Re: [-empyre-] Week 4: Convergence: expanding time-base media
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Ken, Could you offer some online links to some of the images from these works, Box of Men and Hell ? -Christina On Oct 25, 2013, at 4:58 PM, Ken Feingold wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear Friends and Colleagues, In this post I will send along an update on some of my activity, and later I will post further on the subject of convergence. I have been writing personalities for talking animatronic sculptures and virtual characters for some time now. As the work has gone along – coding the applications that run on customized computers and microprocessors which control sculpted, molded and cast figures fitted with pneumatic actuators, or, alternately, the digital processes control virtual 3D figures – the central problem is in the creation of a time-based “scene”. So what is materialized is first imagined, written, sculpted, cast, assembled; a convergence of processes, the “mise-en-scène” for what, finally, becomes an artwork, usually something of a time-based installation or sculpture. This much has been the case for a while, and working in this way continues to attract my attention. To a large extent, the focus of the work is, as mentioned above, “writing personalities” and letting them “run” and interact with each other. The characters need to be doing their scene perpetually, but without explicit dialog or repetition. What is involved in writing a personality, or a scene, in this way? First, each needs a vocabulary, a database of words they can speak. The organization of these words becomes the unconscious mind of the characters, and from here there is a coming and going between this database and the surface of their language, their syntaxes and most importantly, their ability to link one thing to another. The speaking character is a fountain of associations, and what serves as their mind is a configuration of algorithms which model and remodel these links, and through their articulation of responses to the language of each other (or an other) they enact. The scene becomes an image – in some cases, as in my work “Box of Men”, a talking, moving sculpture as virtual scene/moving image (a projection or screen); in others, as in “Hell”, it is a talking, moving sculpture as object/image. The continuum between them is what what I think of as the Image-Action; and finally the screen itself is found in the perception of the work - its mental representation - and its relations to the experience of affect in the viewer. This Image-Action, for me, is a primary site of convergence, located within the subject who is constituted by the convergence itself, and where, as I will discuss later, we can observe with some introspection how we are experiencing affect and representation. All the best, Ken ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] bio / Christina McPhee
Shed Cubed, Carbon Song Cycle, Tesserae of Venus and Naxsmash projects is accessed at https://vimeo.com/christinamcphee Her artist’s site, including a catalog raisonnee of works on paper, photomontage and painting, together with writings and reviews is http://christinamcphee.net Artist’s Resume // recent highlights 2007 to the present June 2013 RECENT EXHIBITIONS + SCREENINGS “Carbon Song Cycle,” immersive 12 channel live video installation by Christina McPhee, in collaboration with Pamela Z (musical performance0, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, L@TE series, April 2013. “Thirty Something”, Storefront for Art and Architecture, curated benefit exhibition, Beekman Place, New York, March 2013. SHED CUBED, 4 channel /Dolby 5.1 sound video installation with related photographs and drawings by Christina McPhee, in Markers: Christina McPhee and Ryan Chard Smith, KROWSWORK project space, Oakland, California, September 7 – October 13, 2012 De-Mobbing: Language, Structure, Bioform. Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California, January 22-March 4, 2012 Collections III : Works by Women Artists at Thresholds Artspace, Horsecross, Perth, Scotland, 23 October – February 2012 Expanded Abstraction, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, July 28, 2011 – January 31, 2012 Liquid Assets: Perspectives on Water. Crocker Museum of Art, Sacramento, California, October 16 – January 8, 2012 A Delicate Landscape of Crisis, solo retrospective screening of a decade of short films, Freies Museum Berlin, April 13, 2011 Teorema Drawings, solo exhibition, Cara and Cabezas Contemporary, Kansas City, March 23 to May 7, 2011. Domains, Parameters, Wanderings. Acadiana Center for the Arts, Lafayette, Louisiana, January 8 to February 28, 2011. La Conchita Paradise, video screening, Cinéphémère in the Tuileries Garden, the 37th edition of FIAC, Paris, October 21- October 24, 2010. Deep Horizon, video screening, Hurricane Season, Issue Project Room, Brooklyn, September 15, 2010. With films by Robert Flaherty (excerpts from “Louisiana Story”), Courtney Egan and Helen Hill, Pawel Wojtasik, Lisa Johnson, Christina McPhee, Tony Oursler, Ghen Dennis, and Gretchen Skogerson. Canyon Variation 4. in Hot and Cold: Abstractions from Nature, group exhibition with work by Julie Mehretu, Christina McPhee, Jasper Johns, Suzanne Caporeal, John Buck, and Alan Gussow, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas CIty, April 20 to October 22, 2010. La Conchita N=Amour (2008), video installation, Silent City, The Rag Factory, London, May 7-10, 2010 Tesserae of Venus – Ghostdance (2009), video installation, Open Space Art Cologne, curated by Heinrich Schmidt, April 20-23, 2010 Tesserae White Cloud (2010), invitational screening, Crossroads Festival, San Francisco Cinematheque, Victoria Theatre, April 20, 2010 SALT, video installation, “Because the Night”, curated by LIVEBOX, Aurora Picture Show, DiverseWorks Artspace,, Houston, February 6, 2010 Tesserae of Venus, solo exhibition, photomontage and drawings, Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, October 23 to December 5 , 2009 SALT video installation “Because the Night,” Chapman College – Guggenheim Gallery, curated by LIVEBOX, Los Angeles, October 19 – November 13, 2009 Screening, Recipe (evacuee cake), short film, VIBA Festival, Buenos Aires, November 27-29, 2009. Screening, Seven after Eleven, short film, Cinema by the Bay Festival, Invitational, curated by Sean Uyehara, San Francisco Film Society, Clay Theatre, San Francisco, October 22-25, 2009. Tesserae of Venus, video installation, ISEA Festival, exhibition, Belfast, August 23 to September 1, 2009, curated by Kathy Rae Huffman Plazaville, variable cinema installation remake of Godard’s Alphaville, by GH Hovagimyan and Christina McPhee, produced with Artists Meeting and Turbulence.org commission-NY State Foundation for the Arts, Pace Digital Gallery, New York, April 7 – May 15, 2009. Recipe (evacuee cake)/Recette-Gâteaux_à_évacués invitational screening, VIDEOFORMES 09, Clermont-Ferrand, March 10-14, 2009 47REDS, drawing installation, in “Twice Upon a Time,” Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna, November 18 2008 – January 10, 2009. Group show with Carla Åhlander, Kaucyila Brooke, Tammy Rae Carland, Carola Dertnig, Desiree Holman, Judith Hopf, Christina McPhee, Susanne Winterling and Ginger Wolfe-Suarez. Recipe (Evacuee Cake), video installation, In Transition Russia 2008, National Centre for Contemporary Art, Moscow, -December 2008. Carrizo Topologies, Bucharest Biennial 2008, curated by Jan-Erik Lindstrom and Johan Solstrom, May-June 2008, Bucharest; and Bildmuseet Umea, Sweden, October-November 2008 (catalog). Carrizoprime, First Sight Scene, LA Film Forum, Egyptian Theatre, January 27, 2008 La Conchita N=amour, 22 screen, 3 channel video installation, Horsecross. Commission for Threshold Wave, Perth, Scotland, October 2007 – April 2008 RECENT PRESS
[-empyre-] off topic: where is the -empyre- archive?
I must be missing something, empyreans I am trying to refer to the archives for some projects and I cannot find the link to our archives.. Can anyone help with the updated link? Christina http:///christinamcphee.net On Oct 23, 2012, at 6:00 PM, empyre-requ...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au wrote: Send empyre mailing list submissions to empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/empyre or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to empyre-requ...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au You can reach the person managing the list at empyre-ow...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than Re: Contents of empyre digest... Today's Topics: 1. week four: Pain, Suffering, and Death in the Virtual (Alan Sondheim) 2. Re: night sea crossing 3 + 4 (simon) 3. comment relating to Johannes' night sea crossing 4 (Alan Sondheim) 4. Re: night sea crossing 5 / Pequenas frestas de ficc??o sobre realidade insistente (Johannes Birringer) -- Message: 1 Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2012 21:29:30 -0400 (EDT) From: Alan Sondheim sondh...@panix.com To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: [-empyre-] week four: Pain, Suffering, and Death in the Virtual Message-ID: alpine.neb.2.00.1210222123440.9...@panix3.panix.com Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed The fourth week of October's -empyre- discussion will start tomorrow, continuing with the topic of Pain, Suffering, and Death in the Real and Virtual. The guest will be Maria Damon. Her biographical information is below. I've followed Maria's work for a long time, and it has always amazed me; it has a poetics all its own, brilliant and surprising. - Alan Week 4 - Maria Damon (US) Maria Damon teaches poetry and poetics at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry and Postliterary America: From Bagel Shop Jazz to Micropoetries, co-author of several books of poetry and online projects with mIEKAL aND (Literature Nation, Eros/ion, pleasureTEXTpossession, E.n.t.r.a.n.c.e.d) and one with Jukka-Pekka Kervinen (Door Marked X), and co-editor, with Ira Livingston, of Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader. -- Message: 2 Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2012 13:34:06 +1300 From: simon s...@clear.net.nz To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] night sea crossing 3 + 4 Message-ID: 5085e5fe.2040...@clear.net.nz Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed On 22/10/12 17:10, Alan Sondheim wrote: Celan, an inertness or silence that's uncanny. isn't Celan's speaking 'uncanny'? 'uncanny' is not the word. The word will have the smell of almonds and bite like teeth. But that the word can, is uncanny - can as in a meditation of Nietzsche be untimely - can do. Even when it just won't do. As Adorno said it could, no longer. Perhaps it was this episode more than any other post war which caused Celan the greatest anguish. Beckett's characters, as Deleuze points out, continue when they can no longer. Beyond exhaustion. Beyond the exhaustion of language. Which, for Deleuze, is also beyond the exhaustion of consciousness. Or is that attention? What struck me in the Abramovic movie was how common pain is. A common sense. The habitus you refer to, Alan? And then that there is this mirror play of fear on the surface which all too readily succumbs to the popular depth of a particular pain. Speaking personally, I remember reading Canetti and nightmares that wouldn't leave about being two-dimensional. The fear grew over many years into an outright hostility towards representation particularly where the depths summoned up by pain were concerned. I'm too thin, as David Byrne sings. I regret the interpretation of Celan that reads his poetry into its aporias. With Anne Carson, I think of him as a lapidary writer, incising at great effort words into warm stone. Exhausted. She can't go on. She goes on... Best, Simon Taylor www.squarewhiteworld.com -- Message: 3 Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2012 04:02:28 -0400 (EDT) From: Alan Sondheim sondh...@panix.com To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: [-empyre-] comment relating to Johannes' night sea crossing 4 Message-ID: alpine.neb.2.00.1210230400450.23...@panix3.panix.com Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; format=flowed; charset=US-ASCII -- I wrote this text for Foofwa d'Imobilite's Involuntaries, which for me were part of the inspiration for this month's topic. The Involuntaries (with Foofwa, Vea Lucca, and myself) are at
Re: [-empyre-] from the personal to the political, a p2p confession
that are the inevitable result of the breaking of the social contracts on which capitalist life was based until now? -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com christina mcphee http://christinamcphee.net http://naxsmash.net ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] laws, outlaws golden pirates
that's interesting, Paulo, what do you mean by 'what really scares me is the infertility of art.' can you expand on this ? c= naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com christina mcphee http://christinamcphee.net http://naxsmash.net On Jul 10, 2011, at 2:47 PM, Paolo Cirio wrote: Hi to all, sorry for the delay, i'm struggling for keeping on the track all the new productions, researches and debates. i won't be able to write much more in this list. new media sucks a lot of energy and the payback is not much. magnus: sorry for my ignorance, but as i wrote, i barely follow the legislations/technologies about anti-piracy bills and tricks anymore, i can't keep track of all of them since the introduction of mp3s, i just had enough. digital content will be always free by it self, and we still are at the beginning of the pervasive network's age. we are probably waiting for the final P2P app that will help us to share any kind of digital material anonymously and efficiently, so that any attempt to stop and criminalize piracy will be useless and harmless, as somehow it's already. however in this time of transition we should stand together, informing and reclaiming sharing and fair use of digital content as a civil right. this is my mere personal opinion. shu lea: i don't want to start a new union, it's not my job neither! it was just a funny idea! it's just one of thousands of strategies available. my only concern is to engage an audience beyond the new media art gallery/lecture/festival which is very limited to a small amount of enthusiasts, often quite self referential. and this concern makes me think at the mindset of the general people like the housewife or white-collars in the deep countryside. do we have any chance to engage them? on my opinion it's very very hard, but it's also very pivotal. however we should just have visions, i guess that is the ultimate job of artists. simon: i don't see nothing of bad about the pirate practices being normalized or assimilated by the empire, if they are innovations and evolutions useful for the society, they just shouldn't be patented. maybe we are too obsessed of being against the system till our last drop of blood, forgetting that the people is the system, the corporations and the authorities (sorry we italian still like Pasolini). furthermore this issue remembers me when some radical hippies went in front of the house of Bob Dylan complaining that he sold his soul to the majors. or some friends of mine who do street art complaining that Banksy sells his art. however both artists are still there with their poetry and messages and probably without such of mainstream idols we couldn't have large consensus in radical culture. so i'm not worry about the assimilation, what really scares me is the infertility of art. cheers paolo. On 10 Jul 2011, at 16:37, marc garrett wrote: Hi Simon, Shu Lea others, Appropriation is a behaviour which holds no favour to any particular group or individual, and perhaps the expectation of 'things not being appropriated' by others whether by capitalism or not - is an unrealistic demand. This (seemingly) perpetual, push and pull between mainstream and counter-cultural/activist actions, may be more part of an ongoing set of dynamics; as natural as eating or breathing - a reflection of what is bound to be. Radical practices become mainstream and diluted not necessarily only because capitalism assimilates its essence, but also because of its success to reach a larger group of people acknowledging the spirit of what is being communicated. And even though, it is deeply sickening watching how our own (media art related) culture and others' creative noises out there, are being sideline by supposed 'gurus', who talk an awful lot of crap about things they have little experience of themselves, whilst top-down 'orientated' organizations get pulled into web.2 myths and similar nonsense. I feel that, by focusing on an argument that gets us caught up in a binary loop of trying to always be 'underground' as the main function of radicalism is a diversion. The question is how to short circuit that process? Any good hacker knows that if you want change, you get to the root - change the defaults - this is where the real battle exists, the rest follows... Appropriation is a secondary behaviour, messing up/altering the root of things is where the change and empowerment occurs. By continuously being concerned with what is commoditised, we get diverted into only worrying about the interface alone. And even though the surface of things is a direct connection to millions of others, whether it be through mobile networks, terrestrial TV, official news, it is still important to keep in touch or grounded with what matters beyond the interface of mediation 'the root of things'. Wishing you well. marc The appropriation
Re: [-empyre-] real vs. unreal
So trenchant and tragicomic an observation is worth setting out on its own as a 'best of -empyre-' comment ( or am i hallucinating again).. . Thanks, Pawel. On Apr 30, 2011, at 9:32 AM, Pawel Oczkowski wrote: Anyway, what makes me feel that things might go wrong faster than anybody could expect, arise from notion of AR occupying or subversive to my physical space but foremost 'gentrifying' my imagery space without ability to overcome its influence. Once perceived, AR objects become embedded not in my physical space but in my imagery space. It's exaggerated, but this dual presence of AR object, its epistemological or rather phenomenological status, might be incredibly close to Freud's remarks about origins of hallucinations: when cathexis doesn't connect memory trace and perceived object but the object is completely charged with it. And as far I'm hallucinating about Tamiko Thiel objects, I can cope with it, but when I start to hallucinate ATT commercial or ARvertising, well...maybe at the beginning it would funny somehow. naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com christina mcphee http://christinamcphee.net http://naxsmash.net ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] a borgesian digital map... and live AR.... on Hana Iverson, Sensible City, etc LIVE now
very enjoyable comment-- and actually ironically enough, i was just posting so quickly to -empyre- because usually my 'naxsmash' posts go through right away because i am a (sometime and former) moderator of the list. But not this time-- so my remarks came on too late. Also, I was writing from California, so the live event in CPN was going on in the late afternoon Friday when I tuned in Friday morning. I dunno if this is privileged or branded, I think it's just syncopation. On Apr 29, 2011, at 10:11 AM, Rodney Berry wrote: watching this at 2:30am in oz makes me think about how even time- zones carry privilege. Cory Doctorow's story, Eastern Standard Tribe http://craphound.com/est/?page_id=1574 revolves around the formation of cliques around the times people are awake for chatting etc. My nephew (in tasmania) is so into particular online games that he's up all night and sleeps all day jsut to sync with th eother gamers. these temporal locations sweep around the globe each night and day (greetings from 3am tomorrow to some of you) a 9am lecture in Denmark is narrowly missed by a Tasmanian who happened to wake up and check his email at 2:30am. (that's why this comment rambles a bit) our 'locations' are simultaneously social geo-spatial technological (and therefor brand-located) anyway, gotta sleep but thanks for linking this. Rod. On Sat, Apr 30, 2011 at 2:27 AM, naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com wrote: this is GREAT survey lecture right now http://itu.dk/networkculture/ Neighborhood Narratives inside mobile media devices by Hana Iverson Live discussion in Copenhagen right now : http://itu.dk/networkculture/ the shft of the image off screen and into embodiment and movement in the urban space... also Decollage-- Torn Exteriors in Brooklyn... digital collages over the present location. Toward the Sentient City-- Mark Shepard's curation... MIT Sensible City lab... check this out... really good xc naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com christina mcphee http://christinamcphee.net http://naxsmash.net ___ 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 naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com christina mcphee http://christinamcphee.net http://naxsmash.net ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] the field disappears....: MUTEmuted: forward from Pauline von Mourik Broekman
