about the full text see the University of Chicago: http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo14413838.html Geert Lovink’s Hermes on the Hudson: Notes on Media Theory after Snowden in e-flux http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/article_8979320.pdf McKenzie Warke’s response to Lovink in Public Seminar Commons Where next for media theory? http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/04/where-next-for-media-theory/#.U2U_z-vWp30 Looking forward to an open, collective month on -empyre. Renate Biographies: Guests: Alexander R. Galloway (US) is a writer and computer programer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. Associate professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, he is author of several books on digital media and critical theory, mostly recently The Interface Effect (Polity, 2012). His collaboration with Eugene Thacker and McKenzie Wark, Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation, has just been published by the University of Chicago Press. With Jason E. Smith, Galloway co-translated the Tiqqun book Introduction to Civil War (Semiotext[e], 2010). For ten years he worked with RSG on Carnivore, Kriegspiel and other software projects. Galloway's next project is a monograph on the work of François Laruelle, set to be published in late 2014. Geert Lovink (ND) is a media theorist, internet critic and author of Zero Comments (2007) and Networks Without a Cause (2012). Since 2004 he is researcher in the School for Communication and Media Design at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA) where he is the founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures. From 2004-2013 he also taught in the new media masters program at Mediastudies, University of Amsterdam. His institute recently organized conferences and research networks around topics such as the politics and aesthetics of online video, urban screens, Wikipedia, the culture of search, internet revenue models, digital publishing strategies and alternatives in social media. Besides this he is a media theory professor at the European Graduate School (Saas-Fee) and an associated member of the Centre for Digital Cultures at the Leuphana University (Lueneburg/D). Mackenzie Wark (AU) is the author of three books, Virtual Geography, The Virtual Republic and Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace. He was a co-editor of the Nettime anthology Readme! and with Brad Miller co-produced the multimedia work Planet of Noise. He is Professor of Culture and Media in Liberal Studies at The New School for Social Research. His research interests are media theory, new media, critical theory, cinema, music, and visual art. Moderator: Renate Ferro (US) is a conceptual artist working in emerging technology and culture. Most recently her work has been featured at The Freud Museum (London), The Dorksy Gallery (NY), The Hemispheric Institute and FOMMA (Mexico), The Janus Pannonius Muzeum (Hungary), and The Free University Berlin (Germany). Her work has been published in such journals as Diacritics, Theatre Journal, and Epoch
[-empyre-] Surfing: new discussions about new media and theory
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- In flux: New Media and Mediation in 2014 Recently while surfing the net I ran across Geert Lovink’s intriguing article, Hermes on the Hudson: Notes on Media Theory after Snowden on the e-flux journal site. (For links to these publications see below. ) Lovink asserts that Edward Snowden’s exposures represent the finality of new media as we know it. “The NSA scandal has taken away the last remains of cyber-naivety and lifted the ‘internet issue’ to the level of world politics.” The egalitarian and utopian hopes and possibilities of the networked internet is lost.” Citing a recently collaboratively published book, Excommunication: Three inquiries in Media and Mediation by Alexander Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark, Lovink appropriates Galloway’s first mode or model of mediation “Hermes” for his title. Hermes is the communication god of messaging, “circulation”, and “exchange” as Galloway begins his proposal for media and its mediations, one that looks back to history first. Geographically pinning Galloway, Thacker, and Wark as the New York’s triumvirate of media theory conspirators, Lovink spins a relatively geographically distinctively different global view on new media’s demise or otherwise. Galloway, Thacker and Wark’s collective claim in their Introduction expresses, “One of the things the trio of us share is a desire to cease adding ‘new media’ to existing things...” Lovink responds, “The ‘three inquiries in media and mediation’ open with the widely shared discontent that ‘new media’ has become an empty signifier. This leaves us with the question of the mandate and scope of today’s media theory—if there is anything left.” Lovink continues with a question, “Are you ready to hand over the “new media” remains to the sociologists, museum curators, art historians, and other humanities officials? Can we perhaps stage a more imaginative “act of disappearance”? Are we ready to disguise ourselves amidst the new normality?” What do you think? Renate Links to Galloway, Thacker and Wark’s as well as Lovink’s writing: Excommunication by Alexander Galloway, Eugene Thacker and McKenzie Wark For information about the full text see the University of Chicago: http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo14413838.html Geert Lovink’s Hermes on the Hudson: Notes on Media Theory after Snowden in e-flux http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/article_8979320.pdf McKenzie Warke’s response to Lovink in Public Seminar Commons Where next for media theory? http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/04/where-next-for-media-theory/#.U2U_z-vWp30 -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) 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-] empyre open call for moderators
--empyre- soft-skinned space---empyre subscribers Do you have a topic that you would like to be featured as an -empyre topic for discussion? Consider being a moderator. Just write a couple of paragraphs that clearly states your idea for the topic with ten to twelve potential guests who you might invite to join you. We will provide you and your guests with instructions and support on how to moderate and post. Your discussion will be archived at http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/ We are now looking for a few moderators to fill out our 2014 schedule and are ready to fill the months of 2015. Please email Renate Ferro at r...@cornell.edu Thanks. -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office: 306 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: rfe...@cornell.edu r...@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-] Welcome to week 4 on empyre: Fiona Barnett, Zac Zimmer, Viola Lasmana, and Vivian Fritz Roa
--empyre- soft-skinned space--During this last week of our discussion, Critical Making in International Networks, many of our guests are convening in Lima, Peru for Hastac 2004, we welcome four featured guests on empyre: Fiona Barnett, Zac Zimmer, Viola Lasmana, and Vivian Fritz Roa. We look forward to their posts and we encourage all of our guests from last week and those previous to post freely. Renate and Tim Fiona Barnett is director of HASTAC Scholars and a Ph.D. candidate in the Literature Program and Women's Studies at Duke University. For the past five years, she has been the Director of HASTAC Scholars, an award-winning annual program for over 200 interdisciplinary graduate students around the world. She has overseen the community of emerging scholars and has developed dozens of highly-viewed topical forums on topics such as new media art, race and queer theory in the digital age, and the future of pedagogy. She is a founding member of the #transformDH collective and continues to develop scholarly projects at the intersection of queer theory, race studies and the digital humanities. Her dissertation project, Turning the Body Inside Out, is a critical genealogy of the desire to see the inside of the body through the practices of autopsy, imaging technologies, biometrics and forensics. In 2013 she was named as a Future Leader of Higher Education by the Association of American Colleges Universities. Zac Zimmer–assistant professor of Spanish at Virginia Tech and faculty affiliate with the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought (ASPECT) and Science and Technology in Society (STS)–received his PhD from the Department of Romance Studies, Cornell University. His research explores questions of literature, aesthetics, politics, and technology in Latin America. His current project, tentatively titled First Contact, is a comparative study of Latin American science fiction and narratives of the sixteenth century conquest of the Americas. Previous publications on contemporary Argentine literature, utopia, post-apocalyptic fiction, and the commons have appeared in The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Latin American Research Review, Chasqui, Modern Language Notes, Transmodernity, and Revista Otra Parte. Viola Lasmana is a PhD student and Dornsife Doctoral Fellow in the English department at University of Southern California, as well as a USC Transpacific Studies Graduate Fellow. She received her master’s degree from San Francisco State University, and her bachelor’s degree from the University of San Francisco. Viola works in the intersections of digital humanities, American and Indonesian literatures, postcolonial studies, and theories of the archive. She is also particularly interested in the generative potentials of the theory and practice of remix for both scholarship and pedagogy. Nelly Researcher and Chilean choreographer, Vivian Fritz Roa, currently resides in France. (Vivian will be represented in English by fellow Seuil-Lab member, nellytodorova.). She took up dance at the University of Chile. she is a professor of art and has studies in digital photography at the Pontificate Universidad Católica de Chile. Creator of Acontraluz, a contemporary dance and educational experiences lab in Chile (pierre Teilhard de Chardin School, 1997-2006). Ms. Fritz has collaborated in creativity and research projects between Chile, Colombia, Spain and France. She has taken courses in dance and the use of images at the University of Strasburg (2010-2013). Founder and Director of project Seuil-Lab (Umbral Lab), which is an experimental laboratory and artistic collective, with the use of new technologies. She is a member of the European Doctoral School. She was awarded a scientific scholarship from the Conicyt (Chile-France) and theCollege Doctoral Europeen (France) to work on her thesis: “Dance and new technologies, towards unpublished/unprecedented forms of choreographic creation” ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] critical space
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear all, I have been lurking so far this month distracted by my heavy teaching load and re-coding my project Private Secrets Public Lies for Hastac (more on that later) . Thanks to Tim for take over the logistics of our discussion on empyre this month. Whew glad to have back up. Marcus thanks for the photograph of the incredibly poignant use of old media. I love it! I'm going to print it out and put in on the door of my Tinker Factory Lab courtesy of you. Tim and I have arrived in Lima and are just now coming to after our flight from Newark late last night. As we sit in the hotel restaurant having breakfast we are seated next to Hastac staff who are madly preparing for our arrival. While their conversation intensely moves from name tags to food to transportation their conversation rests most intently on their anxiety about the unpredictability of the tools of technology. Will the network be slow or too fast, will participants have their adapters, will they arrive in time to set up and hook up their tech projects, what other problems will occur? In re-reading the posts thus far this month the tools of technology and the structures and platforms that they inherently rely on resonate throughout most of the the posts from the South African archive that Danny shared to Diane's archive and ebooks. In the midst of technology, questions of indigeneity are also central to our discussion this month as Kevin Franklin mentioned Arcta and Danny mentioned not only the archives but the the Vha-Venda and Isi-Tsonga kinetic sculptures which I found amazing. Intersections between making and craft have resonated with our themes of tech and indigenous cultures especially in Denisa's maker spaces of Shenzhen as well as Vivian and Joyce's game spaces. Kevin Hamilton's post so brilliantly catalyzes our concerns when he talks about the internet: I look at the internet as both a medium or vehicle and material. The material is the information that is on it. The medium is the networks that transport the material. It also has the properties of a global mythos that transcends and/or absorbs local associations. The nternet can be both a subject and and object. Or rather you can hold both a subjective and objective viewpoint at the same time Technology exists within the zones of craft-making and culture both the subjective and the objective which brings me back to Calin's post a few days ago: The computer is, I like to believe, a new Dada hat where words mix and compose themselves into another random poem a Ready Media piece builds itself up, and works its way toward an unpredictable target or goal. My involvement is in establishing, or provoking the context around the operations of this system. My question for all of you though is in regards to criticality. Tim has raised this question a couple of times in his responses in relationship but I'm wondering if anyone out there could talk about the issues of criticality in regards to our global discussion? For me issues of criticality flourish around my making and conceptualizing. Often times I am totally unaware of the critical issues that I'm dealing with until my project is underway or even sometimes finished. The resonances between the local and the global or negotiating the conceiving, making, crafting, coding, and uploading can only expand and complicate for better or worse original intention. In what ways can criticality provide a GROUND for the beginnings of our multi-dimensional practices. How then? Let's continue to talk about that. -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) 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-] looking for a moderator of the month of May
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Just a brief disruption of this month's discussion. Anyone of our subscribers interested in hosting the month of May? If you have an idea for a topic and a group of eight or so others who may want to join in as guests please email me asap. Thanks. Renate -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office: 306 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: rfe...@cornell.edu r...@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: Welcome to the March discussion of -empyre and moderator Sandra Danilovic.
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Many thanks to Michael Dieter for shepherding out February discussion to a close yesterday. Michael agreed to moderate our session last month at the last minute and we are thankful to him and his guests for leading such an engaging discussion on Hybrid Bookwork. The term hybrid is a fascinating and timely concept and I was thrilled to follow last month's topic. It is with great pleasure that I introduce empyre to our March moderator. Sandra Danilovic (CA) is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. Her doctoral research explores illness and trauma narratives in autobiographical digital games as vehicles for creative self-expression embedded in broader social justice goals. She has an extensive background in film production, fine arts and digital design practice. Her semi-autobiographical machinima documentary, Second Bodies, won Best Documentary at the New Media Film Festival in San Francisco (2010) and has screened at Vector: Game + Art Convergence Festival (2013), San Francisco Indie Film Festival (2011) and The Female Eye Film Festival (2011). Her previous one-hour independent documentaries explored immigrant narratives set within archival and contemporary contexts; Portrait of a Street: The Soul and Spirit of College (2001) and Just Arrived (2004) were respectively broadcast on American PBS and Rogers OMNI Television. She is a member of *The Semaphore Lab* at University of Toronto and Toronto's DIY community, *Dames Making Games. * *Sandra was in residence at the School of Criticism and Theory last summer where Tim and I got to know her better. We are looking forward to her line up of guests and this month's topic, *The playsthetics of experimental digital games. Many of Sandra's guests are new to -empyre which I might add now has 1,805 subscribers with active emails. Thanks Sandra we look forward to your Introductory Post soon. Renate -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office: 306 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: rfe...@cornell.edu r...@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/ -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office: 306 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: rfe...@cornell.edu r...@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
Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 111, Issue 5
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Michael just a quick question. Do you have a quick link to the Post-Digital Research Group? and their publications? Perhaps you did that it your into and I missed it? On Sun, Feb 9, 2014 at 1:44 PM, Michael Dieter m.j.die...@uva.nl wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Something else I want to ask about. This is the definition that the Post-Digital Research group settled on for their publication: Post-digital, once understood as a critical reflection of digital aesthetic immaterialism, now describes the messy and paradoxical condition of art and media after digital technology revolutions. Post-digital neither recognizes the distinction between old and new media, nor ideological affirmation of the one or the other. It merges old and new, often applying network cultural experimentation to analog technologies which it re-investigates and re-uses. It tends to focus on the experiential rather than the conceptual. It looks for DIY agency outside totalitarian innovation ideology, and for networking off big data capitalism. At the same time, it already has become commercialized. I'm curious about the emphasis here on the experiential, rather than the conceptual. Why emphasize one over the other in this way? What works or practices did the group have in mind? In a weird way, this description actually reminds me of something like relational aesthetics. -- Michael Dieter Lecturer Media Studies The University of Amsterdam Turfdraagsterpad 9 1012 XT Amsterdam http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/m.j.dieter/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office: 306 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: rfe...@cornell.edu r...@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-] Closing January discussion on Interactivity
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Many thanks to Patrick Lichty and all of his guests this January. Thank you Patrick for organizing and moderating this past month especially given your busy schedule. I will be introducing our February moderator shortly. Renate -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office: 306 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: rfe...@cornell.edu r...@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-] Welcome Michael Dieter to February on -empyre soft-skinned space
--empyre- soft-skinned space--It is with great pleasure that we welcome Michael Dieter back to the moderator's platform for the month of February on -empyre soft-skinned space. Michael Dieter is a lecturer in media studies at University of Amsterdam and an associate researcher with the Hybrid Publishing Lab at Leuphana University, Lüneburg. His research deals with questions that emerge at the intersection of aesthetic philosophy, artistic practices and politics, and covers a range of specific topics like technological obsolescence, error handling, e-waste streams and information overload. He holds a PhD in media communications and cultural studies with University of Melbourne, and his writing has appeared in differences, Fibreculture Journal, M/C and the Australian Humanities Review. His current research investigates contemporary experimental engagements with the book as media, including aspects of sprints, post-digital publishing, 'bookishness' and alternative distribution. Tomorrow he will be introducing the topic for the month: HYBRID BOOKWORK Experimental eBooks, Post-Digital Publishing Michael has assembled an amazing group of guests and I invite all of our subscribers to join in. Renate Ferro -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office: 306 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: rfe...@cornell.edu r...@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-] February moderator needed: just a brief interruption
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Happy New Year all and thanks Patrick for signing on for this discussion on Interactivity. I am really looking forward to it. Just a quick interruption. The guest moderator we originally had scheduled for February has conflicts. Anyone out there on empyre interested in proposing a topic? If so please send a brief description with a line up of ten potential guests. We are looking for topics that are current and may relate to your research/projects/interests and be of interest to our other -empyre soft-skinned space subscribers. Send an email to Renate Ferro rfe...@cornell.edu and Tim Murray t...@cornell.edu Thanks again. Renate -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) 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
Re: [-empyre-] Response to DYD post from Luz Calvo
buy an organic, heirloom pumpkin or winter squash, you don’t even need to buy seeds, just save the seeds from the pumpkins or squash and plant them in the Spring. Substitutions: Substitute 3 15-ounce cans of canned pumpkin for the fresh pumpkin. You can use ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon instead of a cinnamon stick. You can use ground cumin and coriander instead of whole seeds. You can use a drop of honey or a pinch of brown sugar instead of maple syrup. You can use lemon instead of lime. This soup is very forgiving, don’t fret about having to substitute some of the ingredients. Dr. Luz Calvo Associate Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies Office: MI 4099 Cal State East Bay 25800 Carlos Bee Boulevard Hayward, CA 94542 Decolonize Your Diet https://www.facebook.com/DecolonizeYourDiet http://decolonizeyourdiet.org/ On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 6:45 AM, Irina Contreras icontre...@cca.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello, I thought I might bring to your attention a great article written by Dorothy Santos recently. http://reader.thecivicbeat.com/2013/12/the-honeymoons-over-reflecting-on-the-internet-utopianism-and-the-arts/ The honeymoons over is a reflection on internet utopianism and the arts. This seems like maybe a jumping off point for us to talk about how work like this might/might not relate to Cake And Eat It and Decolonize Your Diet. Cake and Eat It seems to use the internet as a site though perhaps an afterthought? Addie, feel free to pipe in here. Decolonize Your Diet may not identify at all as artists but perhaps use creative ways to make their mission of interest. Dorothy speaks to the use of social media and this overlaps with change. You can also check this interview with Addie from CAEI: http://gagajournal.blogspot.com/2012/06/stigmata-dreams-bled-threads-addie.html Irina ___ 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 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) 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-] Welcome to Irina Contreras, December moderator on- empyre
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- A few days before the end of November we received word that our regularly scheduled moderator was not going to be able to moderate the month of December. Irina Contreras volunteered at the last minute not only pulling together a topic but gathering a group of interesting guests. Irina will be introducing the December topic, Call and Response soon. I would like to thank Irina for her amazing organizational push at this last minute. We all look forward to the discussion. IRINA CONTRERAS (1977) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer, whose individual and collaborative projects examine personal reflections of collective experiences. Recent projects take the form of performance, narrative, video, play, archives and collaboration as a way to manipulate and interrogate physical space. In 2008, she was a resident artist in DF/Mexico City and in Berkeley in 2009. She has performed, shown and programmed film and video in venues throughout the US, Mexico, and Germany and is looking forward to performing in the 2013 Ghetto Biennial in Port Au Prince, Haiti. She has written for various anthologies besides writing regularly for such publications like make/shift Magazine. In 2010, she was a recipient of the Creating Community Grant to co-create a production entitled, Scenes Unseen, which explored the historical and contemporary realities of immigration and gender-based laws. Born in Los Angeles, she will complete her MFA/MA in Social Practice/Visual and Critical Studies from the California College of Arts in 2015. She can be found at machinegunsteady.tumblr.com or scenesunseenproduction.com. -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) 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-] December topic is open: looking for a guest moderator and topic for December
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Dear Patrick and empyreans, My apologies Patrick for interrupting your discussion this month. Our topic discussion for December is open because of unforeseen circumstances. If any of our subscribers would be open to being a guest moderator for next month please email me as soon as possible. Even if you have never moderated before we can help you manage though the month. You need a good discussion topic and a list of potential weekly guests for the two or three weeks of December. Contact me at rfe...@cornell.edu Hope someone is interested. Renate -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office: 306 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: rfe...@cornell.edu r...@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
Re: [-empyre-] New art
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks Isak for sending us links to CHOKRA's work. Generally one of the things I wish we could have talked about this month is the role of the viewer/consumer in the gesture towards convergence. While in Korea earlier this month, one of the observations that Tim and I made was that while the spectacular enticed in the viewer in the critical engagement did not seem evident. The spectacle became part of an advertisement or commercialism. Realizing that Alex wrote that the spectacle itself was a political statement against the old fashioned communist regime I wonder how aware most viewers possibly recognized this political gesture. My caution/question to all of us, both producers and critics, is how to enable the receiver to critically engage the content despite the mesmerizing blast of sensorial output. Isak what intrigues me about CHOKRA is the inclusion of scent which may be a visceral cue that reacting and thinking are expected and encouraged. I can smell the crude oil and the spices as I read them on the screen before I opened the links to the work and that provided me with a powerful political entry into this engaging work. Thanks to all of you who participated. Tim may be closing down this discussion as I write this. Renate On Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 12:17 AM, Isak Berbic isakber...@yahoo.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Chokra: http://vimeo.com/36801706 http://vimeo.com/62685199 http://vimeo.com/42802080 - CHOKRA (Conscious Hoarding Of Kinetic Rage Associated) is a performance music artist from the United Arab Emirates. His sensorial performances integrate surrealistic visuals with automated multilingual rap-rhymes uttered in Arabic, Urdu and English. Combining audio-visual software, algorithmic animations and multi-channel sound, CHOKRA's performances situate a multi-faceted processing of sensorial realities with a heightened propagation of scent, crude oil, pyromania, brilliant pigments, spices and crushed gold. Bio is copy pasted from the internet: http://89plus.com/events/abdullah-al-mutairi/ October, 29, 2013 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office: 306 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: rfe...@cornell.edu r...@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-] Welcome to the November: Documenting Digital Artivism