back decades, the backdoor this structure has offered to an entirely corporatised version of art, wherein genuine diversity and antagonism is replaced by superficially different versions of doing the same thing (and many platforms for critical discussion gradually desist from analysing culture as a whole to discussing the ins, outs, rights and wrongs of particular art forms), is one of the great untold stories of mainstream contemporary culture. As a critical platform seeking to understand culture in the round – i.e. in the many and various ways it exemplifies, illuminates and engages with larger processes (be they, to put it cheesily, part of the 'macro' dimension of global economics, or the 'micro' level of subjectivity) – we have attempted to shore up our core editorial work with a range of others that could help subsidise this. OpenMute, our consultancy and tools agency, through which we also facilitate the publishing activity of many other independent producers, has been the most visible result. But the free-content economy of the web, which felt like a natural home for our discussions, eventually became Mute's nemesis, as sales and subscriptions decreased at the same speed our web readership grew, and a growing international community of readers slowly and unwittingly dealt our 'business model' a death-blow. We must now figure out what to do about this, as all of us who've worked on the magazine for so long have no intention of stopping our work because of a funding decision. Many different working models can and are already being imagined. Others in the many small to medium sized digitally-led organisations which have been cut will be trying to figure out their futures similarly, as will, it seems, many comparable small organisations whose governing remits aren't deemed essential in the current round. We are particularly perplexed by the blow dealt to diversity-led organisations, who engage with questions we imagine will increase rather than decrease in urgency in 'Austerity Britain'. We will attempt to continue the discussion in a number of places. One, on our website, Metamute.org, which publishes weekly and where we will open space for responses to ACE's funding decisions, on Mute Publishing as well as other organisations, as well as the Googlegroup, acedigitaluncut and media arts discussion list CRUMB*, where many are hoping to marshall a more specific discussion about the apparent disinvestment in the still badly understood area of digital practice. ACE's decisions reflect a presumption digital has been 'dealt with' by conceiving of it as integrated in routine organisational development processes, rather than demanding to be explored as a highly self- reflexive area of work with a long and rich history linking into video, performance, independent publishing, installation art, software development, literature and more. Given the consolidation, surveillance and privatisation happening in the digital realm as we speak, now seems exactly the wrong time to be making such a move. The fact that ACE (and partner organisations like the BBC) are seeking to align themselves with digital innovation and broadcasting at exactly the same time just demonstrates further ignorance and shortsightedness. Yours sincerely, Pauline van Mourik Broekman Director and co-founder of Mute, with Simon Worthington, and writing on behalf of brilliant staff, Editorial and Advisory Boards, namely Josephine Berry Slater, Caroline Heron, Howard Slater, Darron Broad, Laura Oldenbourg; Omar El-Khairy, Matthew Hyland, Anthony Iles, Demetra Kotouza, Hari Kunzru, Mira Mattar, Benedict Seymour, Stefan Szczelkun; Sally Jane Norman, Andrew Seto, Sukhdev Sandhu and Andy Wilson. The CRUMB archives, including a recent discussion on this topic, are here: http://www.crumbweb.org/showArchive.php?refr=1301661104sublink=1 On Mar 31, 2011, at 1:47 PM, Simon Biggs wrote: Sorry not to have contributed more. We in the UK are rather preoccupied at the moment with the melt down of public funding for the arts and education. Radical cuts to each have just been announced, most recently yesterday with 100% cuts right across the arts in England. It's a case of crisis management for many. Best Simon On 31/03/2011 20:47, naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com wrote: dear evanescent -empyreans, A relatively failed attempt on my part to 'field' a very broad topic, 'how does a field become visible, when comes to a close as March goes out like a lamb (but not without radioactive traces from Japan in my breakfast milk here in San Luis Obispo County, or 'so I saw the news today, oh boy...').I loved what I read, and I really appreciate those who tried to contextualize a topic with such a subtle gradient of emergence. It was a tumultuous month. So many fields visible at once. So many disappearances. It's a very, very hard time. Thanks
[-empyre-] the field disappears....
dear evanescent -empyreans, A relatively failed attempt on my part to 'field' a very broad topic, 'how does a field become visible, when comes to a close as March goes out like a lamb (but not without radioactive traces from Japan in my breakfast milk here in San Luis Obispo County, or 'so I saw the news today, oh boy...').I loved what I read, and I really appreciate those who tried to contextualize a topic with such a subtle gradient of emergence. It was a tumultuous month. So many fields visible at once. So many disappearances. It's a very, very hard time. Thanks to all who did post-- Chris, Simon, Martin, Cara, Monica, GH, Mike, Simon, Cynthia, Thyrza, Julian, Joel, Andreas, Lynn, Gabriella, Ana-- I hope I didn't forget anybody. I was preoccupied with a new show just opening last Friday, 'Teorema Drawings' -- if you like please have a look. installation curated by Cara Megan Lewis in a new project space in Kansas City, my old home town. http://www.christinamcphee.net/teorema-drawings-at-cara-and-cabezas-contemporary/ Thanks for your patience and have fun next month. Love, Christina naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com christina mcphee http://christinamcphee.net http://naxsmash.net ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] the city of the naked / A cidade do homem nu
I had the pleasure of meeting Inti Guerrero (BR/NL) a few nights ago in San Francisco where we were both attending an opening for Scott Treleaven's new installation works, drawings and photographs at Silverman Gallery. http://silverman-gallery.com/exhibition/view/1971 Meeting Inti reminded me that one of the prime motivations for introducing such a broad philosophical and political question as how does a field become visible, when? is to look with desire and discernment, at the works of artists who have dedicated their lives to the enterprise of 'making visible' -- and perhaps more, of acting this making. Inti has brought to the English-reading world a concise description about one such artist and architect visiionary, Flávio de Carvalho (1899-1973). http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.24/flavio-de-carvalho-from-an-anthropophagic-master-plan-to-a-tropical-modern-design I'd like to direct our thinking to 'nakedness' in connection with antropofagia, the great inventive term of Oswaldo De Andrade (1890-1954)Antropofagia was a movement that literally meant, devour ourselves, or eat our culture, remix and shit out our mixed melange of pasts , our complexities of 300 or more ethnicities in Sao Paulo-- those lost traditions revived through a cannabalism, living again through the eating of culture, thus making new bodies... Tupi or not Tupi...(from the Manifesto Antropófago, Andrade 1928). These new bodies are us, naked we are walking, coming into the city, the city of the naked w/mn, as de Carvalho foresaw, even as in his late practice, he walked the city (streetwalking) of Sao Paulo in an 'experience' wearing a scaffold-like crossdressing rigid structure air-dress mini skirt and blouse (and this at the age of about 60). De Carvalho, moving always towards an architecture of interiority (the inside look, the ingestion, pregnant) , is compelled by an ironic gusto, con mucho gusto, to eat his own architectural (failed) prospectus. Early on as a young painter and architect, de Carvalho envisioned a 'naked mankind' free from 'scholastic taboos'-- 'free for reasoning and thinking' , and, as Inti writes, 'could begin a painstaking process of wonderment, change and becoming in this new cityde Carvalho's urbanism presupposed an existing energy within the subjectivity of the individual, a type of energy coming from a person's psyche and the impulse of his or her desires, which would be stimulated within the different urban scenarios of the 'Cidade do homem nu' De Carvalho ingested, as it were, the hostile fortress of an 'efficient' (as he called it) internally focussed government palace after a palace coup ) with his rejected proposal (Eficácia). I believe that he (poetically, politically) ate his own words, as we say in English; he metaphorically ingested the substance, as well as the notoriety, of his 'violent vision of a government that is in a position of self-defense towards an unstable polity... (Guerrero). He antropofagized the traumatic vision of a repressive palace 'against' the naked people, moving as it were to a profound via negativa, a negative walk. The expression of this 'taking into the self' the stigmata or machine of repression gives De Carvalho, to my imagination, a saint-like apparition, like a glow in the dark animation walking before me, even though his walk occurs in the early fifties before my consciousness, and in another tropical city far from mine. A walk 'against' the repressive consciousness of state and religious systems of control. The walk 'contra' led to a literal walk as an appearance or breakout of the unconscious. He did this by walking against a Corpus Cristi processional, refusing to take off his hat (anti-naked, as naked) in 1956.. Lyncha! Lyncha! Corpus Cristi, the body of Christ-- reconfigured through the design- research action of walking against the corpus of believers, 'as' a sacrificial Naked Man, man with (disrespectful) hat-- to make visible, as he wrote to reveal the sould of believers through a mechanism that make it possible to study their pysiognomic reactions, their gestures, walk, gaze; in summery, to feel the environment's pulse, to psychically touch the tempestuous emotion of the collective soul, to register the expression of that emotion, to rpovoke revolt in order to see something of the unconscious...' (translation Inti Guerrero.) '[D]esvendar a alma dos crentes por meio de um reagente qualquer que permitisse estudar a reação nas fisionomias, nos gestos, no passo, no olhar, sentir enfim o pulso do ambiente, palpar psiquicamente a emoção tempestuosa da alma coletiva, registrar o escoamento dessa emoção, provocar a revolta para ver alguma coisa do inconsciente'. Flávio de Carvalho, Experiência no.2, Rio de Janeiro: Nau, 2001. cm naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com christina mcphee http://christinamcphee.netó
[-empyre-] Fwd: interval. Enter the figural.
This post from Simon Taylor was lost. Mailman software denied it. As a field becomes visible so does this. Begin forwarded message: From: simon s...@clear.net.nz Date: March 4, 2011 1:55:03 PM PST (CA) To: empyre-ow...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: post deemed inappropriate: reasons sought Dear moderator, May I ask why my message was deemed inappropriate? I include it below and look forward to your response. in the figure drawing class. interval. Enter the figural. Suspect, the sense that my mind sees only what it knows. Capture the essence of a departure. We see what we know and what we are conditioned to see annexed also indexically by the matheme hallucinated to predate it. problem of ontology, a rat-race in a cage twitching annex-indexically participants are all making marks of what they know triangulation of mark know repression. Oedipus, can it still be unstill? Still it. really can 'a subject' be 'rendered'? dream of many yet, she escapes site even as I draw, from Bacon via Plateau via Celan: a rendering of fat into soap, soap into RJF - soapstone; foundation... (here comes the liquefaction cf. Christchurch, New Zealand now)... but I suppose what escapes sight is site, outside of the deep things of society, like myth and culture. her body's charge an energy field, her consciousness resists mere countenance, her eyes look back at you not cameras, her body is not a room. neither raum nor noun. But leben? Lebenswert? viewer (a human) that places the image within a complex symbolic or imagined system of language Widened onto a mixture, collecting individuals, materials, institutions on its horizon. she is not not human not in rendition like a prisoner of war Perforce. who is this programmer, if there were indeed instructions in the programmer's wake, after his death, would she, the 'model' have to be instructed, truly rendered? Or has the annexation included an anatomy, an amortization, and gone before as a given of the... Tats, tucks, surgically, inscripted, 'culturally conditioned' , emulated, becoming-something,? ... may i propose, that drawing and rendering are not equivalent, ... finding it a leap not necessary to take from the drawing's trope of a tapping into virtuality, to the rendering, which cannot any which way, witch way, be any other than every rendering inside representation, rendered similar, deadly, but nonetheless able to be traversed. ... then the field where it opens in prolepsis. A probe-head, if ever any was. -c +s On Mar 3, 2011, at 6:35 PM, Alex Gibson wrote: The concepts and relationships developed in the program are considered ... a human. Agency ... strange idea ... difficult to place. We rarely talk about the agency of pencil and paper, Let's. Speculating on the complexity of other machines is always to ignore those closest to us and most in use, no less complex. Computer vision algorithms are breaking down an old specialisation that we humans pride ourselves on, namely being able to recognise stuff within a field of vision and related it to other stuff. If we are to believe Deleuze, Leibniz had this covered. Abandon the human. Visibility is the organisation of sense data into inter-subjective and social realities. Or the distribution ... organs may come hereafter. anatomy, gesture, feeling, perspective, proportion, etc. The subject is isolated, framed and rendered according to the skill and limit of the artists. A computer drawing is no different, except part of the mechanical act of looking is deferred. The wet camera of the human eye and its relational brain to the dry obscura of the cam and its various wares. The machine is programmed with the instructions of the programmer, and these instructions betray prejudices', preferences, aesthetic whims and other culturally conditioned limits that are visible, if we decide to look. The wet to the dry. Instructions. Prejudices. Preferences. Whims. And, with precipitous seriousness, limits that are visible, if we decide to look. An erotics exactly of looking and the amortizing of a rendering. Where looking establishes limits. Aesthetics come later as a matter of manners. How to open the place of field to the future - identity intent on stating its past - the every place of the present so keen on cutting its image as a knife. (1,2,3, the last case draws from (the second, drawing; (the first, an undrawn - maybe (a name, a singularity, escape; (the first, predicated on a middle (term, mid-flight, where the pluses happen) Best, Simon Taylor www.squarewhiteworld.com www.brazilcoffee.co.nz ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Stephen Wilson
Wow, that's really sad. He made this amazing compendium: http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~infoarts/links/wilson.artlinks2.html xc naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com christina mcphee http://christinamcphee.net http://naxsmash.net On Jan 11, 2011, at 2:36 AM, Simon Biggs wrote: I'm sorry to say I heard today that Stephen Wilson, author of a number of key books in the area of new media arts and a pioneer artist in the field, passed away in San Francisco. I understand it was quiet and he was with his family. Stephen's passing is a great loss as he has always contributed so much energy to the new media arts. Steve was a net contributor to our community, part of what helped define it and hold it together. He was also a very nice guy with a great sense of humour. Simon Simon Biggs si...@littlepig.org.uk http://www.littlepig.org.uk/ s.bi...@eca.ac.uk http://www.elmcip.net/ http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Sense as space
Alexander Moi aussi, I am involved in glyphlike topologic drawings http://www.christinamcphee.net/category/drawing/ in my shed /teorema series 2010. growing out of the 'tesserae of venus' attempt to model climate change as a personal/physical measurement of wonder. I am reposting quotes from your post below to facebook and twitter. very succinct. thanks, and hi Sergio, as always-often we are in sync. c naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com christina mcphee http://christinamcphee.net On Oct 24, 2010, at 5:49 PM, sergio basbaum wrote: Alexander, Thank you for you beautiful message. Most of my work in the last years have been exploring different aspects of the multiple meaning of the word sense, as body apparatus, direction and meaning, with a merleau-pontian inspiration. I'm happy to read what your doing, there's alot of common intuitions. best vibes from Brazil s On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 9:01 PM, Alexander Wilson 0...@parabolikguerilla.com wrote: Hello Empyrecists, Thanks Renate for introducing me to the list. Though I have not yet posted, I have been following the discussions for a couple of weeks now. I'd like to write down a few thoughts, post Making Sense Colloquium, and hope they may spark some new tangent discussions. A lot of my theatre and art work has dealt with the idea that sense as in meaning and sense as in sensation, is inherently tied to a third homonym, at least with the french word sens : sense as direction or orientation. This lead me to conceptualize sense as space, space which is not only physical and through which our bodies move, but a heterogeneous space that also includes psychological space, that is, spaces through which our minds move. Sense as meaning and sense as sensation are etymologically derived from the idea of earlier words meaning to find ones way or to orient oneself (see proto indo-european base *sent-, which means to go). So spatiality is extremely important if we want to look at sense holistically. If both are minds and our body are in sense, that is, if they orient themselves within sense in a holistic manner, then we must think of the mind and body as one entity. I have often used the term “topological body” to refer to this, though it is somewhat misleading. The idea comes from the topology of non-orientable forms in topology, like the mobeius strip and the klein bottle, the definitions of which give us a way of thinking how the outside, physical world, could be continuous to the internal mental world. If one were to stand on a gaint klein bottle's surface, one might get the impression that the ground on which he stands has an other side, below his feet, as it were, when in fact this “other side” is continuous to the “side” he is standing on : the klein bottle only has one side. Likewise, the topological body only has one side. The inside mental space of the subjet extends continuously into the physical world outside. The topological body is thus both mind and body. In my work with Parabolik Guerilla Theatre, I have often treated the question of the difference between “having sense”, that is, merely being determined by the space in which the topological body is embeded, and “making sense”, that is actively participating in the constant reorganization of that space. Merleau-Ponty wrote about the difference between parole parlée and parole parlante in this way. It is possible to “use” language in a non creative way, whereas it is also possible to create through language, to reveal through language something other than what a word means on a merely semiotic level. This creative use of language is poïesis. But this distinction between having sense and making sense extends to areas which we don’t usually call language : gestures also adhere to this principle. The body is constantly involved in automatic gestures, it relies on innumerable unconscious gestures that “make” no sense but have sense, that is, the body is on constantly decoding sense which is already there, inscribed in the repetitive processes which make up our present, inherited from the past. However, there are ways in which the body can attempt to become poïetic, and take part in new encodings of sense, create new propagating processes, revealing new meanings, new ways to move, new ways to interact with the world (or be the world). In our practice with Parabolik Guerilla Theatre, Japanese Butoh has been a huge inspiration, and from the very beginning was part of our physical training regimen. Butoh deals with exactly this idea of transcending the usual gestural and postural automatisms that are only decodings of sense. It is and active attempt to not be determined by sense, but actually take part in producing it. The idea of a topological body and of sense as space also ties in with butoh’s sense of the body and space, where the exterior
Re: [-empyre-] Book Piracy and Alienated Labour