--empyre- soft-skinned space--We welcome three moderators to -empyre soft-skinned space, Selmin Kara, Patrick Keilty ad Camilla Mehring. They have rounded up a hearty list of guests this month and we are anticipating a lively discussion, Documenting Digital Artivism. We first met Patrick and Selmin a couple of summers ago when they attended the School for Criticism and Theory at Cornell. We are very happy that they have agreed to organize this online discussion spawned from their collective work with Camilla. Welcome and we look forward to the month. While I list the moderator's biographies below, Patrick will be posting the introduction soon with all of the guests biographies in their entirety. Renate Moderators: Selmin Kara (Canada), Patrick Keilty (Canada), Camilla Møhring Reestorff (Denmark) Selmin Kara is an Assistant Professor of Film and New Media Studies and a co-chair of the colloquium series in media studies and research, ProprioMedia, at OCAD University in Toronto. Originally Turkish, she received her BA and MA in Istanbul, Turkey, and PhD in Detroit, Michigan. She has critical interests in the use of digital technologies, tactical media, and sound in documentary as well as post-cinematic aesthetics and new materialist approaches in film. Her work has appeared in Studies in Documentary Film and Poiesis: A Journal of the Arts Communication, and the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media. Selmin is currently co-editing a journal issue on unruly documentary artivism and working on her monograph “Reassembling Documentary: Sound and Image from Actuality to Virtuality,” which proposes a modular and assemblistic framework for understanding documentary practices in the age of networks. Patrick Keilty is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, and teaches in the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies there. His writing examines and critiques feminist and queer engagements with digital technology, particularly focusing on visual culture, database logic, metadata, existential phenomenology, and sexual desire. He is co-editor of Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader. His monograph project, provisionally titled Desiring Database Logic: Embodiment and Electronic Culture, 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. Camilla Møhring Reestorff is Assistant Professor in the Department of Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University and honorary research fellow at the Department of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne. She has conducted research on nationalism and the intertwining of art, activism and politics in the Danish ‘Culture War’. Her publications include work on contemporary cultural politics and political art, e.g. in Globalizing Art. Negotiating Place, Identity and Nation in Contemporary Nordic Art (Thomsen and Ørjasæter 2011), fictionality as a rhetorical strategy (Andersen, Brix, Kierkegaard, Skov, Stage and Reestorff 2013) and unruly artivist practices, e.g. “Buying Blood Diamonds and Altering Global Capitalism. Mads Brügger as Unruly Artivist in The Ambassador” (Reestorff 2013). Her primary research focus is mediatization, art, artivism and cultural participation. -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) 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-] Week 4: “Convergence: expanding time-base media”
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks to Tim for taking over during week three as I have been in the middle of mid=term critiques with our senior thesis students. Also thanks to Dale Hudson and Gabriel Menotti for being our featured guests this week. For the last week of October we welcome Isak Berbic, Lisa Patti and Ken Feingold, and Malcolm Levy. We will keep this discussion open until Thursday the 31st and are hoping that those of our former guests in previous weeks will feel free to make final closing posts. We met Isak in Hungary just about two years ago and are happy that he has moved to the States after spending time in the UAE. Lisa is a former Cornellian who lives to the North of us and teaches at Hobart College. We do miss seeing you around campus Lisa. We also welcome our other two guests Ken and Malcolm with the anticipation of learning more about their own work especially as it interests with this month's theme of Convergence. Bios are below. Thanks. Renate Ferro Isak Berbic (b.1983) is a photography, moving image and performance artist from Sarajevo. As Yugoslavia dissolved and Bosnia was under attack, he and his family became refugees, moving through Croatia, a refugee camp in Denmark, eventually receiving asylum in the United States. Isak Berbic studied Photography at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In Chicago, he practiced art, worked in theater, and art directed a political community magazine. From 2007-2012 he was based in the Middle East, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, where he taught at the University of Sharjah. In 2012 he joined the faculty at Stony Brook University (SUNY), Art Department. His research deals with social histories, politics, tragedy, memory, humor, exile, and the limits of representation. His recent artworks investigate the overlaps of documentary and fiction in relation to the visualization of contested politics and contested histories. Isak Berbic is now living and working in New York. http://www.isakberbic.com/** * * Lisa Patti teaches in the Media and Society Program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature with a concentration in Film and Video from Cornell University. Her current research explores the global distribution of cinema and television through new media platforms, focusing on the circulation of multilingual cinema. Ken Feingold (USA, 1952) received his B.F.A. and M.F.A. degrees in “Post-Studio Art” from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA. He has been recognized as an innovator in the field of interactive art after fifteen prior years of making films, video art, objects, and installations. His early interactive works include The Surprising Spiral (1991), JCJ Junkman (1992), Childhood/Hot Cold Wars (1993), and where I can see my house from here so we are (1993-95) among others. His work Interior (1997) was commissioned for the first ICC Biennale '97, Tokyo; Séance Box No.1 was developed while in residence at the ZKM Karlsruhe during 1998-99, and Head (1999-2000) was commissioned by the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki for the exhibition Alien Intelligence (Feb-May 2000). Since 2000 he has developed a body of “cinematic sculptures” - objects and installations which include artificially intelligent animatronics and, frequently, moving images. He has taught moving image art at Princeton University and Cooper Union, among others, and he is also a licensed psychoanalyst in private practice. His works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Kiasma, Helsinki; ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, and others. Malcolm Levy is an artist and curator based in Vancouver, Canada. He is the co-founder and current Artistic Director of the New Forms Festival (1999--present), and was the curator of CODE Live at the 2010 Winter Olympics, where he oversaw the installation of over 40 interactive media artworks and 8 performances across the city. He is the Artistic Director of ISEA 2015 with Kate Armstrong. His work was recently shown at Supermarkt (Berlin, 2013) Audain Gallery (When we stop and they begin', Vancouver, 2012), in the “Occupy Wall Street” exhibition (New York, 2011), Grimmuseum (Framework, Berlin, 2011), Nuit Blanche (A Place to Reflect (Nuit Blanche Toronto 2011) and Transmission (Victoria, 2011). Malcolm is currently completely his MA in Media Studies at the New School and teaches at SFU in Vancouver. -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office: 306 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: rfe...@cornell.edu r...@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-] cultural fissures
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks Dale for sharing this exciting work with empyre. I think that the impetus for this month's topic was the notion of cross-disciplinarity (or multi/interdisc) that not only encourage shifts of convergence but are a necessity from my point of view. I have students at Cornell working on their final Thesis research/artistic projects. Many of them working with new media and the moving image must include collaborators from engineering or computing who can enable them to accomplish their projects. What happens in the process is that ideas morph, shift, expand, contract as a result of the input of others and the collaborative process. Film is also a collaborative process but it is generated from the top down, producer to director, etc, whether in main-stream or independent cinema. Earlier this month Young min very eloquently wrote about the split eye as described by Lacan. My basic understanding of the eye/gaze dichotomy is from Jacques Lacan who suggests that the eye and the gaze is the split. The function of the eye is to see, while the gaze deceives the eye. snip... This double gaze of deception/abandonment in the form of moving image (camera eye) can represent the unconscious of the subject by revealing the epistemological potentiality of the unconscious truth in analysis. I would argue that the camera eye becomes a derivative manifestation of Lacanian aesthetics of the gaze, the aesthetics which transforms itself from the images of the hoop nets representing the unconscious to the topology of the klein bottle representing a new way of projection which transgresses the borderlands of the inside/outside region of the uncanny unconsciousness. Tim responded: The issue, for me, is not whether the psychoanalytical paradigm remains helpful, but rather, how it might be rewritten by the convergences of medial culture, perhaps more akin to what the French psychoanalyst J-B Pontalis calls the visual along the lines of vision scanned, glanced, looped, morphed and pixellated. Dale it seems to me that the APPS workshop may be an excellent example of J_B Pontalis'visual or I might suggest Massumi's proprioception/sensing where the eye/gaze is disrupted and other senses take over. The other work you mention that engages social conditions also may highlight possible cultural fissures that have become evident. snip Some of the work is very practical like mods of Wii consoles to help doctors and patients with monitoring physical therapy from remote locations and mobile-phone apps to help orphanages record data for reports to funders, but other work is more engaged with artistic/cultural concerns, such as arts education and counter-narratives of cultural heritage.snip Dale you are reminding me of Ricardo Dominguez, Zach Blas, and Brooke Singer's work that has been featured in many of our discussions here on empyre where the visual becomes not only scanned, glanced, looped, morphed and pixellated but displaced by the social movement and politics that embodies it. While Busan screened international cinema both commercial and independent within the hallows of theaters some situated on the top floors of high-rise department stores, in Seoul vast LED screens looped advertisements where both the aesthetics and the ideas were pretty innovative from my point of view. Multiple screens were perched on only on the sides of skyscrapers; others were propped on the ground. Driving through the city from some vantage points I saw five or six screens at once. To take them in my eyes and my body had twist and turn. Certainly no politics and no social concerns were evident in content but definitely large spectacle. From Alex's post last week I think he may explain the ubiquity of the Korean screens/spectacle and the drive toward the commercial and economic as a political gesture itself (against stuffy traditionalists) This presents both a dynamic cultural difference and a fissure that reminds me of the fact that politics, economics and cultural expectations are so directly related to aesthetic culture. I am hoping that we can really flush out this difference because I think it is an important one. As a producer, critical engagement and collaborative gestures may help to keep my understanding between my production, where the production is taking place, and eventually where it is being received. The international film festival and other international venues may be another necessary way to expose ourselves to other ways of understanding. Still very jet-lagged. Renate -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office: 306 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: rfe...@cornell.edu r...@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
Re: [-empyre-] Week 3 on empyre: thoughts about the first two weeks and moving on
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Juliana, Normally we do not put through individual requests like this but I was thinking about the fact that you have been lurking for such a long time that this might be warranted especially because one of the keywords involved in your research in CONVERGENCE. Can you explain to us how you are perceiving the use of the word itself. It might be an interesting addition to our discussion at this point? I am looking forward to hearing more about this. Renate On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 10:31 AM, Juliana Caetano juliana.caet...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear Empirans, I´ve been following the discussions for many years now, despite of being in aread-only position. However, many years have passed and after such an amount of good surprises and loads of information coming from you, I thought would be great to properly exchange. So here I am, sharing my current research and asking for your kind collaboration. I´m a PhD student at PUC-SP (Brazil) in Communication and Semiotics. In order to collect new objects for my study I´m asking you examples that fit one of the categories below (key-words). Personal projects or other´s are more than welcome. What I really want is to go further Google, Institutes and so on. I wanna go for projects that are not necessarily promoted. Projects can be artistic, related to business campaigns or education. Key-words for the projects: media convergence, urban space, collaboration for collective problem-solving, DIALOGUE and transmedia storytelling. To sum up, projects that use media to empower interaction between people and environment in order to mediate (solve) a problem. The major aim for making this collection is to deeply study these practices. I thank you all in advance and I'm looking forward to hearing from you All the best, Juliana On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 11:22 AM, Gabriel Menotti gabriel.meno...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hey, empyre! Thanks for the intro, Renate. It is quite pleasing to participate of the list in the much more comfortable position of a guest. =) Following Dale’s comments about venues and events in Delhi/Mumbai that foster convergence of practices, I could talk a bit about my recent experience, having returned to Brazil after a four-year season as a PhD candidate in London. Still suffering from academic jet lag, some challenges within local universities, research councils and seminars become very clear. Somewhat, the precariousness of local institutions plays against convergence. In the context of arts humanities, the general lack of resources (books, equipment, funding - and time to work!) seems to result in much more homogenous projects, repeating similar formulas, topics and bibliography. Besides the demands of productivity and accountability, I believe one of the reasons for this streamlining of the field is the very honest desire to find intellectual interlocution - common, reliable bases for dialogue. It can feel quite alienating to be the only one in a whole field dealing with a particular bibliography or theme, having no one to talk to. We invest time and attention in authors and schema that allow us to communicate with our peers. Thus, theory moves slowly, in well-established fads, trailing after what happens in North America and Europe (mostly France). The most recent ones are Rancière and Didi-Huberman, who are being mentioned in virtually every national debate about moving image. There seems to be both insecurity and cautiousness in this development, a kind of fear of walking with one’s own steps and suddenly finding divergences from norms set abroad, risking putting into question the rigid hierarchies scientific authority relies upon. (It’s funny how this creates certain distortions of perception. For a long time, Vilém Flusser – who lived, worked and taught in Brazil for a long time – felt too foreign. When I moved to London, I made the mistake of changing all my main references to match the British edition of “Towards a Philosophy of Photography”, ignorant of the fact that Portuguese was more of a working language for the author, and the Brazilian version of the book is actually more up to date.) Best! Menotti 2013/10/17 Renate Ferro r...@cornell.edu: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Tim and I have returned to the US after an intense and productive time at the Busan Film Festival. It was wonderful to see Youngmin and Alex in real time in both Busan and Seoul. The Asian perspective on convergence is one that I feel we have only begun to flush out. Thank you Alex for teasing out some of the cultural complications involving this fact. This was evident for me not only at Busan's film festival but in meeting many of my former students who despite a critical fine arts
[-empyre-] Fwd: Week 3 on -empyre: Dale Hudson, Gabriel Menotti, and Isak Berbik
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Whoops! Please disregard the email I sent introducing Ken Feingold for Week 3. I am very jet-lagged and provided you with the wrong line up. This week on empyre is indeed Dale Hudson, Gabriel Menotti, and Isak Berbik. My apologies to Ken and we will hear from him next week. Tim and I have returned to the US after an intense and productive time at the Busan Film Festival. It was wonderful to see Youngmin and Alex in real time in both Busan and Seoul. The Asian perspective on convergence is one that I feel we have only begun to flush out. Thank you Alex for teasing out some of the cultural complications involving this fact. This was evident for me not only at Busan's film festival but in meeting many of my former students who despite a critical fine arts education at Cornell have transitioned over to their home in Korea where most of them work in very large commercial design firms. It appears to me that this spirit in celebration of capitalism as opposed to a suspicion (that particularly western academics and artists) stems from a desire and necessity for South Korea to assert itself from its neighbor to the North, communist North Korea. I am thinking though about how other parts of Asia may weigh in on this. Week three brings to us three guest moderators: Dale Hudson, Gabriel Menotti and Ken Feingold. Dale now teaching in the United Arab Emerites has been a guest on -empyre previously so many of you may know him. Dale used to teach at our neighboring institution Ithaca College and we do miss seeing him around town. Gabriel Menotti long-time empyreans will recognize. Menotti was a part of a moderating team a few years ago. We welcome him back as a guest and look forward to his contribution. We also welcome Isak Berbik a friend that Tim and I met in Pesc, Hungary a couple of years ago at a conference. We are so pleased that he has moved and is teaching in our state of New York. Our guest's biographies are below: Dale Hudson (UAE/USA) is a media theorist, critic, and curator. He teaches film and new media studies at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), curates online exhibitions for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF), and serves on the preselection committee for the Abu Dhabi Film Festival (ADFF). His work appears in journals including Afterimage, American Quarterly, Cinema Journal, French Cultural Studies, Journal of Film and Video, Screen, and Studies in Documentary Film, as well as in anthologies. His book-in-progress, “Blood, Bodies, and Borders,” analyzes transnational and postcolonial vectors of U.S. history through the political economies of film. He has also reviewed films, exhibitions, and books for journals including Afterimage, African Studies Review, Jadaliyya, and Scope. Gabriel Menotti (Brazil, 1983) Gabriel Menotti is an independent curator and lecturer in Multimedia at the Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES). He is the author of Através da Sala Escura (Intermeios, 2012), a history of movie theatres from the perspective of VJing spaces. Menotti holds a PhD in Media Communications from Goldsmiths (University of London), and another from the Catholic University from São Paulo. He has published work in a number of research journals and books, as well as contributed to international events such as the São Paulo Biennial, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid and the Transmediale Festival. Isak Berbic (b.1983) is a photography, moving image and performance artist from Sarajevo. As Yugoslavia dissolved and Bosnia was under attack, he and his family became refugees, moving through Croatia, a refugee camp in Denmark, eventually receiving asylum in the United States. Isak Berbic studied Photography at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In Chicago, he practiced art, worked in theater, and art directed a political community magazine. From 2007-2012 he was based in the Middle East, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, where he taught at the University of Sharjah. In 2012 he joined the faculty at Stony Brook University (SUNY), Art Department. His research deals with social histories, politics, tragedy, memory, humor, exile, and the limits of representation. His recent artworks investigate the overlaps of documentary and fiction in relation to the visualization of contested politics and contested histories. Isak Berbic is now living and working in New York. http://www.isakberbic.com/** -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office: 306 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: rfe...@cornell.edu r...@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/ -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) Cornell University
[-empyre-] Welcome to Week 2 on empyre: Convergence: Expanding Time-based Media
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Welcome to Week two: Convergence, Expanding Time-based Media We would like to thank Youngmin Kim for not only participating in this past week's discussion on -empyre soft-skinned space but also for inviting us to participate in the Busan International Film Festival Conference. During Week 2 Alex Taek-Gwang will join us on -empyre. Alex also participated in the BiFF conference as a respondent. Alex lives in Seoul, Korea as does Youngmin but he tells us that he was originally from the beautiful city of Busan. Yesterday in Busan the sun finally broke through the typhoon clouds and Tim and I were lucky enough to stroll along the beach first thing in the morning. Most of our last two days in Busan has been spent watching superb international cinema from Iran, Palestine, India, Korea, and Japan. We are looking forward to teasing out the affects that technology and new media have had, both the conceptually and formally on the moving image. Welcome Alex. Below is Alex's biography. Alex Taek-Gwang Lee (KR) Iiz a cultural critic and associate professor in Kyung Hee University, Republic of Korea. He obtained an MA in philosophy from University of Warwick and PhD in Cultural Theory from University of Sheffield. He writes on fine art, popular culture, continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, politics and contributes to various journals as well as newspapers. His research interests are mainly philosophy, Asian cinema, Lacanian psychoanalysis, politics and popular culture. He regularly appears on radio and TV shows for debating political and cultural issues. His publications include Theory After Althusserianism, Futurism, The Obscene Fantasy of Korean Culture, Nationalism as a Sublime Object, Deleuze as aTheatre of Philosophy, This Is What Is Called Cultural Criticism, The Impressionists, Framing a Witch, etc. He is an editorial member of the English Language and Literature Journal , the Theory and Criticism Journal,tThe Literature and Cinema Journal and of the Gwangju Biennale Journal NOON. He organized The Idea of Communism Conference in Seoul with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek. -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office: 306 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: rfe...@cornell.edu r...@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
Re: [-empyre-] Youngmin and things at BIFF
on digital communication, this ended up being an endorsement of search engines and deep data for advertising and audience development -- a far cry from endorsing a convergence of cinematic and new media habits and techniques. While it's understandable that a major film festival would promote conventional business models, it's disheartening that the Asian independents seem to work indifferently to so many of their Asian peers who lead the new media arts (and this in the land of Nam June Paik -- one of Paik's sculptures even graces the lobby of Seoul airport hotel where we slept off our first night of jet lag). Yet, Renate and I have enjoyed two films that seem to thrive on such convergences. The Korean director Bong Joon-ho screened his extraordinary film, Snowpiercer, which tells an eerie and violent tale of social upheaval in the new postglobal warming ice age, as the survivors circle the globe in a hierarchically ordered train, with a marvelous performance by Tilda Swinton. The marvel is how the film successfully cut between dazzling animated sequences of the train crashing through icebergs and the traditional analogue representation of the diegesis. We enjoyed the flipside of this tonight while watching Japanese director Akira Ikeda's Anatomy of a Paper Clip (a miminalist sado-masochistic portrayal of class abjection in which directing evoked a combination of realist miminalism and pared down animation). While the film contained no animation until the credits, the actors every movements seemed to embody the craft of top-motion animation as nuanced in the digital scene. Today we also enjoyed the dialogue between this week's guest, Youngmin Lee, and next week's featured guest, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee. It'll be very interesting to hear how Alex weighs into the discussion. Of course, we're very anxious to hear the thoughts of empyreans throughout the month. Best, Tim Director, Society for the Humanities Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art Professor of Comparative Literature and English A. D. White House Cornell University Ithaca, New York. 14853 From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [ empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] on behalf of Renate Ferro [ r...@cornell.edu] Sent: Tuesday, October 08, 2013 1:40 AM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: [-empyre-] Fwd: Welcome to the October Discussion: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office: 306 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: rfe...@cornell.edu r...@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: Welcome to the October Discussion:
--empyre- soft-skinned space--For some reason this did not go through on my iphone so I will send it again. . We have arrived in Buson and as we sit next to our hotel window we can look out at the sea. Though a typhoon is expected, the horizontal plane of the massive sea and the striking verticalness of the skyscrapers is a sight to see. Still wondering though about projection and anamorphosis so I'll resend this post. sent Sunday, October 6th.. Thanks Youngmin for this amazing post. I am quickly posting this as I sit on the plane awaiting take off. I am wondering what you think about the moving image as projection especially within installation. I have crafted projects where the 16:9 proportions of the moving image file is skewed on purpose. For example when throwing the image within the corner of an Architectural space. The anamorphic shifts affect the formal qualities but also affect the content. Any thoughts? See you on your side of the world soon. Renate Sent from my iPhone -- Forwarded message -- From: Youngmin Kim yk4...@gmail.com Date: Sat, Oct 5, 2013 at 1:19 PM Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to the October Discussion: To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au --empyre- soft-skinned space-- I just awoke from Zhuangzi’s Butterfly Dream into the “empyre”an, thanks to Tim and Renate. Out of blissful “panic” since this is my first time to encounter the empyrean, I come to see the world as a globe with my eyes. The eye is in fact the eyeball which looks like a globe. Nietzsche once said that men are “deeply immersed in illusions and in dream images;” and “their eyes merely glide over the surface of things and see forms.” I am tempted to open up the issue of rethinking of the eye/gaze in terms of the ontological concept of “medium” before Tim Murrayan “reflecting on the shifting ontologies of film, screen culture, and global media.” During next week at Busan from Oct. 7-12, I hope I am able to observe how BIFF Conference and Forum represent and demonstrate the “convergence of media.” My basic understanding of the eye/gaze dichotomy is from Jacques Lacan who suggests that the eye and the gaze is the split. The function of the eye is to see, while the gaze deceives the eye. His autobiographical story of “Petit-Jean” demonstrates that the gaze is outside in the object when the subject sees with his eyes the thing-object out there. His classical tale of Zeuxis and Parrhasios tells us the issue of “deceiving the eye” (tromper-l'œil), i.e., “A triumph of the gaze over the eye.” In short, the gaze deceives the eye from the invisible side of the light which is truth but in veil. However, Lacan is interested in the “laying down of the gaze,” “dompte-regard” or taming of the gaze. This double gaze of deception/abandonment in the form of moving image (camera eye) can represent the unconscious of the subject by revealing the epistemological potentiality of the unconscious truth in analysis. I would argue that the camera eye becomes a derivative manifestation of Lacanian aesthetics of the gaze, the aesthetics which transforms itself from the images of the hoop nets representing the unconscious to the topology of the klein bottle representing a new way of projection which transgresses the borderlands of the inside/outside region of the uncanny unconsciousness. Your new young empyrean friend, Youngmin 2013/10/5 Renate Ferro r...@cornell.edu --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Tim Murray posted: So one of the questions we'll be asking is how to understand the current moment of convergence. I was at a conference last weekend on comparative media and a very influential film scholar made a passionate claim that cinema shares with literature the access to profundity in a way that media can't. Although I can understand the historical background of such a claim, I found it so curious in an age when profundity has been democratized, stretched, challenged, and mobilized by interactive performance, mobile technologies, and cross-platform exhibition ...Coco Fusco delivered a keynote lecture at a conference in Art History here at Cornell last night. In a powerful juxta-position of examples she laid out an hour's worth of examples of Cuban citizens, mostly performance artists, who use the ubiquitous technologies of cell phones (video capture most notably but certainly still photography via social media) to document their actions to expose the political machinery of that government. There are no independent reporters working inside of Cuba only individual citizens who report from the inside out. Many of these citizens including these performance artists she cited risk jail sentences for their political actions. The documentation of their political acts through the use of the moving image and other social media tools sends
Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to the October Discussion:
and English A. D. White House Cornell University Ithaca, New York. 14853 From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [ empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] on behalf of Renate Ferro [ r...@cornell.edu] Sent: Friday, October 04, 2013 10:13 AM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: [-empyre-] Welcome to the October Discussion: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office: 306 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: rfe...@cornell.edu r...@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-] Week 1: Welcome to Youngmin Kim
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Welcome to Week 1 “Convergence: expanding time-base media” and to our special guest this week, Youngmin Kim. We do welcome Youngkim warmly as we owe the inspiration for this month's topic to him. Youngmin has invited Tim to give the keynote address at the upcoming Busan Film Conference http://forum.biff.kr held in conjunction with the 18th International Film Festival in Korea this week. I will be participating on a panel entitled Film, Design, and Convergence. Throughout the first and second week of this discussion we hope to post regularly from Busan. Additionally our discussion was inspired by the recent work we saw at the Venice Biennale. Digital time-based media seeped though not only the main pavilions of the Giardini and Arsenale but throughout many of the pavilions in the city of Venice. Some were high-budget cinematic spectacles while others were obvious documentations from real-life. Our broad question this month asks the question not only how new media and technology have expanded the scope of the moving image but how the convergence of other cross-disciplinary venues including video, television, performance, design, the fine arts, the humanities and even science morphed not only the technical aspects of production but also how it is streamed, received, and theorized globally. . We look forward to this month’s discussion. Renate and Tim Week 1 Guests: YOUNGMIN KIM has been teaching literatures in English and critical theory at the Department of English since 1991. He is Professor of English at Dongguk University, Seoul, Korea. He has been researching and writing books and articles on modern and contemporary Irish/Canadian/English/American poetry and literature, Lacanian Psychoanalysis Culture, Film, and Literature; Critical Theories including Poststructuralism, Postmodernism, Postcolonialism, Trans/Posthumanism, Transnational and Transcultural studies, Teaching on the Web, Translation and Intercultural Studies. He was Visiting Professor at Cornell University (1998-9) and Sapporo Gakuin University (2009 Fall) in Japan, and the Visiting Scholar at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville (2007-8, 2011 Winter). He had served as the Secretary General, Vice-President, Editor and President of the William Butler Yeats Society of Korea. He gave lectures and seminars at Yeats International Summer School. He was Secretary General, Vice-President, President of The Korean Society of Jacques Lacan Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He was the Secretary General, Vice-President, and President of the ELLAK (English Language and Literature of Korea), and now the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of English Language and Literature. He has been serving until now as the conference committee member of the IATIS (International Association for the Translation and Intercultural Studies), and the representative and Vice-Chair of the IASIL (International Association of Study for Irish Literatures). He was named in 2013 as the Vice-President of The IAELC (International Association of Ethical Literary Criticism) in China. -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office: 306 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: rfe...@cornell.edu r...@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-] a brief interruption
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Sorry to all of you for interrupting this month's discussion but just wanted to call out to all empyreans. We are seeking special guests for our October discussion. See below. Contact Renate Ferro rfe...@cornell.edu or Tim Murray t...@cornell.edu if you want to be featured as a weekly guest during Week1, 2, 3, or 4. . “Convergence: expanding time-base media across the disciplines. moderated by Renate Ferro and Tim Murray In what ways have new media and technology, video, television, performance, design, the fine arts, and humanities converged with and transformed the expressive scope of the moving image? -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office: 306 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: rfe...@cornell.edu r...@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-] enjoying the quiet of August
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Just a quick email to all of our empyre subscribers to give you a heads up on the months ahead on -empyre-. You have have probably noticed that our month off-line in August gives us all a chance to rest and recoup..We will begin our discussions again on September 1st, a special moderated session on biopolitics, hosted by Adam Nocek. We would like to follow up in October with a discussion on surveillance. Given the recent Snowden revelations we thought it might be a timely topic for the fall. If any of our subscribers are interested in being featured as a weekly guest for any of those topics please let me know. Best Wishes. Happy August. Renate Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] empyre subscribers...this is the last day to post your projects, bios, interests!!
--empyre- soft-skinned space--It has been incredibly great to read about so many of your projects. We are hoping that many of you will take this last day of June to respond to our call. Whether you are a participant or a lurker please let us know what your current projects are and post a short bio. Thanks to all of you this month who have shared. Thanks. Renate -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] thanks to Jon, only three more days to post your insights, projects, bios
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Jon thanks for updating your recent work for us and also reminding us about the role of the list-serve. I agree that while published articles and books do have a seminal role historically in the process of promotion within academia, kudos to the University of Maine for embracing the more informal vehicles of networked communication. In my five or so years as a moderator of -empyre, as an advisor to the Rose Goldsen Archive at Cornell, and as a professor teaching new media and theory at Cornell, list-serves such as -empyre- and so many others forms of networked publications like C-theory for example, are key to my teaching the most current and cutting edge hot-topics within the cross-disciplinary field of new media. On behalf of all of the moderators I think I can say that this month has been a pretty interesting and eye-opening experience. We do want to know who -empyre is and so many of you have shared your insights, projects, and bios. We have only three days left so if you have not posted please do so NOW! BOTH LURKERS AND REGULAR PARTICIPANTS ARE INVITED! Simon Biggs will be opening up a new discussion on Monday, July 1st! Thanks to all of you who have posted so far. Renate On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 3:17 PM, Jon Ippolito jippol...@maine.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- I've lurked on empyre since the early 2000s, starting as a new media artist and Guggenheim curator, and now an Associate Professor of New Media at the University of Maine. As a co-founder of Still Water ( http://still-water.net/), I've helped build The Pool, ThoughtMesh, the Cross-Cultural Partnership, and an ecovillage on the Maine coast. On empyre I've probably been most outspoken about future threats to new media, such as copyright lockdown, academic co-optation, and especially technological and cultural obsolescence--all specters that have haunted my own creative work. I have the privilege of being an advisor on Tim Murray's Preservation and Access Framework for Digital Art Objects at Cornell. This preservation research dovetails well with the new Digital Curation program I've helped start this year at the University of Maine ( http://DigitalCuration.UMaine.edu). All the online courses are online; in addition to a two-year graduate certificate, we host periodic hit-and-run events. One of our webinars last spring featured Christiane Paul speaking about the Douglas Davis case profiled this month in The New York Times. Since we're talking about the historical role of a particular email list, we shouldn't forget the threat of academic myopia. Don't get me wrong: books and articles have a long shelf life and have made important contributions to the understanding of our emerging field over the last three decades. I myself am co-authoring the book Re-collection with Richard Rinehart this coming year (http://re-collection.net). But it's critical not to forget the role that listservs and other informal networks of communication have played in this field. One arena where this plays out is in academic promotion and tenure guidelines, which until recently tended to ignore the Internet altogether. At the University of Maine, we explicitly wrote ours to embrace contributions to online discussions and other dialogic forms of scholarly communication and artistic intervention. These New Criteria for New Media became one of the most downloaded articles of Leonardo magazine: http://thoughtmesh.net/publish/275.php Re-collection argues that museums and textbooks aren't yet very good at reconstructing the historical context for creative work. Fortunately, a few universities and archives have given communication networks like empyre the weight they deserve. When I consulted the prestigious Langlois Foundation's research database in 2005 I was pleased to find numerous citations from email lists and Web sites. For example, although Alex Galloway has authored journal articles and books from prestigious publishers like MIT, the two documents that represented his writing in the Langlois database were both from email lists. Since then, the Internet archive's Jason Scott has done important work rescuing historic BBSs. I hope this time capsule of empyre's can draw further attention to the role of electronic dialogue in shaping creative and critical expression. jon @jonippolito ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
[-empyre-] empyre subscribers: we want you to tell us about your new projects and post your bio
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Just a quick reminder that on the 30th of June we will be closing down this special month of empyre. Whether you are a regular participant or a quiet lurker PLEASE let us know what you are working on now. What are your interests? Post a short bio as well. After more than 10 years of empyre we want to archive what is happening now! Hope to hear from more of you. Tim and Renate -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Week 2: empyre subscribers we want to archive your current projects
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear empyreans, Welcome to Week 2 on empyre. This is your chance to send us your biography and your current projects. We have heard from some of you but whether you are a regular participant, a lurker, or you just collect our posts we want to hear about what you are working on now. Are you an artist, theorist, programmer or something in between? We want to hear about what you are writing, creating or conceiving. An Archival Event: Who is –empyre? Noting -empyre- soft-skinned space’s passage through its tenth-year anniversary, (January 2012) we have been spending time cruising through the layered archive of posts during that time. http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/ -empyre- has grown from a small organic collective begun by Melinda Rackam to a large international listserv, now with over 1600 members. One of Melinda's brilliant moves was to link the list serve to software that automatically archives each post for future access -- this was quite a prescient feat a decade ago. As we have been thinking of interesting ways to mark the passage into the next decade, as -empyre- continues to morph and grow in the environment of Web 2.0 (now clearly with many, many more lurkers and passive participants than active interlocutors), we thought it might be nice to take a moment to archive the projects of our members. This is an open invitation to all of our subscribers. We invite you to submit a post with: 1) a brief bio, with contact information 2) a two-paragraph description of your practice, current/recent projects, or writing or curatorial activities We encourage our pioneering members as well as those of you who may have just joined us. We are very open about content (suspending for the month our listserv rules against self-promotion of shows, conferences, and publications) and expect that we all will be enlivened by learning more about our member participants. Ideally our goal is to seed the ground for new discussion topics and new featured guests. Thanks to all of you, Renate, Tim, Simon and Patrick -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Last call and a few random posts
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear all, Just a quick note that our discussion will be coming to an end later today. Last chances for any to respond to a post or make any final thoughts. Many thanks to Ana Valdes whose idea it was to discuss collaboration this month. I will be sending out a final post for this month Collaboration: Art Practice, Theory, Activism in just a bit. Just a moderator's note. We have had odd posts coming though inadvertently that have not been filtered by our mod site. Case in point the two last posts from Melinda Rackham and myself will launch our next month celebrating -empyre's archives. The moderators apologize. Renate On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 10:27 AM, Renate Ferro r...@cornell.edu wrote: Zach thanks so much for the footnote to Jack Halberstarn's The Queer Art of Failure. I think I found a pdf online http://centerforthehumanities.org/sites/default/files/media/Queer%20Art%20of%20Failure.pdf On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 6:15 PM, Zach Blas zachb...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- hi again! i'm glad that renate picked up on failure and its relations to collaboration. i'm quite interested in failure right now, especially how it's recently been taken up in queer theoretical works like jack halberstam's the queer art of failure. halberstam argues that failure is a crucial component of queer aesthetics, since queers having been failing to conform / adhere to various normalizing impulses for quite some time. halberstam describes failure as a style, a way of life, for queers. here, queer failure is about realizing the potential and other possibilities that open when one doesn't attempt to align with standardized / mainstream notions of success. being attuned to this kind of failure seems rather crucial when collaborating because failure is always occurring. the collaborative process takes its twists, turns, bumps, diversions, and embracing those moments of failure during the collaborative process is what pushes the work further (for me, at least). in the mask-making workshops i've led, the moments of failure have been powerful learning experiences that help me continue to develop these workshops, almost more so than when the workshop goes perfectly (but perfectly has never really happened, of course). i guess what i'm getting at here is that it's really worth embracing those moments of collaborative failure, even if they're painful and difficult. as for the issues of aloneness vs collaboration that ana and renate have brought up, it seems like these two are never really completely detached. the longer i am a practicing artist, the more and more i fully realize just how collaborative art-making is, even if the project isn't explicitly collaborative--from receiving critique and feedback, material help / support, finding exhibition sites...the list can go on and on. even during a collaborative workshop, for example, the creative constraints mentioned previously could be thought of as individualized parts that an artist has pre-determined before the collaborative process begins, so you have both aspects at work here. i'm not that interested in debating whether collaboration or working alone is natural or not; we all come to that through our specific social and cultural situatedness. i see no problem with an artist withdrawing to work alone; i enjoy thinking of that gesture as a collaboratively antagonistic relation to sociality. johannes, thanks for your message and questions! i'm really drawn to the mask as an artist because it resides on a blurry boundary between practical use and a more utopic/transformative demand: the mask can aid in practically cloaking oneself from a variety of surveillance devices, but the mask in protest today--from anonymous and black blocs to pussy riot solidarity protests and the zapatistas--is also about positive collective transformation. on this front, the mask is a utopic refusal to be normatively legible, to be represented by the state...there is a commonizing impulse at work with the mask. i see it as a kind of aesthetic, creative, performative exodus that attempts to imagine an exit out of the current socio-political situation. in this sense, i find theoretical work on opacity by philsophers like edouard glissant and nicholas de villier incredibly compelling and useful. their writing insists on a kind of ontological/ethical/politica/creative opacity at the individual and relational levels...and in the midst of global, obsessive drives to standardize how human presence is calculated, parsed, and interpreted by technologies like biometrics and gps, theories of opacity seem so incredibly important and highly needed. also, i'm deeply influenced and moved by much transgender scholarship on the admission and regulation of gender by biometrics and surveillance technologies. work by dean spade and toby beauchamp
[-empyre-] thanks to our guests Collaboration: Art Practice, Theory, Activism
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- On behalf of Tim who is traveling and Ana, I would like to thank all of our guests and subscribers for sharing not only their projects but also the theoretical underpinnings of the collaborative practices that they are involved in. To Carol-Ann Braun and Concert-Urbain, an art startup and stop up based in Paris who wrote about the negotiation process in collaboration among long-term interlocutors. She cited the value of slowness...not linked to value added or prestige value, the pragmatics of useless, and the danger of making product the goal. Erin Manning and The Sense Lab whose events and soon immediations are key to the process of collaboration wrote, The term event is also fluxian and adapted to intermedial work carried by a network that gives life to event.. It highlights the link between collaboration and interactive art. Carol-Ann and Erin's rich and engaging responses during the first and into the second week of our discussion prompted this one by Carol, Here technology is an instrument for helping art, theory, and activism-already tied and active -to infiltrate 'diverging aspects of culture and society.' Erin replied, diverging aspects of culture and society shape technology. It is clear that the technology and practices that emerge with it shape artistic intent as well. During Week 2 Ana Valdes welcomed her collaborator Cecelia Parsberg. Ana we have come to know very well at -empyre- and we appreciate her willingness to not only help this month's discussion but also to be a regular contributor. Ana is in the process of collaborating to create women's activist networks. Cecelia wrote, The space between us is to be handled in collaborations. Handled; shrinking, moving, growing, violated, respected. And I'm interested in the images that are created 'between us' in this space. We also welcomed Paul Vanouse during Week 2. He identified four properties that were crucial to setting up an environment for collaboration for him: shared agendas, the non-rational or working with those you know well/hang out with, parity or working with others with similar levels of expertise, and nomadism or the quality of being flexible to try new roles in participation. Paul's work inspired some posts that discussed the role of playfulness, humor and irony in the collaborative process. During Week 3 Brooke Singer (of Pre-emtive Media and the Counter Kitchen and Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga introduced their collaborative project in Madrid and Brooklyn, EXCEDENTES/EXCESS. Covering a wide range of topics from virtual and on-site collaboration, working across languages and cultures, and teaching new media and collaboration, we ended up with that of scale. Brooke wrote, scale...this is one of the reasons that brought me to collaborate in the first place and I think one of the most powerful forces that bring people to work together...group work as an incubator for socially engaged core issues based projects. The work originates from conversation, debate, struggles, mutual aid not from a single perspective. Marc Garnett also made a post about his own work in England with Furtherfield. During this final Week 4, alonso+craciun made a brief post about their collaborative work. Zach Blas, another past -empyre- moderator, wrote about his collaborative mask-making projects. A founder of the anonymous collective Queer Technologies, Zach's newest project the Facial Weaponization Suite is a workshop-driven project that develops forms of collective and creative protest against biometrics and facial recognition through masks. He wrote, the collaborative process takes its twists, turns, bumps, diversions and embracing those moments of failure during the collaborative process is what pushes the work further. Thanks not only to our guests this month but to those subscribers who enlightened our discussion by asking provoking questions and making thoughtful insights into our discussion. For a link to the entire archive subscribers can go to : http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2013-May/date.html Thanks, Renate Ferro, June 2, 2013 Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] failure, collaboration, masks
a utopic proposition that blurs the relations of practicalities and utopic--perhaps impossible--demands. you might think of something like theatre of the oppressed workshops here as a correlation. the interventions we perform are more speculative and creative--but they are certainly real, public, and create tangible disturbances. there are several groups of people / organizations that i want to do these workshops with, and undocumented persons are important to include. but such things take time, as i begin by developing relationships with people instead of just cold-calling them about a workshop. one element of this workshop that has actually been a struggle is color! the masks are always 1 solid color (those creative constraints, again!). but if the masks are about getting out of the normative traps of identity by collectivizing, using colors like black, yellow, and white become troublesome because the masks can be reduced to blackface, yellowface, whiteface. this is an on-going issue that is always addressed in the workshops, and we try to decide on color collectively. but i am still searching for a creative constraint that can offer a way to work with color sustainably, throughout many workshops. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] … once upon a time ...