Riffing on this, I really resonate to what you (Sean) are saying here about the increasingly diminished conditions for critical thinking-- just how you set up the Public School as a situation without a curriculum itself means that there can be no sure common space in which students/participants can fight to compete, or to jockey for the position of being the best or the most right or the hardest worker, etc , nor can folks establish a hegemonic group position except with difficulty, so that the nuances of the Other can always be at play in the space of learning this comes to nothing when there is no 'point' or 'results' to the 'education'. Thus we fly back into the flow of exchange, this is how generative new content arrives-- in the breach, in the very 'lack' of central idioms. I love Renate's vivid story of her students grabbing aarrggh content and building whole mini libraries. As you point out, who is it gets to build libraries! what is a library? I ask myself that too, which is why i'm working on the 'pharmakon' (the principle of critical reversability, proximity of poison to cure )... having lost my library card and my JSTOR too. It's been extraordinarily difficult (on this end anyway ) to teach criticality (in terms of writing-- i was teaching a graduate writing seminar most recently) within an embattled technocratic university so much fear there that finally the game (of the humanities, themselves) is up-- that the cultural pressure to 'make knowledge production' means that Brett Stalbaum's (echoing Robert Filliou, the French Fluxus artist) definition of 'research' as pretty much investigating and learning and making whatever comes out of that free investigation-- inimical to the needs of the administrators of universities. The admin as Micha has so tellingly witnessed is focussed on 'the right stuff' and the 'right' kind of labour as if there are sinister wrong kinds (like banglab's for example) that must cause people to think bad thoughts and maybe even act on them, saints preserve us! (Sarah Palin blames the environmentalists for the Gulf mess!). I 'm reminded of the beautiful insouciance of Mauricio Cattelan's 'The Wrong Gallery in the early 2000s which came along about the time of the Manifesta debacle (when the curators were chased out of Nicosia when they tried to set up 'school') and the evocative Utopia Station of around 2003Only, once, tenure could, probably did often, help keep the 'voracious' (to steal Renate's term) tendencies of administration in check. but now even this system is under severe stress as the march of 'knowledge production' forces a kind of surveillance over, even self surveillance to do production that fits within ideological schema that seem endemic yet flowing from 'above' . Sean you are so honest, I admire your nuanced resistance, we so deeply need this and must transmit to those who come after us... . (for more on Filliou, there's a terrific essay on him in a recent Art Journal (CAA)-- I think , maybe in print only. Christina naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com christina mcphee http://pharmakonlibrary.blogspot.com http://christinamcphee.net http://naxsmash.net On Jun 4, 2010, at 5:55 PM, Sean Dockray wrote: If it helps, Emmett, I also have mixed and contradictory feelings about the practice. I know I've been playing too much chess recently - I'm imagining how discussions over book piracy seem to open up along fairly common lines: e4 - why are there restrictions on the movement of texts when it is technically possible to overcome geographic, political, or economic limitations? c5 - authors and publishers have put in real labor and deserve monetary compensation in return. The variations that might come out of this position? Attempts to prove that piracy actually helps book sales as opposed to reducing them. Arguments to settle for symbolic capital or other forms of valorization that can be cashed in elsewhere. Assurances that if piracy just went away the market would make sure that all those limitations were overcome. Proposals for micro-payments, creative commons, and other reforms. (This is obviously not the route chosen by Macmillan, who made news last year for standing up to Amazon over lower prices for digital books). Less common lines might be that piracy amounts to a strange form of unpaid marketing; that when it comes to art and theory, reading and writing doesn't break down so cleanly along the lines of consumption and production, or leisure and labor. Emmett's argument about alienated labor resonates with me at this moment in particular because I have had to wait until finishing my full-time day job (which is the equivalent of writing ad copy) each day to participate in this week's discussion! I'm assuming some in this discussion have a university job based
Re: [-empyre-] Delightenment as Mass Perception
Johanna have you got a url or download site for your Quantum ? I love this idea of your book. But i need some enightenment (from MichelA. too) - can you shed lumieres on Luhmann? I have been riffing for a while on this sense (sixth sense) that autopoesis a la Maturana etc is a linguistic generative thing... I mean that you can actually make images and sounds do this as a kind of meta-systems implosion- i am rambling (appropriately enough, as in a rumble, or a walk through the woods). christina naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com christina mcphee http://christinamcphee.net http://naxsmash.net naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com christina mcphee http://christinamcphee.net http://naxsmash.net On Jan 14, 2010, at 6:10 PM, Johanna Drucker wrote: Michael, Wonderful wonderful! I couldn't agree more! I love Brian Green's work, by the way. I wrote a book called QUantum awhile back (artist's book), and have invoked quantum theory in the projects around speculative computing (SpecLab). Absolutely agree that we need to engage with those non-agency agencies of systems theory -- also part of my SpecLab stuff, just fyi -- Heinz von Forester and Ernst von Glasersfeld among my favorites, a little more imaginative than Luhmann, oddly. Also, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's work very important for me. I think Maturana is filled with insight. Another reference in this realm, though some might see it darkly, is Childhood's End. Anyway, thanks for all this, very useful and intersting. Only, let's not call sensation brute -- it is the source of knowledge! Johanna On Jan 13, 2010, at 4:09 PM, Michael Angelo Tata, PhD wrote: Hi, Johanna! Your remarks about aesthetic practice and it roots in brute sensation take me to Dewey’s anti-elitist somatism in Art as Experience and Alexander Baumgarten’s original sense of what aesthetics could mean back in the 18th century, when this discipline was first systematized in the West as discrete branch of philosophy, something different from metaphysics or ethics. I also am drawn very much to the poetics of the quantum, and look to physics and its unfolding symmetries as another place where material complicities are being re-imagined and re-described in ways that transcend mere re-naming of re-branding, and which throw into chaos that simple Cartesian separation between thinking, un- extended and extended, un-thinking matter(s). What do we make of the famous TOE, or Theory of Everything, something that string and membrane theories, with their inherent elegance, to use Brian Green’s highly aesthetic word, have attempted to grasp in recent years in their promulgation of a resonating, symphonic universe? And what of this spooky action at a distance, gravity, which involves us all in the complicities of matter and energy alike, which suffuses scientific fact and myth (that famous apple konking Newton on the head), and which appears to me as the ultimate metaphor for metaphor, this joining of the disparate over time and space within a structure capable of uniting them via only spookiness? I can deal with imbrications being stricken from the list of potential re-brands for the term ‘complicity,’ but still open the question to everyone, as it seems important for me that we find a way to name complicity in a way which invokes the non-agency agencies of systems theory and postmodernism, everything from le schizo to the CSO to the cyborg to that minimally committed Luhmannian para-subject traversing its grooved and groovy (geodesic?) networks. To be honest, I liked the word mostly because it sounded onomatopoetic to me: imbrications can’t be anything but imbricated, the tentacles of those three successive consonants flanked by identical vowels leaving me with the sense that I am being pulled beneath the waters of a lake by a mystery creature part human, part vegetable. In this vein, I look to Lynn Margulis’ recent work on bacterial symbiosis and its relevance for evolutionary biology and autopoiesis (for example, in hers and Dorion Sagan’sDazzle Gradually, an odd fusion of poetry and biology, much of it verging on syphiology). For Margulis, evolution evolved because the simplest creatures learned to coexist in such a way that each benefited the other, a primal form of complicity for sure, one in which the most was at stake, so much more than tenureship or wealth or fame, whatever we gain by becoming accomplices in the human world. In her estimation, sexual reproduction, for example, began as an act of bacterial phagocytosis; when nucleic materials were proven indigestible, they divided along with bacterium, becoming transmitted to new cells (reproduction minus the sex, which, when it was introduced, could only spell death-by-meiosis). This picture is only a rudimentary sketch, but I like very much how
Re: [-empyre-] self and others
Yes, Johanna, thank you. I find making art pure pleasure, but it is the pleasure of bringing something into being, an act of making-as-knowing, that intensifies awareness. I'm an awareness junky. I was really lucky to attend Trisha Brown's early works performed (with Trisha herself in attendance) at the DIA Beacon in NY last November.. works of 'awareness junkiness' unfolded in pairs , each within a specific volume developed by a visual work. Self-not/, alone/community/ there/not there-- Trisha moves that edge with saturated minimalist spaces, with humor and generosity and irony. http://www.trishabrowncompany.org/ Falling Duet (1968), Leaning Duets (1970), Group Primary Accumulation (1970), Accumulation (1971), Spanish Dance (1973), and Locus (1975) In galleries dedicated to the work of John Chamberlain, Imi Knoebel, Richard Serra, and Andy Warhol. naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com christina mcphee http://christinamcphee.net http://naxsmash.net On Jan 13, 2010, at 6:36 AM, Johanna Drucker wrote: Nice turn to these exchanges. I also really appreciated Gabriela's point and the follow-up by others. If we think of art as the act of form giving, we recognize that forms partake of symbolic systems. As social creatures we 'interpellate' (hideous theory word) shared symbolic systems (signs, stories, genres, dance moves, rules of the game etc.). But of course collectively and individually, we shift those symbol systems (for better and worse--think of personal choice and fashion trends). I've fallen from my pure structuralist beliefs. I no longer think we are only 'subjects.' Individualism may be a founding mythology of western culture, absorbed in the most opportunistic ways into contemporary consumer culture, but I think it has grounding. You are not me, even though, to recap all the polit-theo-talk in Pogo's terms, We have met the enemy and he is us. A great deal of cult studs analysis comes to that. Life is short. One of the pressing questions is what does one want to spend time on? The term therapy seems to carry a dismissive tone. I find making art pure pleasure, but it is the pleasure of bringing something into being, an act of making-as-knowing, that intensifies awareness. I'm an awareness junky. Johanna ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Hactivating Design
Wow, great to mention Victor Papanek. I knew him back when I was a student at the Kansas city art institute. I remember his bouyant personality and very dry wit. We have his little book -- containing really the seeds of everything important about design as a generative radical discipline. Terry and I try to teach from this ground every day. It is fantastic to learn how Brooke is taking this on.. On the level of pragmatics much like Papanek. Exciting discussion Christina Sent from my iPhone On Nov 20, 2009, at 12:38 PM, nicholas knouf na...@cornell.edu wrote: Brooke, Ricardo, and everyone, Thanks for your interesting points regarding notions of design, designing, and designers. This has also been on my mind recently, especially as a result of my position within a traditional human-computer interaction program. Here there is no questioning the role of the designer: the designer is to be subservient to the needs of the user, where the user is defined as that constructed by corporations and the market. Researchers actively seek out relationships with corporate sponsors and corporate research labs. As a result, there is no discussion regarding broader societal issues, excepting where they intersect with present corporate priorities, as in the rhetoric of sustainability---and of course there the limits of the conversation are already set, again by the market. This situation caused me to write a polemical paper for the main conference in HCI, ACM SIGCHI, called HCI for the Real World (http://zeitkunst.org/publications/hci-real-world). In it, and this is the main point of my post, I draw heavily on on the work of Victor Papanek, an industrial designer who wrote, for me, a very influential book originally published in 1970 entitled _Design for the Real World_. He focuses on the role of the designer, not only in the composition of the products made, but prior to that, in the very selection of projects to work on: ...I must agree that the designer bears a responsibility for the way the products he designs are received at the market place. But this is still a narrow and parochial view. The designer’s responsibility mus t go far beyond these considerations. His social and moral judgment must be brought into place long before he begins to design, since he has to make a judgment, and a prior judgment at that, as to whether the products he is asked to design or redesign merit his attention at all. In other words, will his design be on the side of the social good or not (66). This is one of the key, but unasked, questions within HCI. There is a general agreement on the relationship of HCI to corporations, the market, and users, yet there is no questioning of the very assumptions that underlie that agreement, and thus what are the important problems that students and faculty spend their time on. Of course there are complicated interrelationships here between funding agencies, professional societies, methods of reward, the system of publication (in HCI, emphasis on yearly conference papers versus less-frequent, but more in-depth, journal articles or monographs), and so on. Yet these are the very conditions that should be at the forefront of debate, especially in a discipline that is relatively young like HCI---but they are not. Returning to someone like Papanek, writing a similar polemic for industrial design and at the height of an earlier ecological movement, is key to foreground the continuities between different aspects of design, different time periods...and to suggest transdisciplinary connections. Design can be more than ICT for development, more than sustainable consumerism, but only if designers take responsibility for their choices of what to research and what to design (and where they can have a decent amount of control over that choice, such as in the academy), and if they instill in their students a similar ethic. Designers in academia would have to push against the notion that they have to teach their students marketable skills. (And, I would argue, that if the designers really wanted to teach skills that would improve the bottom line of companies they would allow for much more creative activity on the part of their student-designers, but that is the topic for a longer post on the interrelationship of interrelationship of contemporary cognitive capitalism and modern technological development.) Undertaking projects such as Brooke's hactivating design and undesigning and Ricardo's garageScience opens up spaces to address these questions and suggest possible alternatives. Nevertheless, I want to additionally point to the ways in which Papanek's project is an explicit critique and condemnation of contemporary (both then and now) processes of consumerist capitalism. Thus this approach is not to encourage design to necessarily create new, more hackable
Re: [-empyre-] final questions for Patrick and Jason: the visual and indexing networked information
no, i think that the sound space/ sonification field is far from narrow-- it's not obscured by the visual-- sound cuts 'below' vision... thanks for sharing the links here for turbulence's sound projects. I had a strange and powerful 'turning away 'from the visual experience in working with carbon sink data on the tallgrass prairie in 2002--the most rich and interesting expression of the datafields was through sound using an extra layer of meaning/ stealing-- from John Cage-- This was slipstreamkonza which I made with the wonderful and amusing help of Henry Warwick (mister H W of -empyre- postings). For my part I feel the most interesting issues in sonficiation have to do with poetics and syntax (as usual in my world)!Rather than 'visualize' the data I just put together a slide show of the microclimate instrumentation on the prairie. To contextualize the sound. In no way was the sonification intended to directly represent the carbon data; rather Henry and I worked with three layers of sound-meaning -- a recasting of Cage's HPSCHD, local ambient sound recorded as the microclimate 'autochamber' machine worked in the field, and aleatory noise patterns coming out of Henry's crunching of the excell spread sheets and assigning arbitrary audio values to numerical patterns. Published for COSIGN, SCALE (USCD) and YLEM in 2004. http://www.christinamcphee.net/slipkonza/autochamber.html -cm On Oct 25, 2009, at 6:39 PM, Helen Thorington wrote: Hi Anna: Re your question to Jason: has the dominance of visualisation of networks obscured more interesting potential sonifications? I remember the Ars-Electronica jury in 2007(?) writing about the overwhelming number of visualization projects they had been forced to review. Their concluding words were: there must be something else out there! I agree: and there is. But visualizations continue to appear in overwhelming numbers; thanks to information aesthetics, new ones arrive in my email every day, . On the. other side, however, musicians and composers have been slow to pick up on sonification. Scientific researchers have looked on it as s a valuable tool , allowing them to study complex sets of scientific data and perceive variations and trends invisible by other techniques, but its use has been pretty much limited to disciplines like chemical analysis, economic analysis, seismology, medicine. (see: sonification in wikipedia) Until recently. So for musicians and composers, sonification is pretty much of an emerging interest. That said, turbulence's networked_music_review contains a number of truly fascinating works that introduce new and/or extra-audible sounds, thus broadening the potential source material for sound and musical work. Miya Masaoka's Pieces for Plants (2002) is an interactive sound installation for laptop, synthesizer, and the American semi-tropical climbing Philodendron. Versions of the piece have been presented in a musical setting in which the plant participates as a member and soloist within an instrumental ensemble. In both installation and performance, the plant’s real- time responses to its physical environment are translated to sound. “The Cloud Harp” installation by Nicolas Reeves sonifies astronomical phenomena. It uses an infra-red laser beam and a telescope that share the same optics to convert the height, density and structure of clouds into sounds and musical sequences in real- time. Daniel Joliffe and Jocelyn Roberts developed an installation that produces music in real time by following the azimuth, elevation and signal strength of the twenty-seven Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites developed by the US military. I could go on... Have visualizations obscured this work? A different question: Has the hegemony of vision been broken? -- Helen On Oct 25, 2009, at 5:25 PM, Anna Munster wrote: I'm about to bring our last lot of guests on board for October but before I do, I'd like to ask Patrick and Jason about the use of visualisation and its relation to information overload and writing/ reading. Patrick you touch on the need to index using some kind of visual system Jason, you use the example of Aaron Koblin's work, which has also delved into the visualisation realm (ie The Sheep Market) and which, for different reasons uses visual display to make its point. In my article I am wary of what visualisation gives form to ie patterns of behaviour in a networked economy. We are all aware of the mot obvious forms of visual indexing of networked information eg tag clouds etc - to what extent do these reduce or enhance flows? And to what extent are they shaping a homogenising behaviour in networks (this has been referred to in Yvonne's posts as well)? Jason, I wonder if the dominance of visualisation of networks abscures more
[-empyre-] last call...