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Awesomeany other contact info etc If not either you can post directly after I introduce the month or I can do it for you. Thanks ever so much. Renate Sent from my iPhone On Jun 2, 2013, at 12:02 AM, Melinda Rackham meli...@subtle.net wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- hello -empyre- That it is eleven and a half years since I sent out invitations to 50 people to join -empyre- is quiet unbelievable! I was looking for that original email invitation however it seems to have been lost several laptops ago - instead I've located an article from September 2002... an archival window into -empyre- as a fast growing 9 month old baby... At that time I was writing my Phd, building non propriety 3d worlds, and -empyre- was instigated as a forum to discuss theoretical issues around virtual and media art practices. The early -empyre- years ended for me in late 2005, participating only sporadically while I was Director of ANAT, then curating in Australia and China. My last -empyre- discussion was Manifest Dynasty: Media Arts in China, co-moderated with Edward Sanderson in November 2010. For anyone interested there is a fascinating archive of the early guests and topics here - http://www.subtle.net/empyre/guests.html My personal -empyre- era seems forever ago. Currently I'm totally enjoying being off grid - researching a book titled Attachment - exploring forced adoption, loss and identity formation. The work is primarily autobiographical; seamed by the fictions of virtual and imagined reality; anchored by the psychology of Attachment Theory. Its a different perspective on the relational realities I've explored over many medias and decades. I have met so may wonderfully articulate, generous and very smart people through -empyre- over the years - too many of you to name - who stimulated my intellect and enriched my emotional landscape. I'd like to specially shout out to the dedicated moderator team I worked with for the longest period - Christina McPhee, Michael Arnold Mages and Jim Andrews.- u rocked! Congratulations to todays' moderators for keeping pushing new boundaries, and too everyone who has contributed in moderation, administration, technically and in discussion to make -empyre- the sophisticated community it is today. long live -empyre- Melinda Rackham * -empyre- :: soft skinned space -empyre- mailing list sprang into being in January 2002, hosted on the College of Fine Arts server at UNSW. It is an online forum which regularly invites guest artists, theorists, curators, producers or administrators from the Australia/Pacific and International media arts field to discuss their projects, publications, pet theories and productions. It intends to focus on media art issues in depth, without necessarily being academically referenced, or concerned with delineating areas of practice into interactive, or digital, 2 or 3D, net or rom, or PDA, or flash, or image or text. The list has a specific format for a number of reasons. Over the years I had been getting frustrated with the low ratio of signal to noise on other lists, and seeing lists like Recode and Syndicate be torn apart by the constant revision of the social structure of the list - i.e. discussions over what was appropriate in mailing list etiquette in terms of announcements and postings. How to deal with those who were perceived to break these codes of behaviour overtook actually talking about media arts topics and the lists died. I also wanted a discussion space which would explore topics specific to 3d spaces on the web, as I had been working in that area of practice for a few years and discovered a vibrant global community discussing the technical issues associated with web3d, but no avenues for the more aesthetic or theoretical discussions of networked dimensional environments. And most importantly, I saw other lists where the culture of the Internet and impacts of technology were being discussed by writers and academics, but not by artists who were making work in the field. –empyre– aims to fill those gaps. How it works is that each invited guest speaker has the list for period of time to discuss different aspects of their new media practice, or their books or their sites, or performances, or curated shows. After a few format changes… (our first guest, theorist and artist Ollivier Dyens, held the forum space for almost 6 weeks discussing his book and website Metal and Flesh,) list guests are generally now in two-week slots. Topics range from artist/curator Patrick Lichty speaking on PDA, wearable, and hand-held art; to producer Antoanetta Ivanova discussing digital copyright and artist rights online. Offline –empyre- would equate to a casual lecture series, or a resident workshop program. The list
[-empyre-] FAILURE AND BETWEEN COLLABORATION AND THE DIVA ART STAR
are distributed, and we perform our action. it goes without saying that each workshop i've organized has been incredibly different--with various degrees of success and failure (but it doesn't even make sense to evaluate the workshops with such a rubric), and these workshops are continuously reoriented as i learn from each one. i have many other thoughts on ideas of collective transformation with the mask as well as desires for opacity / refusals of political recognition representation that i can address later. but for now, i wanted to share the workshop process with everyone. more soon! zach ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Fwd: Thanks to Ricardo and Brooke, Introducing Week 4: Alonso+Cracium and Zach Blas
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear empyreans, This email was bounced back because my gmail account automatically picked up our old gamera.cofa account's address. Here it is one more time! Renate ...sent earlier this week Many thanks to Ricardo and Brooke for stimulating our discussions this week on empyre. My apologies for introducing Week's 4 guests a bit late. As Tim wrote, our weekend was filled with graduation festivities. I am proud of Erin, our son, and all of his fellow classmates. The graduating class of BFA art students were comprised of thirty-seven students from diverse parts of the globe. They represented not only diverse cultural perspectives but also a wide-spectrum of socio-economic class structures. Despite their vast differences they conspired, cooperated, co-produced, interfaced, joined together, teamed up, worked with, colluded, and often concurred and COLLABORATED during their four years at Cornell. During their studio production, studio critiques, seminar discussions, studies in NYC and Rome, and their intense day to day living with one another, I believe the greatest gift they took away was the understanding of how essential collaboration is and will be in their lives as artists. Many graduates in this class we send off are not only interested in being artists but also socially conscious participants in the world. We congratulate all of them. Thanks to all of you this week for expanding our conversation as we look forward to introducing our guests for Week 4: the collective Alonso+Cracium and Zach Blas. We look forward to both of our guests discussing their own work but also giving us an incite into their own collaborative practices. We also invite all of you to continue to respond to other issues we have been discussing. FYI,nWe will be closing down this month's discussion on Sunday, June 2nd. Renate Week 4: Alonso+Craciun (UR) www.alonso-craciun.net The alonso+craciun collective (Sebastián Alonso and Martin Craciun) works on projects linking art, architecture, thoughts and social practices. They live and work in Montevideo, Uruguay. Since the year 2004 the alonso+craciun collective has been working in several artistic projects, in various formats such as installation, presentation, photography, video, publications, objects, actions, workshops. We have tried to establish relations with cultural public institutions, educational institutions; autonomous political and cultural action enterprises, with citizens who make actions on common areas of the city, with artists whose critical thinking dialogues from conflict and maverick and others absolutely indifferent to the daily rhythms. These relationships, approaches and discussions have generated and contributed to generate different venues in the public sphere and an artistic production that seeks to contextualize and belong to the complex world in which we live. They represented Uruguay in the XII international architecture exhibition of the Venice Bienal, they represented Uruguay in VII Mercosur Art Bienal in Porto Alergre, Brazil, they represented Uruguay in the XII Architecture Bienal of Buenos Aires, Argentina, they were invitrd to the firt Uruguay Art Bienal 2012. They had exhibitions in Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Since 2008 they develop the cultural space AMORIR: a place for artistic, aesthetic and political practices. They co-curate the international project The Collective Eye. They work as professors in the Art Academy and in the Architecture School in Uruguay. Zach Blas (US) is an artist-theorist working at the intersections of technology, queerness, and politics. He is the creator of the art group Queer Technologies, a founding member of The Public School Durham, and a PhD candidate in Literature, Information Science + Information Studies, and Visual Studies at Duke University. Currently, he is developing a series of works that responds to technological control and informatic capture through tactics of queer escape, opacity, disappearance, imperceptibility, and illegibility. Zach’s recent exhibitions include Trans Technology, Rutgers University, 2013; the HTMlles Feminist Festival of Media Arts + Digital Culture, Montreal, 2012; and Abandon Normal Devices Festival, Manchester, 2012. He has published writings in the “Five Videos” essay series, commissioned by rhizome.org and the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology for the 2012 Liverpool Biennial, and the Viral issue of Women Studies Quarterly. Zach holds a Master of Fine Art, Design Media Arts, University of California Los Angeles. Currently, he is an artist/researcher-in-residence at the b.a.n.g.lab and Performative Nanorobotics Lab, University of California San Diego. Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@cornell.edu URL: http://www.renateferro.net
Re: [-empyre-] from the south
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear Alonso+Craciun, Thank you so much for introducing yourselves and also for the links to other collaborative teams/collectives. Ana recommended your work to us; I know she is a huge fan. One of the topics of our discussion earlier last week revolved around the issues of both language and cultural translation. Could you comment about both? I am not sure which of your projects have been actualized in other parts of the world but if you could address perhaps some of the successes and challenges you have had in working across language and culture barriers. I have snipped and pasted a couple of the exchanges we had for the sake of continuity. I guess I revisit this topic because your web presence is in spanish. There are a few links on the web in translation particularly: http://blog.goethe.de/thecollectiveeye/archives/8-alonso+craciun.html?user_language=en Welcome to empyre and thanks for being our guests. Renate Renate wrote to Brooke: snip You mention that working between individuals or groups where tensions reside can prove challenging but rich. Obviously there can also be not only conceptual tensions but also language miscommunications caused by translation or the unavailability of translation. Can you guys talk about any language barriers and how you handled that especially during the proposal when you used Skype and Google Docs. Or perhaps everyone was bilingual? Can anyone else talk about their experiences in working in between two or more languages? ... Brooke responded: snip But the language differences are not as memorable to me as the cultural differences I learned and how that impacted our production/implementation. And Ricardo responded snip I acted as the translator/bridge between Brooke and our Spanish collaborators. More than once Brooke was furious at me for mistranslation or simply dropping key points (translation can be exhausting). In the end, the translation came through the work. On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 12:17 PM, alonso craciun . alonso.crac...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello Empyre, We are alonso+craciun collective, a duo project from Uruguay. We work in projects linking art, architecture, thoughts and social practices. Since 2004 we have been working in several artistic projects, in various formats such as installation, presentation, photography, video, publications, objects, actions and workshops. We have tried to establish relations with cultural public institutions, educational institutions, with citizens who make actions on common areas of the city, with artists whose critical thinking dialogues from conflict and others absolutely indifferent to the daily rhythms. These relationships, approaches and discussions have generated and contributed to generate different events in the public sphere and an artistic production that seeks to contextualize and belong to the complex world in which we live. In our last project Modos de Hacer Colectivo (Ways of Doing Collectively) which is actually happening now in cities of Uruguay (Paysandú, Rocha, Tacuarembó). We work around the notion of collective art and how this practices can dialogue with critical practices, militant practices, activism, and reflexing about the word we are living. We are showing some works from us and some others from collectives and artist we have invited. We are also developing workshops with High Schools studemts across the city mapping different situations. Pictures and Spanish texts available here: http://formasdehacercolectivo.wordpress.com/ we would like to introduce the work of some collectives. CRAC (chile) http://www.cracvalparaiso.org/?lang=en La Darsena (argentina) http://plataformaladarsena.blogspot.com/ Iconoclasistas (argentina) http://iconoclasistas.net/ Grupo Stalker (italy), here their work with the rom community http://vimeo.com/20351544 Thanks and greeting from the south, -- www.alonso-craciun.net ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] EXCEDENTES/EXCESS Collabroation
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear Ricardo and Brooke (and a bit later for Paul), The Excedentes/Excess project is absolutely amazing. My apologies for not responding yesterday but I have been finishing up my semester. I had a couple of thoughts that I'll just list below. Right now we are wo Internet so I am typing on my phone. Let's see how this works. You mention that working between individuals or groups where tensions reside can prove challenging but rich. Obviously there can also be not only conceptual tensions but also language miscommunications caused by translation or the unavailability of translation. Can you guys talk about any language barriers and how you handled that especially during the proposal when you used Skype and Google Docs. Or perhaps everyone was bilingual? Maybe Paul could chime in here as well. Btw thanks for talking more about PED. That project was done in China and I can not remember how you handled the educational lectures there? Were they translated? Can anyone else talk about their experiences in working in between two or more languages? I have worked in Chiapis and China and had frustrations when dealing with language and communication. Ricardo and Brooke the short film you produced is fantastic! I burst out laughing when I saw the composting bike. Maybe I have a thing about bikes but as I said about the PED project and yours humor can have a provocative and luring affect. I will finish in commenting on Paul's last post, I think you downplay the importance of humor in PED! Cheers to all. Sent from my iPhone Renate On May 20, 2013, at 2:14 PM, Ricardo Miranda Zuniga rica...@ambriente.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello Everyone, Renate thank you for inviting Brooke and I to join this week's discussion. I'm going to focus my thoughts on a current collaboration that began virtually in 2011, developed in parallel in Madrid and Brooklyn with an initial action in Madrid and continues to expand now in Brooklyn - EXCEDENTES/EXCESS. In early 2011, the culture and art center Matadero Madrid began an initiative that was to pair Spanish artists with artist from elsewhere to collaborate. The space and exhibition itself El Ranchito would focus on process as art. One of the curators Nerea Cavillo put us in contact with Jose Luis Bongore and Beatriz Marcos based on mutual interest - very generally that of art as action in the public sphere to question modes of globalization. (As Paul enumerated - (1) Shared Agendas.) Over a two week period, we used Skype, Google Docs (now Drive) and email to generate the proposal. And the team EXCEDENTES/EXCESS was awarded residency for Brooke and I and a generous production commission. As the final culmination of the collaboration was to be presented in Madrid, the proposed project focused on food waste in Madrid at a time of heightened unemployment when a growing demographic was/is turning to dumpster diving for sustenance, but the act of dumpster diving is illegal and may result in a 750 euro fine. The artists proposed to collaborate with traditional markets (as opposed to supermarkets) to collect food that was to be thrown away at the end of the day and re-distribute on the street. We continued virtual collaboration throughout the summer and fall of 2011 and elected to do the same investigation in Brooklyn as Madrid. In Madrid, the team effectively established relationships with food vendors willing to participate and worked with TODO POR LA PRAXIS to construct a food rescue and re-distribution cart - Carrito Mermas. In Brooklyn, we discovered the Good Samaritan Law that protects from liability those who give reasonable assistance, including food redistribution and we discovered that a more urgent problem in NYC was all the food waste going to landfill. Since NYC has some 1200 soup kitchens and City Harvest rescuing food and dumpster diving is not against the law, the Brooklyn research lead to generating ways to deter food from landfill. Brooke and I landed in Madrid, we worked with Jose Luis and Beatriz to assemble all our research for public presentation. We took the Carrito Mermas out for collection and redistribution and we brain stormed on how to move forward. The following are a few of the transformations of the collaboration: 1. As Brooke and I explained the Good Samaritan Law in the US, Jose Luis and Beatriz moved to establish a similar proposal in Madrid. Following discussions with law professors and round table was assembled and legal proposal began to take form. Effectively, the project changed from a food collection cart to 15+ person team including law professionals and community representatives to form a bill that would facilitate the redistribution of good food. 2. In Brooklyn, we have constructed a food rescue and composting quad-cycle that traverses Crown
[-empyre-] Thanks but one more thing for Paul: humor/play/irony
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear Paul and Cecelia, Many thanks for being our guest this week. Paul we did not want you to get away this week without commenting on the post Renate made about PED and your thoughts about activism and humor/play/irony. Simon thanks for the footnote on network/contact. We are going to be introducing next weeks guests in a few minutes. Hope you will continue though to chime in as your schedules warrant. Renate and Tim On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 10:47 PM, Renate Ferro r...@cornell.edu wrote: Hi Paul, Cecelia, Erin, and to all of our -empyre subscribers, I have been traveling this past week and am just getting caught up on your posts. Thanks to Ana for nurturing the list this week. Paul your posts made me think about your collaborative PED piece http://paulvanouse.com/ped.html In your summation of your experiences with collaboration I am struck by the fact that at the heart of many collaborative successes is playfulness and humor. I thought about the PED piece because though there was certainly activist intent humor, playfulness, irony seemed to seep throughout the entire project. I guess I am picking on PED because it is one of my favorites but I'm wondering if you could take a few minutes and talk more about the playful gestures that resonate in your activist projects? I am really interested n the gestures of play and fun even in the midst of pretty serious subject matter. I am asking Paul this but hope all of you will chime in. At Cornell about five years ago I founded a lab called The Tinker Factory. Riffing off the word tinker to experiment, mess around, with things that sometimes you have no preplanned path of action for, tinkering with materials or technology or the stuff of creative production. And the word Factory, I borrowed inspiration from Andy Warhol's performance, collaborative playground in New York City in the early 1960's. It was a space that nurtured creative practice and experimentation as well as conceptual ideas. The Tinker Factory for my students and me has been a space where we can bring in guests and share work, ideas in both a collaborative workshop production space and a creative mentoring space. We have brought Kevin Hamilton, Maurice Benayoun, Andrew Galloway, and Mari Velonaki among others. These guests not only provided an opportunity to share their expertise but also gave us license to think about broader issues involving critical digital technology in a relaxed atmosphere. In the middle of Upstate NY we are centrally isolated and sometimes it is difficult to network. The Tinker Factory brings together faculty, students, and sometimes even community members who come together even if it is for a brief period of time. What have resulted are connections among artist's, engineers, and others that ordinarily would never have an occasion to happen. So to all of you what do you think about location? Just a few weeks ago I heard Ricardo Dominguez talk about his early collaborations with his Tallahassee buddies. They lived and worked together in the same geographic location. Is it possible or how is it possible to network using social media, or email, or Skype to enable collaborative practice and thinking. Anyone out there have some good examples of this that has worked successfully? Happy Friday to all of you and for others Happy End of the Semester! Renate -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Week 3: Introducing Marc Garrett, Brooke Singer, and Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- This week on empyre there were so many juxta-postions that helped me to think more deeply about the fluid boundaries that entwine art, work, life, play, theory, relations, activism, networks, contacts, and so many more. We are looking forward to continuing this discussion for week 3. We welcome Marc Garrett of furtherfield.org, Brooke Singer and Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga this week as we continue our discussion Collaboration: Art Practice, Theory, Activism. We hope that Paul, Cecelia, Ana, Erin, Carol Anne, Brian, Simon and others of you will continue to contribute to this months discussion and archive. For those of you who want a concise account of the discussions this month and others http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2013-May/date.html Wecome to Marc, Brooke, and Ricardo. Bios are below. Marc Garrett (UK) is a net artist, curator, writer, street artist, activist, educationalist and musician. Emerging in the late 80's from the streets exploring creativity via agit-art tactics. Using unofficial, experimental platforms such as the streets, pirate radio, net broadcasts, BBS systems, performance, intervention, events, pamphlets, warehouses and gallery spaces. In the early nineties was co-sysop (systems operator) for a while with Heath Bunting for Cybercafe BBS. Co-director and co-founder, with artist Ruth Catlow of the net arts collectives and communities- furtherfield.org, furthernoise.org, netbehaviour.org, also cofounder and co-curator/director of the gallery space called, London UK. Currently involved in co-running and getting the Node London festival happening for March 2006. Also co-curating various contemporary Media Arts exhibitions, nationally and Internationally. Brooke Singer (US) Brooke Singer engages techno-science as an artist, educator, non-specialist and collaborator. Her work lives on and off line in the form of websites, workshops, photographs, maps, installations and performances that often involves public participation in pursuit of social change. Recent awards and commissions include a Madrid Council’s Department of the Arts commission, Turbulence.org commission, New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) Individual Artist award, a Headlands Center for Arts residency and a fellowship at Eyebeam Art + Technology. 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. Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga (US) approaches art as a social practice that seeks to establish dialogue in public spaces. Having been born of immigrant parents and grown up between Nicaragua and San Francisco, a strong awareness of inequality and discrimination was established at an early age. Themes such as immigration, discrimination, gentrification and the effects of globalization extend from highly subjective experiences and observations into works that tactically engage others through populist metaphors while maintaining critical perspectives. Ricardo has established a socially investigative creative practice that utilizes whatever media possible to present content in a manner that may generate interaction and discussion by others. Ricardo has a Masters of Fine Arts from Carnegie Mellon University and a Bachelor of Arts in Practice of Art and English Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. He is based in Brooklyn, NY and is an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at CUNY Hunter. Ricardo’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] humor, play, and collaborating via technological networks
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi Paul, Cecelia, Erin, and to all of our -empyre subscribers, I have been traveling this past week and am just getting caught up on your posts. Thanks to Ana for nurturing the list this week. Paul your posts made me think about your collaborative PED piece http://paulvanouse.com/ped.html In your summation of your experiences with collaboration I am struck by the fact that at the heart of many collaborative successes is playfulness and humor. I thought about the PED piece because though there was certainly activist intent humor, playfulness, irony seemed to seep throughout the entire project. I guess I am picking on PED because it is one of my favorites but I'm wondering if you could take a few minutes and talk more about the playful gestures that resonate in your activist projects? I am really interested n the gestures of play and fun even in the midst of pretty serious subject matter. I am asking Paul this but hope all of you will chime in. At Cornell about five years ago I founded a lab called The Tinker Factory. Riffing off the word tinker to experiment, mess around, with things that sometimes you have no preplanned path of action for, tinkering with materials or technology or the stuff of creative production. And the word Factory, I borrowed inspiration from Andy Warhol's performance, collaborative playground in New York City in the early 1960's. It was a space that nurtured creative practice and experimentation as well as conceptual ideas. The Tinker Factory for my students and me has been a space where we can bring in guests and share work, ideas in both a collaborative workshop production space and a creative mentoring space. We have brought Kevin Hamilton, Maurice Benayoun, Andrew Galloway, and Mari Velonaki among others. These guests not only provided an opportunity to share their expertise but also gave us license to think about broader issues involving critical digital technology in a relaxed atmosphere. In the middle of Upstate NY we are centrally isolated and sometimes it is difficult to network. The Tinker Factory brings together faculty, students, and sometimes even community members who come together even if it is for a brief period of time. What have resulted are connections among artist's, engineers, and others that ordinarily would never have an occasion to happen. So to all of you what do you think about location? Just a few weeks ago I heard Ricardo Dominguez talk about his early collaborations with his Tallahassee buddies. They lived and worked together in the same geographic location. Is it possible or how is it possible to network using social media, or email, or Skype to enable collaborative practice and thinking. Anyone out there have some good examples of this that has worked successfully? Happy Friday to all of you and for others Happy End of the Semester! Renate ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] my observations about collaboration
, Michael Mateas, Steffi Domike, Andres Tapia-Urzua, Rob Fisher, Peter Weyhrauch, Patrick Lichty, John Pollock and others. Later collaborators include the Critical Art Ensemble, Faith Wilding, Beatriz da Costa, Millie Chen, Warren Quigley and Andrew Johnson. Furthermore, I’ve frequently worked with several scientists in relationships that are more cooperative than necessarily collaborative, but many of the same notes apply. (1.) Shared Agendas: Pose project collaborations in terms of shared goals and agendas, or even shared sense of process. Avoid collaborations based on some notion of a fixed form or final outcome. It can be tempting when working with someone that you don’t know well or have little in common with to try to invent a project based on a shared form/product through which you will each achieve your own separate agenda. I’ve found this never works because experimental projects never exactly take the form you expected and if goals differ then you’ll never agree on the acceptable changes to the form. But when agendas and process sensibilities are shared, each new challenge and change of plan tends to strengthen the project. (2.) The Non-Rational: Work with people that you generally like to be around and to drink with (or whatever ;-) The most interesting ideas typically arise when you aren’t “on-the-clock” or trying too hard. Conversely, the processes and the outcomes of purely institutional collaborations tend to recapitulate the institutional structure in which they occur. (In this sense it is analogous to the open source critique of institutional software structure being merely a diagram of the corporation’s power relations.) (3.) Parity: Try to collaborate with others with similar levels of experience to contribute (but hopefully in different areas), and a similar time commitment. Try to share all credit equally and avoid any complicated differentiation that might undermine shared ownership. (The film industry model is an appropriate example of what I try to avoid because of its minute detail in credit differentiation and the static titles in which participation might occur—which insure a predictable result.) (4.) Nomadism: Obviously, collaborations are usually undertaken by identifying a project, teaming up with those with complimentary backgrounds best suited for it and following the project through to its completion. The next project however, will probably necessitate (or at least suggest possibilities for) different tactics, different skill-sets and different processes. Perhaps because the former outcome has been re-appropriated or diffused of its radical potential or perhaps because of a more subjective personal need. Try to be open to new vectors of participation—not only a different type of project, with different collaborators, but also try new roles for your own participation. If you’ve typically been the theoretician in the group try being the technician, or if you’ve previously done all the visual production try taking on the logistical planning. Nomadism in this sense is not only about with whom you play, but also who plays which roles. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Erin Manning Concordia Research Chair Faculty of Fine Arts Concordia University 1455 de Maisonneuve W. Montreal QC H3G1M8 http://www.senselab.ca http://www.erinmovement.com http://www.inflexions.org ___ 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 -- Erin Manning Concordia Research Chair Faculty of Fine Arts Concordia University 1455 de Maisonneuve W. Montreal QC H3G1M8 http://www.senselab.ca http://www.erinmovement.com http://www.inflexions.org ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] All call: moderator wanted for June discussion
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear empyre subscribers, Apologies for this disruption in the middle of the month. The empyre moderators are extending an all call for anyone interested in moderating the June discussion. If you have an interesting topic or discussion point that has not been discussed in the recent past please send a two to three paragraph prospectus with a list of potential guests. -- Please send to r...@cornell.edu Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Week 2: Introducing Paul Vanouse and Cecelia Parsburg
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Many thanks to Erin and Carol Ann for launching our first week’s discussion. Erin my response to your differences was certainly in regards to how you both proceed. Your process oriented, movement/choreographic based methods at the center of The Sense Lab have been understood to me to be your signature! This process has always been understand to be the centralizing force behind The Sense Lab (perhaps wrongly by me). You are also working within an educational institution somewhat insulated from governmental politics (or perhaps not) At any rate a huge thank you though for highlighting your similarities. That is a pretty extensive list so perhaps I have misjudged. At any rate thank you both so much for agreeing to introduce our topic. Carol Ann I am thrilled to learn that you are an MFA from Cornell and I am hoping that upon one of your return trips back to the states you will travel through Ithaca and visit Cornell at some point. Thanks for sharing your work in France with us. I would like to welcome Paul Vanouse once again to empyre. Paul was a guest of ours in February and has agreed to join us once again this month. We also welcome Cecelia Parsburg, a visual artist from Stockholm. Ana Valdez recently introduced us to Cecelia's work. Their biographies are below. Paul Vanouse (US) has been working in emerging media forms since 1990. Interdisciplinary and impassioned amateurism guide his art practice. His electronic cinema, biological experiments, and interactive installations have been exhibited in over 20 countries and widely across the US. Venues have included: Walker Art Center, Albright-Knox Museum, Carnegie Museum, Andy Warhol Museum, New Museum, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, Louvre in Paris, Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, Berlin, Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsrhue, Centre de Cultura Contemporania in Barcelona, and TePapa Museum in Wellington, New Zealand. Recent large-scale solo exhibitions include: Schering Foundation in Berlin (2011), Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana (2011), Muffathalle in Munich (2012), and Beall Center, Irvine CA (forthcoming in 2013). This work has been discussed in journals including: Art Journal, Art Papers, Flash Art International, Leonardo, New Scientist, New Art Examiner, New York Times and numerous academic books on art and technology. Vanouse is a Professor of Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo, NY. He has been a Senior Artist at Banff Center, Alberta, Canada (2011), Foreign Expert at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, China (2006) Honorary Research Fellow at SymbioticA, University of Western Australia (2005), Visiting Scholar at the Center for Research and Computing in the Arts, UC San Diego (1997), and Research Fellow at the Studio for Creative Inquiry, Carnegie Mellon University (1997-2003). He holds a BFA from the University at Buffalo (1990) and an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University (1996). Cecilia Parsberg (SE), visual artist, lives and works in Stockholm. Since Jan 2011, PhD student in Fine Arts http://www.konstnarligaforskarskolan.se ”Five Actions” in South Africa and eight projects in Palestine and Israel have shaped my view of art and its meaning. It is not the image of an event that counts, I produce the images because of the encounter. And then how and where the image is mediated is a political question. The title for my PhD projekt is : Private politics ( Public Secrets) A practical project that I started last year is “How to be a successful beggar in Sweden?” I have conducted a market survey, a method which commercial companies looking to launch a product/service usually do. I have also interviewed ten beggars in Gothenburg, written a thesis performed at some international conferences, and more to come… ( see: http://tiggerisomyrke.se ) The overriding research issue can be formulated as follows: How can public structures be shaped, influenced or even created by individuals? It’s about the gift – to give/take, gift economy and the ability of the individual to change existing structures of power. -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] the changing nature of collaboration
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Ana Valdes suggested about one month ago that we think about hosting a discussion investigating the contemporary uses of collaboration in art practice, art theory, and art activism. -empyre last hosted such a discussion in February, 2004. In re-reading those posts, Tim and I noted about how much has changed in the last ten years in new media circles. Realizing that many collaborative and collective teams of artists work together on broad, institutional macro initiatives, we thought it might be interesting to additionally consider micro initiatives that happen on a day-to-day basis usually on a personal scale. Those collaborations that happen randomly or on an impromptu basis or that are in flux. Tim Murray and I have been collaborating for many years but it is within the last decade that I have been comfortable in not only acknowledging but also in embracing our collaborative work space in curating and writing. It was at that time I shifted my production to new media practices and he founded The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art. We have shared goals theoretically and conceptually but we both attain those goals very differently. We each have our expertise, his in theory and mine in production, but in our shared spaces of life and work involving politics, writing and curating we have both been able to disrupt and even invade to a degree each others zones. That disruption requires not only confidence in ones own expertise but also a degree of generosity in giving something up of oneself. Ricardo Dominguez visited us a Cornell just last week. His artist talk recounted his own collaborative ventures throughout his life. Describing a shared set of goals as a horizontal access, each of his collaborators was a point on that horizontal line. Within a given time each member of that collaborative team produced something that helped to accomplish those goals and that production was directly related to that person's expertise. According to Dominguez his collaborations evolved from a set of like-minded friends living within the same city. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer also spoke at Cornell in 2011, where he his role in collaborative encounters very differently. As a conceptual conductor, he orchestrates the movements of each member of a collaborative team towards a final goal. Both are well regarded in new media circles but both achieve their collaborative missions very differently. Our hope this month is that comments of our invited discussants spark our subscribers to post about their own evolving collaborations. We realize there are divergent models of collaboration that many digital new media artists and theorists incorporate. We are hoping to archive as many of these as possible and to also note the ebb and flow of the changing nature of those relationships as they are affected by both the networked space of new and social media and that of the real time spaces of participatory culture and activism. I am really looking forward to this month's discussions. Best, Renate Renate Ferro Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Welcome to May: Collaboration: Art Practice, Theory, Activism
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Welcome to the May discussion on –empyre- soft-skinned space: Collaboration: Art Practice, Theory, Activism Moderated by Ana Valdes (UR), Renate Ferro (US), and Tim Murray (US) with invited discussants ___ In February of 2004 Trebor Sholze and Geert Lovink hosted an –empyre-discussion entitled “Networks, Art, and Collaboration.” Citing both the positive and negative connotations of the word collaboration, a good deal of the discussion revolved around online cultures that allowed for shared information systems. During the past few months threads of discussion have referenced real time collaborative alliances. This month on –empyre- soft-skinned space we pick up threads from past discussions to highlight collectives, alliances, partnerships of artistic capacities for rhizomatic production. Regardless of rank or hierarchy, we are particularly interested in networks where art, theory and activism infiltrate diverging aspects of culture and society. What role does technology have in the making of those relationships? Real interactions as well as virtual labs and virtual artistic collaborations create constellations with new shapes and reformulations of old terms. A cybernetic and intelligent swarm, using the concepts of multitude as formulated by Negri and Hardt, Deleuze and Guattari. Week 1 May 3, 2013 Tim Murray (US), Renate Ferro (US), Ana Valdes (UR), Carol-Ann Braun, Erin Manning (CA) Week 2 May 10, 2013 Cecelia Parsberg (SE) Week 3 May 17, 2013 Marc Garrett (UK), Ricardo Miranda Zuniga and Brooke Singer (US) Week 4 May 24, 2013 Alonso+Craciun, Zach Blas (US) Biographies: Monthly Moderators: Ana Valdes (UR) I was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. Spent four years in jail as political prisoner (belonged to the gerilla Tupamaros, actually in power in Uruguay) and was deported to Sweden where I lived for 34 years. I moved back to Uruguay one year ago but I travel to Sweden back and forth. I am a writer (14 books published) and an anthropologist, specialized in digital culture and urbanism. Renate Ferro (US) is a conceptual artist working in emerging technology and culture. Most recently her work has been featured at The Freud Museum (London), The Dorksy Gallery (NY), The Hemispheric Institute and FOMMA (Mexico), The Janus Pannonius Muzeum (Hungary), and The Free University Berlin (Germany). Her work has been published in such journals as Diacritics, Theatre Journal, and Epoch. She is a co-moderator for the online new media list serve -empyre-soft-skinned space. Ferro is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at Cornell University teaching digital media and theory. She also directs the Tinker Factory, a creative research lab for Research Design, Creativity, and Interdisciplinary Research. Tim Murray (US) Tim Murray is Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Director of the Society for the Humanities and Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Cornell University. Managing Co-Moderator of -empyre-, he sits on the Executive Committee of the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC). Author of Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota 2008) and Zonas de Contacto: el arte en CD-ROM (Centro de la imagen, 1999), he is completing two books on Virtual Archives and Media Art in Asia, and editing volumes on Jean-Luc Nancy and Xu Bing. Week 1: Erin Manning, is a philosopher, visual artist and dancer, and is currently a University Research Chair at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University, Montreal. She is also a founder and director of The Sense Lab, an interdisciplinary laboratory on research, creation and an international network focusing on intersections between philosophy and art through the sensing body in motion. Erin Manning received her Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Hawaii (2001) and has been teaching philosophy, political theory, visual studies, cultural studies, and film theory. She is a member of the editorial board for the online journal Inflexions and the author of works on movement and ephemerality, for which she frequently collaborates with Brian Massumi. Carol-Ann BRAUN (US/FR) is a Paris-based American artist who has been working with digital technologies since 1985. Her work ranges from still images to animations to interactive immersive text-based environments (inner-media.org). Closely affiliated with the Atelier du CUBE (lecube.com ), she has extended her artistic practice beyond esthetics to include “social media”. The first prototypes involved chat spaces as a search engine. This led to the design of polling technology (http://cie.acm.org/articles/braun-phones-kids/). Last month Concert-Urbain launched a poetic polling platform on the subject of happiness: lebonheurbrutcollectif.org. The project’s intention is to find contribute to defining new criteria
[-empyre-] Welcome to Erin Manning and Carol-Ann Braun
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- We are most grateful to Ana Valdes for agreeing to guest moderate the May discussion with Tim Murray and myself and welcome her back to -empyre- as a guest moderator. We also wish to thank Erin Manning who has agreed to make the transition from last month's discussion to this month highlighting The Sense Lab. Erin will be making a few posts specifically about her own experiences with collaboration. She will be joined by Carol-Ann Braun. Biographies for Week One guests are below. We look forward to the month with you. Tim Murray and Renate Ferro Week 1: Erin Manning (CA) is a philosopher, visual artist and dancer, and is currently a University Research Chair at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University, Montreal. She is also a founder and director of The Sense Lab, an interdisciplinary laboratory on research, creation and an international network focusing on intersections between philosophy and art through the sensing body in motion. Erin Manning received her Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Hawaii (2001) and has been teaching philosophy, political theory, visual studies, cultural studies, and film theory. She is a member of the editorial board for the online journal Inflexions and the author of works on movement and ephemerality, for which she frequently collaborates with Brian Massumi. Carol-Ann BRAUN (US/FR) is a Paris-based American artist who has been working with digital technologies since 1985. Her work ranges from still images to animations to interactive immersive text-based environments (inner-media.org). Closely affiliated with the Atelier du CUBE (lecube.com ), she has extended her artistic practice beyond esthetics to include “social media”. The first prototypes involved chat spaces as a search engine. This led to the design of polling technology (http://cie.acm.org/articles/braun-phones-kids/). Last month Concert-Urbain launched a poetic polling platform on the subject of happiness: lebonheurbrutcollectif.org. The project’s intention is to find contribute to defining new criteria for measuring the ineffable nature of happiness...It will be gathering momentum over the next three years. The Ministry of Culture and the Region Ile de France have taken a particular interest in “Le Bonheur Brut Collectif, ” which is also being followed by a research team at the CNAM (Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers), Paris. -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] looking for special guests for our May discussion: Collaboration: Art Practice, Theory, Activism
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Dear empyreans, Just a quick note between posts to ask out there if there are any of you who would like to be discussants during the month of May. Our dear friend Ana Valdez, Tim and myself will be hosting a month entitled, Collaboration: Art Practice, Theory, Activism We are seeking anyone whose own practice might incorporate collaboration. Inspired by this past month's discussion on The Sense Lab and a few of February's posts that discussed Beatriz da Costa's own collaborations we went back to search for the last time empyre spent an entire month on the subject. It was actually back in February 2004 when Trevor Sholze and Geerte Lovink hosted the subject matter. We are interested to consider how models of collaboration may have changed over the years. Please contact Renate Ferro at r...@cornell.edu if you would like to be a special guest. Hope to hear from many of you. Also please feel free to pass this on to others who may be interested. We will be introducing the discussion on May 3rd and 4th! Thanks. Renate ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Closing this month's discussion