hi everyone, I am just about to say goodbye-- It's been an astonishing month of tough stuff on -empyre- -- thanks so, so much for giving me a chance to learn and listen. Last call for last posts--I'll be closing the topic later tonight . August will be vacation on -empyre-.. all best c naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com christina mcphee http://christinamcphee.net http://naxsmash.net ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] out the blue
Well on that blue note, im going to put out the patio lights, let in the cats, clear the dishes, and channel Lennon. Thanks everyone for participating in our somewhat less/more than Platonic symposium- on queer relational... Simon, Johanne, Lessa, David, Nick, Kip, Marc, Tara, Tim. Saul, Julian, Christiane, Judith, Robert, Reggie, Renate, Davin, Micha, Virginia, Brad, and Esquizo-trans See you in Sept. Out the blue you came to me And blew away life's misery Out the blue life's energy Out the blue you came to me =John Lennon peace, c naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com christina mcphee http://christinamcphee.net http://naxsmash.net On Jul 31, 2009, at 6:47 PM, Robert Summers wrote: I have been thinking about whether or not to post this to the empyre listserve, share it at the proverbial sumposium, and then reading an advanced copy of David Halprine's, et al.'s new anthology titled _Gay Shame_, esp. Ellis Hanson's essay on queer pedagogy, made me decide with a resounding decision. Yes, I shall post it! I was standing in front of my mom's house -- I've been staying at her Laguna Beach house for a while, another story -- and I was drinking an iced tea and smoking a cigarette. Walking up the street was a young boy (17? 18? 20? 21?): he was 21 -- I would later find out. He asked me if I was drinking a beer and if he could bum a cigarette. I told him I was drink tea, and I gave him a cigarette -- even lit it for him. We talked for a bit: he was walking over to his friend's to smoke a bowl. I laughed. We talked some more: there was a subtext, which I was clueless about till later. It was a random meeting: out of the blue. Walking the streets of residential Laguna is not the place one would expect such an encounter, a relationship -- no matter how brief, or how temporary. He asked if I lived here. I told him no. I am just visiting my mom. He asked if he could come in out of the sun: a hot day for Laguna. Sure. I finally knew what this talk was really about. We had sex. In the words of Ellis Hanson, the only good sex is the type you are ashamed about afterwards. Indeed, I was joyfully in shame. He was shameless. Shame and shameless: separated by a suffix. Soon enough, after our other encounter, I walked him out, he bummed another cigarette (I though of Genet's Un Chant Amour). I walked to the curb and lit up a(nother) cigarette (myself: a metaphor for one of this actions that took place 40? 50? behind me. I saw him walk down the street: to (really) smoke a bowl with his friend? I realized this was queer relational. This was one art of living. This was queer: perhaps, peculiar is a better word. I never saw him again, and I doubt I ever will. But this does not mean it was not a valuable experience: it was. And, this does not mean that there was not a relationality (queer to be sure) that took place, which left me in a different place -- as well as leaving me otherwise. I guess what I am writing now (here, now) is what I wrote about Miwon Kwon and John Ricco and queer relational a few days ago, but this took place on a grassy lawn and then a wooden floor not the pages of books, which is not to say those types relations are not just as valuable and engaging and dangerous. Shamelessly, Robert Robert Summers, PhD/ABD Lecturer Art History and Visual Culture Otis College of Art and Design e: rsumm...@otis.edu w: http://ospace.otis.edu/robtsum/Welcome ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] bridging flying machines
johannes--- link: http://vimeo.com/channels/naxsmash or : http://vimeo.com/channels/naxsmash#5766529 thanks also for sending me a link to your video, soda lake (unbound'), which i first couldn't watch as our network here in the Mine was too slow, and so it stopped, after a few seconds, a black and white ghostly panorama of a figure, a women perhaps, or a man, trying to open some tent or sail or heavy parachute that might have dropped her/him from skies to shores of desert or ocean in white (salt lake) or outdoors somewhere, frozen. when the film started to move again (the network here being fickle) i am spell bound by the movement in this film: broken up into 5 parallel (horizontally placed) film frames in almost constant motion and some less so (slowed, then blurred forward), the center frame seems a bit larger (but changes place on occasion) and over the rustling sounds (the parachute that is being unfolded or the tent that is constructed or some not yet known da Vincian flying apparatus or perhaps fishing device) are unfolding an uncertain plot , uncertain emtotions, there is no resolution for this person there on this beach-head or sky-line, the unfolding seems unsuccessful but perhaps it is the contrary as i do not know the purpose of the flying apparatus, or modes of preparing the flying machine, and at the end the breath of the dance of this effort and the gliding motion of this split screen film finally become smaller and smaller, a little windown in the black center of things, and pfffh, it is gone. blushing : I did not realize you would write about this for - empyre-... I am touched. this is quite an unusual and thrilling, mysterious film noir dance video, the protagonist is a woman, but one cannot be sure, i recognize a tattoo and the effort of the labor in the sky, the effort seems real, the meaning of the dance osbcured and multiplied in the segmentational transitions. love, c ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] a last minute plea for discussion about transfeminism
For the longest time, a book called This Bridge We Call Home was in the bookcase by my bed. Every night I 'd see that title and it would comfort me. The image of a home on a bridge, and calling (naming ) , this imaginary sound , resonated with a sense of power and hope. Now for some reason the book has gone, missing. I find it on googlebooks, though, in excerpts.. Opening the introduction, I find the late Gloria Anzaldua walking along the cliffs at Santa Cruz-- a walk I have taken so many times as well, as I try to get ready to teach up on the mountain above us. She muses on the natural bridges, huge limestone remnants of arches that rise just off the edge of the beach, and how the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 brought down the closest to shore of three. The tension in all writing and speech is a kind of bridge between 2 unstable conditions , one/the nature of words as representations of real and two/the nature of words as constructions of real. Queerness, for me involves the exhilaration and hope in the ex- tensions between these. It is a 'tentative' but also a tent, a mobile unit. I pitch my tent on a bridge... a sliver, just a shimmy, shimmer, of temporary architecture. The real-- is an earthquake, it will come and change things, rearrange things, without warning. The natural bridge falls. Unlike words, or my tent on the bridge, The real is pure process, the real is that quake that will come. The limestone bridge will fall, the beach will disappearmy legs may break, my lungs may give out, I may not run fast enough from the tsunami. I know this which is why I can speak : because I can anticipate pure process. There is no 'woman' but there is a place on the bridge 'for woman' .I mark it x, I stay there, it is my mobile device, my free phone ... I walk the bridge, my home. I like Gloria's naming too, for this walker on the bridge: 'nepantlera' : those who facilitate passage between worlds. -christina Micha wrote: and i know the queer/feminist divide is long and painful and deep, not just from reading about sandy stone's experience but also from my own personal experiences with some second wave feminists... Really my own work even seek to sort of expand the notion of gender to the point that sandy stone said during one of our talks i worry about the notion of gender floating away here. Of course there is still gender based violence all over the world on a daily basis, and I struggle to get my students and nieces and sisters to understand the relevance of feminism even while I question its revelance to our current /evolving ideas of identity... out of breath, stopping there... m ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] a last minute plea for discussion about transfeminism
The liminal zone-- Gloria was talking about this bridge-- its always on the edge of something we cansee, like those luminous jets, not touch, just yet-- what does Eve Sedgwick say about touch? LIke the biblical Thomas some need to touch the wound in order to believe. naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com christina mcphee http://christinamcphee.net http://naxsmash.net On Jul 29, 2009, at 8:21 AM, Judith Rodenbeck wrote: Dinner conversation: the missing Bridge We Call Home makes me think of two things: 1 - TJ Clark's lengthy and brilliant discussion of the great social satirist Honore Daumier and his relation to both the vanishing artisan class and the beginnings of the avant-garde, an awkward phoenix/golem made from those still-smoldering and not-yet-disappeared ashes. For some reason this is associated in my mind with the description of the Pont-au-Change in the novel (not the movie) Perfume... 2 - a memory of Gloria Anzaldua channeling so strong as she described a dream in which she saw Cherie Moraga with lavender flames shooting out of her head that we saw Cherie, too, with her bandana and luminescent jets of lavender arcing skyward. J On 7/29/09 3:28 AM, naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com wrote: For the longest time, a book called This Bridge We Call Home was in the bookcase by my bed. Every night I 'd see that title and it would comfort me. The image of a home on a bridge, and calling (naming ) , this imaginary sound , resonated with a sense of power and hope. Now for some reason the book has gone, missing. I find it on googlebooks, though, in excerpts.. Opening the introduction, I find the late Gloria Anzaldua walking along the cliffs at Santa Cruz-- a walk I have taken so many times as well, as I try to get ready to teach up on the mountain above us. She muses on the natural bridges, huge limestone remnants of arches that rise just off the edge of the beach, and how the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 brought down the closest to shore of three. The tension in all writing and speech is a kind of bridge between 2 unstable conditions , one/the nature of words as representations of real and two/the nature of words as constructions of real. Queerness, for me involves the exhilaration and hope in the ex- tensions between these. It is a 'tentative' but also a tent, a mobile unit. I pitch my tent on a bridge... a sliver, just a shimmy, shimmer, of temporary architecture. The real-- is an earthquake, it will come and change things, rearrange things, without warning. The natural bridge falls. Unlike words, or my tent on the bridge, The real is pure process, the real is that quake that will come. The limestone bridge will fall, the beach will disappearmy legs may break, my lungs may give out, I may not run fast enough from the tsunami. I know this which is why I can speak : because I can anticipate pure process. There is no 'woman' but there is a place on the bridge 'for woman' .I mark it x, I stay there, it is my mobile device, my free phone ... I walk the bridge, my home. I like Gloria's naming too, for this walker on the bridge: 'nepantlera' : those who facilitate passage between worlds. -christina Micha wrote: and i know the queer/feminist divide is long and painful and deep, not just from reading about sandy stone's experience but also from my own personal experiences with some second wave feminists... Really my own work even seek to sort of expand the notion of gender to the point that sandy stone said during one of our talks i worry about the notion of gender floating away here. Of course there is still gender based violence all over the world on a daily basis, and I struggle to get my students and nieces and sisters to understand the relevance of feminism even while I question its revelance to our current /evolving ideas of identity... out of breath, stopping there... m ___ 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
Re: [-empyre-] _I Am Transreal_ : [part 1] [_Augmentology.com_]
ah Brad what clairvoyance! You must be one of the guild members who
eat the spice (see: DUNE).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melange_(fictional_drug)
Although it is referred to as spice, can be mixed with food, and is
used to make beverages such as spice coffee, spice beer, and
spice liquor, melange is in fact a drug in the clinical sense, and
daily use can extend human lifespans by hundreds of years.[3] In
larger quantities it possesses intense psychotropic effects, and is
used as a powerful entheogen by both the Bene Gesserit and Fremen to
initiate clairvoyant and precognitive trances, access racial memory
and heighten other abilities.[3] But melange is highly addictive,[4]
and withdrawal means certain death; Paul Atreides notes in Dune that
the spice is A poison — so subtle, so insidious . . . so
irreversible. It won't even kill you unless you stop taking it.[3]
naxsmash
naxsm...@mac.com
christina mcphee
http://christinamcphee.net
http://naxsmash.net
On Jul 29, 2009, at 5:38 AM, { brad brace } wrote:
all careerist complicit-fantasy positions and especially
those of the arts-dot-edu variety are reprehensible; the
pseudo dialogue merely stylistic passcodes *wink wink
nudge nudge*
/:b
On Tue, 28 Jul 2009, Saul Ostrow wrote:
might it not be the inverse - that the myths and master narratives
that inform our multiple
simultaneous realities order our experiences and therefore our
notion of our relationship to others are not in actuality
transformed beyond our expectation that they should be - and as
such your article merely reflects your expectations and that if it
did not you wouldn't have most likely written it in that few of us
are actually open to undermining our own positions
Hi all, I also wanted to share this new article I wrote which was
just
published on Augmentology.com, as I think its very related to the
question of Queer Relational, and how we are transformed by our
relationships both with others but also how those relationships and
our
notions of the subject are transformed by our experiences of
_I am Transreal_: A Reflection On/Of Becoming Dragon [Part 1]
[complete version with video and links here:]
http://arsvirtuafoundation.org/research/2009/07/29/_i-am-transreal_-a-reflection-onof-becoming-dragon-part-1/
I am transreal. Look at me. When you do, a million iridescent scales
across my dragon hide flick, move and align to create a
multiplicity of
perceptions, transversal illusions and realities cutting through each
other, intersecting, dancing. Look at me. You see a shimmering of my
fantasies and yours, a convergence of your minute sensory events,
your
imaginary constructs and my desires. Look at me. The mythopoetic
elements of your reality and mine come into contact, unwind and
become a
recombinant event of male and female and something else, something
more,
for just an instant. Perhaps after that initial instant, one of your
myths takes over your perception and you decide that you
understand, but
before that, I instill confusion and doubt. I can see it on your
face.
I am becoming mythopoetic, a shapeshifting creature of legend, a
dragon.
Standing here, on the border, the sunlight through the clouds
defeating
the fence, I am transreal, between realities, moving through layers
of
the symbolic, the imaginary and the real, simultaneously quivering,
swapping out and swapping back in, too fast to find the border
between
them. I am existing between my fantasies and desires, which are
driving
the changing form of my body, and the moment of perception in which
you
see me and call me maam, sir, dude, miss, or avoid choosing a
category.
Speaking, being with different people throughout the day, my body and
name changes, my realness or unrealness oscillates. You see me
standing
here, but really, you see my avatar, my body, which is under
construction. We bring our illusions together. You see soft skin. I
see
the pills and the bloody razor that made it soft, making me feel
happier, more feminine. You see scales, I see textured prims and
their
glow values.
A dark moment in the street at night, your illusions of masculinity
swirl up against the confusion I install in you, and you attack. My
reality becomes a blur, a flurry of motion, and a sharp chemical
emotional reaction, as I strike back with pressurized chemical
weapons.
Yet even in that moment, I am transreal, between my reality and
yours,
only finding a hard fissure between the two.
In bed with my lover, we are transreal, deep in our illusions of each
other, feeling our very real emotions for each other, between bodies,
looking into her eyes, slipping out of myself and my concerns and out
into the bright nebula of pleasure.