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks so much to Claudia for taking over the month's discussion. It has been awesome to have her host the month. Tim and I were called out of town rather suddenly the second week of March and we are so appreciative of Claudia's willingness to take the entire month over. Claudia you have always been an awesome colleague and friend and to that I am very grateful. And now to Patrick Lichty. Hey Patrick looking forward to your hosting April's discussion. We will let you take it over from here. Cheers to everyone. Renate On Mon, Apr 1, 2013 at 9:28 PM, Claudia Pederson c...@cornell.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- I wanted to thank you all for taking part in this month's discussion covering games of various forms, on the internet, off the internet and in between these spaces, and exploring some of the questions that arise as artists, activists, and educators attempt to adapt gaming media for educational, awareness-raising purposes, aesthetic expression, and even the creation of alternative visions of community. That these efforts have impacted the development of the medium should be recognized, even if the contributions of these forms of gaming are far out of the radar of what is being presented currently as games at museums and other institutions (the NYT, for instance). We saw our discussion then as an opportunity to highlight what gets obscured from public view in these spaces--alternative forms of gaming that in form and concept aim to transform our vision of the self and the world... Looking forward to a new game. Claudia and Renate ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Week 2 on empyre: Soraya Murray and Joseph DeLappe
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks to all who participated in Week one in March. Claudia and I would like to introduce the second week of guests. we look forward to hearing from Soraya Murray who is friend from Cornell who currently teaches at Santa Cruz and Joseph DeLappe who has been a former guest on empyre. Looking forward to it. Soraya Murray Soraya Murray holds a Ph.D. in art history from Cornell University. An Assistant Professor in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she is also faculty in the Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program. Murray is an interdisciplinary scholar who focuses on contemporary visual culture, with particular interest in new media, cultural studies and globalization in the arts. Her writings have been published in Art Journal, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Public Art Review, Third Text and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. Murray inaugurated a course on UCSC's campus entitled Video Games as Visual Culture which promotes the study of games for their cultural meanings, visual analysis, as well as social and theoretical contexts. -- Joseph DeLappe Joseph DeLappe is a Professor of the Department of Art at the University of Nevada where he directs the Digital Media program. Working with electronic and new media since 1983, his work in online gaming performance and electromechanical installation have been shown throughout the United States and abroad - including exhibitions and performances in Australia, the United Kingdom, China, Germany, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Canada. In 2006 he began a project dead-in-iraq , to type consecutively, all names of America's military casualties from the war in Iraq into the America's Army first person shooter online recruiting game. He also directs the iraqimemorial.org project, an ongoing web based exhibition and open call for proposed memorials to the many thousand of civilian casualties from the war in Iraq. He has lectured throughout the world regarding his work, including most recently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He has been interviewed on CNN, NPR, CBC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and on The Rachel Maddow Show on Air America Radio. His works have been featured in The New York Times, The Australian Morning Herald, Artweek, Art in America and in the 2010 book from Routledge entitled Joystick Soldiers The Politics of Play in Military Video Game. Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Videogames of the oppressed / oppressive games
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi Paolo, Thanks so much for the link to your work and links. They are amazing! I wanted to push you to talk a git more about how you feel that the less abstract games. You said: snip The less abstract are the games, the more they tend to be problematic and fall under scrutiny. There is a lot of literature discussing the urbanist ideas advanced by SimCity or the portrayal of contemporary and historical conflicts in first person shooters or strategy gamesThey are artful depictions of reality, and as such, we should describe them not in terms of how realistic they are, but in terms of the arguments they deploy and the narratives they support within the larger context. This is, by the way, the reason I often use satire, cartoonish styles, and a rather overt authorial presence: to defuse the temptation of interpreting these games as objective. Many of our subscribers are not gamers but new media artists, programmers, and curators. My question is (and my apologies if this is naive) but how much do you think the platform, that is the coding and programming structure and the scale of games has to do with your understanding for the necessity of the aesthetic of less abstraction as you describe it. Games especially successful ones seem to have a common aesthetic or at least those that I am aware of. Any thoughts about that? I refer here to the look not the content here Thanks. Renate -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] OPEN CALL FOR GUEST MODERATORS: share with your networks
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear -empyreans, Please share this with your network of new media artists, programmers, curators, theorists: OPEN CALL FOR GUEST MODERATORS -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). -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. If you are interested in being a guest moderator on -empyre- soft-skinned space please send a description of the topic and a list of potential guests that you would like to invite. Generally two to three guests per week work best though you want to submit a large list to initially contact. Any topic that relates to our mission is acceptable. We currently are looking for moderators to fill our program for 2013. -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Art cred and advocacy
people deeply and for more than a fleeting moment; capable of providing richer experiences the more you get intimate with them. Love, Paolo ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Week 4 on -empyre: Natalie Jerimenjenko and Kathy High
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello all, Just a quick note to let all of your know that I will be closing out the February discussion in honor of Beatriz da Costa's life and work later tonight. I invite all of our current guests and empyre subscribers to post their final thoughts today. Many thanks to all of Shani's friends and colleagues. Especially to Robert Nideffer. The entire -empyre soft-skinned space sends our deepest sympathies to Robert and Beatriz' family. Thanks to all of you for a very special month on empyre. Renate Ferro On Sat, Feb 23, 2013 at 5:06 PM, Kathy High kittyh...@earthlink.net wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi everyone, I have loved all the entries everyone has posted in the past few weeks- thank you to everyone who has contributed along the way. And special thank you to Robert for your postings. These stories have been amazing to read and give a really wonderful rounded picture of Shani/Beatriz. All your thoughts/stories have brought up many emotions, memories and tears and I appreciate your insights. Thank you. My story: Shani and I were close, but I didn¹t know her nearly as well as the others who have written. We had admired each other¹s work for years (from afar). Shani asked me to become better friends with her after she moved to NYC in 2011 and when she was in the throes of her cancer. I was very moved by her request. And so we did exactly that we became closer friends. I felt a deep connection with Shani and what she was working on especially in her last years. I think we trusted each other because many of our concerns were very close. And writing this is funny in its timing I have had a terrible case of shingles over the past two weeks which has left me house-bound and in a lot of pain. I only share this because it has added another layer of empathy for Shani¹s situation as I was reading everyone¹s texts. The fact that she worked so much from a place of Œdis-ease¹ was amazing. This state brings clarity to one¹s situation, and the need for urgency and focus. And it creates a good way to cut through the bullshit (not that Shani had a problem with cutting though bullshit!). It makes one choosey and select priorities carefully and brings a sharpening of the senses. Everyone who has written has noted this focused state that Shani worked from in her last years. It was palpable. And the sense that her time was precious and limited was evident. And as I think about her later art pieces which she was very excited about I am super moved by her works around cancer Dying for the Other, and the Anti- Cancer Survival Kit, The Life Garden - all part of The Cost of Life project. Of course, because of my work with lab animals, Shani¹s very real look at the use of lab mice for research on her cancer drugs touches my heart. We had talked about the links between Dying for the Other and Embracing Animal. Now I see through Shani¹s Dying For the Other, the real desire she had for forming the link with our animal counterparts, giving a new regard for these invisible workers, and providing a better understanding of our collaboration and debt to them. It is hard for me to watch Dying For The Other now - and to see Shani in it now that she is gone. She seems just like an experimental animal in the video. It is so poignant and equalizing and strange. Shani would often surprise me. A number of years ago I complimented her after a talk she gave at a conference. And she looked at me and said, ³Really? I thought it as crap.² She was dissatisfied in a funny way with her work not in a way that was insecure but rather dismissive. I am not sure which work she was referring to specifically, but it was this drive to always push forward to continue her search and her researchŠ Maybe she was getting ready for his final work which had a different kind of connection to biology (animal and plant), to the body, and to life and death. I think one of Shani¹s final and unfulfilled projects and one of the most beautiful ones, was her collaborative work with Lucinha (³bringer of light²), her collaborator and service dog companion. Shani wanted a service dog and in late 2011 and the beginning of 2012 and started making inquiries as to how one should go about Œgetting¹ one. Sadly, it could take up to a couple years to obtain a service dog. So Shani, in her persistent way, decided she would train her own. She knew she was going to be faced with balance problems following future brain surgery, so she initially got Lucinha was to help with that. But she soon began to think in other ways about the types of service Lucinha might provide. I askedRobert about this and he shared a few facts with me. From an email Shani had written to Jamie Schulte, a past collaborator, Shani said that after Pigeonblog she ³Šcame across
[-empyre-] Four more days to post for this months discussion
://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] looking for March discussants for the topic Videogames and Art: Incite/Insight
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear empyreans: A call for discussants for March: Videogames and Art: Incite/Insight Guest moderator Claudia Pederson is hosting the month of March on -empyre with help from -empyre moderator Renate Ferro. The month's discussion Videogames and Art: Incite/Insight will investigate the relationship of videogames and Art. Why Games? asked a curator from the Mass MoCA in 2001 in an essay entitled Game Show. Just a little over a decade later this question rings quaint. The desire for legitimization speaks to still lingering beliefs that videogames are chiefly a subcultural form. In a recent press conference after the Newtown shootings (and subsequent calls for gun control), the NRA president Wayne LaPierre deflected scrutiny by shifting blame to violent videogames, calling the videogame industry a shadow organization. At this point of their cultural trajectory videogames look to be becoming just another form of entertainment (think of the booming of social games). As the history of art expands to include diverse fields of media arts, the recognition of these practices is not only overdue but also urgent to the development of both art history and social understandings of media. In this interest, the above observations are meant as threads to stimulate discussion on this month's topic: alternative, diverse forms of gaming aimed at (cultural) change. Anyone on the -empyre list serve who would like to be an invited guest moderator for one week in March should contact Renate Ferro r...@cornell.edu as soon as possible. Send along a biography and what week you would like to feature your work. Please pass this call on to artists, programmers, art historians, curators or anyone whose practices or writing may intersect with these issues. Thanks. Renate -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Beatriz da Costa - the early years
and exhibited it as part of the 2001 Sculpture Conference in Pittsburgh. “Nomadika: No Strings Attached?” was a multi-part (again) project and live storefront installation that explored Wireless technology and Surveillance. We posed as employees of Nomadika, a fictional marketing firm. We collected data on our users and displayed it publicly in real time, as well as tried to inform the public about the costs of giving away personal data. It seems dated now, but at the time, it was an exciting topic and I had a lot of fun making the piece collaborating with 5 incredibly smart women. We performed, we educated, we critiqued. And in perfect Shani fashion, the project concept was addressed from multiple angles. From my perspective, a lot of what she carried through to other projects such as “Swipe” and “Zapped!” incorporated a similar approach. It was critical that her projects include interacting with and educating the public about a research topic, and critiquing socially accepted beliefs about science and technology. She did this until the very end. I will stop for now and let others have their say… Heidi Kumao -- Heidi Kumao Associate Professor Penny W. Stamps School of Art Design University of Michigan 2000 Bonisteel Blvd. Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109 hku...@umich.edu Office: 734.763-0183 www.heidikumao.net ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Week 3 on empyre: Paul Vanouse, Amanda McDonald Crowley, Claire Penacost, and Heidi Kumao
talents to the task; no doubt the research and knowing was a powerful coping mechanism typical of her way of dealing with all kinds of things. The last time i saw her was about a year ago. She had been through so much by then but her humor seemed to be the quality most in charge that evening. claire On Sat, Feb 16, 2013 at 10:54 AM, Renate Ferro r...@cornell.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks to Antoinette and Brooke for being our guest this week on empyre. Antoinette your last post on some of the historical precedents involving women and cellos was interesting. I am also reminded of the various collaborations that cellist Charlotte Moorman accomplished with Nam June Paik. A quick image search of the two artists brought up a number of images. Thanks so much for the post. This week on empyre we welcome Paul Vanouse, Amanda McDonald Crowley, Claire Penacost, and Heidi Kumao. Their biographies are posted below and welcome them warmly to -empyre soft-skinned space. I am hoping that all of our guests from other weeks will feel free to post as their schedules permit and that any -empyre subscriber that is lurking in on our conversation who knew Beatriz or was inspired by her work to please post. For anyone missing the discussion thus far, the entire conversation can be accessed in our archive at: http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2013-February/date.html Best to all of you. Renate Ferro Biographies Week 3 Paul Vanouse is a Professor of Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo. and has worked in emerging technological media forms since 1990. His biological experiments, electronic cinema, and interactive installations have exhibited in over 20 countries and across the US. His recent projects, “Latent Figure Protocol”, “Ocular Revision” and “Suspect Inversion Center” use molecular biology techniques to challenge “genome-hype” and to confront issues surrounding DNA fingerprinting. Paul and Beatriz began their friendship at Carnegie Mellon in the late Nineties, while Paul was a Fellow at the Studio for Creative Inquiry and Beatriz was finishing her degree. They taught together at the University at Buffalo, exhibited alongside one another in group exhibitions, and organized panels and workshops together, including Wetware Hackers workshop for ISEA 2006 in San Jose. Paul and Beatriz have dialoged and collaborated for over fifteen years and she will be dearly missed. Amanda McDonald Crowley is a cultural worker, curator, and facilitator who creates media and contemporary art programs that encourage cross-disciplinary practice, collaboration and exchange. Recent curatorial efforts include Our Haus, the 10th Anniversary exhibition for the Austrian Cultural Forum, NY. In late 2012 she did a residency as a Bogliasco Fellow, working on curatorial research at the intersection between art, food, and technology. Amanda is also currently a Board member of the National Alliance for Media Art + Culture (NAMAC) in the USA. She has been Director of the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) where she made significant links with science and industry by developing a range of residencies for artists in settings such as science organizations, contemporary art spaces and virtual residencies online. She was Associate Director of the Adelaide Festival 2002 in Australia, and also co-chair of the working group that organized the exhibition and symposium ‘conVerge: where art and science meet’. Critical Art Ensemble were to present their collaboration with Beatriz at that Festival. Alas, the Festival wasn't able to support the performance. While Executive Producer at ISEA2004 (the International Symposium for Electronic Arts 2004) held in Tallinn, Estonia and Helsinki, Finland, and on a cruiser ferry in the Baltic sea, she finally met Beatriz who suggested that she consider professional options in the USA post ISEA. Amanda told Beatriz she would never move to the USA. 18 months later, when she became Executive Director of Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in New York City, Beatriz commented never is not a very long time in your language it seems. When Amanda first arrived at Eyebeam in late 2005, Beatriz, with Preemptive Media, were commissioned to develop Area's Immediate Reading. Beatriz was also a member of the last residency program cohort Amanda oversaw at Eyebeam in 2011, where Beatriz was researching and developing her final projects Dying for the Other and Anti-Cancer Survival Kit. Claire Penacost: Claire Pentecost’s work engages diverse strategies—collaboration, research, teaching, field work, writing, lecturing, drawing, installation and photography—in an ongoing interrogation of the institutional structures that order knowledge. Her work has long addressed the contested boundary between natural and artificial, focusing the last fourteen years on food, agriculture
[-empyre-] Week 4 on -empyre: Natalie Jerimenjenko and Kathy High
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks so much to Paul, Heidi and Claire for posting this week on -empyre. We continue to talk about Beatriz' life and work this last week of February. In New York on this Sunday the 24th many of Beatriz' family and friends will gather at Postmasters Gallery. For those of us too far away to travel to New York City we send our sincerest sympathies to all of you. Tim and I are hoping that many of you who have not added to this discussion in honor of Beatriz will do so before we close the discussion on Thursday the 28th. This week on empyre we invite special guests Natalie Jeremijenko and Kathy High. Their biographies are below. Welcome to both of you! Kathy High is Associate Professor Of Video and New Media in the Department of Arts, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Troy, NY. She is an interdisciplinary artist, educator working with biology and time based arts. In the last ten years she has become interested in working with living systems, animals and art, considering thesocial, political and ethical dilemmas of biotechnology and surrounding industries. She has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts. Her art works, have been shown in film festivals, galleries and museums, including Documenta 13, Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, among others. Her co-edited book The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming Unglued, with Sherry Miller Hocking of the Experimental Television Center and Mona Jimenez of the Moving Image Preservation Program at NYU, will be published by Intellect Books (UK), 2013. The book presents stories of the development of early video tools and systems designed and built by artists and technologists during the late 1960s and 70s, and how that history of collaborations among inventors, designers and artists has affected contemporary tool-makers. Natalie Jeremijenko Beatriz and I both worked on technological opportunities for social and ecological change including : air quality projects using sensors attached to pigeons and robotic dogs respectively towards redesigning human/animal relationship; both worked on developing alternative biomedical institutions that recognized participatory research and food and nutrition-based work and the convivial contexts for rethinking these. Animal behavior, gmo food, representations of cancer it seemed we were automatically attracted to similar issues, and of course I could not have been luckier in this respect. Aside from the professional overlap I loved her as a friend she was incredibly dear to me. Named one of the most influential women in technology 201, one of the inaugural top young innovators by MIT Technology Review, and a current Creative Capital awardee, Natalie Jeremijenko directs the Environmental Health Clinic, and is an Associate Professor in the Visual Art Department, NYU, affiliated with the Computer Science Department and Environmental Studies program. Previously she was on the Visual Arts faculty at UCSD, Faculty of Engineering at Yale University, a visiting professor at Royal College of Art in London, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Public Understanding of Science at Michigan State University. Her degrees are in biochemistry, engineering, neuroscience and History and Philosophy of Science. Jeremijenko was included in the 2011 Venice Bieniale, the 2006 Whitney Biennial of American Art, also in 1997, and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Triennial 2006-7. In 2010 Neuberger Museum produced a retrospective exhibition surveying recent work, entitled Connected Environments; in addition to a solo exhibition entitled X in November, 2010 at the University of Technology Sydney. Currently on view: Civic Action, an exhibition of urban plans, at Socrates Sculpture Park, Other recent exhibitions include Civic Action @ Noguchi Museum; talk2me exhibition at MOMA, and the ongoing Cross(x)Species Adventure Club. -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Week 3 on empyre: Paul Vanouse, Amanda McDonald Crowley, Claire Penacost, and Heidi Kumao
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Paul thanks so much for sharing your insightful observations about Beatriz' early working process. I am also reminded about the appearance Beatriz made in Lynn Hershman's film Strange Culture about Steve's ordeal. You were in that too were you not? For those subscribers who may want to look at the trailer it can be found at http://www.strangeculture.net/ I am sure that our subscribers as would I love to hear more about the generation of the wetware hackers. I wrote in an earlier post that I was at that symposium at ISEA and I believe I have a videotape of the panel...will look for it tomorrow. But in the meantime can you share more about you and Beatriz' discussions and how you came up with the conceptual and practical parameters. It has been incredibly interesting for me to read so many times that at the heart of so many of Beatriz' collaborations a friendship or personal connection preceded. I am hoping you will have time to make a post or two more about all this. Thanks again. Renate -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Week 3 on empyre: Paul Vanouse, Amanda McDonald Crowley, Claire Penacost, and Heidi Kumao