We fill the craters left by the bombs
And once again we sing
And once again we sow
Because life never
[-empyre-] please welcome Alex Donis
Hi -empyreans-, Just when you thought 'queer relational' might have collapsed from sheer exhaustion- (electronic ss of sighs of relief or frustration..) it's a pleasure for me to introduce Alex Donis. Alex writes, I guess I'm officially an artist/curator, am working on the big Getty initiative Pacific Standard Time: Art of Southern California 1945 - 1980 My Curatorial project is called Collaboration Labs: Southern California and the Artist Space Movement will open in 2011. Alex has a lively wit as you will soon find out. http://frankprattle.wordpress.com/2008/03/20/alex-donis-march-20th-2008/ more on Alex: Alex Donis is a Los Angeles-based visual artist whose work examines and redefines the boundaries set within religion, politics, race, and sexuality. Interested in toppling societies’ relationship to icons, his work is often influenced by a tri-cultural (Pop, Latin Queer) experience. He has worked extensively in a variety of media including painting, installation, video, and works on paper. He was born in 1964 in Chicago, IL and was educated at a Catholic school in East Los Angeles, an east-coast prep school in Massachusetts, and a military academy on the southern coast of Guatemala. He received his undergraduate degree at California State University, Long Beach and his graduate degree from Otis College of Art Design in Los Angeles. Donis has exhibited his work at the UCLA Hammer Museum of Art Culture; the Longwood Art Center, New York; the Santa Monica Museum of Art; the Geffen Contemporary (MoCA); the Laguna Museum of Art, Laguna Beach; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE); the Mexican Museum, San Francisco; Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago; Galeria de la Raza, San Francisco; Pretoria Arts Museum, South Africa; and Artspace, Sydney Australia. His work was included in the landmark exhibition “Made in California: Art, Image, Identity 1900-2000” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Potentially Harmful: the Art of American Censorship” at Georgia College and State University, and the 10th Havana Biennale, in Cuba. He was a 2005 Alpert Award nominee in the Visual Arts and has been the recipient of the Durfee Foundation’s Arts Completion Grant and the California Community Foundation Individual Artist Grant. His work has been featured in Art in America, Art Papers, FlashArt International, Artweek, Art Forum the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, La Opinión, the Chicago Tribune, and the San Francisco Chronicle. His work is part of the two volume anthology “Contemporary Chicana Chicano Art” published by the Bilingual Press of the University of Arizona, Phoenix and “100 Artists of the West Coast” published by Atelier Books. Donis has also been awarded residencies at the University of Texas, Austin; the Brandywine Institute, Philadelphia; Artspace, Sydney, Australia and the18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica. He has been a guest lecturer at numerous universities institutions and is currently represented by Sherry Frumkin Gallery in Santa Monica. please welcome Alex.. c naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com christina mcphee http://christinamcphee.net http://naxsmash.net ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Identity ... Disruptions ... and MIcha new on video
Thanks for the the citation for this book-- I recently had the pleasure of meeting Dr Johnny (Sue) Golding in the UK.-- she has also just now been involved in a conference in June for CTheory with our guest Micha Cardenas (djlotu) I just want to correct the citation slightly to this: it's The eight technologies of otherness By Sue Goldinghttp://books.google.com/books?id=U08IDMF82oUCprintsec=frontcoversource=gbs_navlinks_s London: Routledge 1997 # # ISBN-10: 0415145791 # ISBN-13: 978-0415145794 Micha and Johnny are now online (or, rather their talks are now or will be soon) with CTheory , in honor of the debut of the Digital Critical Studies Reader.http://www.criticaldigitalstudies.net/workshop check it out : here is our Micha: http://pactac.net/pactacweb/web-content/video77.html I would, also, like to surface a quote by William Haver, which I have been think about for about two years: “What if queer studies were to be something other than the hermeneutic recuperation of a history, a sociology, an economic, or a philosophy of homosexual subjectivity? What if, that is to say, queer research were to be something more essentially disturbing than stories we tell ourselves of our oppressions in order precisely to confirm, yet once more, our abjection, our victimized subjectivity, our wounded identity (Haver, Queer Research, in _Eight Technologies of Otherness_, Sue Goldin, ed., 278. So just some thoughts ... musings ... gesturings ... As ever, Robert Robert Summers, PhD/ABD Lecturer Art History and Visual Culture Otis College of Art and Design e: rsumm...@otis.edu w: http://ospace.otis.edu/robtsum/Welcome ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Identity ... Disruptions ; 'it's a delicate game we are playing, after all'.
I would, also like to send you to Johnny Golding's amazing performance=essay , Conversion on the Road to Damascus (2): Minority Report on The Political (or how to have an adventure after Metaphysics) http://gre.academia.edu/ProfessorJohnnyGolding/Papers#d98974 this incarnation 'installed' at the Critical Digital Studies Workshop Johnny: Conversion on the Road to Damascus 2: Minority Report of the Political (or how to have an adventure, after metaphysics)1 Professor Johnny Golding (text), Dr Stephen Kennedy (music composition) it starts out, like, this, ecce homo (this man; this woman; this hermaphrodite!; this androgynous! this ISH! – and no other). ToDAY. today I am part thief, part iron-claw, transformed in the first instance as a swift and shadowy runner, skimming the surface of greasy back alleyways with goods close to hand! Nothing stops me: not sirens, not wounds, not the filthy dirty air! Nothing impedes my rush! But at the slightest sniff of danger I can transform! Oh, I can transform into – a blue flower! Or maybe a nasty coral reef! Or perhaps just some old rusty tractor, digging and banging and digging some more, same place, same time, same rhythm. And I think to myself: isn’t it just grand how the ground gives way under my – imagination! Maybe this is what it means to make a gesture towards aesthetics in the age of relativity and technological change? I want to say: yes (but not exactly). this, 'ecce', amazing lovely smashing counterpoint finds some elision and even kneeling in an ars erotica/ars scientifica... you must read on http://gre.academia.edu/ProfessorJohnnyGolding/Papers#d98974 as she notes at end, 'it's a delicate game we are playing, after all Soon, we 'll be able to hear the music and voice soon from this text, when Ctheory uploads the next videos from last June. -christina I would, also, like to surface a quote by William Haver, which I have been think about for about two years: “What if queer studies were to be something other than the hermeneutic recuperation of a history, a sociology, an economic, or a philosophy of homosexual subjectivity? What if, that is to say, queer research were to be something more essentially disturbing than stories we tell ourselves of our oppressions in order precisely to confirm, yet once more, our abjection, our victimized subjectivity, our wounded identity (Haver, Queer Research, in _Eight Technologies of Otherness_, Sue Goldin, ed., 278. So just some thoughts ... musings ... gesturings ... As ever, Robert Robert Summers, PhD/ABD Lecturer Art History and Visual Culture Otis College of Art and Design e: rsumm...@otis.edu w: http://ospace.otis.edu/robtsum/Welcome ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] more on cooptation of the oppressed
Micha, I really appreciate your picking up on the threads in Virginia's comments on transfeminism and my request for quotes from This Bridge We Call Home. Could you contextualize your reference here to Sandoval a bit more? I am intrigued-- as you quote her, ...enters the kind of psychic terrain formerly inhabited by the ... queer... yes this is what David's been riffing on too in his post about guantanamo-American poetry . so what do we do about it ... you mention denise ferrira de silva here too and I'd love to listen more to you about these conditions of possiblity rethinking the subject... maybe the best 'answers' to my query come in the world of actual practice-events- hmm On Jul 22, 2009, at 2:11 PM, dj lotu5 wrote: i also wanted to add that i think sandoval's writing in methodology of the oppressed is brilliant in this regard. she writes: “If, as Jameson argues, the formerly centerd and legitimated bourgeois citizen-subject of the first world (once anchored in a secure haven of self) is set adrift under the imperatives of late-capitalist conditions, if such citizen subjects have become anchorless, disoriented, incapable of mapping their relative positions inside multinational capitalism, lost in the reverberating endings of colonial expansionism... then the first world subject enters the kind of psychic terrain formerly inhabited by the historically decentered citizen-subject: the colonized, the outsider, the queer, the subaltern, the marginalized. So too, not only are the “psychpathologies,” but also the survival skills, theories, methods, and the utopian visions of the marginal made, not just useful but imperative to all citizen-subjects.” [p. 27] i deeply appreciate virginia's repeated efforts to bring this conversation back into a broader political grounding and i also, as she does, find a lot of relevance in the work of anzaldua and sandoval. while i think that the intersectional argument is problematic, as denise feerrira da silva has pointed out, i think that da silva's work does point to the way that epistemological systems underpinning the operation of sexuality also shape the conditions of possibility rethinking the subject which carries the markers of race and gender as well. dj lotu5 wrote: hello all, this week i finished reading Paolo Virno's A Grammar of the Multitude and i want to share a quote from it, because i think that it would be a mistake to not discuss RA in the context of post-fordist cooptation of earlier strategies of resistance. Virno writes: When hired labor involves the desire for action, for a relational capacity, for the presence of others--all things that the preceding generation was trying out within the local party headquarters--we can say that some distinguishing traits of the human animal, above all the posession of a language, are subsumed within capitalistic production. The inclusion of the very anthropogenesis in the existing mode of production is an extreme event. Forget the Heideggerian chatter about the technical era... This event does not assuage, but radicalizes, instead the antinomies of economic-social capitalistic formation. Nobody is as poor as those who see their own relation to the presence of others, that is to say, their own communicative faculty, their own possession of a language, reduced to wage labor. and also This is one role of the communication industry, once post-Fordism has become fully entrenched: an industry of the means communication. In this way, I think we can see Relational Aesthetics as a cooptation and commercialization of earlier, more radical, art practices based on social processes and presence. Surely, Kaprow and Fluxus happenings were aimed at getting people together in live, unregulated situations where they could interact, but outside of the profit system of galleries and museums. One could see RA as a cooptation of many queer artistic and biopolitical strategies as well. I think that in Jack Smith's flaming creatures and in kenneth anger's pleasuredome, one can see on screen, a rich social process. While RA claims to want to reclaim social interaction as an artistic domain, it is actually reclaiming the kind of queer community building practices that are so necessary for queer people to live safely and happily, but reclaiming them for the profit making art industry. RA can be seen as heteronormative in that it is normative, taking the kind of collective, social artistic process of earlier artists and putting it on the tongues of artforum readers everywhere as something totally hip. It's like a feminist consciousness raising meeting for the art elite. Looking at Tara's work, particularly the Men With Missing Parts makes me think of how this process of cooptation and recuperation flips over and goes through a constantly resonating feedback
Re: [-empyre-] Queer *Is* Violent: Response to Part of Judith's Position/Statement
Cutting/blows/kisses are sublated via montage in yellow tahiti substation piece and elsewhere ( http://www.vimeo.com/4189136) and also the differential is the sense of place, it s not just anywhere, its a cutting/kissing of places together short version on version http://version.org/videos/show/1 this matter of the real place, it's not theatre only but the real world (west Los Angeles), i mean , here's the problem with Genet for me, leaves me so cold (probably as cold as acorpse after being beaten in some alley), because in the end it's all about his f-ing freedom, I say, so what, so what next. its convenient to hate the world and to hate the specific places and sense of place in the world-- hey like Palestine, sure, so specially glorious that Gaza strip, but only if it never becomes a state. A specific place and its familiars (the bus station mens room in the Back Bay 1980 for example) must be ratted out, must be exposed as vulnerable, as a mere shadow-play, a theatre ( yes so its ok to kill, there). Right. And then, in the handing out of treats (after or before the bloodbath). Isn't it only ever ok to save the best meth for women and street kids because they look and act weak. Us 'girlies' 'we' get the good stuff from the strong protector- lurker in the dark- but watch out if we ever become other than 'women' or 'working kids' , that's when we become monstrous to Genet and he (like David's meth head) has to be the only monster. No Caliban in love with Ariel, this one. He cuts up the meth, or he will cut you, if you get too strong to move out of the shadows. The young women of Teheran now rip and slash their chadors to pray in a new way, they burn them against the tear gas. Bataille in Erotism elides the erotic with death and names such 'transgression' to motivate all politics-- it's interesting (i was checking last night.. that central to the argument is that eros, gets down to being about reproduction, that's all). You end up with one man standing , the author (aka prick, who writes 'beautfully' and 'scandalously' : reproduces himself through the violence of the text, and also dreams of same in the 'location' of cocks inside police trousers, that's where he'll write his next text)...) Following this logic , the young beautiful women of Teheran 's 'divagations' (wow that s a cool word) has to lead to their destruction; in this Genet and the conservative ayatollahs are agreed. It's only ever ok for them (the 'girls) to enact beauty if they are going to be mowed down. LIke the sissy boys in Stonewall eighties they gotta be stuffed back in the garbage dump, glorious compost. In the Sotomayor hearings last week the ranking Republican oozes about how the judge is a real american story of success and a real family person, etc etc, and then accuses her of racism (bullies always accuse others of exactly what they are doing and think no one else can see). That's just so no Puerto Rican woman in her mid fifties with the most extensive trial career of any potential Supreme Court judge in the last 100 years in America, can EVER have power over the folks who want to be in charge of who gets the really good crystal. Tara Mateik s work- the performance replay/docudrama of the Billie Jean King/Bobby Riggs match complete with replay of the TV commentary (old fart Cosell vs 'cute' Rosie Casales) is pertinent here. Tara does this series of inversions and replays that work more like montage , where you bring disparate elements together, sublating/cutting/melding- to produce a kind of direct address: look at this! watch me ! This to me is an antidote to the death cult of Genet and the Republican guard. Politically the twists and turns are so important because, as Tara's work shows, the powers who want to humiliate and torture the 'weak' must be confronted with a 'twisted' or torqued (twerk) display of largesse , even nonchalance (coolness), and a slight smile at the edge. RC: I just wonder whether Bobby would look better in a tennis dress . . . better than the shorts maybe. -christina Judith wrote, I also read a really amazing account on one of the Tehran sites today of last Friday's prayers in which the raconteur details the divagations from the proper format of various religious practices: women doffing the chador and praying, sexes praying together, burning chadors to mitigate teargas, etc. David wrote he explained again for him it was a class thing--and gave me a great many more examples of al kinds of things he had learned to work on since he began chrusing the bus station bathroom at age 15 to find marks--some of the things he told me of were more sublte yet just as vioent in other, more aesthetic ways-- on the rare times our days off somewhat converged we wd work on his autobio and i wd read Genet aloud to him and hims mangy dog--while he cut up
Re: [-empyre-] David Chirot: Queer *Is* Violent: Response to Part of Judith'sPosition/Statement
I was searching last night around the house for a book called A Bridge We Call Home. I could not find my copy, sadly. Does anyone have quotes from this book that might touch on this..http://www.amazon.com/this-bridge-call-home-transformation/product-reviews/0415936829 On Jul 21, 2009, at 10:48 AM, virginia solomon wrote: I think. what transfeminism allows us to do, I think, is to see the tactic of cutting meth for upper and middle class consumers, I suppose, but to see that within a strategy that considers how race and class play into drug use, how normative prescriptions of the body and behavior intersect with drug use in such a way as to engage issues of gender, race, and class. On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 1:25 PM, Robert Summers robt...@gmail.com wrote: Hi David, I have some questions and comments re: your post: You state, ... a fighter -- i remember at the time what an immense moment and example this was, like the lid had been blown off the streets, the sewer lid, and suddenly swarming forth from the degrading darkness into ful view were these gladiators, tough guys, men on the move with weapons against the forces endlessly making them stay in the closest or bars, behind the scenes ... I like the metaphor (but is it?) of the sewer lid being blown off and the monstrosity emerging: a swarm (a war-machine? fueled by a superhuman love). I think this could be a corrective-as-a-return-to-radicality in queer politics and queer action/s that would counter the conservative turn in the major gay and lesbian movements in North America (esp. the USA) -- for example Equality California and the HRC, which in many aspects just has bisexuals and transsexuals as tokens. Such gay and lesbian movements are fighting more for gays in the military and gay marriage then AIDS/HIV, queer youth, rethinking kinship, etc. Prop 8 in California passed, in large part, because the gay, white, middle-class community did not reach out to the working class, the working poor, and people of color -- as well as the places outside of there comfort zone: East LA, South Central, the Inland Empire, etc. With regard to Stonewall, I want to add that queers -- or then gays, in the broader sense of the term, -- of color, trannies (of color), dykes (of color), and drag queens (of color) were also at Stonewall and involved in the revolt/revolution, and a similar event took place in LA approx. two years earlier; thus, complicating the narrative, the history of the gay and lesbian movement and problematizing the masculinist actions taken during the 3 day (?) up-rise. I would like to know more of what you think of queer friendship, queer kinship, and queer politics -- then and now. Also, you write about queer and the class issue. What does queer theory and queer politics have to say about class? Has it done a poor job in addressing this issue: the class issue -- not to mention the race issue, which often dovetails into the class issues of the poor? Finally, for this email to you (and others), you write, i [would] read Genet aloud to him and his mangy dog -- while he cut up the meth -- the cutting it was also a form of violence against the middle and upper class customers -- working kids and women like ourselves got the good stuff ... This reminds me of a story by Foucault (?). He and Jean Genet were in a protest and the police arrived, and as Genet was thrown to the floor by the police, he was drawn to the shiny, leather boots of the police. This is interesting to me because Genet (as in his writing) eroticized power, and he reversed (if only momentarily) the movement of power, by turning the Subject (the Police) into objects (of perverse pleasure and desire). This also shows the power of disidentification, if you will. I just love the fact that the brutality of the police was eroticized -- turned in another direction: one unrecognized and unstoppable by the police, the State apparatus. This is similarly played out in _Funeral Rites_ and even _Un Chant Amour_ -- as well as the play of _Un Chant Amour_ in Todd Haynes's _Poison_. Here is a link to a brilliant essay on _Poison_ and queer cinema: http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue1/bryson/bryson.html Thanks for your intriguing post; there is much there what needs further discussion, I think. As Ever, Robert ... Robert Summers, PhD/ABD Lecturer Art History and Visual Culture Otis College of Art and Design e: rsumm...@otis.edu w: http://ospace.otis.edu/robtsum/Welcome ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Virginia Solomon ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Queer *Is* Violent: Response to Part of Judith's Position/Statement