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks to Antoinette and Brooke for being our guest this week on empyre. Antoinette your last post on some of the historical precedents involving women and cellos was interesting. I am also reminded of the various collaborations that cellist Charlotte Moorman accomplished with Nam June Paik. A quick image search of the two artists brought up a number of images. Thanks so much for the post. This week on empyre we welcome Paul Vanouse, Amanda McDonald Crowley, Claire Penacost, and Heidi Kumao. Their biographies are posted below and welcome them warmly to -empyre soft-skinned space. I am hoping that all of our guests from other weeks will feel free to post as their schedules permit and that any -empyre subscriber that is lurking in on our conversation who knew Beatriz or was inspired by her work to please post. For anyone missing the discussion thus far, the entire conversation can be accessed in our archive at: http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2013-February/date.html Best to all of you. Renate Ferro Biographies Week 3 Paul Vanouse is a Professor of Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo. and has worked in emerging technological media forms since 1990. His biological experiments, electronic cinema, and interactive installations have exhibited in over 20 countries and across the US. His recent projects, “Latent Figure Protocol”, “Ocular Revision” and “Suspect Inversion Center” use molecular biology techniques to challenge “genome-hype” and to confront issues surrounding DNA fingerprinting. Paul and Beatriz began their friendship at Carnegie Mellon in the late Nineties, while Paul was a Fellow at the Studio for Creative Inquiry and Beatriz was finishing her degree. They taught together at the University at Buffalo, exhibited alongside one another in group exhibitions, and organized panels and workshops together, including Wetware Hackers workshop for ISEA 2006 in San Jose. Paul and Beatriz have dialoged and collaborated for over fifteen years and she will be dearly missed. Amanda McDonald Crowley is a cultural worker, curator, and facilitator who creates media and contemporary art programs that encourage cross-disciplinary practice, collaboration and exchange. Recent curatorial efforts include Our Haus, the 10th Anniversary exhibition for the Austrian Cultural Forum, NY. In late 2012 she did a residency as a Bogliasco Fellow, working on curatorial research at the intersection between art, food, and technology. Amanda is also currently a Board member of the National Alliance for Media Art + Culture (NAMAC) in the USA. She has been Director of the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) where she made significant links with science and industry by developing a range of residencies for artists in settings such as science organizations, contemporary art spaces and virtual residencies online. She was Associate Director of the Adelaide Festival 2002 in Australia, and also co-chair of the working group that organized the exhibition and symposium ‘conVerge: where art and science meet’. Critical Art Ensemble were to present their collaboration with Beatriz at that Festival. Alas, the Festival wasn't able to support the performance. While Executive Producer at ISEA2004 (the International Symposium for Electronic Arts 2004) held in Tallinn, Estonia and Helsinki, Finland, and on a cruiser ferry in the Baltic sea, she finally met Beatriz who suggested that she consider professional options in the USA post ISEA. Amanda told Beatriz she would never move to the USA. 18 months later, when she became Executive Director of Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in New York City, Beatriz commented never is not a very long time in your language it seems. When Amanda first arrived at Eyebeam in late 2005, Beatriz, with Preemptive Media, were commissioned to develop Area's Immediate Reading. Beatriz was also a member of the last residency program cohort Amanda oversaw at Eyebeam in 2011, where Beatriz was researching and developing her final projects Dying for the Other and Anti-Cancer Survival Kit. Claire Penacost: Claire Pentecost’s work engages diverse strategies—collaboration, research, teaching, field work, writing, lecturing, drawing, installation and photography—in an ongoing interrogation of the institutional structures that order knowledge. Her work has long addressed the contested boundary between natural and artificial, focusing the last fourteen years on food, agriculture and bio-engineering. Pentecost was a presenting artist at dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, Germany, and is represented by Higher Pictures in New York. She is a Professor in the Department of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and often collaborates with Compass in the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor. Heidi Kumao: Emerging from the intersection of sculpture, theater and engineering, Heidi Kumao’s installations, experimental films
Re: [-empyre-] Week 3 on empyre: Paul Vanouse, Amanda McDonald Crowley, Claire Penacost, and Heidi Kumao
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Just caught this. Sorry to Claire Pentecost for the misspelling her name. My apologies. Renate On Sat, Feb 16, 2013 at 11:54 AM, Renate Ferro r...@cornell.edu wrote: Thanks to Antoinette and Brooke for being our guest this week on empyre. Antoinette your last post on some of the historical precedents involving women and cellos was interesting. I am also reminded of the various collaborations that cellist Charlotte Moorman accomplished with Nam June Paik. A quick image search of the two artists brought up a number of images. Thanks so much for the post. This week on empyre we welcome Paul Vanouse, Amanda McDonald Crowley, Claire Penacost, and Heidi Kumao. Their biographies are posted below and welcome them warmly to -empyre soft-skinned space. I am hoping that all of our guests from other weeks will feel free to post as their schedules permit and that any -empyre subscriber that is lurking in on our conversation who knew Beatriz or was inspired by her work to please post. For anyone missing the discussion thus far, the entire conversation can be accessed in our archive at: http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2013-February/date.html Best to all of you. Renate Ferro Biographies Week 3 Paul Vanouse is a Professor of Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo. and has worked in emerging technological media forms since 1990. His biological experiments, electronic cinema, and interactive installations have exhibited in over 20 countries and across the US. His recent projects, “Latent Figure Protocol”, “Ocular Revision” and “Suspect Inversion Center” use molecular biology techniques to challenge “genome-hype” and to confront issues surrounding DNA fingerprinting. Paul and Beatriz began their friendship at Carnegie Mellon in the late Nineties, while Paul was a Fellow at the Studio for Creative Inquiry and Beatriz was finishing her degree. They taught together at the University at Buffalo, exhibited alongside one another in group exhibitions, and organized panels and workshops together, including Wetware Hackers workshop for ISEA 2006 in San Jose. Paul and Beatriz have dialoged and collaborated for over fifteen years and she will be dearly missed. Amanda McDonald Crowley is a cultural worker, curator, and facilitator who creates media and contemporary art programs that encourage cross-disciplinary practice, collaboration and exchange. Recent curatorial efforts include Our Haus, the 10th Anniversary exhibition for the Austrian Cultural Forum, NY. In late 2012 she did a residency as a Bogliasco Fellow, working on curatorial research at the intersection between art, food, and technology. Amanda is also currently a Board member of the National Alliance for Media Art + Culture (NAMAC) in the USA. She has been Director of the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) where she made significant links with science and industry by developing a range of residencies for artists in settings such as science organizations, contemporary art spaces and virtual residencies online. She was Associate Director of the Adelaide Festival 2002 in Australia, and also co-chair of the working group that organized the exhibition and symposium ‘conVerge: where art and science meet’. Critical Art Ensemble were to present their collaboration with Beatriz at that Festival. Alas, the Festival wasn't able to support the performance. While Executive Producer at ISEA2004 (the International Symposium for Electronic Arts 2004) held in Tallinn, Estonia and Helsinki, Finland, and on a cruiser ferry in the Baltic sea, she finally met Beatriz who suggested that she consider professional options in the USA post ISEA. Amanda told Beatriz she would never move to the USA. 18 months later, when she became Executive Director of Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in New York City, Beatriz commented never is not a very long time in your language it seems. When Amanda first arrived at Eyebeam in late 2005, Beatriz, with Preemptive Media, were commissioned to develop Area's Immediate Reading. Beatriz was also a member of the last residency program cohort Amanda oversaw at Eyebeam in 2011, where Beatriz was researching and developing her final projects Dying for the Other and Anti-Cancer Survival Kit. Claire Penacost: Claire Pentecost’s work engages diverse strategies—collaboration, research, teaching, field work, writing, lecturing, drawing, installation and photography—in an ongoing interrogation of the institutional structures that order knowledge. Her work has long addressed the contested boundary between natural and artificial, focusing the last fourteen years on food, agriculture and bio-engineering. Pentecost was a presenting artist at dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, Germany, and is represented by Higher Pictures in New York. She is a Professor in the Department of Photography at the School
Re: [-empyre-] Week 2 on empyre, Welcome Brooke Singer, Antoinette LaFarge, and Tad Hirsch
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear Brooke, For those of our subscribers who may want to look at the Preemtive Media Website I have pasted the URL below: http://www.preemptivemedia.net/ Brooke I recall seeing AIR at EYEBEAM but don't remember when that would have been. Thanks for sharing this early work. Renate On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 10:10 PM, Brooke Singer bro...@bsing.net wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello all from snow covered Brooklyn. I am going to take this conversation back in time a bit… As has been already stated here, I was a co-founder of Preemptive Media with Beatriz (aka Shani) along with Jamie Schulte. Our collaboration began several years after a close friendship. Shani and I were both studying in the art department at Carnegie Mellon University. It was late 1990s and early 2000s. We did not collaborate immediately. We were involved in our own research and creative projects that were time consuming. Shani was working on a robotic cello piece. The project had a steep technical learning curve that she embraced with a joy and intensity that was pure Shani. It was only on the tail end of three years at CMU that Shani and I talked about doing a project together. We began to conceive the project SWIPE and Shani brought in Jamie, whom I had not met before. Shani was always very good at bringing people together. There was a lot excitement -- if we failed we would fail together having a good time. We shared and learned so much with each other through those years so it is hard for me not to be nostalgic (sorry Shani!). We had a lot of fun. There were frustrations, too, fights and long working days on top of the stress of both being junior faculty members. But we were doing work that we all deeply believed in and were finding avenues to share it. We were able to do things together that we could not have done on our own. Strength in numbers. The sum was greater than the parts. I deeply respected and learned from Shani’s incredible drive and self-confidence; she just went for it. She never self-doubted or asked for permission. Her strength was one of her most defining characteristics. Preemptive Media was a full on collaboration, something rare I think and for that I am really so very grateful. We brainstormed and conceived everything together. We stood on stage and co-presented (finishing each other’s sentences). We divided production work but were in constant contact and involving each other in every detail from the technical to the conceptual and aesthetic. This allowed us to learn from each other’s strengths as well as challenge our assumptions. Here are some things I learned from our ~six years of collaboration together and still deeply value: 1. The best collaborations start as a friendship. 2. In collaborations you do not assume someone who is very good at one thing is not also very good at many other things. 3. It is best to ask for forgiveness later than to ask for permission first. 4. Release early and release often (do not hold ideas close to the chest). 5. Keep moving but make old work open source / open design so others can pick up and carry on as desired. 6. Don’t become the expert (I have written about this more here: http://beautifultrouble.org/principle/team-up-with-experts-but-dont-become-the-expert/). With love and in loving memory, Brooke On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 4:40 PM, Renate Ferro r...@cornell.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- -empyre soft-skinned space February 2013: Art, Engineering, and Politics: In Memoriam, Beatriz da Costa It was such an honor to have both Robert Nideffer and Christiane Paul begin our monthly discussion in honor of the memory of the life and work of Beatriz da Costa. We have spent the week talking about Beatriz' process and how remarkable her life and work were intertwined. Both Robert and Christiane you were so generous to enlighten our subscribers about her most recent work especially the conceptual projects that have not been realized thus far. Over the next three weeks there will be others who share with us their recollections and collaborations with Beatriz. I would like to introduce to our list-serve Week 2's guests: Brooke Singer, Antoinette LaFarge and Tad Hirsch. They will be our guests for the entire week and I know the three of them have much to share. Welcome to -empyre soft-skinned space: Week 2: Art, Engineering, and Politics: In Memoriam, Beatriz da Costa. Below please find their biographies. Best, Renate Brooke Singer When Brooke was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University in the late1990s she met Beatriz who was on an exchange program from France. They became good friends. In 2002 they began to collaborate with Jamie Schulte on a project called Swipe and later co-founded the collective Preemptive Media
Re: [-empyre-] looking further back
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks Antoinette for mining through old emails but especially for inspiring me to search for Beatriz' robotic cello piece. http://www.beatrizdacosta.net/cello.php Brooke in reading from your list: In collaborations you do not assume someone who is very good at one thing is not also very good at many other things. inspired me to note the breadth of technological practices that Beatriz was actually able to manage. I have colleagues who complain about the fast moving pace of technology and how it is so difficult to keep up. Many have given up. I am inspired and struck at how engaged and intense Beatriz/Shani was in both the practices of technology and the conceptual ideas that were enabled by them. Her abilities to manage both practice and theory in tandem even lately (here I am thinking of Robert's descriptions of the intensive research she was carrying out during the last months she was ill and the fact that she took an editing class at SVA to improve her editing skills) so adeptly is inspiring. Thanks for sharing. Renate On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 6:06 PM, Antoinette LaFarge alafa...@uci.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Shani was working on a robotic cello piece. The project had a steep technical learning curve that she embraced with a joy and intensity that was pure Shani. It was only on the tail end of three years at CMU that Shani and I talked about doing a project together. We began to conceive the project SWIPE and Shani brought in Jamie, whom I had not met before. Brooke, I remember that terrific robotic cello piece from back when we were interviewing Shani for the UCI faculty. Your description of that period inspired me to troll back through my email to see when and how Shani first turned up. There are a bunch of fairly dull-but-important-at-the-time emails having to do with the early days of our Arts Computation Engineering (ACE) program which she worked like mad to help build-- a huge responsibility for a junior professor. There is a reminder about contributing data for the SWIPE project when it was at the Beall Center. And there begin to be emails here and there about having dinner or commuting or going to a lecture together; small traces, nothing dramatic. In one of these, in a list of people she thought might be good to bring out as visiting artists, she wrote: ‘may be we can piggy bag onto an existing trip of hers.’ It was always easy to forget that English was Shani’s second language since she spoke it with such fluency, until she stopped you to demand the meaning of some obscure bit of slang, or poetically mangled an idiom she hadn’t gotten quite right. I suppose the above example could be a mere typo, but even so it immediately brought to mind how much I loved those moments when her speaking would run off the rails, into some temporarily surreal territory. I wonder if the mingling of languages in which she thought contributed to that vividness of her project titles which someone mentioned earlier? Brooke’s reminiscences about those days of intensive work at CMU speaks also to the relentless forward-lookingness of life in a research university, where the next production often seems to be all that matters. It suited Shani very well, I think, but it also means that almost the only time we are prepared to stop and explicitly reflect is in the context of a promotion review, when what we make with our life’s blood becomes subtly converted into evidence in a case for or against us. Or, as now, under the spur of loss. It is as though we stand on a bridge that we are constantly chopping off behind us just so that it can continue to extend in front. When else would any of us have ever gone back and re-conjured our shared history with Shani in such detail? Anyway, I came away from my email troll-through with a strange sense of relief: yes, there was a time when our friendship was ordinary, even light-hearted, before it fell under the sign of the crab. Later, --Antoinette ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] response to Robert's first post
to approach it. This is partly because I'm insecure about how comfortable she would be with my publicly sharing things which were so early in her development process. Simply going through her various computers, the terabytes upon terabytes of external disks, attempting to organize things, back stuff up, etc, was a very interesting and revealing process for me. In a very general (yet highly personal) sense, one's computer(s), the applications, the folder names and file structures, the organization of media, the projects and documents, the bookmarks, all serve to provide a fascinating kind of portrait... I suspect much more could be discerned about personality by analyzing these sorts of things than, for instance, hand writing. The amount of effort Shani put into project planning was pretty incredible. Even things that she was just beginning to think about had a high degree of clarity. I'll mention just a couple, and risk her wrath. Hopefully I won't butcher the concept. She wanted to create her own cell line, so that various chemotherapy agents could be tested on them, in effort to ascertain effectiveness. She actually wanted her neurosurgeon to take a sample from a tumor in her brain while she was under anesthesia during her last surgical procedure on December 6th, when she had a port implanted in her spine for drug delivery (her third, the first was in her chest, and the second her skull). He was not willing to do this, but he did take a sample of her spinal fluid, which he said could be used for the same purpose. I've been thinking I should contact him about this. I think it would have been an amazing project. She may have had a working title for it, but I can't find it right now. She was working on a book (The Train We Thought We Should Have Been On) of short passages/stories, to be accompanied by photos, about various happenings from her daily life: her dog's being almost supernaturally sensitive to her emotional state/need; the perceptual shifts in hearing, thinking and seeing that were triggered by swelling in her brain, accounts of what it's like to be pushed and pulled around the city with a body becoming increasingly out of control; the loss of memory, among many other things. The Unlikely Dancer, a project inspired by seeing Herzog's film on Pina Bausch and the idea of using untrained dancers. She wanted to develop a piece in collaboration with a choreographer about her progressive loss of control of her balance and her body. In fact, in what would become the last week of her life, she wanted me to mount a video camera in the apartment and start shooting footage of us walking to the bed, the bathroom, the table, and so on. I bought her a light kit for her camera as a Christmas gift to do it, but it was not to be. It's another piece I can really feel, as I still have such a bodily memory of the intricate steps that were required to get from one place to another, and the manner and method with which she would prompt my movement and participation, and vice-versa. She also had begun nose work training with her service dog, a wonderful companion named Lucinha (Portuguese that roughly translates as little bringer of light), because she had been reading about the possibility of training dogs to sniff cancers for early detection. There were many others. The last I'll mention for now, just because it represents a work that was not about her illness, was Nostalgia in the Post Colony. Shani's father was from Goa, India, a former Portuguese colony. Some of her family on that side remain there in a home that they have had for many years, and which held a special place in Shani's heart, and around which many interesting stories could be told. I never had the chance to go there with her (though we'd started making plans to do so this past Fall). She had been in communication with her aunt, and was planning to do a video piece (that would have been part of a larger installation including an architectural model of the house, and multiple projection screens) documenting their stories. Apologies for the length of the post! Robert On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 12:00 AM, Renate Ferro r...@cornell.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks Robert and Christiane. Robert_ For some reason I can not find Dying for the Other on Vimeo anymore. I was able to see a portion of it a few days ago and I must say that it was very difficult for me to watch. There was such a straightforward yet vulnerable tension throughout the portion I watched. If you have the direct link and could pass it on that would be good. Thanks so much for sharing with us your recollections of visiting Dr. Schneider as well. To both of you_ As long as this is our first week it may be good if you wouldn't mind talking generally about Beatriz as well as other projects she was working on most recently. Any
[-empyre-] Week 2 on empyre, Welcome Brooke Singer, Antoinette LaFarge, and Tad Hirsch