On Jul 16, 2009, at 1:47 PM, virginia solomon wrote: so in all of this talk of violence and the violence attendant to any sort of queer operation or tactic, I very much understand Robert, Davin, and Christina's arguments but I am nevertheless troubled, with Judith, about the stakes of referring to that as violence. What are the stakes of calling an ontologic/epistemologic shift violence when those enacting that 'violence' face the very real threat of actual physical violence? yes I guess that is what Judith is saying when she notes that the videos coming out of the Iranian election protests are 'queer' Reconfiguration is certainly violent, enacts a violence, because it changes the meaning of bodies for those whose very bodies have been the site of their power. But what is at stake for emphasizing that violence? I had a very strong desire to make a repetitive collage stacking video stills of Neda's face as she died. Yes this was the site of her power. And still to honor that power, that sacred face-- (meaning sacred as all faces are but also beyond this , her face, this terrible violence ) means not to show her face. So i didn't make the collage. At least not yet. So far I have thought it would be violent, and I wasn't sure I totally could understand or take responsibility for that (if I were to go ahead). But, if violent, also in the sense of swerve: turning the video image into a flag-like repeat-- the wallpaper idea (of how traumatic images are part of a 'resonating surface' (Suely Rolnick) we do not want to really look at , like wallpaper. something like that I think this is less a meta question than a practical one. Davin discusses definitions of violence from the dictionary (its own framework, to be sure) with a different set of terms - alteration, fervor, discordance. To that I would want to add ambiguity and contradiction. Do these different terms acknowledge the violence inherent in the changes that need to take place for social justice? I think so. And yet they don't place that violence at any kind of premium. I think of practices that practice inaction, but that nevertheless enact what we seem to be collectively arriving upon as a queer operation - the labor slow down, masochism, Jamaica Kincaid's 'Autobiography of My Mother (in which a narrator refuses, though various steps, to be interpellated by any number of the systems with which she comes into contact). did someone (Robert?) already mention Bartleby the Scrivener in this connection? Once a few years back I got to see a dance theatre production of Bartelby at the Theatre de la Ville de Paris. Stark sets , the clerks high desk and chair like a guillotine. The dancer all angles , falling from and into steep crashes, over and over. It actually hypnotized me; I was in a trance. I wonder now whether the means, 'alteration and fever' around 'inaction' is an aesthetic mode that alllows us to let the comprehension of violence seep into us, even against wishes to stay normal, follow the action, look at a picture the usual way, ie go to the theatre, watch the dance, leave the theatre, unscathed. This is a situation sort of like Bacon's tripych painting of his lover George Dyer. christina http://christinamcphee.net/photo/american_iraqi_flag.html ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Queer *Is* Violent: Response to Part of Judith's Position/Statement
Judith Rodenbeck writes: How could one make that image, when her eyes literally go blank and the blood rivers out of her nose, swerve? I'd think a 3-Songs-of-Lenin treatment rather than Nam June wallpaper. Or Kali Ma. the swerve as the swerve is happening physically and at the level of the image: the video is already suggestible as transport around a goddess dying trance-substantial. For example, Rudolph Otto [9] in The Idea of the Holy produced a battery of Latin terms that suggest aesthetic dimensions in religion. He wrote of human confrontation with the numinous, which is wholly other or outside normal experience and which is indescribable, terrifying, fascinating, characterized by dread and awe. The experience is of a mysterium tremendum et fascinosum, an awe-filled and fascinating mystery. http://www.proz.com/kudoz/latin_to_english/religion/905612-numen_tremendum.html not any more outside 'normal' experience, not anymore with you tube. So Bacon goes to the edge of this. Pope screaming: at what . At the fascinosum... in front of him. that quality then characterizes the space in front of the painting. when you stand in front of it, buffetted, slapped. Inaction fever. Resisting also the fascinosum. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Queer *Is* Violent: Response to Part of Judith's Position/Statement
speaking of peace, I 've got to head out to yoga but back in a few hours. thanks for the great exchange so far and we can keep it going shortly. -moderator naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com christina mcphee http://christinamcphee.net http://naxsmash.net On Jul 16, 2009, at 5:02 PM, davin heckman wrote: Absolutely! And, I must confess, that I am not entirely sure what I think about it either way, only that I have been thinking about it. Even my own professed pacifism is hard to trust, because pacifism itself is only truly pacifism when survival would seem to require one to be something other than a pacifist. Davin On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 6:50 PM, virginia solomonvirginia.solo...@gmail.com wrote: totally, which was the thrust of the not just the billy club point! I wanted to make the point of ontologic/epistemologic violence and change enacted by the minoritarian subject as being distinct from the violence, either physical or let's say ideological, of the dominant. does that make sense? On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 7:44 PM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: Virginia, I wouldn't necessarily say that my comments were meant to condemn ontological violence, particularly as it has been deployed as a defense against actual physical violence... only that it strikes me as an area of caution (and the ethical aspects of it most certainly depend on who holds the power). I think it is important to note that ontological violence often paves the way for physical violence. I would say that in post civil rights United States, people with power and privilege seem to do much of their work at the ontological level (defending abstractions, arguing principle, speaking hypothetically), as a way of concealing the real consequences that their policies have for various populations. In many cases, these policies translate into various sorts of hate crimes or policies, but rarely do the leaders of these anti-social culture warrior movements speak in any way where direct lines can be drawn between, say, a particular speech and the random acts of violence that happen daily. Peace! Davin On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 3:47 PM, virginia solomonvirginia.solo...@gmail.com wrote: so in all of this talk of violence and the violence attendant to any sort of queer operation or tactic, I very much understand Robert, Davin, and Christina's arguments but I am nevertheless troubled, with Judith, about the stakes of referring to that as violence. What are the stakes of calling an ontologic/epistemologic shift violence when those enacting that 'violence' face the very real threat of actual physical violence? Is this different for different subjects, ie might calling upon dead male french theorists (ok agamben and guattari aren't men but you get my point) say something about the positioning of the producers of a particular kind of theory? Reconfiguration is certainly violent, enacts a violence, because it changes the meaning of bodies for those whose very bodies have been the site of their power. But what is at stake for emphasizing that violence? I think this is less a meta question than a practical one. Davin discusses definitions of violence from the dictionary (its own framework, to be sure) with a different set of terms - alteration, fervor, discordance. To that I would want to add ambiguity and contradiction. Do these different terms acknowledge the violence inherent in the changes that need to take place for social justice? I think so. And yet they don't place that violence at any kind of premium. I think of practices that practice inaction, but that nevertheless enact what we seem to be collectively arriving upon as a queer operation - the labor slow down, masochism, Jamaica Kincaid's 'Autobiography of My Mother (in which a narrator refuses, though various steps, to be interpellated by any number of the systems with which she comes into contact). I think it might be useful to distinguish ontologic and epistemologic violence from physical violence, where we include in phisycal violence social violence, or the violence enacted upon minoritarian subjects by structures and policies that aren't necessarily a billy club to the head. And that we think about the stakes of Derrida talking about violence in ways that, say, Angela Davis or Gloria Anzaldua don't. On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 11:25 AM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: I was reading Agamben's State of Exception, and then stumbled across Robert's post. It strikes me that Agamben's discussion of Benjamin's pure violence might be useful here. Also useful here might be Agamben's discussion of anomie (lawlessness) and nomos (the law), and the sort of lawlessness that results where the law is too weak (there is no norm) or too strong (where the norms are impossible
[-empyre-] Fwd: Queer *Is* Violent: Response to Part of Judith's Position/Statement
Here is a side exchange that has gone on between my partner Terry, who teaches a design studio in architecture, and George, a former student of Terry's who's been working on the problematics of violence in architecture. Thought it would be worth sharing with the list. George observes, Thank you Terry for this article. I was particularly interested in Summers post and the Derrida argument. This is pretty important from where I've gone from your class in that instead of just violence in architecture, I'm now trying to design a particular violence related to the project, yet at the same time almost coddle the users...to embrace the users I suppose. My thoughts are that isn't violence the norm they speak of (which would be some weird implication statement of Summers' on violence against the norm)? After all, aren't nearly all civilizations/cultures founded upon violence of some form or another? Do not all humans resort to violence when bare instinct is all you have to rely on? Even the simple things such as learning how to ride a bicycle or learning how to cook have their own 'violence in learning procedures. They are times when hasty decisions lead to disastrous consequences, but hold to be the most valuable of learning experiences none the less. However, we all tend to forget that stage of development. I also think that humans are a psychologically tortured species who happiness is merely a level of facade. Secretly regretting mistakes in the past and trying to get over them one by one. I think the glow of a person is a reflection of personality rather than one's happiness. Its the recapturing of that through design that is what is important because I think society tends to forget the violent process, the tortured soul, and we only portray our best and never show anything less. So, design in affect, should remind the users of that violent learning process, the violence of instinct, the mistakes, but also let the users feel submerged into their accomplishments, level of experience, and their rate of happiness. Its all a complete duality but I guess it lets the user interpret if they want to be caressed or take a blow. On Jul 16, 2009 9:30am, Terry Hargrave tharg...@calpoly.edu wrote: fyi queer nation implications from Christina's friends at empyre t Begin forwarded message: From: davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com Date: July 16, 2009 8:25:59 AM PDT To: soft_skinned_space emp...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Queer *Is* Violent: Response to Part of Judith's Position/Statement Reply-To: soft_skinned_space emp...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au I was reading Agamben's State of Exception, and then stumbled across Robert's post. It strikes me that Agamben's discussion of Benjamin's pure violence might be useful here. Also useful here might be Agamben's discussion of anomie (lawlessness) and nomos (the law), and the sort of lawlessness that results where the law is too weak (there is no norm) or too strong (where the norms are impossible to follow). In my mind, queer tactics reside in between the two poles of anomie. On the one hand, as Foucault demonstrates, norms play a critical role in shaping and cultivating desire. On the other hand, where norms are too severe, they have the effect of criminalizing everyone. I think there is a metaphysical violence in queer tactics here, but I think they are the kind of violence that the Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines as undue alteration (as of wording or sense in editing a text). Occasionally, this violence might also describe a category of emotional state (fervor) or aesthetic state (discordance). And, as a fundamental goal, an anomic relation to the law (which verges closer to the kind of physical confrontation associated with violence.) At some point, as we progress from undue alteration towards a critique of the law as a system, we move from a discussion of improvised means towards a discussion of strategically defined ends... which might mean that it is impossible to theorize a queer tactics, as they would more properly regarded as strategies. I don't know what to make of these connections. In my mind, such a conception of a pure violence, if it is to be applied, veers too close to an outright nihilism. If it is to continue as an abstraction, it does not offer practical utility. And, finally, as a pacifist (I am, I think, as I write this, a pacifist), I wonder what the implications of an abstract pure violence would have for my opposition to the forms of violence that we are familiar with (from physical force to threats of force). On the other hand, it is hard for me to imagine a queerness which is not, in some way, threatening not by its own design, but by the very laws written to prevent its
Re: [-empyre-] -twerkw or placebo
I felt a certain puritanical-- perhaps hygienic-- fastidiousness in Relational Aesthetics'; to be sure the Thatcher/ Reagan years immediately precede the nineties and Bourriaud's invocation, without apparent irony, of a general human or 'general audience' interacting with/as the artistic work. Fastidious because this aesthetics is wanting to shed any taint of beauty, mixed relations, sleeping with beauty, sleeping beauties, and worrying about the consequences. A hygienic its so Good for you! this interactivity neatly packaging for us something artful but lacking that quality Judith here insists on, that 'not then yet-' meaning some kind of slippage between event and meaning, between overt action, the 'work' and interpretation, a time lag or latency without [ not then yet-] the space of the participatory art in the classic Relational Aesthetics reminded me, sometimes, of walking into a nice semi-private, semi-public waiting room where, here and there, attractive popular magazines, and toys for the kiddies, stack up; maybe, a doctors office reception, freshly redone. A mistake no doubt, this feeling of unease. One wasn't supposed to feel this dread or pleasurable dread?one was supposed to feel correct... Or corrected? Liam Gillick's striped units, impassive and cheerful, Were they a placebo or a real drug? Were 'relational aesthetics' corrections? An exact duplicate of reality (as in the old saw: all my belongings have just been stolen and been replaced with exact duplicates!) ot then yet is important, inasmuch as those historical projects not only established certain areas of productive material inquiry General Idea got into this business of the placebo as a productive material inquiry. Probably Virginia has something interesting to say about this work-- the giant placebo pills installations Taking on placebo in the height of the AIDS crisis: Placebos are pseudo-medications that in fact do not contain an active ingredient—candy-coated sugar pills [that] fake your body into feeling better while leaving it defenseless.9 When used for experiments testing drugs for terminally ill patients, placebos raise ethical dilemmas by endangering individual lives for the ultimate good of the many. As General Idea tells us, the etymology of the term placebo goes back to the Latin placere, meaning to please.. . (Lilian Tone) http://home.att.net/~artarchives/tonegeneralidea.html On Jul 14, 2009, at 7:15 PM, Judith Rodenbeck wrote: . In my own thinking I've been interested in Bourriaud's *active suppression* of the event works--not then yet performance--of e.g., happenings, Fluxus, task dance, and eventually expanded cinema. Because the not then yet is important, inasmuch as those historical projects not only established certain areas of productive material inquiry but also, more importantly, engaged in meta-critical art-driven analysis of the art world--avant la lettre of and, at least to my mind more poignantly than, the now become-capitalized (and generic) Institutional Critique. And lastly, I'd be interested in thinking queer not through art made of specific bodies and their comparative innies/outies but as vectored and filiated querying. Unlike Marc, I found the slapping piece distressing to watch. It made me think of, in no particular order, the Milgram experiments, waterboarding and wingnut excuses for it, the rather twisted story of Blanchot and Levinas before and during the war, bullies in the White House, gender stereotypy, bulimia, dysphoria, the bathos of so much body art... It can't help that this past few weeks I've been consumed with reports from Iran, the rapid tarnishing of the Obama administration, and then the last two days with the Sotomayor hearings. The stream of cell phone videos from Iran seem pretty queer, and deeply relational, to me. Judith On 7/14/09 7:46 PM, naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com wrote: ... thinking about 'queer' as a functional shift, or even 'clinamen' (swerve)-- just trying to develop an nominative (naming ) of queer as noun makes it disappear (rather, it is in transaction, translation. Thats why... ___ 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-] queer love-machine and Haraway's 'other-worlding'
I too find that Haraway has something wonderful going ('mess making'
in the mess hall). Virginia has touched
on this too, the way of thinking about 'queer' as a functional
shift, or even 'clinamen' (swerve)-- just trying to develop
an nominative (naming ) of queer as noun makes it disappear (rather,
it is in transaction, translation. Thats why
it's so interesting , Like MIcha's 'mess-making' Haraway's new term
'other-worlding' as a gerund (a noun in English containing an implied
action, via the 'ing' ending).
AND in When Species Meet, Haraway does this beautiful thing, of
asking the word 'figure' to become a transitive, too. She writes,
Figures help me grapple inside the flesh of mortal world-making
entanglements that i call contact zones. The Oxford English
Dictionary records the meaning
of 'chimerical vision' for 'figuration' in an eighteenth century
source, and that meaning is still implicit in my sense of figure.
Figures collect the people through
their invitation to inhabit the corporeal story told in their
lineaments..
c
Micha writes,
although i'm not excited about holding on to war metaphors, so i
wonder
if we can think of it as more of a love-machine that breaks down by
binding and reconfigures relationality along new configurations? can
we
think of queer as an anti-categorical category? i often have a
suspicion
that when we discuss artwork as queer we're actually talking about art
done by people who identify as l, g, b, t, q or i, but perhaps the
self-identification of work as queer is the best indicator? i'm not an
art historian, so excuse me if i'm asking naive questions...
personally
i find haraway's recent writing in When Species Meet to be most
fruitful
on queer mess making (mess as in eating together) and rethinking
kinship and relationality by thinking through cross-species and
transspecies relationships and the kinds of communication necessary
and
operations that unfold there...
___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Response to Virgina Re: Robert's Respons e on Queer Mésentente
Political aesthetics eapecially as you refer to Butler--- crucial and important Also your analysis and perceptive remarks about General Idea are of keen interest...please jump back in with this. More, please! christina Sent from my iPhone On Jul 11, 2009, at 6:18 AM, virginia solomon virginia.solo...@gmail.com wrote: There are many points upon which we strongly disagree, with significant political consequence. No one else seems to be jumping in, however, and with that as an indication of indifference from the rest of the group I too will be brief and say I am more than happy to continue this conversation directly but remove it from the listserv. If I may propose another couple possible avenues of conversation: Shall we follow up on some of the work that has been posted to the list thus far, as a concrete set of stuff we all know we can access? I apologize for not yet posting on them myself but I am slow with work. I also have a question that relates to medium, as per Robert's thought piece. Other than the collage, if I recall everything that has been posted is either a mediated performance or a video work. How does relationality relate to medium, and how might considering the relationality of less obviously relational media (sorry to use the same work a million times in one sentence!) push us to think about wider ramifications of that operation? -- Virginia Solomon ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] slippery synaptic summaries and rolling ronellian resonances
slipp!! so how petroleum /silicon are these drugged environments plasticizing/ forming new projections through postnatural biospheres-- so are you saying or wishfully dreaming of priori deep type or life- type forms linguistically tucked inside the assemblages of ecosystems (laced with the drugs we have // petrol, cinema, silicon, psyllicibin // and these blow out into community-spaces via punctuation (exclamation point?!) -christina On Jul 6, 2009, at 6:40 PM, dj lotu5 wrote: in the spirit of tweeting, i'm going to pop in again quickly now that i'm mostly caught up... looking fwd to virginia and emily's posts... seems like we're off to an expansive start, getting to good questions, like can we use the notion of Relational Aesthetic, add to it, parasite it, exploit it for our own ends? i'm still interested in hearing more from folks about their notions of queer... its also good to see derrida's spectre being raised and my friend and advisor avital ronell. i always thought she was an amazing at making connections, thinking the call of Dasein through technology and schizophrenia, through AGB's first words to watson and their latent homosexuality Watson, come here! I want you! reading the desire in the exclamation point! yet still one of the most important works of Ronell's for me was her book Crack Wars, in which she wrote Much like the paradigms installed by the discovery of endorphins, Being-on-drugs indicates that a structure is already in place, prior to the production of that materiality we call drugs, including virtual reality or cyberprojections. which for me recalls the question of biopower being heteronormative, if we can consider, weigh and differentiate those two structures from those of our own biology... surely if we think of Foucault's definition of biopower as control over populations through bioinformational practices, then we can think at a basic level, is biopower heteronormative, and if the census options of male/female and married/single and the medical forms i fill out when i visit the doctor which have no checkbox for my gender ( [genderfucked/transgender/fluid/dragon/moonlight on dark miami waters would] be an exciting checkbox to stumble across) are an expression of biopower, then perhaps biopower can be heteronormative, but in our expansive alter-globalization optimism perhaps there is also a biopower of the multitude, if we step back a level and think of biopower as a quasi-cause, or as a virtual structure, not a specific instance. and in agamben's formulation surely the oikos of oikonimia pointing to the managing of the house as the root of economics surely shows a patriarchical root to even neoliberal economics, but lets be clear and keep our patriarchy separate from our heteronormativity. Again returning to Ronell, and Crack Wars again she writes “You understood so little about the chemical prosthesis which was the real, insubstantial vehicle constituting the virtual... The age of the chemical prosthesis has already begun.” Bourriard's formulation of altermodern seems curiously centered around travel to me, and perhaps in that forumlation the checmical prosthesis is not simply caffeine or cocaine but petroleum or silicone, as in both chips and implants. And considering the virtual in Bourriard's Altermodern, if you'll indulge me for one more messy gooey moment, another quote from Crack Wars may be of use to consider the broader implications of our discussion so far: “If the literature of electronic culture can be located in the works of Philip K. Dick or William Gibson, in the imaginings of a cyberpunk projection, or a reserve for virtual reality, then it is probable that electronic culture shares a crucial project with drug culture. This project should be understood in Jean-Luc Nancy's and Blanchot's sense of désoeuvrement—a project without an end or program, an unworking that nonetheless occurs, and whose contours we can begin to read.” Ronell's writing may be of use here in dissolving or disarming the binary of critique/creation, in that perhaps we can imagine a world-building project such as queer theory, alter-globalization, virtual worlds and/or science fiction/meta fiction/magical realism/transreal, which is simultaneously an unworking, which is both rigorous and leisurely, both militant and pleasurable, both ethical and acknowledging our fault, our finitude, our failings, aesthetically and theoretically... Perhaps this kind of unfolding serpent full of shifting intensities is more akin to a dark precursor or line of flight than a set diagram? ( Really my objection to Badiou is the void. How can there be an ontology based on the void? How can anything be created from the void? What is the real world expression of the void? Or perhaps years of studying set theory in my compsci days makes me more jaded to the idea of a set diagram
[-empyre-] Becoming Dragon?
Micha, do you have any online clips or links to Becoming Dragon performances? You write, : n In Becoming Dragon, I sought to explore the subject in transition, in a way creating a space of relation between the audience and a subject who's state of being-in- transition or becoming is foregrounded. The performance coincided with the beginning of my hormone therapy, so it was also a meditation on the resonances between a physical becoming or transformation and a digital becoming avatar, becoming mythopoetic and becoming the body-in-transmission. I definitely can see this as a queer relational piece, between genders as well as between spaces, the physical space and the space of second life. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] queer art practices: editorial note
dear -empyre= I've just asked Marc to break up his posts and responses into smaller chunks. Ironically, I mistakenly posted this long one again because i was on my i phone and could nt see what I was doing !!! crazy... anyway, back home now, and I would like to just say I am sorry for the confusion about length of posts and the nature of this conversation. I do moderate -=empyre= a bit differently, in that I much prefer shorter posts that are conversational perhaps 300 words on the outside-- , it just makes for a more inclusive textual space and helps us to flow with one another. So anyway Marc has been kind enough to split his responses down to smaller concise segments and I'll publish these in a slow stream now. I hope everyone can just roll with this first few days on this complex topic. I've left things so open-ended so that there are many vectors and opportunities for all of us as readers and writers. Looking forward to more, Christina hi all, sorry for the repetition of my text - some problems with the server resulted in mine and Christina's efforts to fix the problem leading to repetition. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] queer art practices: editorial note
I do appreciate everyone's patience with this. -empyre- is for thoughtful posts with some time delay, some reflection. That's why it's the -empyrean- , a bit set off beyond the horizon. -empyre- is a formal space for writing and reading, a hypertext like interleaved pages of a book. Another tip I forgot to mention, is that when one posts it's helpful just to cut and paste phrases from previous posts if you like, rather than copying the previous post in its entirety. General guidelines about the nature of posting to -empyre-, and how it's a space of reflection, are here: http://subtle.net/empyre -empyre- is not a chat space, nor an announcement or self promotion list, nor online performance space, and doesn't accept HTML formatted email or attachments on the list. The facilitators reserve the right to not publish posts that disregard these guidelines, or the current month's topics, disrespect the featured guests, or monopolize the forum either via individuals or group, and may unsubscribe anyone consistently doing so. This is a guideline our founder Melinda Rackham wrote up in 2001 and we've stuck with it :-). Rather old fashioned-ly. all best Christina christina mcphee http://christinamcphee.net http://naxsmash.net On Jul 4, 2009, at 12:59 PM, Kip Jones wrote: This way we can tweat and twitter like the rest of the world. Nice. kip Dr Kip Jones ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Aesthetic of Skeletons (forward from Lessa Bouchard)
that each of us, no matter what gender, creates barriers to intimacy, and is strongly affected by the expectations of the people around us. How we decide to navigate these things, how we decide to arrange the bones we pick up along the way, and whether we feel rewarded or traumatized by what they become is a unique and complex experience. It is exciting to me to work like this, to poke at the soft places that we are unsure of, that are in between and tender. Sometimes it’s enough to know they’re there and figure out what it means honor them. naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com christina mcphee http://christinamcphee.net http://naxsmash.net ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Queer Relationally -- Queer Aesthetics of Exsistence
Robert I would be interested in any stories you might have about particular perfomance artists and events that you 've witnessed , wriiten about.. Specific moments when you noticed this kind of heightened or intense techne. Sent from my iPhone On Jul 2, 2009, at 6:49 PM, Robert Summers robt...@gmail.com wrote: Homosexuality is a historic occasion to reopen affective and relational virtualities, not so much through the intrinsic qualities of the homosexual but because the 'slantwise' position of the latter, as it were, the diagonal lines [s/]he can lay out in the social fabric allow these virtualities to come to light. - Foucault [Foucault argued in his late work for] inventing new possibilities of life. Existing not as a subject but as a work of art -- and the last phrase presents thought as artistry. - Deleuze Aesthetic experiences should be considered no better or worse -- no higher or lower -- than sexual ones. - Dean I start off with these three quotes in order to gesture toward other modes of life and art practices and productions, which would be an aesthetics of existence (Foucault), and which are not at all related to what we currently find in galleries and museums. I think we have to re-think art's placement in the social-sphere and daily life, and rethink it as a techne, and also what constitutes art today -- by which I mean art that is awarded prizes, galley shows, etc. I think that such a re-thinking will surface an art (relational to be sure) that foregrounds the intertwining of aesthetics, politics, and ethics; for example, the art of the cruise, the art of the fuck, the art of living an existence that resists the State apparatus. I think that by following the late work of both Foucault and Tim Dean we can develop new forms of (embodied) art practices and (queer) relationships and realtionalities, and ironically (?) these are only to be found in non-normative sexual communities. - Robert Summers, PhD/ABD ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] signing off: Participatory Art: New Media and the Archival Trace
hi everyone empyrean I'm happy to say its an incredibly glorious summer day and tonight I am entertaining friends with a dinner al fresco-- so I cannot take up - empyre- moderation til tomorrow, July3 for Oz , July2 for most of the rest of us. Happy July! catch you tomorrow. Christina naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com christina mcphee http://christinamcphee.net http://naxsmash.net On Jul 1, 2009, at 7:16 AM, r...@cornell.edu wrote: As we draw our June discussion to a close we would like to thank our guest discussants to whom we are most appreciative: Hana Iverson (US), Sarah Drury (US), Nicholas Knouf (US), Claudia Pederson (US) and Miyawaki Atsuko (UK/Japan). Thank you to our curated guests as well: Sean Cubitt, Simon Biggs, Linda Dement Annette Barbier, Richard Rinehart, Patrick Lichty, Yiannis Colakides and Helene Black, Horit Herman Peled,Deborah Tolchinsky, David Tolchinsky, and Shadi Nazaria and the rest of our online participants who sent us posts this month. Just yesterday I found myself in a heated debate with a group of humanities summer school students who had just read Balzac's The Untitled Masterpiece. I was invited by their professor to spend an hour sharing my own work with them as well as other artist's work who had influenced me: digital, participatory, networked, affective, ephemeral. These students just could not fathom how this work could possibly be categorized as art. Their questions illuminated their tightly held notions about the nature of what art is. Those notions nurtured during their primary and secondary school educations. How is artwork that exists in Second Life valued in the art market? What beauty is recognized in work that does not exist materially? How can the skill of a video maker be compared with an artist who can render the figure realistically? How do art historians record work where there is no tangible evidence of the work? I fleetingly answered their anxious questions in the time we had and then pointed them to our archive from this month's discussion: http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre Perhaps Simon Biggs is correct when he writes I gave up calling what I do art a while ago. Generally I refer to what I do as creative practices (note plural). In interdisciplinary and collaborative working contexts this allows you to divest yourself of a lot of baggage whilst ensuring that the most valuable aspects of the practice formerly known as art are retained. Many thanks to all of you for sharing your views. Welcome to Christina McPhee who will be introducing our topic for July. Renate and Tim -- Renate Ferro URL: http://www.renateferro.net Email: r...@cornell.edu , Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Ithaca, NY 14853 Co-moderator of _empyre soft skinned space http://www.subtle.net/empyre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre Art Editor, diacritics http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dia/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] R: Truths and temporality
Hi Stamatia and all, I got interested in researching peaking rhythms as part of research on carbon PPM concentrations in the atmosphere and how to visualize it. In connection with this notion of intrinsic singularity , following Bernard Cache, I started to wonder about delta values, possibly a derivative but of something you cannot hold, ever-- an object of thought not yet coordinated, not yet mapped. Or perhaps disappearing from a coordinate map. This led to an exciting find http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_delta_function which develops a peaking function from a 'point' that is either x = infinity or is zero or both. Has implications for measurement while itself not a function that you can use in a direct kind of way. Norah comments on how her project aims but to create a trace/traces of choreographic principles or what we started calling a choreographic object. Bill wrote an essay on this that might be of interest: http://www.wexarts.org/ex/forsythe/ so that the trace is an aftereffect but also a predictive? just at the point when an aftereffective trace wants to become a predictor (like a ideality to be actualized into a well-defined curve' or whatever at some future date or almost-now): at that point I wonder if we might use the Dirac Delta Derivative? (DDD?!) but i probably sound like I am on crack. :-)! In Earth Moves, Bernard Cache defines the point of inflection as an intrinsic singularity which is not yet related to a particular development of coordinates and, like every 'solid' work of art for Deleuze and Guattari, is neither high nor low, neither on the right nor on the left, neither in progression nor regression, because it is in absence of gravity. Inflection is the pure event of a line or a point, a virtuality, an ideality to be actualised into a well- defined curve. In this case, the virtual inflection point of the videos appears as the idea of playing with the malleable folds of time, in more than two simultaneous directions at once. Christina ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] R: Truths and temporality
2 Deleuze discusses cinema in a similar way. For him, the power to constitute something is to “bring back reasons to believe in the world, or whatever is being constituted. Deleuze discusses the body to explore this concept. In Cinema 1 he discusses this body in terms of movement. Movement is a translation in space… movement always relates to a change, migration to a seasonal variation. And this is equally true of bodies: the fall of a body presupposes another one which attracts it, and expresses a change in the whole which encompasses them both. (8). I present the work and thoughts of Kentridge next to a couple of Deleuze’s explanations of movement and the body to consider two things. First, here is a direct interaction between art practice as theory and theory as art practice (In a sense, I will argue, Deleuze creates a practical movement score with his words and concepts). Second, here are two considerations of the human-technology interaction as a movement existence and temporal instantiation of that existence. The first uses technologies to disrupt a movement “truth,” but only in hopes of understanding it more. The second uses movement and the body in a discussion of a technology, cinema, to consider temporal progression in terms of change. As I carry these musings forward I would like to rewind in our conversation to the concept of affect. How can we consider our more recent topics again in relation to an affective or experiential reception of movement? Rather than attempt to answer this question I will conclude with a short description of my experiences in Kentridge’s exhibition space. I enter the exhibition space and am struck by four projections. One faces me, one stands behind me and there are two pairs of projection; one stands to my right and the other to my left. The sound score is consistent, but each projection moves differently. The content is fluid and similar, but I can’t decide where to stand. First, I walk through several people to stand in a corner. From here I can see several projections at once, but they are fragmented. The movement on the screen radiates beyond the filmic realm and into the exhibition space around me. Viewers move toward and around each projection in ways that mirror a man in his studio. He walks in and around his sketches. The viewer walks in and around his films. I see each fragment of each film through the moving people that perform with me, a moving viewer in a room with six projections. The films, though, exist outside of my temporality. Papers fly against gravity and ripped images turn back into whole ones. I move toward one projection. As I get closer I move through the people around me. The screen grows larger. The screen is now whole. Live movement no longer fragments the image that I look toward. I piece together a projection that was previously fragmented with my movement toward the screen. I mirror Kentridge as he pieces together what was previously torn. Perhaps I do share his temporal situation. Or, maybe not. What is this effect that he uses to render his cinematic reality complete? I watch a man in his studio. I know that the technology of his body is off. He catches papers. They fly into his hands. The objects around him are playing in reverse. Each wrinkle in his shirt, twitch of his eye flick of his finger, though, seems to move forward in time. His movements do not look like movements in retrograde. I look toward my own hand. I pretend to throw a book on the floor. I watch my movement. I now place Kentridge’s motion onto my body. We move together. I perform this throwing motion again. I watch as each joint, muscle and tendon work as a mechanic device to perform an action. I try to reverse this action. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. With close and careful attention it seems that I can choreograph my body memory to throw in reverse. Kentridge reversed his corporeal actions and set them straight by reversing his technological capture. ___ 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 naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com christina mcphee http://christinamcphee.net http://naxsmash.net ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] R: Truths and temporality