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- -empyre soft-skinned space February 2013: Art, Engineering, and Politics: In Memoriam, Beatriz da Costa It was such an honor to have both Robert Nideffer and Christiane Paul begin our monthly discussion in honor of the memory of the life and work of Beatriz da Costa. We have spent the week talking about Beatriz' process and how remarkable her life and work were intertwined. Both Robert and Christiane you were so generous to enlighten our subscribers about her most recent work especially the conceptual projects that have not been realized thus far. Over the next three weeks there will be others who share with us their recollections and collaborations with Beatriz. I would like to introduce to our list-serve Week 2's guests: Brooke Singer, Antoinette LaFarge and Tad Hirsch. They will be our guests for the entire week and I know the three of them have much to share. Welcome to -empyre soft-skinned space: Week 2: Art, Engineering, and Politics: In Memoriam, Beatriz da Costa. Below please find their biographies. Best, Renate Brooke Singer When Brooke was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University in the late1990s she met Beatriz who was on an exchange program from France. They became good friends. In 2002 they began to collaborate with Jamie Schulte on a project called Swipe and later co-founded the collective Preemptive Media. Brooke Singer engages techno-science as an artist, educator, non-specialist and collaborator. Her work lives on and off line in the form of websites, workshops, photographs, maps, installations and performances that often involves public participation in pursuit of social change. Recent awards and commissions include a Madrid Council’s Department of the Arts commission, Turbulence.org commission, New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) Individual Artist award, a Headlands Center for Arts residency and a fellowship at Eyebeam Art + Technology. 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. I respected Beatriz deeply as an inspiring colleague interested in similar areas to mine. She befriended me when she moved to NYC and we met more often while she lived there to compare notes and discuss her work. I would consider Beatriz a friend, a colleague, an inspiration, a collaborator and a mentor. I miss her deeply. Antoinette LaFarge is an artist-writer who is interested in deception, actuality, and enactment. Her areas of activity include mixed-reality performance, interactive installation, avatar improvisation, and fictive art. Recent projects include Galileo in America (2012), WISP (World-Integrated Social Proxy) (2010), Hangmen Also Die (2010), World of World (2009), and Playing the Rapture (2008-09). She has been working between digital and analog media for over a decade, and in the 1990s she founded one of the first net-based performance troupes, the Plaintext Players. She co-curated two early exhibitions on computer games and art: “SHIFT-CTRL” in 2000 and “ALT+CTRL” in 2003, both at UC Irvine, where she is Professor of Digital Media in the Art department. Her projects website is www.forger.com, and her blog is www.artisallwehave.com. I have known Beatriz since she came to UC Irvine in 2003, and as colleagues in new media we worked closely together on curriculum and related issues. Our practices are different enough that we never collaborated on an art project together, though we had discussed the possibility. Our friendship grew after she moved to Long Beach, where I also live, and we could meet up for dinner or a yoga class or an impromptu beach walk. Tad Hirsch is Assistant Professor of Interaction Design at the University of Washington, where his research interests lie at the intersection of design, urban space, and collective action. He directs the Public Practice Studio, a multidisciplinary, public-interest design group, and was a founding member of the Institute for Applied Autonomy, an internationally-renowned art/technology/activism collective. -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] response to Robert's first post
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks Robert and Christiane. Robert_ For some reason I can not find Dying for the Other on Vimeo anymore. I was able to see a portion of it a few days ago and I must say that it was very difficult for me to watch. There was such a straightforward yet vulnerable tension throughout the portion I watched. If you have the direct link and could pass it on that would be good. Thanks so much for sharing with us your recollections of visiting Dr. Schneider as well. To both of you_ As long as this is our first week it may be good if you wouldn't mind talking generally about Beatriz as well as other projects she was working on most recently. Any links that you could pass would also help. Establishing a good base this week will lay the foundation for the rest of the month when our other guests join us. I have posted her website link below: http://www.beatrizdacosta.net/ And the Irvine announcement http://news.uci.edu/briefs/studio-artist-beatriz-da-costa-dies-at-38/ I also noticed that some of her work is archived in the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art today as I was doing a bit of searching. I will be introducing two new guests on Friday so anything you can add would be great. This month's discussion will be archived. Hope you will freely share. Many thanks again. Renate On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 7:04 PM, Robert Nideffer nidef...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks for your comments Renate. I was able to locate the password to view the full length video for those that are interested. From your first link, at the bottom of the trailer you'll see a To view full video... click here which takes you to a pass protected page -- just enter humans to gain access. I also was struck by the immediacy of Dr. Schneider's response. I went with her to that first meeting at his lab. A number of others would follow. The specifics of much of the initial conversation escape me now. It was background about the nature of his research, some discussion of Shani's most recent history with cancer, and of course her project ideas. I do remember his being quite taken by Shani, If I had to guess I'd think it in part due to her deep knowledge of her disease, the considerable research she'd done on laboratory practices involving mice, her directness and openness, her motivations, and her desire to translate her experience into something she could creatively offer to others while in the midst of dealing with her own terminal illness. He introduced us to the researchers working with the mouse models in his facility (exclusively women as I recall, at least the ones we met and who became featured in the video), and essentially granted her access on the spot. Walking out I remember turning to her and expressing my amazement at what had just happened, since it's very rare to be allowed access to film inside an animal research facility, especially for a visual artist. If she was surprised, she hid it well. I do know she was very happy... and immediately began planning what to do next. On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 4:07 PM, Renate Ferro r...@cornell.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear Robert, Thank you so much for agreeing to be our guest during such an emotional time for you. I wanted to respond to you sooner but your post was so compelling yet complex I found myself reading it and then rereading it over again. I post the URL to the website Dying for the Other for our subscribers and those who may not be familiar. http://beatrizdacosta.net/Dying_for_the_Other/ Also this on Vimeo http://vimeo.com/33170755 The timeliness in which Dr. Schneider responded to her first query seems remarkable. I look forward to your sharing not only this completed project but also the ones that were in progress. Can you let us know if there are any online resources for the video project? This month's discussion may be a good place to begin to help assimilate these resources. Many thanks again to both you and Christiane. Looking forward to hearing from both of you. Renate ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Welcome to the new -empyre soft-skinned space interface
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear -empyre subscribers: It is with great pleasure that we announce that -empyre soft-skinned space has a new interface on the Cornell library server. The web address will remain http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/ Since 2002 -empyre has been one of the foremost list serves featuring current topics in new media art, technology and culture. Many thanks to George Karalis, a Cornell University Senior College Scholar, who began redesigning the site about a year ago as part of a web design class. He became so invested in the site he has continued to work on it over the past several months with great tenacity. There were numerous occasions when he met with Renate to sort out decisions about design, usability and inter-activity. We are very thankful to George for all of his hard work. . Also thanks to Melissa Wallace, James Reidy, and Danielle Mericle from the Cornell library web team for helped us test, troubleshoot and upload this site. . The site if you take a few minutes to go through has some new and improved features: 1. The Homepage has been redesigned so that subscribers can see what the most up to date topics are by hovering over the new -empyre graphic. Text has been updated. Under what the history of empyre has been updated. Who lists our current active moderating team: Renate Ferro, Tim Murray, Simon Biggs and Patrick Lichty. Over the next year Renate would like to nurture a couple of more moderators to the team. A call will go out soon. 2. Under Topics and Guests: EVERY first introduction post will be cataloged on this page. All moderators will use the same template for the first post every month. 3. Under discussions : This new message board interface provides an alternative way to read and search the discussion. It is a mirror of the discussions. By hitting SEARCH above the box or following the link at the top under archive you will notice that George has designed a new and improved search capability. While COFA still houses the official archive it never had a good way to research contributors, posts, etc across the years. This new capability allows viewers to just type a keyword or name and get all related posts from the ten plus hears of discussions. For researchers this feature will make empyre a very usable archive. The possible google ads that appear right now WILL BE DELETED next week by the Cornell Library whose not-for- profit status will enable google to take the ads down. That is in process now. 4. The subscription link is now active as well as the unsubscibe. Finally! 5. The only thing that I am still working on is to arrange to have Melinda Rackham redirect her original subtle site to the cornell empyre site. Right now if you do a google search for -empyre soft-skinned space the old static historical site from 2006 comes up hosted on Melinda's subtle site. I will be introducing the February discussion shortly. We will be paying tribute to Beatrix da Costa and her work for the entire month. Best Renate Ferro -empyre- soft-skinned space moderator -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to the February discussion: Art, Engineering, and Politics: In Memoriam, Beatriz da Costa
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Welcome to the February discussion on –empyre- soft-skinned space: Art, Engineering, and Politics: In Memoriam, Beatriz da Costa Moderated by Renate Ferro (US) and Timothy Murray (US) with invited discussants Week 1 Robert Nideffer, Christiane Paul Week 2 Brooke Singer ,Tad Hirsch, Antoinette LaFarge Week 3: Paul Vanouse ,Amanda McDonald Crowley Claire Pentecost Week 4: Natalie Jeremijenko, Kathy High On behalf of -empyre-, we want to express our deepest sympathy to the close friends and family of Beatriz da Costa, who passed away on December 27th after a long and courageous battle against cancer. Beatriz was a co-founder with Jaime Schulte and Brooke Singer of Preemptive Media, a former collaborator of Critical Art Ensemble, and Associate Professor of Art at the University of California, Irvine, where she specialized in the intersections of art, science, engineering, and politics. As so many of you know, Beatriz was an innovator in the use of wetware in her artistic interventions and more recently had been experimenting with the potential of interspecies co-production in promoting the responsible use of natural resources and environmental sustainability. She also was a leader in our broad field of adapting emergent technologies to address the politics and configurations of social justice. ( we will write more specifically about her bio here) Beatriz was always one of the first to respond to our e-mails about monthly -empyre- themes, and was a brilliant interlocutor on -empyre-. At exhibitions, conferences, and when visiting Cornell, we always marveled at her warm generosity with students and members of the public who requested further discussion about her projects. Yes, she was the epitome of an artist experimenting with the flexibilities of soft-skinned spaces. For the month of February, we organize this special monthly discussion in her honor. We invite her family and friends, colleagues, students, and anyone else to participate in this month’s tribute. Beatriz da Costa and her work influenced a global audience of artists, engineers, technologies, and others. This month is for you Beatriz. TO MAKE A POST empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au FOR AN MAKE AN ACTIVE SEARCH IN THE TWELVE YEARS OF INFORMATION WITH THE EMPYRE ARCHIVE GO TO http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/archive.php TO ACCESS THE COFA ARCHIVE: : http://lists.cofa.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: Renate Ferro is a conceptual artist working in emerging technology and culture. Most recently her work has been featured at The Freud Museum (London), The Dorksy Gallery (NY), The Hemispheric Institute and FOMMA (Mexico), The Janus Pannonius Muzeum (Hungary), and The Free University Berlin (Germany). Her work has been published in such journals as Diacritics, Theatre Journal, and Epoch. She is a co-moderator for the online new media list serve -EMPYRE-soft-skinned space. Ferro is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at Cornell University teaching digital media and theory. She also directs the Tinker Factory, a creative research lab for Research Design, Creativity, and Interdisciplinary Research. Timothy Murray is Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Director of the Society for the Humanities, and Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Cornell University. Co-Managing Moderator of the -empyre- new media listserv, he also sits on the Executive Committee of the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC). Among his books are Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota 2008); Zonas de Contacto: el arte en CD-ROM (Centro de la imagen, 1999); Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video, Art (Routledge, 1997); Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas (Routledge, 1993); His curatorial projects include CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA and Contact Zones: The Art of the CD-Rom.Technology. Week 1 Robert F. Nideffer holds an MFA in Computer Arts, and a Ph.D. in Sociology, and is a Full Professor in Studio Art and Informatics at UC Irvine. His work has been shown at a variety of venues including Museo Nacional Centro de Arte, Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; the Whitney Biennial; and the Museum of Modern Art New York, NY. Robert was Beatriz's colleague and partner. Christiane Paul is Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Associate Prof. at the School of Media Studies at The New School. She has written extensively on new media arts and lectured internationally on art and technology. Her recent books are Context Providers – Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts (Intellect, 2011), co-edited with Margot Lovejoy and Victoria Vesna; New Media in the White Cube and Beyond (UC Press, 2008); and Digital Art (Thames
[-empyre-] WEEK 1 on empyre: Art, Engineering, and Politics: In Memoriam, Beatriz da Costa
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- It is with honor that -empyre soft-skinned space pay tribute to the life of Beatriz da Costa and her work this month. Today we have also launched -empyre's new website. This week we are grateful to Robert F. Nideffer, Beatriz' partner who will be our guest joined by Christiane Paul. Their biographies are listed below. We want to invite all of Beatriz' family, friends, colleagues, and others to participate this month on -empyre. Please forward the introductory post on your emails and social media so that we can a broad and global response this month. Robert F. Nideffer holds an MFA in Computer Arts, and a Ph.D. in Sociology, and is a Full Professor in Studio Art and Informatics at UC Irvine. His work has been shown at a variety of venues including Museo Nacional Centro de Arte, Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; the Whitney Biennial; and the Museum of Modern Art New York, NY. Robert was Beatriz's colleague and partner. Christiane Paul is Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Associate Prof. at the School of Media Studies at The New School. She has written extensively on new media arts and lectured internationally on art and technology. Her recent books are Context Providers – Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts (Intellect, 2011), co-edited with Margot Lovejoy and Victoria Vesna; New Media in the White Cube and Beyond (UC Press, 2008); and Digital Art (Thames and Hudson 2003; expanded new edition 2008). As Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art, she curated several exhibitions—including Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools, Profiling (2007), Data Dynamics (2001) and the net art selection for the 2002 Whitney Biennial—as well as artport, the Whitney Museum’s website devoted to Internet art. Other recent curatorial work includes The Public Private (Kellen Gallery, The New School, Feb. 7 - April 17, 2013), Eduardo Kac: Biotopes, Lagoglyphs and Transgenic Works (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2010); Biennale Quadrilaterale (Rijeka, Croatia, 2009-10); Feedforward - The Angel of History (co-curated with Steve Dietz; Laboral Center for Art and Industrial Creation, Gijon, Spain, Oct. 2009); INDAF Digital Art Festival (Incheon, Korea, Aug. 2009); and Scalable Relations (Beall Center for Art and Technology, Irvine, CA; as well as galleries at UCSD, UCLA and UCSB, 2008-09). Dr. Paul has previously taught in the MFA computer arts department at the School of Visual Arts in New York (1999-2008); the Digital+Media Department of the Rhode Island School of Design (2005-08); the San Francisco Art Institute and the Center of New Media at the University of California at Berkeley (2008). Renate Ferro -empyre- soft skinned space moderating manager ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Fwd: Robert's first post
encouraged to maintain as much of an emotional distance to the animals as possible, whereas now things have changed to encouraging handlers to develop a more personal relationship with them. It sounded like a really difficult position to be in. Thanks again, I am really looking forward to this, Beatriz Already there's probably plenty here to discuss -- gaining access to the field, the idea of interspecies co-production, working at the nexus of art and science, making manifest what are often hidden and/or complicated and difficult to translate cultural practices to a broader public, one's position as subject/object in relation to a project, the artist as researcher, just to mention a few. In re-reading these messages I'm again struck by the clarity Shani had at the very early stages of thinking about her work. It stuns me to realize that she initiated this just 10 days before she went in for a craniotomy to remove two (of multiple) tumors, one quite large, and disturbingly close to her brain stem. Her work truly was her life's blood. It was to become her first video piece, and what a piece it became. She never stopped being a student, and challenging herself to think and create in new ways. She would go on to take a video class at SVA in order to better learn software, hardware, and the mechanics of production. She would find an amazing cameraman, Juan Recaman, to work with. I would get to carry gear, occasionally offer my take on things (but only if asked, otherwise beware!), and try to learn from her process. And for that, and so much more, I'm eternally grateful... Robert -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Debt Culture--types of debt
Dear -empyre- subscribers: Our discussion this past week on debt has resonated with many of our subscribers. Please feel free to continue the posts on this thread. We thank Anna Fisher and Annie for hosting last week. At this time we would like to introduce Patty Keller and Paulina Aroch-Fugellie who will finish out the month. Their biographies are reprinted below. Renate And Tim Week 4 Paulina Aroch-Fugellie holds a Ph.D. in cultural analysis from Amsterdam University, with a focus on postcolonial theory. She is lecturer in African studies at the Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey and assistant professor in art theory and interdisciplinary methodologies at the Centro Nacional de las Artes, both in Mexico City. She is a 2012-13 fellow at the Society for the Humanities, with a project entitled Risk at the Periphery. In her present research, she explores the notion of risk across disciplines and geo-politcal boundaries, focusing on art from the global periphery as a space that points to scholastic imaginations of risk as narratives that themselves have to be questioned. Her other areas of interest include semiotics, critical theory and psychoanalytic theories of language. Patty Keller is Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University. Her research and teaching interests are in the fields of modern and contemporary Spanish cultural studies, with an emphasis on visual culture and the intersections between literary, filmic and photographic texts. Currently, she is completing a book manuscript titled Ghostly Landscapes: Film, Photography, and the Aesthetics of Haunting, which examines the relationship between ideology, spectrality, and visual culture in fascist and post-fascist Spain. Her work on Spanish photography and cinema includes scholarly articles published in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Hispanic Research Journal and Hispanic Issues. She is beginning research for her second book project—Photography’s Wound—a study that explores structures of belief, the ethics of seeing, and figurations of the wound in contemporary Spanish photography. Her additional research interests are fascist technologies and spectacles, new wave cinemas, landscape theory, critical theory, film theory, and philosophical and political approaches to reading photography. Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Welcoming
Thanks to Stewart Auyash and William Leiss for being our guests last week for the November discussion on risk. Stewart's experience with SARS and William's discussion of the recent political metrics and its influences on Obama's Presidential win were among the highlights of the week's discussion. We would like to introduce Anna Watkins Fisher and Annie McClanahan for Week 3 of our discussion on Risk. We look forward to their thoughts on our topic and encourage our subscribers to freely post their own responses. _ Anna Watkins Fisher received her Ph.D. from Brown University in the Department of Modern Culture and Media and works in the areas of performance and media studies, experimental art, queer and feminist studies, and critical theory. Fisher has published in TDR (The Drama Review), WSQ (Women's Studies Quarterly), Artforum and e-flux journal's ArtEducation, Le Texte étranger, and Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. Annie McClanahan is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She received her Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley in 2009 and was a 2009-2010 postdoctoral fellow at the Humanities Center at Harvard University. She is currently a Society Fellow at the Cornell Society for the Humanities, where she is completing a book titled Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and 21st Century Culture. She has published on the ideologies of financialization, the doctrine of preemption, and the politics of student debt. Most recently, her essay Dead Pledges: Debt, Horror, and Credit Crisis appeared in the online journal Post-45 Peer Reviewed. Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@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/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