http://pharmakonlibrary.blogspot.com/2009/05/bird-girl-can-fly-delta.html from the series Tesserae of Venus now in production. By using Venus as an allegory for climate change on Earth, the body of work moves the planetary figuration of tesserae into photomontage. To do this, impromptu paper sculptural models are built, photographed, left to weather outdoors and photographed again, then juxtaposed. This raw phenomenological study serves a formal structuring function, upon which objective reportage of technological energy installations is layered. Photomontage of the site data then becomes a function of tesserae, or complex ridged and tiling folds and tiles created by a shortening of the planetary crust. On Venus, when the crust is pushed together, the surface folds, buckles, and breaks. As if to manifest a future archive of time-lapse photography in the near- ‘arrival’ of Venus-like conditions, the project imagines speculative Terran landscapes of proliferation in a topology of break points. On May 11, 2009, at 9:56 PM, naxsmash wrote: love, c thanks to Ashley and Stamatia-- this is totally related to the work i am doing now and I do thank you for this powerful writing. I hope to contribute to this thread when i get a bit of distance from the intensity of visual processs and am able to articulate a response. christina On May 11, 2009, at 7:57 PM, stamatia portanova wrote: Hi Ashley thanks for the beautiful example of Kentridge's work that you describe here. It reminds me of some other videos by the same artist (although I don't remember the titles, I think one of them was called Memo, but I'm not sure its the right one), where he also plays with the reversibility of movement and time. And it also makes me think, among other things, of Deleuze's description of 'inlections' and 'folds' in art. For Deleuze, every spatiotemporal line (or curve) is the path of a point that suddenly changes direction at particular inflection points. The inflection point would be, in other words, the idea, as an inflection of thought, and as generative of a gesture or a work. In this sense, the image of the progressive-regressive alternation of Kentridge's movements becomes like the variable curvature (or actualization) of a particular idea (the idea of folding the elasticity of time), in its turn realized through the perceptual foldings allowed by technology. In Earth Moves, Bernard Cache defines the point of inflection as an intrinsic singularity which is not yet related to a particular development of coordinates and, like every 'solid' work of art for Deleuze and Guattari, is neither high nor low, neither on the right nor on the left, neither in progression nor regression, because it is in absence of gravity. Inflection is the pure event of a line or a point, a virtuality, an ideality to be actualised into a well- defined curve. In this case, the virtual inflection point of the videos appears as the idea of playing with the malleable folds of time, in more than two simultaneous directions at once. A whole choreographic and causal geometry of sensations is consequently developed, or folded, after the idea, when the constructivism of drwaing, of the camera or of the technology transforms the point of inflection of a gesture into a fully formed curve. By following the formation of the movements in their continuing-forward from past to present and vice versa, and by revealing the serpentine line of these movements as a vector of symmetric exchanges, technology here seems to transform bodily movements into two-fold or circular structures. And it is surprising to see the artist's own transformation into a reverse-performer, together with objects and movements folding into a continuously renewed dance. I wish I could see this piece. I just wanted to through this idea of inflection out there, it has always intrigued me and made me think of potential unexpected results... stamatia --- Lun 11/5/09, Ashley Ferro-Murray aferromur...@berkeley.edu ha scritto: Da: Ashley Ferro-Murray aferromur...@berkeley.edu Oggetto: [-empyre-] Truths and temporality A: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Data: Lunedì 11 maggio 2009, 01:31 In Some Thoughts on Obsolescence William Kentridge makes a comment on contemporary technology. “There is a way in which working with contemporary technologies, either as a medium or as subject matter – cell phone rather than Bakelite phone – becomes very much about fashion, style, and temporality.” He explains, “A refusal to move with the times is also a refusal neatly to accept the precepts of preoccupations of the metropolitan center – far off, and often mistakenly assuming that its concerns and its times are the only ones appropriate to everywhere else.” I would like to reflect upon this week’s discussion and in particular the last few posts on truth and choice in the context
Re: [-empyre-] TAZ-mania
A good thought about how art practice matters, gives me a moment to smile while on a very grey bus lumbering into Chicago. Sent from my iPhone On Apr 21, 2009, at 10:15 AM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks for spending a little time on deCerteau... And as for your call to revolution, to “arms,” as Nick might call it, given his initial interest in creativity and armature, I think of de Certeau’s notion of La Perruque in The Practice of Everyday Life: all those tiny, little breaks in the system we effect each day, everything from oppositional shopping (label-switching, kleptomania) to the simple act of writing a love letter “on the boss’ time.” No giant Arendtian break, but sweet and individual tears in the social tapestry that give meaning to the banal, the programmatic, the codified, the staid, the static. I think this might be wear the artist's work is important. Brian mentioned previously the idea that a crisis of confidence is precisely what is needed to turn people away from this idea that financial markets are the measure of a society's health and that Wall Street is somehow sexy. For years, the evening news would should the Dow Jones Industrial Average as a shorthand for the health of the economy. But as my father got older and had difficulties finding employment and finding stable housing, I always saw the Dow Jones as a fetish that was increasingly divorced from any stable referent... it would climb and people would cheer but for a growing segment of the population, things got harder and harder. I don't think that artists should have to worry too terribly much about fixing everything. But what artists can do is illustrate the many small moments and mark them so that others can see them. Rather than exposing the insufficient nature of the financial system at delivering social goods art can illustrate the many other sites where social goods are delivered. The artist does not have a special corner on the market of these small detours, they just have a great excuse for talking about detours--they're artists! We all make detours throughout our days. In fact, we live for the detours. Art can provide the occasion, the pretext, and the excuse for making a detour. (If you have a friend shoot you in the arm... normally this is frowned upon. But when Chris Burden decides to do it... people think about it differently.) But even within finance itself, we live for detours. If you listen to talk radio, they love to go on and on about this idea of the welfare queen--who has children so she doesn't have to work (The Octo-mom is just an hyper-example of this). Talk radio personalities love to rant and rave about how lazy welfare recipients are... about how unjust it is for them to be unproductive, but still draw an income, by working the system. BUT if you listen to these very same talk radio personalities, they gush with praise for elite investors. The paradigmatic hero for our age is the man who gets rich on the stock market. Why? Because the investor figured out a way to make money without breaking his back all day. Warren Buffet or Donald Trump or whoever has figured out a way to make money without actually doing anything, by working the system. This is the kind of a god that we can believe in the kind of figure who can transcend the evil that we fear (poverty, being a nobody, etc.)... who can warp the laws of the material world and triumph over them. What is this dream but the hope for a detour? Instead of working all day, I might be snatched from ill-fortune by purchasing the right thing at the right time. Hence, the success of multi-level-marketing companies like Amway and Herbalife and Monavie... they offer the working class person a chance to be the boss and to reap rewards by having others do the work for them. (And, in the process, they tend to lose money but more tragically they lose friends. The biggest irony: the money they lose and the work they put in, the very fruits of their failure, will be used, up the ladder, as evidence of success.) Artists can do a lot just by affirming human experiences--imagination, love, tragedy, laughter, absurdity, etc. I cannot tell an artist what he or she should or shouldn't do... but I do prefer artists who can speak to me. I like art that taps into my notions and desires in such a way that I feel validated in my experiences. And, I love art which helps me see something that I didn't quite understand or couldn't precisely articulate in a way that makes the experience useful to me. In short, these little ruptures are everywhere all the time. What artists can do is mark them. They can show people that their own lives are filled with meaningful alternatives to the machinations of capitalism. And, in the process, people might seek happiness in one of the many compelling alternative
[-empyre-] house of cards
could argue that it's just a circulation of signs that inherits something from outside and changes nothing. Either is a way of reifying metaphors as facts. The trick is to see what is represented, how it's represented, and what is transformed by the fiction. I think I might be my own school of criticism g. John naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com christina mcphee http://christinamcphee.net http://naxsmash.net ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 51, Issue 21: Gamma Rays
So interesting, yes, indeed the same affliction occurred on Wall Street, that a correlation calculation could be presumed to be real, and of course the converse, at the same time, that the real didn't matter. (see: George Bush on realism). there's a Wired Magazine article on this very point. A formula of correlations produces a fiction about risk. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant In the world of finance, too many quants see only the numbers before them and forget about the concrete reality the figures are supposed to represent. They think they can model just a few years' worth of data and come up with probabilities for things that may happen only once every 10,000 years. Then people invest on the basis of those probabilities, without stopping to wonder whether the numbers make any sense at all. As Li himself said of his own model: The most dangerous part is when people believe everything coming out of it. — Felix Salmon (fe...@felixsalmon.com) writes the Market Movers financial blog at Portfolio.com. On Feb 24, 2009, at 5:17 PM, John Haber wrote: Thanks! (Oh, dear, it's so long since I've been in Paris that I've no idea. If Laurent is still editing posts here, he'd know.) One thing that interested me about the handout was its confidence in the analogy. It's easy to forget that, when it comes down to it, anything is analogous to anything. The analogy is itself a creation, an illumination, an insight. That's important in appreciating art and metaphor, but it's a natural mistake for artists to make for at least two reasons. One is that they care about and believe in what they do. But the other, often quite conversely in ideology, is the presumption of realism, whether mediated by representation or not. (I've argued that new media is especially susceptible to this, now that we're used to real time data and now that other genres have waned in presumed realism and dominance.) John ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com christina mcphee http://christinamcphee.net http://naxsmash.net ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] citation correction
In the last post I 've mentioned the book 'Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy,' : the author's name is Christian Marazzi. The book is out just now in English via the imprint Semiotext(e). Christian Marazzi, Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy. Translated by Gregory Conti, introduction by Michael Hardt. New York: Semiotext(e), 2008 Apologies for the author name error. c naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com christina mcphee http://christinamcphee.net http://naxsmash.net ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] scalability and 'knowledge production
but also, at the same time, the principle of 'scalability' , as Christiane has described it, offers a kind of spreading of effects from an implied singular or set of controls, like spray from a spray gun, with the spray made up of units that can insert anywhere at the 'right' resolution. Does 'scalability' imply controls or a control principle, as in the scientific method, wherein we look for variables 'against' or in contrast to 'controls'? Back at Flickr, the designers figured out how to let servers handle trading/sharing of what they call shards, of information, rather than having master servers (content sorting and matching software) outputting to slaves (content- archiving software) , if I understand this correctly. This change of design model allows for a marvelous lateral spread into large quanta of requests from individuals using the Flickr site around the world at any particular moment. The spray gun spray is lost, now its more like a steam bath of image delivery. What a fascinating issue-- is this 'knowledge production' in some sense ? Christina On Feb 12, 2009, at 11:27 AM, naxsmash wrote: thank you, Simon-as editor/moderator i was hoping someone would rise to this occasion. This is a delicate yet powerful subject--- i do think that the elegance of the works in Christiane's curatorial project have in common this kind of useful uselessness that is both 'production' frm the point of view of the University of California (tallying up the credits as it were) and yet the content of all of it is fluid and Kafka=esque at its best. As one would hope. christina On Feb 12, 2009, at 2:03 AM, Simon Biggs wrote: I read Tom Holert’s piece the other day. He makes a fundamental error conflating research and instrumentalisation in his efforts to distinguish (as somehow intrinsically better) artistic practice. Let they who cast the first stone, etc... Research can be as creative as artistic practice. Research need not be goal driven. Research can be as dangerous, exciting, ethically and morally challenging as the best of art. Research is something that any experimental artist has to do if they are to be experimental. Yes, there are pressures coming from government and industry (pressures that the current economic situation will probably exacerbate) for research and practice to prove their social (e.g: economic) worth. The US Senate’s recent rejection of Obama’s culture bill on the grounds that (paraphrasing from memory) museums, galleries, road-side decoration, are not a priority in a time of economic crisis (end paraphrase) evidences this demand of creative and experimental activities (whether in the creative arts, physical and social sciences or the humanities) to instrumentalise themselves. In England the government’s decision to prioritise research funding away from pure research in the arts and sciences towards applied research (STEM subjects - science, technology, engineering and medicine) is also part of this dynamic. In Scotland we await the deliberations of government to find out how the pie will be carved for the next few years. In contesting the instrumentalisation of cultural practice Holert is well intentioned. However, to identify the bogey as research is wrong. Much research, in both the sciences and humanities, represents the very opposite of instrumentalisation. It could be argued that significant radical activity in our society happens in the guise of research. In this respect the thesis the paper forwards, arguing that to equate practice with research is a process of instrumentalisation, is fundamentally flawed. The enemy of creativity is not science and it is not research. The enemy is the required acquiescence of creativity, whether in practice or research, to the bureaucratically defined needs of society. Creativity, as I understand its value, cannot be constrained by such a need. It has to be allowed to be dangerous and inimical to the concerns of planners. Scientists, just as much as artists, need this freedom. We are all Kafka’s children. I would also identify some errors in the paper. For example, the section on PARIP (which some people here are probably members of) contains a mistake, describing it as a research group initiated by the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). PARIP currently exists as a loose network of practitioner/researchers around what was a research project initiated at Bristol University. It has no affiliation with the RAE or the research councils and set itself the objective of critically inquiring into the RAE and research council’s definitions of creative practice (in performing arts). They were research council funded but, so far as I am aware, had no remit from the funders. The arm’s length principle, overseen by sector peer review, is default in the UK. The manner in which Holert describes the relations between creative arts educational
Re: [-empyre-] scalable relations-- how does this matter? (orde-materialize?)
Dear Anna, While Christiane formulates one of her elegant responses (!~) I just want to say that I was pondering the same issue over the last 24 hours. The key query you make locates a problem of human values ( specifically relational aesthetics) within the topologic 'deformations' or transformations (you note relations cannot be simply toologically deformed without very real consequences for their relationality.) I wonder are you suggesting that human use and human values always activate these topologies at a core level.? - personally I think so , despite the old seduction of the autonomous machine (good old bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even). in re all of this please see this amazing little sketch (see ref below) by the architect of requests to Flickr, David Vance Pattishall. One guy managing an amazing amount of requests: by simply moving the Flickr architecture away from a master/slave topology and into multiple afilliated 'masters' exchanging 'shards' so that all the servers are participating with one another in sharing key information. This is a very beautiful example of relational aesthetics in information design! Check it out..it's quite a provocative instance of an almost utopian moment for info sharing and personal exchanges. The originating polity of the design is a system of 'federation' . Federation at Flickr: Doing Billions of Queries Per Day http://www.scribd.com/doc/2592098/DVPmysqlucFederation-at-Flickr-Doing-Billions-of-Queries-Per-Day -Christina On Feb 5, 2009, at 10:33 PM, Anna Munster wrote: Hi Christiane, I've had a brief look at the website but won't be able to experience the exhibition - stuck in Australia I'm afraid! What a pity - looks great! I am wondering how you see the relation - at a curatorial and conceptual level rather than purely technical - between the idea of 'scalable' and the commonly used notion of 'scale-free' which abounds particularly in contemporary network science? I think your idea of scalable within the aesthetic context perhaps in fact includes both the concept of 'scale free' especially as you put it in terms of the continuing functionality of a database for example in spite of changes in context or transaction quantity. But perhaps scalability also includes the opposite of this - ie that relations cannot be simply topologically deformed without very real consequences for their relationality. If something can be scaled, then there will be relational aesthetic changes although this may still allow functionality... Just wondering about your thoughts on this Best Anna A/Prof. Anna Munster Assistant Dean, Grant Support Acting Director Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics School of Art History and Art Education College of Fine Arts UNSW P.O. Box 259 Paddington NSW 2021 612 9385 0741 (tel) 612 9385 0615(fax) a.muns...@unsw.edu.au ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com christina mcphee http://christinamcphee.net http://naxsmash.net ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
